Bread and Roses, Too

“Short pay!” It was one of the Italians. Halfway back in the line waiting for his pay envelope, Jake felt a thrill of fear or excitement, he couldn’t have said which. All week the men had talked of a strike. The Italians had passed around a petition. If you signed it, you were promising to walk out if the threatened pay cut came through in Friday’s envelope. None of the Irish, who were mostly management or skilled, nor any of the other native-born, had signed it. But Jake had put his X on it, mostly because his pa had threatened to kill him if he went out on strike “with those wops,” and Jake, as usual, had been furious with him. The sot had drunk up all of Jake’s last pay envelope so that he had had to spend the past two weeks stealing food and sleeping in garbage dumps just to stay alive.
At first the non-Italian workers seemed confused. Should they walk out or stay put? Several started back toward their stations, then changed their minds and followed the Italians. Paddy Parker, the Irish floor boss, had planted himself at the head of the escalator, trying to block anyone’s attempted exit with his huge body. Billy Wood, owner of half the mills in town, was uncom monly proud of that escalator. It got the workers from the ground floor to the upper stories of the mill in record time. That, with the speeded-up machines, was swelling the profit margin at the Wood Mill.
“Strike! Strike!” another worker cried, racing back and forth between the rows of spindle frames. Someone pulled a switch, and the belts slowed and stopped.
“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.