Uprising

  Bella longed to clutch Pietro’s arm as she had yesterday, to cling to him for protection. But somehow she couldn’t. Touching him would mean something different today. She’d lain awake last night trying to remember how close a cousin Pietro was—was her grandfather his grandmother’s brother? Or was the connection her father and Pietro’s mother? It hadn’t mattered, back in Italy. Pietro had grown up in another village. She remembered seeing him only once, at a funeral. But now . . . what were the rules in America about cousins getting married?

  Even in the dark, her back against the wall, two of Signora Luciano’s filthy children snoring beside her, just thinking that question had made her blush. She felt the heat rising in her cheeks now, in the daylight. She tilted her head back, hoping for a cool breeze on her face. But the air around her was hot and still and stale. In America, it seemed, even air got trapped in the crowd.

  Bella gasped.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing upward.

  “Just more tenement buildings,” Pietro said, shrugging.

  “No, there,” she said. “Those metal things, running down the side of the building like caterpillars. There’s one there— and there and—” She narrowly missed poking a man in the eye. He scowled at her, spat, and rushed on.

  “You mean the fire escapes—the stairs on the outsides of the buildings?” Pietro asked. “The Lucianos’ building has some, didn’t you notice? They’re so people can climb down from the higher floors if there’s a fire.”

  Bella counted windows. One, two, three, four ... All the apartment buildings were five stories high. Back home, except for the priest and the one or two families who actually owned land, everyone lived in one-story, one-room mud houses. The women did their cooking in the doorways; most nights, no one bothered lighting a lamp or a candle before going to bed on the dirt floor. Fire wasn’t a problem.

  Bella tried to imagine living on the fifth story of some wood-framed apartment building. She imagined flames licking up through the wooden floor. She shivered despite the heat.

  Pietro was chuckling.

  “I forgot how strange everything seemed when I got here last year,” he said. “The littlest things. Engraved buttons. Food in boxes. Bridges. Doorknobs. Traffic cops. Now I don’t give any of it a second thought. Don’t worry—you’ll stop noticing things after a while too.”

  Bella wasn’t sure she wanted to stop noticing. She was thinking how grateful she would be for a fire escape, if she ever needed one.

  “Now, remember, at work today, don’t let them see how much you don’t know,” Pietro said. “Just do what they tell you. And it’s payday—Saturdays are when they give out the money for the whole week. But they won’t give you anything, because this is just a practice day, a tryout. They want to see if you can do the work.”

  “What do you mean, they won’t give me anything?” Bella asked, horrified. “Pietro, I have to make money, for my family, for Mama, for . . .”

  She wondered how he could have misunderstood so completely, how he could have agreed to such a ridiculous thing on her behalf. Didn’t he know how close her family was to starving? Couldn’t he tell by looking at her, Bella, with the bones of her face jutting out in hard knobs, her skin stretched tight, her eyes sunken in? The thin stew Signora Luciano had fed them for dinner, the slice of hard bread she’d given Bella for breakfast—that would have been three days’ worth of food back home. They’d had bad harvest after bad harvest, ever since Papa died.

  Why else would Bella have come halfway around the world, to this strange place, except that her family was desperate?

  “They have to pay me,” Bella said. “And if they won’t, I’ll work somewhere else.”

  “Calm down,” Pietro said. He looked around, as if worried that someone else in the crowd would overhear. “This is just how they do things here. Any other place in New York City, it’d be the same. I got you the best job I could find for a girl. You work hard today, next week they’ll pay you. And then I’ll send the money to your mama, right away.”

  “You will?” Bella asked. “Oh, thank you!”

  She walked on, not minding how thick the crowd was she had to plow through. As far as she was concerned, she would walk over burning coals if it meant help for her family.

  • • •

  The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory was at the top of a ten-story building. Bella froze on the sidewalk for a moment, looking up and up and up. It made her dizzy to bend her head back so far. This was like staring at the mountains back home, except the mountains sloped down gradually, and the Triangle building shot up straight from the ground to the sky, its sheer, steep walls blocking out the sun.

