City Of Fire Trilogy 1 - Dreamland (54 page)

“I’m sick of this slave-driving!” he screamed. “You ask me to do this? Don’cha think I’m a human being, too?”

“That’s the offer, bite the feather bed if you don’t like it,” Bernstein told him, as cool as ever.

“Never! Never! I don’ care if you stand one foot on heaven an’ t’other on the earth, I won’t do it! I won’t make my girls do it, I don’ care if I starve to death!”

“Fine! Then go, what’s stoppin’ ya?” Bernstein shouted back in his face. “Only—the girls stay!”

“My girls?” Wenke stuttered. “
My
girls? I’m the subcontractor, they work for me—”

“They stay here. Go on up to the tenth floor if you don’ want to stay, and cash out.”

“Pah
! See if I don’t, then!” Wenke spat out, and started toward the elevator. But Kristol and Podhoretz were already making their way across the floor, grinning maliciously, and he began to hedge.

“Wait—are
they
going with me?”

“What about it? You wanted to go, just go.”

Bernstein waved a dismissive hand at him. Wenke shuttled back toward where his girls huddled in their usual corner, but the two floor supervisors walked after him, still grinning.

“Wait, wait! I don’ want to go with them!” Wenke cried out, appealing to the whole shop. “Can’t you see? They’re going to give me a slugging, once they got me in the elevator!”

“Get out!”
Bernstein shouted at him, at the top of his lungs, and now Kristol and Podhoretz seized the
shadchen
by his long, sticklike arms and began towing him toward the yawning elevator.

“They’re going to give me a slugging!” Wenke called out hysterically, as they dragged him down the length of the shop floor like a sack of felt scraps. His
yarmulke
dropped off, the long, waxy strands of his hair trailing along the floor.

“People,
please
! Will you stay at your machines and see a fellow worker treated this way?”

The two foremen threw him in the elevator and shut the door—but Esther could still hear Wenke’s shouts and screams as the car went down, the dull, terrible sound of blows striking a body.

“All right, everybody back to work,” Mr. Bernstein announced calmly, the captain of his ship once more.

But it was too late. Women were already standing up at their work stations—the shop growing suddenly quiet as they began to shut down their Singers and unscrew them, cradling the machines in their arms as they hop-skipped down the length of the benches toward the stairs. Esther heard herself shouting with the rest.

“Up! Up! Everybody out!”

There were no fiery speeches, no appeals to unity. Nothing more than that simple command, going up and down the benches in a dozen tongues:

“Up! Up! Let’s go!”

“Girls! Sit back down!” Bernstein ordered. “Any girl not back in her seat in one minute gets five dollars taken out!”

But this was too much of a threat, it only underscored how serious the situation was. The usually impeccable Bernstein had overshot his mark, and now none of them dared to be left behind. They kept going, shoving past him when he tried to block the stairs—past the goons, Kristol and Podhoretz, who had come back up and stood smirking in front of the elevators, unaware of what was going on.

“Up, up! Everybody out!”

Esther shook with the emotion of it, she could barely see straight as she gathered up her own coat and hat, and unbolted her machine from the bench. Such a simple little gesture, almost like going home in the evening, but how dangerous, how daring it seemed! Afterwards she wasn’t even sure why she had done it. None of them were: after all, Wenke wasn’t really a worker, he was a boss, and a cockroach boss at that, who brought his pathetic girls in to lower their rates and keep them in line.

Maybe it was simple resentment at being subjected to such a spectacle. Maybe it was their whole, cumulative degradation realized in that moment, but whatever the reason, they kept going: sweeping up to the tenth floor, and down to the eighth; spreading the word to the pressers at their hissing iron coffins, and the cutters at their workbenches, and the pieceworkers and the little girl string pullers, and the floor sweepers. All of them, even Wenke’s forlorn line of incompetent girls, coming out with them—nobody wanting to be left behind. Plodding down the stairs and squeezing down in the elevator until the whole shop was out—out on the sidewalk on Washington Place, smiling and shielding their eyes against the unaccustomed midday sun, and wondering what it was they should do now.

