Swimming in the Moon

by Pamela Schoenewaldt

  Josephine straightened her hat. “You see, Lucia, everyone wants to help if you just find the right job.”

  The boys’ mothers thanked me heartily for “saving” their children. Workers’ troubles were less easily solved. Forced overtime brought weariness and accidents. Supervisors found errors and laid fines. “We’re tired,” women protested. “Hire more help if you need more dresses.” With a fifty-hour workweek, many sighed, life would be so good. When I walked through the factory floor, breathing in the weight of hours, weary eyes followed me and whispered words scraped my back: “Office work.”

  Strikes in Chicago had won standard wages at some factories. That meant, Josephine explained, that desperate women couldn’t be frightened into taking lower pay. “Maybe in Chicago,” someone called out. “Cleveland’s different.” We heard that suffragettes in New York City had supported strikers, marching with them, sometimes paying their bail. Rich women made a “Mink Brigade” and fed the strikers. Would rich Cleveland women do the same? Or would they side with husbands who owned the factories and mills?

  Talk spun through the union halls, debates raging until midnight. Even Josephine’s rousing speeches couldn’t lift the dreary certainty that bad as conditions were, change was impossible here. I began finding excuses to miss meetings, stay home, read or work out equations in algebra. At least I could solve these problems. What was my place in the vast machine of contractors, factories, the splintering of immigrant groups, cotton prices and garment markets? Equity, justice, even solidarity seemed as impossible as healing my mother’s broken mind.

  Everything changed in late March. I had risked taking Mamma to Youngstown for the day. The air was sharp with foundry smoke and the dust of limestone quarries, but in Charlie and Yolanda’s messy little house we played music on Charlie’s new Victrola. After dinner, Mamma watched our card game. Pleased by this sign of sociability, I casually dealt her in. She played a little, then slammed down her cards and hid, claiming that Toscanini watched us through the window. I had to take her home. But she had played two hands of gin rummy.

  That trip was on March 25, 1911. On the twenty-sixth, I saw no newspapers and noted only a strange hush among the clerks. I gave it no meaning and worked more quickly without the normal clatter of voices. When Enrico brought news of an emergency union meeting the next day, I nearly didn’t go. But passing through the factory, I overheard whispering: “girls . . . fire . . . jumping.” Mamma was in bed sick with a headache. Roseanne said she’d watch her, so I went to the hall alone.

  “Lucia, can you help us onstage?” Josephine asked. She didn’t wait for my response but sat me with Isadore Freith, Father Stephen, and Rabbi Rosen before a large, murmuring crowd.

  “What happened?” I asked the rabbi. He shook his head and pointed to Josephine.

  “Yesterday afternoon,” she began, “one hundred forty-six workers, mostly young women, died when fire broke out on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Stairways were locked. To escape the inferno, girls jumped from eighth-, ninth-, and tenth-floor windows to the sidewalks below. Why were they locked in? Because no law compels owners to provide fire exits. Because workers’ lives are cheap.” Eyes closed, I saw girls like human torches, pausing briefly in the window before that desperate leap. I heard thuds on pavement and saw the crushed and burned and mangled bodies, heads turned wrong, limbs splayed out.

  “Now we will honor the dead,” Josephine announced. “Lucia D’Angelo will read the names and ages of those who have been identified. Think of the fallen, their families, and those who loved them. Think of their tireless work for the Triangle Shirtwaist Company and think of their reward.”

  I was handed a list and walked to the podium. “Weren’t you nervous?” Roseanne asked later. No, I was only astonished by my own calm and the ranks of upturned faces watching me, quiet and expectant, even small children in their parents’ arms. I settled my feet as Mamma did onstage, took a breath, and began.

  “Julia Aberstein, thirty; Lizzie Adler, twenty-four; Anna Altman, sixteen; Anna Ardito, twenty-five.” After each name and age, Father Stephen rang a bell. Ignazia Bellotta’s father identified his daughter by the heel of her shoe. Two Brodsky sisters, sixteen and twenty-one. Dosie Fitze, twenty-four, survived the jump for a day and then died. Pausing for bells, I caught movements in the crowd: signs of the cross; flutters of handkerchiefs; children hushed; adults nudging boys to pull off their caps; bearded Jewish men folding their arms and rocking. “Mary Goldstein, eleven.” Children’s heads jerked up. A woman gasped. So many names were familiar: Sara, Vincenza, Rose, Jennie, Abraham, Ida, Jacob, Max. We could have been the ones falling in flames.

