Lyddie

“Oh, hush.” Betsy’s tones were gentler than her words. “We do you no harm. Can’t we just live and let live?”

Amelia began to cry. Her chiseled marble features crumbled into the angry, helpless rage of a child. As Lyddie watched, she could feel the hardness inside herself breaking, like jagged cracks across granite.

She got a clean handkerchief from her own box and handed it to the older girl. “Here,” she said.

Amelia glanced quickly at the hanky—making sure it was a clean one, Lyddie thought wryly—but she murmured a thank you and blew her nose. “I don’t know what possessed me,” she said, more in her old tone.

“We’re all working like black slaves, is what,” said Betsy. “I’ve half a mind to sign the blooming petition.”

“Oh Betsy, you wouldn’t!” Amelia lifted her nose out of the handkerchief, her eyes wide.

“Wouldn’t I just? When I started in the spinning room, I could do a thirteen-hour day and to spare. But in those days I had a hundred thirty spindles to tend. Now I’ve twice that many at a speed that would make the devil curse. I’m worn out, Amelia. We’re all worn out.”

“But we’d be paid less.” Couldn’t Betsy understand that? “If we just work ten hours, we’d be paid much less.”

“Time is more precious than money, Lyddie girl. If only I had two more free hours of an evening—what I couldn’t do.”

“Should you sign the petition, Betsy, they’ll dismiss you. I know they will.” Amelia folded the handkerchief and handed it back to Lyddie with a nod.

“And would you miss me, Amelia? I thought you’d consider it good riddance. I thought I was the blister on your heel these last four years.”

“I’m thinking of you. What will you do with no job? You’d be blacklisted. No other corporation would hire you.”

“Oh,” said Betsy, “maybe I’d just take off West. I’ve nearly the money.” She smiled slyly at Lyddie. “I’m thinking of going out to Ohio.”

“Ohio?”

“Hurrah!” Betsy cried out. “That’s it! I wait till I’ve got all the money I need, sign the petition, and exit this city of spindles in a veritable fireworks of defiance.”

“No!” Lyddie was startled herself that she had spoken so sharply. Both girls looked at her. “I mean, please, don’t sign. I can’t. I got to have the money. I got to pay the debts before—”

“Oh Lyddie, hasn’t your friend Diana explained it all to you? We’re working longer hours, tending more machines, all of which have been speeded to demon pace, so the corporation can make a packet of money. Our real wages have gone down more often than they’ve gone up. Merciful heaven! Why waste our time on a paper petition? Why not a good old-fashioned turnout?” Betsy put her botany book on the counterpane face down to save the place, hugged her knees, and began to sing in a high childlike soprano:

“Oh! Isn’t it a pity such a pretty girl as I

Should be sent to the factory to pine away and die?

Oh! I cannot be a slave,

I will not be a slave,

For I’m so fond of liberty

That I cannot be a slave.”

“I ain’t a slave!” said Lyddie fiercely. “I ain’t a slave.”

“Of course you aren’t.” Amelia’s confidence had returned and with it her schoolmarm manner.

“At the inn I worked sometimes fifteen, sixteen hours a day and they paid my mother fifty cents a week, if they remembered. Here—”

“Oh shush, girl. Nobody’s calling you a slave. I was just singing the old song.”

“How do you know that radical song?” Amelia asked.

“I was a doffer back in ’36. At ten you learn all the songs.”

“And did you join the turnout?” Now Amelia looked like a schoolmarm who had caught a child in mischief.