To Make My Bread (52 page)

Each day some of the women took charge of the children in the tents while the others worked at various things, going into the country, working in the office, and picketing. Bonnie had brought her furniture and young ones to the tent colony, for she could not pay rent any more, and the children stayed there while she was out working for the union.

Bonnie learned that the word scab has two meanings. She had known it to mean an ugly piece of mattered growth over a wound. But she learned that a scab was also a person who would take the place of another who was fighting in a union. She felt a sympathy for them, since, like her, they were poor and only wanted to make their bread, but she knew they must learn that if they scabbed then they were really cheating themselves in the end, and were also being traitors to their own people.

She had explained this some days before to Mary Allen in her tumble down cabin in Stumptown. And Mary, who had been asked by the mill to go to work as a weaver, because she had swept the floor in the weave room and knew the process somewhat, spoke with her reasonably about it.

“Well, it's mighty hard for us not to give in, honey,” she said. “For they have never given us a chance before to do nothing but sweep and work in the opening room, or something like that.”

“But you'll see,” Bonnie explained anxiously. “They won't keep you long when they can get somebody else. And if we get a strong union hit means they'll take back workers, and the union will get better wages for you, too.”

She went further and spoke of the message to Mary. And Mary's brown eyes stared out of the white eyeballs at her.

“Oh my Lord,” she said. “Could it be? Oh Sweet Jesus.

“I'll try,” she said. “I'll try to get the others here around the house, and you can speak to them what you've told me.”

So Bonnie spoke one morning while Dewey Fayon waited with a truck from the mills to take the colored people. She stood on Mary Allen's steps and spoke to the black faces that were looking up at her.

“We used t' live way back in the hills,” she said. “And up there they told us, ‘Come down to the mills and work. Down there money grows on trees.' Well, I have seen that those trees have produced nothing except what the bosses have gathered for themselves.”

She saw Dewey Fayon leave the truck. He came forward and spoke in a loud, heavy voice that seemed to strike them. Some even winced as if a blow had been struck across their shoulders.

“Hurry up now,” he said. “Whoever's going has got to hurry. I can't wait all day.”

He pushed into the crowd and called out again, then he pointed at Bonnie. “Shame yourself, Bonnie Calhoun,” he called out, “for keeping people from making good wages.”

She looked down from the steps on his white face raised up among the black ones. She felt anger at him and a sorrow that pulled her heart down. But her anger was greater.

“Shame yourself, Dewey Fayon,” she called back to him, “for going against your own people. Not so long ago, you was a mill hand yourself. And now you've reached a higher place you've gone back on your own.”

Then she remembered something John Stevens had said and taking her gaze away from the white face of Dewey Fayon she turned to the black faces.

“Can't you see,” she spoke to them anxiously, “they look on us as owned cattle? If we die, or our children, hit don't matter to them, for they know there's plenty more of us to get. What we must do is show them we're people that have got pride in ourselves, and won't be used. If we scab on each other then we're no better than driven cattle that don't know any better. Please, good friends, don't let him take you to the mill.”

It was the best she could do, and not nearly good enough. In the seconds that followed while she waited to see how many would follow Dewey Fayon and his shot gun she held to Mary Allen's arm, to keep her knees from giving way.

“All right,” Dewey Fayon called out. “This is your last chance.” He turned toward the truck. About ten followed him. When he saw that only a few came he turned back for a moment.

“We'll get you for this, Bonnie Calhoun,” he said. And many of that company remembered his words afterwards, when people in Stumptown and those in the village were mourning.

When Bonnie reached the union hall the others had just returned from picketing the mill. And she heard with joy that they had persuaded the ten who had gone with Dewey Fayon to go back to their homes. But many had suffered from the deputies. Mrs. Sanders was lying on the plank floor of the hall, and Ora was trying to revive her. Two of the other women bathed her bruised head, for one of the deputies had knocked her in the eyes with his fist. Her dress was torn to shreds by the bayonets.

