To Make My Bread

by Grace Lumpkin

  Ora was leaning over Bonnie. Tom Moore spoke. “This is war, and it must go on. This is war.” He stood in front of Ora and Bonnie and spoke with authority to the others, who were standing in bewilderment.

  “We’re going to picket the mills,” he cried. “And bring everybody out to-night. Form in twos. Jesse McDonald and Sally, are you ready?”

  For Jesse and Sally had been chosen to lead the pickets that evening. They responded to his words at once

  He saw Sally walking very proudly beside Jesse out into the road. Behind them the two women relief workers fell in and then the others. Jesse and Sally began the march. Soon, two by two, the people were marching along the road toward the mill, in the quiet darkness.

  Tom Moore turned and knelt down by Ora. Bonnie lay on her side, for Ora had not dared to touch her. Very tenderly they turned her body.

  “I’m afeard,” Ora said, “I’m afeard she’s done for.”

  “Henry,” Tom Moore called out, “go for a doctor.” He and Tom Bachley lifted Bonnie into the union hall and laid her on the long table.

  “I don’t see how I can stand it,” Ora said.

  “You go on,” she said to Tom Moore.

  He knew that he was needed with the others. He ran to overtake the line. He was proud of their fine discipline, of the way they walked together. Soon, after they had passed the railroad, they would begin singing to let those in the mill know they were coming. They would sing one of Bonnie’s songs, and others they had been taught. There was one they had not been taught. It went through him as he stumbled over the rough ground beside the people who were marching. “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,” it said, “ye wretched of the earth . . . . A better world’s in birth . . . .” That sounded under the circumstances almost sardonic. “But pain,” he thought, “accompanies birth—pain and sometimes death.”

  He was nearly to the front of the line. The leaders were going up the slope of the railroad crossing. “Faster,” he called out to Jesse McDonald. Then he saw Jesse and Sally and the others turn. Men with guns came up from the other side of the embankment. The lights from the poles near the station made them black shadows. The shadows were thick like an army, and they came over the track and charged the line of strikers.

  “Run-n-n,” a woman’s long wail came and another shrieked, “The Law’s coming!”

  Then there were no more words. The strikers scattered before the deputies who were running them down. There was the sound of blackjacks smacking bare flesh; cries of horror, and groans of pain, came from those lying on the ground.

  Some escaped to the union hall unhurt. The others, when the deputies had finished with them, made their way slowly along the road.

  Between Tom Moore and another striker, with his arms across their shoulders, stumbled Jesse McDonald. He had tried to protect Sally from the gun butt of one of the sheriffs and had been struck in the belly. At every step blood came from his mouth and stained the shirt that Sally had ironed for him that morning in preparation for the triumph they had expected that night.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  ORA came up through the woods from the tents. A light breeze was blowing and the pine needles far above her were beating the air softly, making their usual whispered moan.

  Down in the tents she knew people were whispering together, “Bonnie is dead.” She had quieted them as much as she knew how to do, for it had been decided that everyone must go to bed except the guards, and that the lights must be put out. Those who had been wounded in the picket line were tended. She had seen that Bonnie’s four young ones were put to bed and had left Sally with them. They were so accustomed to having Bonnie away, at the mill, and then in the strike work, they were satisfied to sleep without her.

  She was going back to stay with Bonnie. The doctor had already come and said he could do nothing except send the people who were necessary.

  In the office the two boys, Henry Sanders and Tom Bachley, were standing near the table on which Bonnie lay. The blood was on her dress, a heavy black stain now, a blotting of ink like that she had sometimes made and worried over on the pages of her account book, only much larger than those. The hair lay back from her high forehead, and spread over the end of the table. The mouth that had opened to speak not long before was closed in a sort of smile. Her brown eyes that Ora remembered well because they were like Emma’s, were closed.

  “Where’s Tom?” Ora asked.

  “Gone up the road.”

  “He wanted to meet John if he happened to come now.”

  They spoke in whispers, as if they were afraid of waking Bonnie.

  “You boys go on out. I’ll stay now.”

  They filed out of the door. She heard them moving on the ground outside and talking in low tones. There was the clear sound of a match being struck out there. In the office there was no sound. Ora sat in the chair near the table and rested her head on the back. Thoughts of Emma came into her mind, and of Bonnie as a child in the mountains, and then a young woman when she was so bashful at the Christmas party—the time when the preacher had spoken of brotherly love, and the spirit of good will toward men. There was Bonnie’s marriage and her happiness at that time, and Emma’s death. She saw Bonnie taking part in the union, speaking, singing to her people who were heartened by her speeches and songs. Now she lay on the table, without life. And she had not wanted to die. There was no one who had wished more for life. And she had wanted enjoyment not only for herself but for others. For that she had been killed. But what she had begun was not ended with her: and never would be until what she had dreamed about had become a fact.

  Tom Moore came into the hall. “I don’t see anything of John,” he whispered.

  “Pore John,” Ora said. “I left Zinie down there a-crying. This may make a woman of her.”

