Beyond the Pale: A Novel (47 page)

“Of course,” everyone murmured. Dovida started to rise but I motioned her down. “I’ll see the girls out tonight, Dovid.”

“That wasn’t too bad, was it?” I said softly as the girls hugged me goodnight.

“No,” Chava grinned at me. Rose just raised an eyebrow as she pulled on her gloves.

“Now be good to your cousin,” I whispered in Chava’s ear, amused at the confused look she shot me.

When I returned, Lillian Wald was appealing to Dovida for funds. Sometimes I felt Dovida was paying my wages at the Settlement. That was the odd circle that money imposed on our interactions. Dovida’s generosity made it easier to waive the $5 I was supposed to charge tenement women for delivering their babies. Within a half hour, Lillian Wald and Rita said their goodbyes.

I ruffled Dovida’s hair as I started to clear the dishes. She pulled me into her lap.

“Did you see that flirting?” she asked.

“It’s nothing, Dovida. Chava’s dedicated to Rose.”

“I didn’t mean them,” she said, tickling me with her mustache.

I
KICKED THROUGH THE PILES
of autumn leaves on the sidewalk, feeling light and easygoing for no reason at all. On our street there were no trees, so I liked walking home by Seward Park.

“So,” said Rose, “what was that about?”

“What?”

“What? What! You couldn’t stop looking at her all night.”

“Miss Wald?”

“Chava—.” Rose scraped her foot along the pavement in frustration.

“Rita? You mean Rita?”

“No, Gutke. Of course I mean Rita.”

“I was just looking at her.”

“So I noticed.”

“You think I—.” I stopped, realizing I did, I was—that whatever Rose was accusing me of, I was genuinely guilty of it.

“It’s only because we happen to share a bed that you want me, isn’t it?”

“Rose, I wouldn’t. How can you think such a thing?” The shop signs threw shadows over our faces.

“You know I could never feel for some dance hall boy the way I feel for you. But when I saw how you looked at Rita, it really scared me. Not everyone stays with their first, I understand that.”

Her face was tight, composed in the faint streetlight. She picked up a brown leaf and crumpled it slowly. I took her hand.

“Rose, I’m not saying you were wrong in what you saw. But what you saw was only looking.”

“But how long before one day you look at someone like that and decide you want to leave me?”

“I can’t imagine leaving you.”

“Then you have very little imagination.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“It’s not hard to do.” She made a fist with her free hand and pushed a little at my shoulder.

“I want to be with you. I want you to want to be with me. If I tell you every morning when we wake and every evening before we fall asleep, will you forgive me if I sometimes think of other things during the day?”

“You want me to give you permission to spend your days swooning after other girls?” She squeezed my hand tightly.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know, sweetheart.” Her face softened. I took her arm and pulled her close to me. As we walked, I was careful to match my long stride to her shorter step. We were silent, the street curiously quiet, a few animals rummaging in garbage, distant shouts. By the time we got home I felt like we shared the same body, separated only by skin.

On the second landing, I turned to her. “I love you,” I whispered.

She gulped, gesturing at the stained, pressed tin walls. “You always tell me in such romantic places.”

Pleasure Is
My Answer

N
OVEMBER 22, 1909
, the day before Rose’s birthday—at last we would both be done with our teenage years—we arrived at Cooper Union two hours early. Already every seat was filled so we found a position, not far from the stage, where we could lean against the stone wall. Rose had been working in the garment industry for more than five years and she knew hundreds of the girls—it seemed like hundreds to me. Rose had been feeling both guilty and glad that she didn’t get hired at Leiserson’s. She’d wanted to work there at first: they had electricity, not gas, for light. Now Leiserson’s had been out on strike for at least two months and probably nothing was left in Local 25’s strike fund. Rose had been working at Moss’s, which had the same conditions as a basement sweatshop, with two hundred girls. But it was better than working for Harry—and for Leiserson’s too, as it turned out.

