Uprising

  “Oh,” Rocco said sadly. “You already look American.”

  Bella unwrapped the package and held up the clothes. They were the cheapest shirtwaist and skirt possible, undoubtedly bought second- or third-hand from a peddler’s cart. A month ago, Bella would have considered them an incredible gift. But now she refolded them and started to hand them back.

  “Rocco,” she said, “you should give this to your mother.”

  “Wouldn’t fit,” he said.

  Bella tried not to giggle at that.

  “Then sell them and give her the money for your family,” she said. “For your brothers and sisters and the baby—”

  “The baby died,” Rocco said.

  Bella saw the effort he made to keep his face still while he said that, not to let any sorrow break through his expression.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  Rocco shrugged.

  “It was just a baby. Babies die all the time. Just about all the babies on the whole block died. The nurse said it was whooping cough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bella said again. There was nothing more she could say about the Luciano baby, because she’d never once taken it in her arms and cradled it against her chest. She’d never loved it. She’d just listened to the baby cry and resented it, resented the way its misery mirrored her own.

  “But our baby—I thought he was going to grow up,” Rocco said. “I thought I’d get to teach him how to shine shoes, and show him the best corner for selling newspapers. . . .”

  Bella remembered that she’d sometimes seen Rocco lean over the baby, letting the baby suck his finger. She remembered that Signora Luciano yelled at him when he did that, because he was wasting time he was supposed to be spending making flowers.

  Rocco seemed to shake himself, shaking off his old hopes.

  “I’m sorry about your family, too,” he said. “And I promise, for my family, I will repay all the money my father owes you. Here’s the first part.”

  He held out one penny. Bella hesitated, then took it. She placed the shirtwaist and skirt neatly on the table. She patted Rocco’s head.

  “Thank you,” she said, quite formally. “Thank you for the gift and the repayment. I accept your promise. But, Rocco—if your own family is hungry, spend the money on them. Or if they need medicine, that comes first. I can wait. I’m fine.”

  “You’re out on strike,” Rocco said.

  “And that’s why I’m fine, don’t you see? I’m standing up for myself.”

  Rocco squinted, as if this was a new concept, a girl standing up for herself.

  “Oh,” he said. “I wanted to tell you, too ... I found out what Pietro did with your money, that he said he was sending to your family. He was using it to pay off the padrone for your ticket to America. He told his friends he wanted to wait to tell you about your family until the debt was all paid, because he wanted some good news to give you with the bad.”

  Bella blinked.

  “Then . . . then he didn’t cheat me,” she said. Tears stung at Bella’s eyes—this changed everything. Pietro had hidden the letter to protect Bella, not to take advantage of her. All that time Bella had been daydreaming about Pietro, maybe he’d been daydreaming about her, too.

  “Oh, Rocco,” Bella said. “This is even a better present than the clothing.” Rocco recoiled a little, and she hurried to add, “Though the clothing is magnifico, it’s so kind of you to bring me a present at all.”

  Rocco nodded stiffly, but he soon slipped back out the door.

  “What was that all about?” Yetta burst out as soon as he was gone. Of course, she’d understood nothing, because Rocco and Bella had been speaking Italian.

  Bella started to explain, but the story shifted in the telling. She couldn’t make Pietro’s secrecy sound noble and kind. Just because I am a girl, I don’t have to be protected that much, she thought. That just made things worse when I did find out, that my family had been dead for so long and I didn’t even know it.

  “If Pietro ever comes back and we get married,” she told Yetta and Rahel, “he’s going to have to promise not to keep any more secrets like that.”

  And this was something different about Bella, maybe from being on strike and standing up for herself. She wasn’t the terrified girl she’d been when she’d first come to America. She wasn’t as easily fooled or as desperate as she’d been when Signor Luciano was stealing her money.

  But she was glad that she’d be able to daydream about Pietro again.

  Yetta

  Yetta crowded into a rented hall with Rahel and Bella and hundreds of other workers, to listen to the union officials talk. A new proposal had come in from the manufacturers who hadn’t settled yet—even Triangle.