“Henry was near by,” Ora told Bonnie. “And when they had knocked her on the ground and began twisting her arms he rushed through the crowd. Small as Henry is he would have gone at those men. We had t' hold him back by main force.”

The union lawyer was in the room sitting at the table. Some had been arrested and carried to jail, and he was getting their names in order to bail them out with money sent by workers and those sympathetic with workers. When Mrs. Sanders was well enough to sit up he went over to her.

“Mrs. Sanders,” he said. “I want you to put that dress away.” He pointed to her clothes that had been torn by the bayonets. “We should have that for evidence.”

“I couldn't put it away,” Mrs. Sanders told him, but she would not give the reason and was too weak for him to urge her. Later she told Ora, “Hit's the only dress I've got. I couldn't give it up.”

When Ora came back from helping Mrs. Sanders down to the tents she spoke to Bonnie.

“They chased us like rats. Hit was good you were not there, for you always get mad, like Henry, and want to light into them.”

Bonnie had been in jail several times already.

“Hit's something I can't help,” Bonnie said. “When I see them stomping down people . . .”

“Do ye know who's living in the house to the right?” Ora asked her.

“The Coxeys.”

“And who else?”

“No.”

“Minnie Hawkins. She's got a room there. I saw her to-day at noon talking with Sam McEachern, right out in broad daylight on the porch.”

“I reckon she's got a right there, if the Coxeys will have her.”

“Yes. But hit looks funny. For on the same day she comes t' stay on one side of us, Lessie Hampton takes a room on the other. Lessie has got a job now working in the office of the mill at a big wage.”

“Listen to this,” John said to them. He was reading a newspaper the lawyer had left in the office.

“The Governor has written something about us. He says Tom Moore and the others from the North have gone about ‘bedeviling the issue'—and that we all have got in the way of a ‘dis-passionate approach to the problem.' ”

“Maybe he means a dis-passionate approach is them approaching our union hall on Railroad Avenue and throwing our food into the streets,” Jesse McDonald said. “Only we didn't seem to prevent hit.”

Frank spoke up from his place in the corner where the sun could come in on him, as it could not come down in the shady hollow. “Maybe he means that the deputy sheriffs twisting women's arms and tearing their dresses, and beating us in the faces, and sticking us with bayonets and stomping us on the ground—is a dis-passionate approach. We have certainly got in the way of those things—though we didn't mean to.”

“Once,” Ed Thatcher told them, “up in the hills a man stole my hog. I recognized my hog in his pen by a crotch in the right ear. So I told him. ‘Give me back my hog!' And he said, ‘Now look. Here's fifty cents. If you'll go on your way and leave the hog, there won't be any trouble.' I reckon that might be what the Governor means by a dis-passionate approach.”

They spoke lightly, but thoughts were beneath their words. John was thinking, “There is a spy among us,” and he searched the faces before him. His eyes dwelt longest on one of the younger strikers. Fred Tate was a weakly young man who had never been much good at working. It was a wonder the mill kept him on when they had dismissed so many. He had seemed well disposed toward the union, and had come to live in the tent colony. His wife and baby were staying with an aunt in the country, but Carrie Tate had written that there was not a dry place in the house when it rained, and Fred had asked if he might bring them to the tents. Tom Moore said, yes, though he and John suspected Fred of being a spy.

As John looked Fred Tate turned his eyes away. Then John heard some words spoken that drew his attention from Fred.

Someone said, “It's time we used our guns!” and there was no joking in the voice.

Everyone in the room, men and women, looked at John intently, questioningly. And he had no answer for them. He knew as they did that hate surrounded them. It was in the air, in the gaze of people from the town. The newspapers were full of hate in the day, and at night while they slept or tried to sleep down in the hollow they heard men walking in the brush around the tents, and hushed voices. One night some shots were fired.

