“Judith is right,” Patience assured her. “Your parents won’t starve. We’ll be back at work soon.”
“I’ll write to my people,” Georgie offered. “Perhaps they’ve got another coin for yours.”
Covered in embraces and kind words, at last Abigail nodded. “Yes,” she agreed, “you’re right. I don’t—I mean, I know we’re in the right. My mother will be proud when she learns what we do here.”
Relieved, Judith returned to find a seat beside Hannah. The Seer hadn’t moved but sat, eyes closed, with her face turned to the knot of young women surrounding Abigail. Judith pinched her and told her to eat, pulling over what remained of her own portion. Hannah was too thin as it was; it was a wonder she ever had the strength to manage a power-loom at all, to throw the levers and knock the weft thread home after a bobbin change.
To liven the room, someone called for Lucy to do a reading, but instead of an original ode or acrostic, Lucy stood up on the bench and read out an opinion of the strike from the Boston Herald, with all the gravity of a schoolmarm, until all her audience laughed to tears: “‘The ambition of a woman ought to begin and end in adorning the domestic sphere, not inciting her sex to riot. Governor Everett must call up the militia and prevent a gynecracy in Lowell.’”
“Hah. I should like to see what the militia does when they see who their enemy is,” declared Sarah Hemingway.
“Probably lay down their arms and ask Lydia to dance,” said Judith, which neither Lydia nor Hannah smiled at. But Lucy chuckled before announcing she would write a rebuttal to the Herald.
Sarah Payne found the next page of newsprint far more distressing. Her brown eyes, wide and liquid at the best of times, grew to the size of saucers as she spread the page across the table. “Oh, look here! Do you see?”
Lydia leaned over and read it out in her clear, declaiming voice: “‘WANTED: healthy grown girls and women for mill work. Fair wages and clean board. Must be unmarried. Good character. Lowell, Massachusetts.’”
Many of the young operatives grew quiet. A few muttered oaths as they passed the page around the full length of the table.
“Boston is rife with girls who will answer that ad,” said Lydia. “Think of the shiploads of Irish, the orphans and widows—”
“—and not one reason they oughtn’t make common cause with us against rich men in gilt houses,” said Judith, still wiping at her tears of mirth.
“If they don’t join us, they could have a job and wages,” said Sarah Hemingway, growing gloomy.
Surrounded by her fellow strikers, Judith could feel their uncertainty tugging at her, like a litter of insistent pups at her skirts. After Abigail had come around, she’d hoped they would show a bit of sterner stuff. “Come now! Don’t forget your worth. Sarah Payne,” she called, “when you came to Lowell, did you know a warp thread from a weft?”
The girl blushed. “No, not at all. My family never had the money for a loom of our own.”
“Who showed you how?”
“Why, Georgie did. We started in the same weaving room.”
“Now you run five looms yourself. Five! And Lucy, did you work in any factory before this one?”
“No, Judith,” Lucy replied, grinning, for she must have seen at once what their ringleader was about. “It was Betsy Thorne and Sylvia who taught me.”
“And you’ve worked as drawing-in girl for twelve months, haven’t you? You see?” Other faces besides Lucy’s were brightening now, eyes rising from the floorboards and up from the trestle table.
“Us in this room are worth triple and quadruple what the owners get us for,” Judith preached, a gospel she could feel their ears eager to hear. “The corporations may try to replace us, but they’ll have no one to teach the new girls, and no one to run the machines meanwhile.”
“That’s true,” murmured Sarah Payne.
“Of course it’s true!” Judith cried. “This is no time for faint hearts. We are on the cusp of victory!”
“Hear, hear,” said Lucy, rapping her spoon against her bowl.
“Mind the crockery,” Mrs. Hanson scolded from the kitchen.
“To victory,” wheezed Hannah, raising her cup. “To the Factory Girls’ Union of Lowell.”
Around her, more cups rose and the chorus went up. “To victory! To the Factory Girls’ Union of Lowell!” There was nothing but watery coffee in the cups, but tonight, it sufficed.
5: Loyalty
STILL, NO SOUL SLEPT SOUNDLY in Mrs. Hanson’s boardinghouse that night, least of all the little general herself. At dawn, Judith whispered her plea to Hannah that the older girl come with her, away from the dormitory, away from the house, where no anxious ears would hear them.
Together they took the path between the blocks of worker tenements leading toward the factories, quite deserted while the strike lasted. Without thousands on thousands of machines thundering along inside the factories and workers chattering to and fro, all Lowell was peaceful as a churchyard.
“Tell me again what it’s like: what you do.”
The Seer didn’t need to ask what Judith meant. “Think how, if you stare long at a candle’s flame, the phantom hangs there even if you shut your eyes.”
Judith nodded. She liked this: to hear the older girl speak with confidence on a subject she knew well, her voice rough and low like a carpenter’s file against supple pine.
“When I know a person,” Hannah continued, “I can spy their phantom in everything that’s theirs. What they own, and what they make, and what they use. It all becomes a part of them, soul if not body.” She paused, and in the silence, Judith answered the unasked question.
“The problem,” she began with a sigh, “is, one, we Union girls are pledged to stay out of the mills until our demands are met. Two, Mr. Boott is determined not to meet them. Therefore, three, as soon as he is able, he will have new workers in the factories, more desperate and more docile.”
“Then you are worried about the advertisement? About—about replacements?”
“Of course! The looms don’t care who tends them.”
“But what you said at supper . . . Our skills? Knowledge? Were you—”
Judith caught the way she spun the braided band of Judith’s hair around her finger. “I meant what I said!” She tossed the loose hair that remained attached to her scalp. When Hannah’s mouth opened again, she rushed to finish. “But Boott and his masters won’t care: they’ll sacrifice a few months’ productivity on teaching new weavers and spinners, if at the other end they can declare victory over the Union . . .”
The Seer only continued to twist that woven ring around her finger.
“ . . . Unless,” said Judith, taking Hannah’s hand so the fretting ceased, “we convince the machines to strike with us.”
They stopped now and looked up, to find out where their footsteps had led them. The path that gobbled nearly eight precious minutes of meal times on a working day had taken less than three minutes now that it was empty. The Merrimack Mill, the colossus, stood before them, just over the canal: six stories of red brick, long as a village lane, and nearly a village of its own, and yet only one of the eight in Lowell. Warehouses surrounded the mill, where bales of cotton and bolts of finished cloth were stored, and offices, where the clerks and overseers kept accounts. Another morning would have found Judith and Hannah working on the upper stories of the mill itself, minding three and four looms at a time, with a hundred other girls occupied just the same. Downstairs, hundreds more would be carding and cleaning and spinning cotton on the river-powered wheels, and the smallest ones—children of eight or ten—would be filling baskets and swapping empty bobbins for full.