  “It’s really quite generous,” the union man said from behind his podium. “Shorter hours, fairer wages, four holidays a year with full pay, no more petty fines and charges for thread, for needles . . . It’s almost everything you’ve been asking for.”

  “What about the union?” Yetta yelled out. “Are they going to recognize the union?”

  After all the time she’d spent picketing and trampling around in the snow, her voice was too hoarse to carry to the front of the room. But others picked up her cry: “Can we keep our union? Will they give us a closed shop?”

  “What’s a closed shop?” Bella whispered.

  “It means that the factories will only hire union members. If they can hire anyone they want, why would they bother negotiating with us?” Yetta said. “Why would they bother following any of the rules they agree to if they can just hire nonunion workers and treat them however they want?”

  The man at the podium held up his hand, trying to silence the questions.

  “Now, now,” he said. “You have to be willing to compromise. You can’t expect to win everything. That’s, uh”—he looked down at his notes, as if he needed extra help—“that’s the one concession the manufacturers weren’t willing to make. No closed shops, no union recognition. So we’ll just have to make the best of the circumstances. Now, if you’re ready to vote on this fine proposal—”

  “Voting’s no good without the union!” Yetta shouted. “What do you think we’ve been fighting for?”

  This was almost as bad as when the Triangle owners started a fake union. Yetta had to remind herself that this man was supposed to be representing her and the other workers, not the owners.

  At least she wasn’t alone in her outrage. Around her, others began shouting, “That’s a terrible proposal!” “Send it back!” “I won’t vote on that!”

  Girls who were standing on tables, just so they could see, began stomping their feet; other girls leaned over the banisters, calling out, “For this I’ve been starving for three months?” “For this I went to the workhouse?”

  “Now, calm down,” the man behind the podium said. “We have to be reasonable—”

  That’s all Yetta could hear before his voice was drowned out by a chant flowing through the hall: “Union! Union! Union!”

  The man gathered up his papers and scurried away.

  The chanting girls spilled out into the streets, too riled up to notice the cold. Yetta thought it would be great to have another automobile parade now, while everyone was so excited, or to march to City Hall again, as strikers had done in early December. But it was night now, and dark; there was nowhere to go but home. By the time they reached their own tenement, the cold had seeped through their clothes again. Bella’s face was almost blue in the light from the street lamps, and Yetta’s teeth were chattering.

  “I wonder if that was wise,” Rahel said, as the three of them stood warming themselves over the feeble heat of the stove.

  “You mean, rejecting that ridiculous offer?” Yetta asked. “Of course it was wise! That offer was nothing.”

  “Maybe it was the best we could get,” Rahel said.

  “Without union recognition?” Yetta said incredulously. “They’d have us back at our machines, and five minutes later some boss
would be whispering into some girl’s ear, Yes, I know you’re supposed to work only ten hours today, but I’ll need you to stay late.’ Or, ‘I know there were not supposed to be any more fines, but I saw you break that needle. That’s five cents off your pay this week. . . .’ Without the union, without a closed shop, what could she do?”

  “And did you see how excited everyone was?” Bella asked, her eyes shining.

  Rahel looked sadly at the two younger girls.

  “Excited, yes,” she said. “But it was like a riot of skeletons. Did you see how feeble everyone is becoming? I wager, not a single girl there had a decent meal today. And there was as much coughing and sneezing as cheering. The girl beside me was burning up with fever, and so weak, her friends had to hold her up. And, Bella, you’re not completely well yet yourself—”

  “I’m fine,” Bella insisted, but she couldn’t help coughing. Her face still looked blue, even indoors.

  “The rich women are still helping us out,” Yetta argued. “Why, the three of us still have the money Jane gave us—”

  “Except for the part we gave to the union,” Rahel said. “And what we spent on rent. And everything we spent on food. We can’t live on that money much longer.”