  Something like terror gripped Bella, and her thoughts tangled: I cant work in a big fancy place like that.. . I’ll starve and so will Mama and the little ones....Oh, how far away the ground must look from those windows up there. .. .

  She swallowed hard, and the only words that slipped out were a question: “No fire escapes?”

  “Not here”, Pietro said. “Not in this part of the city. There are hoity-toity rich people just around the corner. They think fire escapes are ugly.”

  “But if there’s a fire . . .” Bella wasn’t really thinking about fire. She was thinking about falling, or failing, or being fired.

  “There’s probably a fire escape at the back, I guess. Or they have extra stairways inside. This is New York City. They have rules about things like that. Now come on. You can’t be late your first day.”

  They went inside and stepped into a marvel called an elevator—a little box that whisked them up to the ninth floor. Other girls were crowded into the box with them, girls in fancy hats and elegant skirts and those shining white shirtwaists. Bella guessed these girls were royalty of some sort. She might have been brave enough to ask them who they were except that they all seemed to be speaking in other languages. Even one girl who looked Italian was chattering away in a strange tongue that Bella couldn’t understand at all.

  The box stopped and the doors opened. The other girls streamed out, rushing toward rows of machines on long tables. Pietro led Bella to a man standing at the end of one of the tables.

  “This is Signor Carlotti,” Pietro said. “Signor Carlotti, this is Bella.”

  “Scissors,” Signor Carlotti said, handing her a pair. “When the shirtwaists come to you, cut the loose threads.”

  Actually, that wasn’t exactly what he said. Bella couldn’t quite make sense of any of his words—his accent was even murkier than Signora Luciano’s. But he demonstrated as he talked, lifting a shirtwaist from the table, snipping threads, dropping the finished shirtwaist into a basket. Another girl sat nearby, already slicing threads with her own pair of scissors with such reckless speed that Bella feared that the blades would slip through the cloth as well.

  “Buon giorno,” Bella started to say to the girl. “My name is—”

  “No talking,” Signor Carlotti said. “Work.” At least, that’s what Bella guessed he said, because he held his finger to his lips and glared.

  Bella picked up her first shirtwaist. The garment was delicate and fine, with frills around the collar and gathers at the waist. It was like holding stitched air. Bella turned it over carefully, searching for hanging threads. Ah, there’s one. She lifted her scissors, angled the blades just so, gently pulled the handles together.

  “Faster,” Signor Carlotti said. “You take that long over every thread, you will never earn a cent in the factory. You will be out on the streets and even Pietro won’t be able to save you. Your family will starve.”

  It was amazing that Bella could understand what he was saying, without comprehending a single word.

  Bella glanced up and saw that the other girl had whipped through three shirtwaists in the time it had taken Bella to cut one thread. Bella decided that if the other girl wasn’t afraid of ripping the shirtwaists to shreds, Bella shouldn’t worry either. She sliced through the rest of the threads, dropped the shirtwaist in the basket, and
picked up a new one.

  “That’s better,” Signor Carlotti grunted, or something like it.

  “You’re set then,” Pietro said. “Good-bye. I’ve got to get to my job. I’ll meet you on the sidewalk outside, after work.”

  “Okay,” Bella said. She wanted to flash him a big smile, to tell him how grateful she was that he’d be waiting for her, that she wouldn’t have to find her way back to the Lucianos’ alone. But Signor Carlotti was glaring again, so she dipped her head down over the shirtwaist. She resisted the impulse to watch Pietro walking back to the elevator.

  Pietro, Bella thought. Such a nice name. Such a handsome man. And so kind to me . . .

  “Faster!” Signor Carlotti said.