Robert Phillips, John's old friend, who was Captain Phillips now, from having been in the war, and was a lawyer for the mill, would not speak to John on the street: and Albert Burnett who had never known him well, but who had spoken to him pleasantly before, passed him on the street and spoke a name that was hard to leave unchallenged. “And him a government lawyer,” John said to himself, and spat on the ground to take the bitter taste from himself, that he could not, since they were all together, think of personal revenge.

John knew all this. Yet he had to keep silent before the eyes that looked at him questioningly asking him how long they could go without defending themselves.

While they all sat in the room, quiet, thinking about what had been said, a young girl walked into the office.

“Is Tom Moore here?” she asked.

“No, Helen,” John answered, for he recognized Mrs. Sevier's daughter.

“You are John McClure?” She spoke to him, as if she had recognized him, too.

“Yes.”

She held out a letter to him. “One of our boarders, the one named Jackson, sent a suit to Reskowitz to be pressed,” she said. “Mr. Reskowitz found this in the pocket. He said, give it to you or Tom Moore.”

“Was there anything else,” John asked.

“I was to say they are watching our house.”

“Thank ye.” John said to her.

He opened the letter. It was addressed to no name but to a number, V-500. At the top was the name of a detective agency in the North. The person who wrote the letter said that V-500—who was Jackson of course—must always report to the clients, the mill management. Jackson had been trying to sell washing machines in the village. The letter went on:

“The cover you have arranged—selling washing machines—may be all right, except that I do not think you can sell many washing machines at their current prices to a lot of people making eight and ten dollars a week. It is all right to associate with the employees of the clients, but I repeat the people for you to become acquainted with and cultivate their friendship are the leaders of the union and in the strike. These are the people you want to buddy around with and get real inside advance information from. And, remember, your client wants to hear from you daily.”

John looked up from the letter. “Fred, was it you that wanted t' bring a man named Jackson up here?”

Fred did not answer. He looked at John with his sad, weak eyes, and looked away. Just then John was interrupted, and this was a pity, for the opportunity was lost then to bring Fred and perhaps others into the open. And in the stressful days that followed there was no time to search for spies again.

Jim Allen looked in at the window. “There's a preacher outside to see you, John,” he said.

“A preacher!” Ed Thatcher exclaimed.

“Well, he might be well-intentioned,” John told Ed. “For there's one at Sandersville that has taken up for the union so he's been run out of his church by the mill.”

“Maybe it's Mr. Simpkins,” Bonnie said.

“Not him,” Ora told her. “Didn't you hear? He's sick in bed of a sour stomach, from preaching hate at us.”

“I knew he was a-saying Tom Moore was preaching the breaking up of the home, but I . . .”

“And he don't yet seem t' know that we and our families and goods have been put on the streets. If that isn't breaking up the home, I don't know what is.”

M
R
. W
ARMSLEY
was waiting for John.

“Are you John McClure?” he asked.

“Yes,” John answered and took the hand that was stretched out to him.

“Can we walk down the slope a little way?” Mr. Warmsley asked. “I would like to speak with you privately.”

They walked as far as the trees that began the woods filling the hollow.

“You have been helping to lead this strike,” Mr. Warmsley began. He hesitated when John did not answer. For John there was nothing to say. He wished to hear what the preacher had come for, and waited to know if it was in friendliness. Preacher Warren in town was speaking terrible things of them, and the others were after them like a pack of hounds. Perhaps this man of God, too, was an enemy.

“I have come as a friend,” Mr. Warmsley said.

“I'm mighty glad t' hear that.”

“You see, Mr. Wentworth, young Mr. Wentworth, belongs to my congregation, and Mr. Randolph the manager, and others . . . so I—I know them rather well.”

“I see you must.”

“I went to them,” Mr. Warmsley said, “to the mill and begged them to end this terrible war—for it is a war. I went there prepared to blame them—but I came away satisfied that all the blame is not on their side.

“They told me this. For a long time they have not made much money on the mill. And many times during the past four or five years they might have stopped the mill altogether and would have done so, had it not been that you people must be looked after. They felt a responsibility for you.”