  Outside the hall the two boys stood near the wall of the building. They saw that Ora and Tom Moore had put something over the light inside to make it dim. The murmurings that had been going on in the tents below died out. Then the windows in the house next door became dark. The darkness pressed on them.

  “Did you hear that?” Henry asked Tom, standing close by him against the side of the hall.

  “It sounded like a car coming up the road.”

  “I reckon it’s John.”

  “Or maybe the undertaker coming.”

  They peered into the dark.

  “It hasn’t got any lights,” Henry said and took a step forward.

  The car stopped just at the place where the Coxeys’ driveway met the road. A man stepped out of the car, and after him came three others. They stood together for a moment, then one of them came toward the union hall.

  “Who’s there?” Henry called out.

  The man in front was Sam McEachern. “It’s the Law,” he said.

  “Where’s your warrant?” Henry asked.

  “We don’t need no warrant,” Sam called out, and spoke to the men behind him. “Come on, men,” he said.

  One of them ran past him and went up to Henry. “Put down that gun,’ he ordered. But Henry was not ready to give up. They struggled, each one trying to get possession of the gun.

  “Let that man go,” Tom Bachley called out and went to the two who were struggling. Two guards from the tents came running out from the trees, and the two men from the car ran toward them a little way and stopped.

  A shot sounded, then another and another. They came again. The bright powder spurted from the guns in flame, but no one saw them. And no one saw where the bullets came from nor where they went. Tom Bachley dropped his gun and held his arm, into which one of the bullets had gone. And Sam McEachern fell to the ground. When he fell, the shots stopped as if a command had been given. The men who were with him carried his limp body to the car and drove away.

  It had taken perhaps five minutes for this to happen. The houses on each side of the union hall remained dark and quiet, but men and women came up from the tents and surrounded the hall, asking questions, speaking excitedly. They were
there when the men the doctor had sent came for Bonnie: and stood quietly and sorrowfully in the dark while her body was carried out to the waiting hearse.

  And they were still there when men with white arm bands came. Tom Moore, Ora, and about a hundred others were arrested and taken away in cars to the jail. But some of the white banded men stayed. They went down to the tents and drove the children and women out, so that they ran about under the trees, until they got into the open where they wandered all night hunting for a place to stay.

  The tents were torn down and left flat on the ground, and the food was scattered everywhere so that it dammed up the spring and the stream that had given water to the strikers.

  Coming back very late that night from Sandersville, John McClure walked into the unlighted hall, and found it deserted and wrecked. The table was still in the center of the room, but it lay on its side and one of the legs was broken.

  He went down to the hollow and found the tents as they had been left, and no one there. In the union office he turned the table in the hall right side up, propped its leg on a bench, and slept there the rest of the night.

  The next morning, waking early, he went down to the hollow again. The place looked as if a storm without human knowledge had passed across it. But he knew that the storm which had come had full knowledge of what it was doing.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  SAM MCEACHERN was dead. And fifteen strikers, including Tom Moore and the two relief workers from the North, were held accused of murdering him. The rest of those who had been arrested were let out on bail furnished again by those workers and sympathizers who had in the first place sent money for relief.

  When the women came out of jail they went about the country looking for their children, who had been driven from the tents that night. Jennie Martin found two of hers twenty miles away with a farmer who had picked them up on the road the next morning.

  John broke in the door of the cabin in which Bonnie had lived, and some of the furniture that had not been broken too badly was moved there. Ora, Sally, their families, Jennie and her families, and three other families lived in the three rooms of the cabin. There was only one bed. This they gave up to the children at night. And all the young who could not be crowded into the bed slept on the floor between the older people.

  The morning after his return from Sandersville John had gone straight to the lawyer, then on to the place where they were keeping Bonnie. Now he was preparing for her funeral.

  A sign was written and put on the door of the union hall. Jennie Martin and Sally placed it there with some sprigs of honeysuckle, and a small piece of black cloth above the sign. On the paper was printed in black ink, “Come to the Burying of Bonnie Calhoun at the cemetery.” And it told the day and hour.

  They did not expect many people to see the sign, but it was right to put it there, along with the flowers and the black cloth. For they were mourning for Bonnie, as well as for those who were in jail accused of murder.

  When the funeral procession that carried Bonnie’s body to the cemetery passed by the Wentworth mill, those who were working there left their looms and frames and crowded to the windows. They spoke to each other softly, while the hank clocks behind them ticked off the money they were losing each minute. “It’s Bonnie Calhoun,” they whispered, seeing the hearse and the long line of mourners walking behind it. “She was killed for . . . the union,” this they whispered fearfully, for the mill had ears.

  In the weave room one girl said, “That’s John, the tall one just behind the hearse.”

  “Yes, it’s John.”

  “Why, he’s got a red band on his arm,” another one said.

  “A red band?”

  “He ought t’ have a black crape.”

  “I wonder now . . .”

  “There’s Mary Allen that used t’ sweep in here.”

  “Is she there?”

  “Just behind Ora.”

  They watched until the procession went out of sight, toward the cemetery.