  Bella forced herself to stop thinking about Pietro. Cut, cut, cut, drop. Pick up a new shirtwaist. Cut, cut, cut. . . drop. Pick up a new shirtwaist. This was not a difficult job. Bella’s little sister Guilia, who still sucked her thumb and clung to Mama’s skirt most of the time, would have been capable of doing it. But Bella found herself having to concentrate hard, especially with Signor Carlotti hovering over her, watching her every move, yelling “Faster!” every time she so much as hesitated picking up the next shirtwaist. The pile of shirtwaists with hanging threads kept growing, and Bella couldn’t even stop long enough to look up and see where they were coming from, who was bringing them over. Her neck grew stiff, but she didn’t dare tilt her head back to relax it, even for a second.

  Suddenly Signor Carlotti grabbed up one of the shirtwaists Bella had just dropped into the basket.

  “You idiot girl!” he screamed, shaking the shirtwaist in her face. “Can’t even handle a simple job like this! Look at the thread you missed!” The offending thread unfurled from a hiding place in the sleeve. It dangled in front of Bella’s eyes, a mark of shame. “I’ll fire you if I find another one of these! The Triangle label stands for quality and pride! Not dangling threads! Not shoddy work by useless girls like you!”

  Maybe what he actually said was that she was being fired, right then and there. But Bella was determined not to hear that.

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she said, snatching the shirtwaist from his hands, slicing through the thread. “I’ll never make another mistake again. I promise!”

  Her hands were shaking when she turned her attention to the next shirtwaist.

  I cant be fired, she told herself. I cannot lose this job.

  “Tu es ale mol inem zelbikn seyder,” the other girl said, which was totally incomprehensible. But it made Bella look up. She saw that the other girl was showing her something, turning the shirtwaist in her own lap this way and that.

  Ooohhh, Bella thought. The other girl meant that she’d found a pattern to her work. The hanging threads were in pretty much the same places on every shirtwaist, so the girl cut them in the same order each time. That way, she never missed any.

  “Grazie,” Bella said. “I understand.”

  “Back to work!” Signor Carlotti screamed. “No chitchat!”

  Bella settled into a pattern of her own. Front, right side, back, left side. Then a quick once-over just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything.

  Cut, cut, cut . . . drop. Cut, cut, cut . . . drop.

  Something shifted in Bella’s brain. She was still whipping through the shirtwaists as fast as she could, and she didn’t dare look away from her work, even for a second. But she found that every now and then she could allow herself the luxury of thinking about something besides shirtwaists and scissors and hanging threads. She let herself notice the glorious rumble of the rows and rows of sewing machines, all racing together. She’d gotten a quick glimpse of them before she sat down and started cutting. How Mama would have stared, to see such a thing! Sewing was Mama’s least favorite chore; when the news had come to Calia that they had machines to do such things, out in the rest of the world, Mama had talked about it for days.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to be that free?” she’d asked Bella wistfully. “Just tell a machine, This is your job now,’ and you can go out and enjoy the sunshine? No hunching over a needle all the time, no worrying about mending and patching?”

  Signor Carlotti bent over in front of Bella, screaming right into her face.

  “You’re slowing down again! The shirtwaists are piling up! Work faster!” Spittle flew out of his mouth and landed on Bella’s eyebrow, but she didn’t dare take her hands off the shirtwaist to wipe it away.

  Oh, Mama, Bella thought, with an ache in her heart. You didn’t know the sewing machines still left some work for girls to do! And the machines are so fast I can never keep up....

  But she had to try.

  Bella worked for hours, the shirtwaists flying through her hands. About noon, the machines suddenly lapsed into silence.

  Grazie, grazie, Madonna mia, Bella thought. They’re going to give us a break for lunch.

  The other girl put her scissors down, stood up, and stretched. Bella smiled at her. She dropped one last shirtwaist into the basket, and reached out to place her scissors on the table too. But Signor Carlotti shoved the scissors back at her, back into her hand.

  “Oh, no, no, no, no, no! You do not get a lunch break, you lazy girl! You’ve done nothing all morning! Look at all these shirtwaists you haven’t finished! You sit right there and keep working until they’re done!”