  Catherine Maltese died with her daughters, Lucia and Rosalie. Bettina Miale, eighteen, and Israel Rosen, seventeen, identified by their rings; Sophie Salemi, twenty-four, by a darn in her stocking. Someone brought me water. “Should I finish?” Isadore asked. I shook my head.

  Candles were handed out and flames passed from person to person. Damp eyes glittered. The lights of the union hall dimmed as I finished the list: Joseph Wilson, twenty-one, found by his fiancée. Tessie Wisner, twenty-seven. Sonia Wisotsky, seventeen. Zeltner, no first name, thirty, died of injuries in St. Vincent’s Hospital. After the final name, Father Stephen and Rabbi Rosen offered prayers for the dead.

  “We will have time in the coming days to determine our course in Cleveland,” Josephine said. “Tonight we must go quietly home, remembering those who have fallen, praying for strength that from their deaths will come justice for all workers.” I was given a candle and followed the others to the street, a river of light in the chilly darkness.

  Chapter 15

  WE ARE THOUSANDS

  In the months after the disaster, stories streamed west. Witnesses on the street had thought owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were throwing bolts of burning fabric out the window until they realized in horror that the “bolts” were jumping girls. Nineteen bodies were found melted against a locked door. All the victims had been working overtime; their miserable wages could not support decent life in New York City. Brave men made a bridge of their bodies from an eighth-floor window to another in the next building. A few girls safely crossed before the “bridge” broke and all fell to their deaths. There was one unlocked door at the west end of the factory, but it opened inward and a crush of desperate girls forced it closed. The owners had never installed a sprinkler.

  “Because they weren’t forced to,” Isadore and Josephine tirelessly reminded us, adding that strikes and walkouts in other companies had won higher wages, safer factories, and the right to arbitrate grievances. Those workers didn’t have to rent sewing machines or buy costly thread from owners. They enjoyed Saturday afternoons with their families. Workers who did the same job got the same pay. Fines were listed, not imposed at will.

  “We could have all this, Mamma,” I related one hot April night after a meeting. She didn’t look up from the dance of her knitting needles. “Remember the fines you paid at Stingler’s?” She jerked her head away. Dr. Ricci had warned me to avoid distressing subjects and follow her lead. But she gave so little lead. On many days, she barely spoke. Yet sometimes she stroked me as one might stroke a pet, small comfort to light the years of caretaking that rolled out before me.

  Much of that spring she spent in our darkened room, plagued by headaches with no one to sing them away. Chamomile tea didn’t help. Even the tread of stocking feet pained her. I confess to using her troubles for my purposes. I ran home after work, ate quickly, helped her to the bathroom, sponged her with rosemary water, and then hurried to a union meeting.

  There were many meetings, for the plan was to call a general strike in early June. Success would require meticulous organization. “If we build the will to strike,” said Josephine, “we must prepare the means to win.” The strike might last eight weeks. We hoped for five thousand strikers. Few would have savings. Even now, on nights before paydays, many ate only beans and bread, espe
cially those still paying off doctor bills and funeral costs from the epidemic.

  “How will we eat when we strike?” many asked anxiously.

  Supporters in Cleveland—wealthy women, suffragettes, enlightened industrialists, philanthropists, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and Jewish charity groups—would all help, Josephine replied. With this support and union dues from other cities, we could give out strike pay: four dollars per week for single workers; six for those with small families; eight for large families. With exceeding care and union soup kitchens, nobody would starve.

  Josephine asked me to keep the ledger books for strike pay. They must be meticulous. Hungry, tired, and frustrated, some might try to collect twice. Then others would have nothing. All the ledgers I ever kept for Kinney’s and Printz-Biederman, the streams of money I tracked, even my studies in college seemed so insignificant now. This work could help families hold on for justice. “Yes,” I told Josephine, “I’ll do it.”