  In some of the rooms the section bosses called them back to their frames before the hearse had gone past the mill.

  It had rained all night. The road out to the mill cemetery was deep in red mud, in which the wheels of the hearse sank to the axels. Twice some of the men who were marching in the back had to put their shoulders to the wheel of the hearse to help it move forward again.

  As they reached the grave the rain began again. It came down in slow fine drops as it does in summer. It was not a heavy rain, but it prevented them from opening the casket so that those who wanted to might go by and see Bonnie’s face for the last time, as the custom was in that part of the country.

  People crowded around the grave, standing in the deep red mud, while the casket rested beside the open red hole in the earth.

  Someone who had come from the North to take Tom Moore’s place spoke a few words. In the silence that followed them the faces of the people gathered around the grave—faces drawn down with grief and thin with lack of food—looked into John’s face. And he knew looking at them, that he must speak what was in him. When he stood forward he saw Ora and Jennie standing together, and knew, though he could not see, that they were crying. He saw Bonnie’s young ones by the grave in front of Ora, and saw that little Emma, holding the youngest child, the baby, was like a little old woman who has gone through much pain.

  “Friends,” he said. “We have not invited a preacher here to-day. But if one was here, he would say in the presence of death we should not have any bitterness in our hearts. It is true that bitterness in the heart wears it down, like too much acid in the dye eats at a piece of cloth. Yet there are times when not t’ have bitterness is the worst sin a man can commit. And I consider this is one of those times.

  “A preacher would tell us that the people who killed Bonnie are fine, honest men.

  “Maybe they are, but they killed Bonnie.

  “I don’t mean those misguided ones that fired the shot, but the ones who are behind the killing.

  “The ones with Power, they killed her.”

  “Maybe they are fine, honest men. But they tore up our union hall and had our food thrown out, good food for our children. They had it thrown on the ground.

  “They call themselves dis-passionate men.

  “Yet they have had their paid men beat our women and force us to the ground when we were unarmed.

  “They say what they want is peace and harmony.

  “But they have leveled our tents and driven us out to live in the wilderness.

  “They call themselves just men. Yet they have jailed our people and not one of their law breakers has been brought to justice.

  “They will say we have killed. But if one of us did that it was done in a fair and open fight, while we were defending our homes against a lawless attack. And we had given fair warning that we would.

  “They call us murderers, and the preacher will tell you they are fair, honest men who call us that. And maybe they are.

  “Yet they shot and killed Bonnie in cold blood.

  “I can’t forget that as I can’t forget the other things they have done. And I’m going t’ remember—in bitterness. I will remember these fine, honest men. But I will remember more what they rep-resent. For what they rep-resent is an evil thing that must be put off the face of the earth.”

  He stepped back with the rest, and with his head bent looked down into the open red grave.

  “Sally,” Ora whispered, and Sally stood forward. She had been chosen to sing one of Bonnie’s ballads at the grave.

  Her head lifted and the song came from her mouth.

  “How it grieves the heart of a mother,” she sang and went on to the end.

  As she finished, there was some disturbance in the crowd of mourners. A man pushed his way through, and as he came to the grave they saw it was Preacher Simpkins. They had not expected this. He held his Bible in front of him—open—and as they lowered the coffin into the ground he read from the pages.

 
; “In my father’s house are many mansions,” he read. “I go to prepare a place for you.”

  When he had finished reading he looked up at those who were around him. While the clods of red mud were shoveled on to the coffin he spoke. “Death is not an aristocratic event,” he said. “It comes to poor and rich alike, in the mansion and in the hovel. This mill woman is not different from the man who owns the mill, for he, too, must come to the same end. All are the same before Jesus. And the rich may be as fine and honest as the poor, just as the poor may be as fine and honest as the rich. And rich or poor we must humble ourselves before the Lord, for the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  He stood until the last clod had been put on the mound that sloped down the hill, for it had been hard to fit Bonnie’s grave into the space which they had been able to buy.

  Ora and Zinie put the few flowers on the mound. Then they all walked down the slope to the road. Ora held Bonnie’s youngest child in her arms and little Emma and John helped the two others through the mud. At the gate Preacher Simpkins got into a car that was waiting there for him. But the car did not drive away. From it stepped State Attorney Albert Burnett, with a long white paper in his hand.

  He walked up to Ora and John. “You are to give those children into my care,” he said to them.

  “We aim t’ care for them,” John told him.

  “The law demands that those who wish to adopt orphans be able to swear that they have a certain income,” Attorney Burnett said. “Have you that income?”

  “I have nothing,” John said. “But with hit I will care for my own young, and together we can care for hers.”

  “This is a court order,” Attorney Burnett said, and held out the paper. “It says you must give up the children to be put in an orphanage.”

  “We’re ready t’ care for them.” Ora spoke out and held tightly to little Emma’s hand.

  “I’m afraid we must take the children.” With a possessive gesture Attorney Burnett laid his hand on the child’s shoulder. “All of them,” he added firmly and reached out his hands to take Bonnie’s youngest from Ora’s arms.