  Yetta stamped her feet with impatience.

  “There’s still a rally with the rich women next week,” she said. “At Carnegie Hall . . .”

  But when the night of the rally arrived, January 2, 1910, a brand-new year, Yetta could feel a difference in the air. Maybe it was because of Rahel, who sat staring off into space, her face blank, even as the speakers up on the stage praised the strikers’ courage, their perseverance, their cause. Maybe it was because Yetta heard so many of the rich people grumbling as they left: “A little too radical for my tastes, frankly,” and “Isn’t it appalling, how those socialists are deluding those poor little girls?”

  One man in a tuxedo, pushing his way out the door near Yetta, complained, “I hear the union turned down a perfectly good offer. The girls who are still striking are just lazy. They don’t want to work.”

  “That’s not true!” Yetta yelled, and began fighting through the crowd to get to the man, to make him understand.

  “Yetta, no,” Rahel said, and pulled on her arm to hold her back.

  “But—” Yetta protested. It was too late—the man had already disappeared into the crowd. Yetta turned around to complain to Rahel, and bumped directly into Jane Wellington.

  Jane was beaming at her.

  “I saw you from across the hall,” Jane panted, tugging at her corset as if desperate for air. “I thought I’d never catch up—how are you? How’s the strike going?”

  “Fine,” Yetta said.

  “I’ve been so worried about you and Bella,” Jane said. “I’ve wanted to come down to the picket line, but Miss Milhouse practically has me under lock and key. I had to sneak out tonight. But I want to help so much. I think soon . . .”

  The crowd surged forward, separating Yetta and Jane. Yetta made no effort to get back to her. It was too depressing. Jane had so much money. She lived in a mansion, she owned more dresses than stores did, she had servants waiting on her hand and foot. If a girl like Jane could be kept under lock and key, what hope was there for a girl like Yetta?

  “It’s over,” Rahel said.

  Yetta blinked up at her sister. Normally Yetta wasn’t much for sleeping late, but it was February now. Yetta had had six more weeks of picketing through snowdrifts and screaming herself hoarse and being beaten up and arrested. Earlier this morning, Yetta had crawled out of bed and immediately fallen to the floor. Rahel had insisted on tucking her back into the blankets.

  “Bella and I can take your picketing slots today,” Rahel told her then. “One day in bed will do you a world of good, and it won’t hurt the strike at all.”

  Yetta had fallen directly back to sleep. She wondered if she was still dreaming, imagining that Rahel had returned.

  “Got to . . . get back ... to striking,” she murmured, struggling to lift her head from the pillow.

  “No, Yetta. Didn’t you hear me?” Rahel said, her voice firm and all too real. “The strike is over. They sent us home.”

  Yetta gasped, fully awake now. She sat up straight, drawing on some reserve of energy she hadn’t known she had.

  “You voted?” she asked. “Without me?”

  Rahel shook her head.

  “The union leaders settled,” she said. “They want us to go back to work.”

  “No vote?” Yetta croaked out. She squinted into the dim light coming from the next room. “Did we—did we win?”

  “Triangle said they’d give us higher wages and shorter hours,” Rahel said.

  “But not a closed shop,” Bella added.

  “Then—that’s not good enough!” Yetta said. “That’s just what we turned down in December! What we refused to vote on!”

  “Everyone’s tired, Yetta,” Rahel said. She sounded tired herself, like some old crone who’d lived a long, hard life.

  “But the strike was going so well!” Yetta said. “The college girls are still donating money, the Yiddish theaters had those benefit plays . . . George Bernard Shaw himself sent a telegram about the strike!” Never mind that she hadn’t heard of George Bernard Shaw until the telegram—he was some famous playwright in England. In England!

  Rahel sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked Yetta’s hair, just like she had when Yetta was a little child.

  “So much spirit,” she murmured sadly. “Yetta, can’t you see? It had to end. The society women are arguing with the socialists, the union leaders want to be done with us so they can get started with the cloakmakers’ strike—”

  “They just think they can win that one because it’s all men,” Yetta said bitterly.