After that, though, the strike spread like a conflagration. Before the week was over, all the big factories were on strike, and the little shops, too; at Schwartz’s, and Agronick’s, and the Marquis and Haskin’s and Berlant’s. Clara got wind of it at once, where she was working over at Leiserson’s, and before the day was out she was leading parades of strikers through the Village and the Lower East Side to any shops that were not out yet, banging broomsticks on the sidewalk grates and yelling up at the shop windows:

“Out! Out! Everybody out! The strike is here!”

The next morning, on her way to the settlement house, Esther saw the
fabrente maydlakh
, the fiery girls, out on every street corner. They spoke in Yiddish, and their stiff, classroom Italian and Portuguese, but the message came through in their hands, and in their faces, and the stirring tremor in their voices.

Little groups of women were gathered before them—some of them no more than children of fourteen or fifteen—talking excitedly over the latest news and rumors. The newspapers were already calling it The Uprising of the Twenty Thousand—then the Thirty Thousand, then
Forty
—and there were rumors that women were walking out of shops down in Philadelphia, and up in Rochester, and even out in Chicago.

Every night the union offices were jammed with more women, bustling about under the glowing yellow balls of light. The strike committee met in continuous session: Clara and Leonora O’Reilly uncompromising and making speeches, Mrs. Perkins and Miss Dreier listening quietly, little Rose Schneiderman careful and reconciling. Clara’s friend Pauline Newman staring owlishly out of her large glasses, organizing everything.

The question in everyone’s mind was whether they could get the men who headed the garment unions to call a general strike. The women’s strike committee wanted to demand recognition from the big shops, but the men weren’t willing to risk making it a fight to the death. They preferred to settle for another small rate increase—so they could go back to organizing, and planning, and all the endless talking.

“You got to seize a revolutionary situation when it happens,
bubbeleh
,” Clara insisted. “They don’ always present themselves right on schedule, like a streetcar. We got everybody out
now
, we have to seize the chance.”

“We’ll need every help we can get if we go after it,” Leonora O’Reilly warned them, looking at Mrs. Perkins, who sat perfectly composed across the table as always, in her black, triangular hat. “This is the time we need our friends to stand by us!”

The ladies
were
out on the street—setting up free coffee stands by the picket lines. The strikers shied away from them for days, embarrassed, afraid to take so much as a cup of coffee or a cruller because they thought of it as charity. It was only later, as the weather changed, and they were wet through and through by the incessant rains, that they yielded, shamefacedly picking up their little cups and pastries from the society matrons. Yet more was required.

“You can be sure of our support,” Mrs. Perkins told them, in that firm, cool voice that allowed for no contradiction. “Anything we can do, we will.”

They all knew, though, that it didn’t change what was coming next.

“Soon they’ll start with the arrests: they’ll be hauling us in like streetwalkers.”

“We can take it,” Clara boasted. “There is no sacrifice the women won’t make for the union!”

Esther sat beside her in silence, and wondered if Clara really knew what she was talking about.

What does it even mean, any sacrifice?
she asked herself. What would
she
be willing to sacrifice?

Esse had busied herself like the others, organizing collections of food and coal for the strikers’ families. Selling the
New York Call
the only English-language paper that was backing the strike, out on the street corners. Helping at the free coffee stands—the wealthy ladies in their fine coats so kind, so maternal toward them but condescending as schoolteachers. As the days and weeks went by Esther put in longer and longer hours, until she was living at the settlement house, not even bothering to go home, but stealing a little sleep when she could on the office couches.

Yet she knew it was nothing. The real work, the real test of herself was still ahead. Out on the picket lines.

“This is when you see what kind of a chicken you are,” Clara had only chuckled when Esse confided her fears in her friend. “This is where you see what you are really made of!” Which was exactly what Esther was afraid of.

