This book is a fictionalized account of the 1929 Loray Mill Stike in Gastonia, North Carolina that resulted in bloodshed and the death of Ella May Wiggins a Union organizer. Cash uses different voices to tell the story from Ella May's herself to Lily Wiggins her daughter, to Vershel Park, who knew her in South Carolina when she worked at a mill there, to Brother a man who lived with the monks who helped the strikers, to Claire McAdam who met her in Washington D.C. while being escorted around by a Senator from North Carolina, to Richard McAdam her father a mill owner who worries about the strikers making a bad impression on his daughter's future in-laws who are visiting, to Katherine McAdam, wife of Richard, who makes friends with Ella, to Hampton Haywood, a black Union man from up North who has come down South to organize the blacks into the Union with Ella's help, to Albert Roach, a cop on suspension for bad behavior who doesn't know when to quit.
Ella has four kids and a fifth one has died because she wasn't there to take care of it or had the money to get him proper medicine or a visit to the doctor. When the Union comes to Gaston County to Gastonia to help with the Loray Mill strike they are encouraging the other mills to strike by getting employees to join the Union. Ella, a singer, had written a song about working in the mill and the Union people asked her to speak before the crowd about her story and to sing her song. When she does she immediately becomes famous as "the singer".
Ella wants to organize the blacks into the Union as does Sophia, the Northerner who recruited her into the Union wants to do. But the Union leader at the site, Richard Beal believes that they should wait until they get their demands met for the whites first before they bring in the blacks. Sophia wants to bring in a black Union man from up North to help Ella organize the blacks. Meanwhile, she is helping with the Loray strike and with the Union in general by going to D.C. to talk to the North Carolina Senator about their plight.
This book is written in an interesting way as it's told from many different vantage points. You wind up with different viewpoints and ideas about what happened and why and who was to blame. You also get the viewpoint of a mill owner who runs a good mill and treats his mill workers fairly but finds himself tempted to join in with the bad mill owners in doing bad things because he is against the strikes because they make his town look bad. It also shows the viewpoints of his wife and daughter who are against his viewpoints because they sympathize with Ella. But you also see the viewpoint of Albert Roach one of the instigators and "bad guys" of the story and what motivated him. This can be jarring a bit and honestly, I wanted to read a book about Ella May and wound up with one about the South at this point of time. This book is very well written and takes a fascinating look at something that happened in history that was quickly hushed up as the author himself is from Gastonia and had never heard of it until he went to grad school in Louisiana. I'm glad the author chose to shed some light on this brave female who fought for others and died tragically in the process. I give this book four out of five stars.
Quotes
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone.
-Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward Angel)
She’d decided that giving birth to a child is nothing but
an invitation to losing it, and that was what she feared each time she’d heard
the first newborn cry of one her children.
-Wiley Cash (The Last Ballad p 122)
“You’re young, hungry, smart. Don’t ruin it. Don’t encourage
your brothers to ruin it.” “What are you saying?” Haywood asked. “I’m
suggesting that you stick with whom and what you know.” “You’re telling me not
to mix with white people,” Haywood said. “Not the ones who will get you killed.
And, Mr. Haywood, there are many kinds of death.”
-Wiley Cash (The Last Ballad p 261)
There is an old saying that every story, even your own,
is either happy or sad depending on where you stop telling it. I believe I’ll stop telling this one here.
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