  “Good, or brava, as you say.” Her accent stretched the word, eating the v, kneading the a’s into soft and windy ahs, little chills in the stuffy room. She needed a translator to help recruit Italian workers. When had I been included in great plans? In Naples, aside from reading to distract my mistress from her headaches, I was needed only to clean. As Mr. Sutherland often told me, bookkeepers could be easily replaced. The fact that Josephine needed me, Lucia, was thrilling. For the first time I was swept into a cause larger than my own troubles. Perhaps my strength would grow to meet this challenge.

  Yes,” I told Josephine, “I’ll translate too.”

  There were so many tasks: finding a printer for signs, leaflets, and bulletins to report the strike’s progress; collecting water barrels, cups, and wooden stakes for picket signs. We’d need bandages, iodine, smelling salts, splints, stretchers, and crutches. We must enlist messenger boys and translators in other languages, observers and photographers to record disturbances, sympathetic lawyers, doctors, and nurses, reporters who might support the strike, rabbis and priests to lead prayers and speak well of us to their congregations.

  “You’re writing this down, Lucia?” Isadore asked. My fingers had cramped around the pen. I shook out my hand and kept writing. When he and Josephine stopped to debate a point, I read over the list. Splints, stretchers, and crutches? Outside, the streets seemed peaceful enough. Women passed in feathered hats, men in homburg hats and straw boaters. Two boys raced by with their hoops, dodging an ice wagon. We’d soon be at war, needing bandages? Here in Cleveland?

  “Don’t worry, Lucia,” said Josephine as we hurried to a shop on Woodland Avenue to meet ten dressmakers from Calabria. “That’s why we’re planning, so we can build a great swell of support, a tide to carry us to victory. Because we are right. We will win.” That May was buoyant with promise. I was lifted up by speeches and songs, even by the tedium of pay lists I prepared in our parlor after work.

  Late at night, when cool breezes finally curled into our room, Mamma and I took turns brushing out each other’s hair. It was a good sign that she would do this, Dr. Ricci said. I recounted the speeches and how an Irish piano player had made up funny strike lyrics for “Frankie and Johnny” and “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.”

  “Before Mr. Keith,” Mamma muttered at breakfast. The boarders stared, for she rarely spoke in public. When I asked what she meant, she pushed a spoon around her oatmeal, saying nothing.

  Roseanne drew me aside. “I think she meant that you’re like she was before she joined vaudeville. Happy and excited.”

  I was. May’s unseasonable heat didn’t bother me. Neither did Roseanne’s constant accounting of the cost of every foodstuff, as if we ate boiled pennies. Even stopping at Henryk’s shop was possible if the purpose was to enlist assurance of good prices on vegetables for our soup kitchen. I smiled at Miriam standing by the beets, ignoring her icy stare. I even felt sorry for her, for anyone not busy organizing.

  “Will Bohemians join the strike?” Henryk asked.

  “They said they would. They didn’t know how much less they were making than factory workers. They didn’t realize that contractors pay each of them differently and pit them against each other. They’re angry now.”

  Miriam had moved to a pool of light where her glorious black hair glistened. “I wouldn’t trust Bohemians. They don’t mix with anybody. They don’t want to be American and they can’t keep their word.”

  “Not all of them,” Henryk said quietly.

  I managed to smile, thank Miriam for her concern, wish them both a good day, and leave, feeling triumphantly above petty issues of the heart. The Bohemians would strike, I reminded myself. More than promised, they understood that even if they lived apart and worked for contractors, only unity could save them from misery.

  We would begin the strike on June 6, 1911. A letter of demands was sent to the owners and ignored. “Of course,” said Josephine, “if they answer it, that means they think we’re worth answering.” We would be absolutely peaceful and orderly, trusting in the virtue, modesty, and logic of our cause. New York owners had agreed to these demands. Why shouldn’t owners in Cleveland? I was sent home early the night before. I’d done enough, Josephine said, and needed rest.