As the hall filled up, we could tell that many would be left outside. I felt bad taking up a garment worker’s space, but then I saw Mary Drier, the head of the League, step onto the platform with Gompers and the other men, and I remembered that we were all workers together. I was there to be with Rose. Packed in with the others was the first time I’d felt really warm in a month. The newspapers said it was going to be an especially cold winter.

I enjoyed hearing Miss Drier speak, even if she addressed us in English, throwing in the few Yiddish words she knew, for solidarity. It made me proud that the AFL and the socialists took us seriously enough to have her at a mass meeting. But the speeches seemed to go on forever. Words rippled through the arches of the big hall and I got that slightly seasick sensation again. Rose slid down to the floor, hugging her knees, and I followed her. When she bent over, I rubbed her neck. A young woman standing next to me smiled, then pointed to her mouth, opening it wide in a yawn. I nodded. Was something really going to come of this?

Suddenly there was a commotion in the middle of the seats, almost directly beside of us. We stood to see what was going on. A small girl yelled that she’d been picketing Leiserson’s all this time and demanded to be heard. “Let her through,” people were saying, and as she dashed by us Rose whispered, “That’s Clara!” The girl leaped onto the platform.

“I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions,” Clara said. “I am tired of listening to speakers talk in general terms. What we are here for is to decide whether or not to strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared—now!”

Everyone was out of their seats, shouting and yelling. A small group of Italian girls in the aisle behind us looked puzzled and I heard someone quickly translating for them. They had lasted through all these hours of Yiddish and English rhetoric. I knew that lots of Italian girls had worked with Rose but I didn’t see many in the hall. Of course, in American clothes, Jews and Italians often looked like cousins. The shouting drowned out their translator. Rose was waving her arm in the air, yes, yes. The Italians got the idea and started waving and shouting too.

A strike! All the garment workers, the whole industry, thousands of—thousands of girls! Suddenly I realized what was happening and my whole body tingled, as if someone was making sparks against my skin from the inside.

Gompers looked like he was going to explode. Hadn’t he just advised everyone to be cautious? In his black boxy hat and long black coat he looked like a beardless cantor who’d been upstaged by a choir. The chairman, Feigenbaum, kept calling for order but no one paid attention. When he asked for a second to the motion, the whole room started to yell again. When there was a pause in the noise, Feigenbaum called out, “Do you mean faith? Will you take the old Jewish oath?”

As if we were transported to a synagogue, with the Italian girls gaping at us, all the Jews intoned, “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.”

“Chava, you’re crying,” Rose said as she turned to me. She was beaming, excited. She put her hand up to my cheek to show me.

“I guess I am,” I sniffled.

“Don’t, sweetheart. It’s my birthday now, but this is the best present.” No one paid any attention to us in the din, though I was vaguely aware that the people on the platform were giving out instructions, where to go to join Local 25, how to find the Women’s Trade Union League. Rose and I already knew.

I told Rose I’d do her early picket duty for Thursday morning before I went to work. She could come relieve me at seven. I was a member of the League, if not the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, and we were all in this together. Why shouldn’t I help?

It was 4:00
A.M.
when I woke. Rose was a soft series of mounds. I squinted at her and pretended she was the shape of Russia from the boat. Only her I got to keep by me, more steady than any country.

When I crawled out of the bed it was bitter cold. Maybe the gas lines had frozen again. Picketing before dawn was so unpleasant, but I was glad to do it for Rose, she needed to sleep. Everyone was stretched beyond what they could take. Besides the scraps Harry threw us, it was just my wages keeping the household from the street. Bina kept taking in work from Harry, even after Rose told her it was like being a scab. Bina said she wasn’t crossing a picket line, she wouldn’t do that. But Harry had to get through this strike too; the preparation she did would help the union girls when Harry settled. She would make sure he was among the first to sign a contract, so what was the harm? Rose had walked out on Bina and I followed her. I began to understand how people in families stopped talking to each other. Of course, we were talking to Bina again within the hour, but we gave Harry the cold shoulder. Thirty thousand girls were out—what would it have been like if we could have organized the homebound pieceworkers too?