  Bella was pretty sure that was what he was saying, because he gestured at the pile of shirtwaists as he pushed Bella back into her chair. Bella wanted to fire back angry words of her own: “But you are not even paying me today! I’m just learning—how can you expect me to keep up? This isn’t right! I’m not a machine! Even back in Calia, the landowners give the laborers a chance to eat lunch!”

  But Bella remembered Pietro saying this was the best job he could find for her; she remembered him saying that it would be the same anywhere else in New York. She remembered that Guilia, her little sister, had had so little food lately that sometimes she didn’t have enough energy to play, she just lay on her blanket staring up at nothing.

  I can skip lunch today if it means that next week Mama will have money for food for Guilia, Bella told herself. I can bear anything for Guilia.

  Bella picked up the next shirtwaist.

  The rest of the day passed in a blur. The factory became stiflingly hot by early afternoon, and sweat poured down Bella’s face, but she forced herself to ignore it. A blister rose on her thumb where the scissors rubbed, but she just shifted positions, sliding the scissors handles further up on her hand. Her back ached, her head ached, her neck ached, her hand ached—she didn’t let herself care.

  Bella was so dizzy, light-headed, and hungry by late in the day that she was back to needing to concentrate intensely on each shirtwaist, to focus precisely on each snip of her scissors. So she didn’t notice the screaming across the room right away. The girl sitting beside her had to nudge Bella’s arm.

  “Ze nor!” the girl said, and pointed.

  Bella looked up.

  Two tables away, a red-faced man was screaming while two other men stood on either side of him, tugging on his arms. The screaming man was thin and stooped over; the men pulling at him were big and beefy and mean-looking.

  They were screaming too, but their voices didn’t carry. Bella could only hear what the thin man said. Of course, Bella couldn’t understand any of his words, but she could tell he was very mad. And he wasn’t giving up, no matter how much the other men tugged at him. The men knocked his glasses from his face; they ripped his shirt; they slapped him and lifted him and carried him out. But still the man kept screaming, kept kicking and pulling back.

  Suddenly, all around Bella, the other workers stood up. It was like watching a dance, everyone making the same movement at once, except for one or two laggards who were out of step. Bella was one of the laggards, but she sprang up only a split second after the other learner girl. Bella didn’t know why, but obviously everyone was supposed to stand.

  The wheels of the sewing machines kept turning fo
r a few moments, as if, being machines, they were left out of the dance. Bella could see fabric bunching, thread snagging.

  Oh, no, those shirtwaists will be ruined, Bella fretted. But no one else seemed to care. People were streaming past her, rushing for the elevator. The girls Bella had thought were royalty, some women with matronly faces, the few men and boys who worked on this floor—all of them were rushing for the exit at once. They knocked over baskets of shirtwaists; they trampled the shirtwaists underfoot.

  And they were all yelling and talking—even laughing— at once.

  Is this how they always act at the end of the day? Bella wondered. Or just Saturdays, when they’ve been paid and they know they’ll have the next day off?

  In the confusion of strange languages Bella didn’t understand, she started noticing that one word was being repeated over and over again: “Strike.” Boys and girls yelled it; women murmured it wonderingly; men whispered it in hushed tones.

  “What’s a ‘strike’?” Bella asked, but in the hubbub, nobody seemed to hear her.

  Bella let the crowd carry her into the elevator, out of the building. On the sidewalk below, she resisted the urge to bend down and kiss the ground—Oh, thank you, God, I was so high up in the sky, but I made it back down safely. The sidewalk wasn’t exactly “ground,” anyway—not dirt, but pavement.

  The rest of the workers scattered, but Bella leaned against the building, waiting for Pietro. He appeared around the corner, his dark hair curling at his temples, his dark eyes flashing, his lips pursed into an O—he was whistling. Bella forgot her aching back, neck, head, and hands; she forgot the throbbing blister on her thumb; she forgot her empty stomach.

  Does whistling mean he’s happy to see me? she wondered.

  “Did Signor Carlotti say to come back on Monday?” Pietro asked.