She gnawed it over, walking back from the hall at night. The summer was rapidly fading away now. Street gangs lit bonfires in empty lots, challenging their enemies to come out and fight. Already the evictions had started up. Families stood begging out on the street among all their possessions, a
Shabbos
candle lit on top of their dresser, a begging saucer beside it.

There was no place for her to go to now, no way she could avoid it. Now, she knew, all of her years of wondering would come to an end. All her days leaning over her machine or staring out the back window, down into the courtyard with its weird gravestone paving blocks—one way or another, all of her wondering about herself would finally be resolved.

Inside the union hall, the women swayed slowly back and forth, vague, bulky shapes in the predawn darkness. They were dressed in their good coats, and their best, wide-brimmed hats, folded with grand ribbons and bows, covered with netting—many bought just for the occasion. They didn’t like risking them on the line or in jail, but the press was bent on depicting them already as prostitutes, and street trash, and they were determined to show how respectable they really were.

When they first gathered there was all kinds of speculation about what would happen:

“Do you think they’ll give us a slugging?”

“I hear everybody’s goin’ to jail. That’s their tune now—”

“What’s it like in there? What’s it like? Do you know?”

They sang the “Internationale,” and then the “Marseillaise,” to keep their spirits up. Yet as the time to go drew near they spoke less and less, each woman and girl silently steeling herself to what lay ahead. Their lines still swaying slowly, unconsciously back and forth, like old men at their Talmud.

Outside, it was a miserable morning. It had been raining for days, off and on, and they could hear the rain begin again now, cold and relentless, as they waited.

How nice it would be to be at my machine
, Esther thought, treading in place, loathing herself for even thinking such a thing—but thinking it nonetheless.

How nice it would be to be inside, in the warm factory, pumping the pedals—

Clara came down the line—no longer one of the
fabrente maydlakh
just now but their gentle commander, giving a kiss or a touch to a woman here, a word to one there. Esther felt immediately embarrassed, as if somehow she might read her thoughts. Clara stopped in front of her, and held her hands in her own, her square, passionate face now kindly and serene.

“Don’t worry, little bird, don’t worry. We will all be out there. We will help each other be brave.”

She kissed her cheek and passed to the head of the line, hoisting herself up on a chair to give them a final talk before they marched.

“All right, you know what to do,” she told them, no fire in her mouth for once, only the radiant confidence of a great general.

“Remember: you got to walk in a straight line, keep on the sidewalk. Keep moving. Stop, an’ they can arrest you for loitering. Talk, an’ they arrest you for soliciting.

“Of course,” she said, some of the old mischievousness returning to her eyes, “of course, they may just arrest you anyway. They don’t even play by their own rules, the little
yentzers.
Just do what you can, an’ don’ worry, the union will get you bail.”

Esther nodded, and smiled with the rest of them—though she knew that in fact the union’s bail fund was already almost exhausted, and that the magistrates could remand them to the Tombs with no bail, for as long as they pleased. She tried not to think of the prison, with its grim gray slanting walls. When she was a child they had still let paying crowds in to see the public hangings. It all seemed impossible—she had been a good girl her whole life. What thing had she done, what harm had she meant, to risk being locked up in such a place?

“All right—if, you’re ready. Remember: you are people, and you got the right to do this for yourself. If we stick together—and we are going to stick—we will win.”

The doors opened, and the strikers filed out along the gray slate sidewalks, their cardboard signs brushing against the leafy tree branches beat low by the rain. They wore white sashes with their union locals, and brave, defiant slogans like we are not slaves! or down with the malefactors of wealth! sewn in the same, careful hand with which they had once sewn shirtwaists and fine ladies’ cloaks.

They walked quickly, heads down, through the Village streets already filling up with indifferent carters and puschcart vendors and hod carriers, off to their own work, their own city. The rain fell off a bit, a little light beginning to seep through the sky, as they turned the corner on Washington Place to the Triangle, with Clara striding happily at their head.

Up in the Triangle, the young women shuffled and turned awkwardly, in time to the scratchy phonograph set up in the corner. The music filled the eighth floor, echoing off the barren walls and hardwood floors.