I got by Moss’s at 5:15. I was the first one there. At 5:30, several carts came up and maybe thirty Negro women jumped off, forming a queue. It was me and my one picket sign, them and two guards. One guard was by the front door, unlocking it. The other waved at me with his club from the front of the line.

I caught up to the last woman. I had never been that close to a Negro before. Her nose was broad like my Aunt Shendl’s. In the Yiddish press I’d read how white people in the South hung Negroes—lynching, they called it. “Sister,” I whispered to her, “don’t scab on the union.”

She turned and glared at me, sharp. “Sister!” The cold air made a cloud that hung between us. “You going to feed my children, sis-ter?”

“Join the union. The strike fund will give you food.” I wanted to talk to her about how alike our plights were, how the world made pogroms on us both, but I lost my footing on the ice and had to hurry to catch up with her.

She kept looking at me. “You going to give me a union card?”

“Why not?”

She shook her head. The guard was getting closer as we got near the door. “Either you just got off the boat, honey, or you’re blind. Your union folks won’t sign up a colored woman.”

“I would.”

She squinted at me. The new electric lights weren’t much brighter than the old gas ones. “I believe you might,” she laughed.

“Get along, you—you know what we do to your kind!” The guard yelled and swung his stick an inch from my cheek. I jumped back. He grunted, satisfied.

When I got off work from the bindery later that day, I walked all the way up to East 22nd Street, to the League strike center. I recognized some of the rich women from the speeches. Leonora O’Reilly and Rose Schneiderman I knew already from the League office. Lena was there too, on the telephone, as usual, but she looked up and waved at me. Everyone was talking, drinking coffee, gesturing, campaigning. At least it was warm, mostly from the heat of our bodies. Some of the girls probably joined the union just to feel all right about attending their meetings, thawing out. Finally I made my way over to Leonora.

“I’ve got to ask you about something, about the scabs?”

She turned. I could see she recognized me but didn’t remember my name. Thousands of girls were walking in and out of the center every hour, but still, I’d been to three executive meetings, since the girls in the bindery nominated me as representative. “Go ahead,” she said. It would have been easier to talk to Lena Reznikoff instead of to this American, even though Leonora used to be a working girl. Maybe I wouldn’t know how to say it right. Somebody was already asking her a question about bail money for the girls in jail.

“In a minute,” she said to them and turned back to me, raising her eyebrows as a question, waiting.

“Is it true the union won’t sign up, up—,” I fumbled in English.

“Who?”

“Women who used to be slaves?” I thought she would understand but she didn’t.

“All of us are wage slaves here. Who told you somebody wouldn’t sign them up?”

“That’s not what I mean. I mean, the, the Negro women.”

“Oh.” She frowned, looking over my shoulder at the crowd. I looked too. Almost all the girls were Jewish, some Italian—that was who worked in the needle trades. Where did the Negro women work?

“You know I belong to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People myself,” Leonora said.

“No. I didn’t even know there was such an organization.”

She nodded, patiently, the way she always did. “I’ve taught Negro girls sewing at the Manhattan Trade School. I agree it’s of the utmost importance that the League support the Negro cause. Many misunderstandings and injustices keep us apart. If they came up here to join the union, surely we’d sign them up. I’d sign them up myself. But they don’t, do they?”

“A woman I talked to this morning said we wouldn’t give her a union card, so maybe they don’t know. We should send an organizer to where they live.”

“I can’t find but a handful of organizers for the Italian girls. Now how I am I going to organize Negroes? Are you going to do it?”

“I’m the only one at home bringing in a paycheck now. I work for a bindery,” I added quickly, in case she really didn’t remember. “How could I?”

“There you have it. Now I have to see about this bail fund.”

“But—”

“Come talk to me after the strike’s over. I know most of your people are like-minded on this, and after the strike we should make every effort to extend our services to Negro women. But I have five thousand girls to feed tonight and another thirty I have to arrange bail for.”

The month jumped out of our hands like a starving alley cat. One night Rose and I went to hear Mother Jones speak at the Thalia Theatre. Guss’s pickle stand was closing up as we hurried past, and Mrs. Guss offered us a pickle. “If you’re strikers, it’s on me,” she said.