Bread and Roses, Too

"Strike! Strike!" And then, pandemonium. Jake heard his own voice join the roar. "Short pay! All out!" He heard the sound of wood shattering and saw knives slashing across the great belts. He grabbed a fire bucket and threw the filthy water on the gleaming white thread. The smell of wet wool filled his nostrils. He took the empty bucket and heaved it against the line of spindles, breaking three of them. The power of it filled him like cheap wine. He smashed three more, then another two before someone—Angelo Corti, as it turned out—grabbed him by the back of his shirt. "Come on, boy, everyone's getting out!"

Jake bashed another three or four spindles before dropping the bucket. The big man's hand still held tight to his shirt. He tried to shake it away, but Angelo yanked him the length of the floor, past Paddy Parker, and down the nonworking escalator. Someone had obviously broken Mr. Wood's pride and joy, or at least shut it off.

The iron gates to the mill yard were locked—it was only eleven forty-five in the morning—but several large Italians found the gatekeeper and persuaded him, none too gently, to unlock it.

"Short pay! All out!"

It was spitting snow. Jake had no jacket, and his thin cotton pants and shirt were no protection against the wind. Once outside the gates, he planned to hightail it east for the shelter of his shack near the river. He could have easily weaseled his way through the chanting mob. Angelo had let go his shirt the moment they passed the big front doors, but he couldn't make himself leave.

"Short pay! All out! Short pay! All out!"

He crossed the bridge as though hypnotized and allowed himself to be carried by the mob from the Wood to the other mills—to the Ayer, the Washington, and on to the Atlantic and the three Pacific mills—gathering men and women and children strikers at each place. The city riot bells had commenced a frenzied clanging, and whistles screamed at them from the top of every mill as they passed. The workers chanted louder to drown out the panicked alarms of the authorities.

As storm winds gather power, so did the mass of strikers. There must have been hundreds of them—no, thousands—all chanting, "Short pay! All out!" And the workers were pouring out of the mills as they passed each gate. Not only the Italians but all those strange people from other parts of the world—Poles and Lithuanians and Russians and Syrians and Jews and Greeks and Portuguese and Armenians and countries and languages he'd never heard of, taking up the cry, in maybe the only words of English they knew: "Short pay! All out!"

He patted his pocket. His pay envelope was still there—less twenty-five cents, the cost of a week of beer for himself. But enough to pay the rent on the shack and buy him food for the next two weeks if he could keep it away from his pa. Or he could just give the old man half and tell him that short pay meant half of what he got last payday. Maybe on the way home he should stop by and buy a bottle. If the old man had a few swigs, he might believe the lie.

Pa would be raging mad about the strike. Best not to tell him he'd joined up. It couldn't last long—probably be over by Monday or so. Nobody could afford to stay out long in the wintertime. They'd freeze before they starved.

"How you feeling, Jake?" It was Angelo, slapping him on the back, treating him like a man, something his own father never did.

"Swell," he said, joining the chant again: "Short pay! All out!" Kids were hanging out the schoolhouse windows staring at him—envying him, he reckoned. He stood up straighter and chanted louder.

When the marchers got to the Plains neighborhood, where most of the workers lived in mill-owned tenements, they began to separate. Some of the men were talking of forming a picket line around the mills to keep scabs from returning after the dinner hour. Others were talking about strike meetings that night to plan strategy, but Jake could catch only the English words dropped into the foreigners' talk—words like "scab" and "strike." Angelo turned to him. "I guess you native-born got no strike organization," he said, a big smile on his face.

Jake shook his head. He had yet to see a regular American or an Irishman in the crowd.

"You wanna join us Italians tonight? Be a good meeting, I promise you."

"Yeah, sure," Jake said. Anything to postpone the strapping he was sure to get when he went home.

"Meantime," said Angelo. "I got money in my pocket. How about some grub? My treat."

The tavern was full of Italians spraying tomato sauce as they jabbered excitedly at each other. Angelo told Jake to sit down, and then he disappeared across the crowded, smoky room. Soon he returned, bringing two huge platters of spaghetti to the table. He set one of them in front of Jake. It was the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. The tomato sauce even sported a few bits of greasy sausage. Jake forgot the crowd around him, forgot the strike, forgot the menace that waited for him in the shack, and fell to, his nose almost in the steaming plate. He hadn't had a full platter of food to himself in his entire thirteen years of life.

"Hey, hey, take a breath, boy. Enjoy!" Angelo said, plunking down a glass of red wine in front of Jake. He sat down on the bench next to him, but before long he was jawing with his pals—eating and drinking at the same time—just like everyone around them.

The talk was all in Italian. Jake knew only a few words; most of them he suspected were cusses, because he often heard them muttered behind Paddy Parker's back. Then, seemingly without warning, the men around him jumped to their feet.

"We're going down to picket, Jake boy," Angelo said. "Try to keep the blasted scabs from coming back in after the noon hour. You wanna come?"

Jake shrugged. It was the end of free food and drink, so he might as well join them. It was better than the leather strap waiting for him at the shack. He grabbed his glass and drained the last few warming drops.

They marched down Union Street in a body, cha

nting, "Short pay! All out!" and blocking the street entirely so that no one, much less a wagon or buggy or auto, could get past. When the mills lining Canal Street came in view, the roar grew louder. It wasn't just men and boys—there were women and girls as well, maybe more of them than men. The women were smiling and laughing, as though heading out on a gigantic picnic. Some of the crowd stopped to surround the gate at the Everett, others broke off at Canal to cut off entry into the Washington, the Atlantic, and the Pacific mills. Jake followed Angelo toward the bridge across the Merrimack, back to the Wood Mill, which they'd left less than an hour earlier.

"Scab! Scab!" they yelled at anyone trying to muscle his or her way through their midst. "Make a line! Make a line!" someone shouted. Angelo grabbed Jake's arm, and then, grasping hands, the crowd of marchers spread out in a line that kept anyone from crossing the bridge and entering the gates of the Wood.

Jake was watching Angelo, so when the icy water came gushing down on his head, he looked up to see if it could be pouring rain in the middle of January.

"Fire hoses!" Angelo yelled. "They're setting the blasted fire hoses on us!"

Some of the women and girls screamed. They were all soaked through before they could get out of range of the hoses. A few hardy souls, including Angelo, started for the bridge. Jake ran to catch up with him, but then a stream of water hit him in the chest and knocked him flat on his back.

"It's no good!" Angelo yelled over the racket of water and human cries, grabbing Jake's hand and pulling him to his feet. "They break our bones and freeze us to death if we stay. Go home," he said to the departing backs of the workers, and almost to himself. "Yes, go home, it's all right." Then he shouted, though no one on the other side of the bridge could have heard him over the sound made by the torrents of water, "We be back! You see, Mr. Billy Wood. We don't give up!"

It seemed to Jake, shivering in the freezing gray afternoon, that they had given up. They'd all run as soon as the water hit them. Not that he had stayed. He wasn't a fool.