  Rahel didn’t disagree.

  “Our people have been waiting thousands of years for the Messiah,” Rahel said. “You can’t expect to change the world in a few short months.”

  “Five months,” Yetta corrected her angrily. “Five months of freezing and starving and all but killing ourselves to say, ‘Look, world, we matter. So what if we’re poor? So what if we’re girls? So what if our English isn’t so great? The bosses owe us some common decency. We deserve to be treated like human beings.’ And now—now you’re just going to go sit down at your machine again, quiet as a mouse, and sew when the bosses say sew, and stop when the bosses say stop, and let them tell you when you’re allowed to use the facilities, and when you get only an apple turnover for working late, and—”

  “No,” Rahel said quietly. “I’m not going to do that.”

  Yetta was surprised to see that Rahel was shaking.

  “What other choice do we have?” Yetta demanded.

  Rahel looked down. She was twisting her hands in her lap, nervously.

  “Maybe now isn’t the best time to tell you.”

  “What?”

  Rahel looked back up. Maybe her eyes were blazing passionately; maybe they were dull and glazed. Yetta just couldn’t tell in the dim light.

  “I’m going to marry Mr. Cohen,” Rahel said, and her voice was as firm as a slamming door, revealing nothing else.

  For a minute, Yetta just stared at her sister, speechless. She felt suddenly that she didn’t know her sister very well, had never known her very well. Then she gulped and asked, “Who’s Mr. Cohen?”

  “From my English class,” Rahel said. “You met him on the sidewalk that one night, after we walked Bella home. He’s been . . . courting me. If it hadn’t been for the strike, he would have been taking me to movies and dances, bringing me flowers. But as it is . . . he’s asked me to marry him.”

  Yetta leaned back against the iron frame of the bed, trying to make sense of this, trying to make sense of her sister.

  “Do you love him?” Yetta asked, her voice strangely shy and husky.

  Rahel shrugged.

  “I think so. But what do I know about love? How can I be sure?” she asked. “He’s very hands
ome. His English is good. And he owns his own grocery. I can help him in the store, so he doesn’t have to hire anyone else. And maybe later, when there’s more business or when we have babies, he could hire you, too, so you wouldn’t have to work in the factory either. You can live with us, of course. . . .”

  Yetta tried to picture this life Rahel was describing: Rahel as a storekeeper’s wife, Yetta as the spinster aunt/servant, juggling a crying baby as she stands on a ladder reaching for cans of food, trying to calm customers who grumble about broken crackers, rotting potatoes, spoiled bologna. That wasn’t Yetta! Yetta was a shirtwaist striker!

  Not anymore . . .

  Yetta glared at Rahel.

  “If you wanted Mama’s life, why did you bother leaving the shtetl?” Yetta asked coldly. “Are you a revolutionary or not?”

  “Oh, Yetta,” Rahel said despairingly. “I was always a better revolutionary in your mind than in reality.”

  “But in Russia . . .”

  “I was just an ignorant girl from the shtetl. Everyone in the movement was so sophisticated and they knew everything—and the boys were so handsome—so of course I joined. The leaders didn’t even know my name. I didn’t know anything about the plot to kill the Czar.”

  “But you had to run for your life—”

  “Mostly because I was Jewish,” Rahel said. She shifted positions, and now Yetta could see that her eyes were fierce and blazing. “There was a horrible pogrom in Bialystok— houses burning, Jews beaten to death, tossed out of windows and killed . . .”

  Yetta had known this—known it without wanting to. But she’d tried not to remember it.

  “And, Yetta, it’s not safe for Mother and Father even in the shtetl,” Rahel continued. “I’ve been reading the papers, and it’s just a matter of time until the Russians pick our shtetl, pick our family for the next pogrom.”

  “That’s why we’re saving money to bring them here,” Yetta said, as if she were the older sister and Rahel was some small child who needed everything spelled out for her.