  I didn’t rest. I watched gaslight from the street throw shadows on our wall, imagining problems that might unfurl in the morning. Workers would not come to their posts as we’d instructed, or would not leave in a mass at ten o’clock, taking their tools. There would be heckling or fights with those who refused to strike. The factory doors would be locked so we couldn’t walk out. Yiddish workers had raised their hands and vowed: “If I turn traitor to the cause I now pledge, may this hand wither from the arm I now raise.” Suppose they foreswore? Suppose only a pathetic scattering of us rattled in the union hall, looking foolish?

  Nothing I’d seen in America, not the first snow or any blaze of autumn, was as beautiful as that day. A crisp breeze had scuttled across the lake that morning, pushing heat and clouds away, scrubbing the air. Workers found the promised red cards calling for a general strike and calmly left their stations at the stroke of ten. I stood in a balcony over the factory floor to watch that thrilling sight: rows upon rows of women and girls pushing back chairs; dropping scissors, needles, thimbles, and thread in their waist bags; and walking calmly out of Printz-Biederman, their faces alight with purpose. Have you ever wanted arms enough to gather in hundreds of fearless women, a massive chest to hold your swelling pride? The entire fleet of ancient Greece sailing out to vanquish Troy could not have been more glorious.

  We were six thousand Italians, Poles, Jews, and Germans, a thousand more than we had fondly hoped for. The Bohemians came together, a glorious show in blazing white, puffed-sleeved blouses, embroidered crimson vests, and blue skirts. “New Americans wearing the flag,” I heard a striker say approvingly. Women brought babies in beribboned carriages. Lines of finishers, shirtmakers, dressmakers, and tailors swelled our stream. We were a “joyful parade,” the Plain Dealer reported, and indeed we were. Enrico carried the union flag, head high, sunlight frosting his dark curls.

  “He’s so proud,” his mother told me. “And I’m so proud of him. I just hope we can go back to work soon. The strike pay isn’t much.”

  “I know.”

  “Still,” she said loudly in English toward a hovering reporter, “I’d rather starve fast than starve slow at Printz-Biederman.”

  “It has been an orderly strike,” the Cleveland Press acknowledged in an editorial read aloud at the union hall, “and orderly strikes, when waged in a just cause, are almost certain to end in a victory for the wage earner.” We cheered and sang. On my way home, I stopped at an Italian bakery for little almond cakes to celebrate with Mamma that night. The baker wished us well and slipped an extra cake in the neat package.

  The Cloak Manufacturers’ Association’s statement came three days later in the Plain Dealer. “I could have written it myself,” Josephine huffed. The full page announced that our strike
was useless, even foolish. We enjoyed “optimal” conditions and pay. We were dupes of the East, stirred up by outsiders and radicals to price Cleveland cloak makers and dressmakers out of business and thus enrich New York manufacturers. Thinking only of our welfare, the association urged us to return to work and in that way avoid reprisals for our ill-considered actions.

  We marched again. This time hecklers stood in clumps. “Socialists! Go home if you don’t like American work!” they shouted. Alda, a clerk whose desk was near mine, called from the sidewalk: “My little boy’s sick, Lucia. How do I pay the doctor if we can’t work? How?” Men and women whose faces I knew from church or scribing watched grimly. How could they not see the rightness of this strike? Yet I had no answer for Alda. How had everything that seemed so clear yesterday now become so murky?

  As we turned from a shaded street to a blast of sun, my head swirled. In that instant, a bull-shouldered vagrant named Roy who was often thrown out of Lula’s charged our line, flailing like a drunkard seeking a target. Over and over Isadore had warned: “There must be no violence. Whatever the provocation, do not fight back.” Newspapers, suffragettes, churches, and city leaders who might support our cause would turn away if we behaved like ruffians.

  “Lucia, do you know him?” Josephine whispered. I nodded. The gesture must have caught his eye, for he lunged at me. A heavy hand pawed my shirtwaist. “Ex-cuse me!” he muttered. When I stepped aside, he followed. From the sidewalk, people watched as if we were a vaudeville show.

  Steeling myself to Isadore’s orders, I stood like a post until Roy’s heavy hands gripped my head as Dr. Galuppi once did, fingers driving through my hair. A voice thick with beer whispered: “Eye-talian girl, go home to your crazy mamma.” Basta! I wrenched myself free from his grasp. How could I know that he would stagger, trip, and fall, cutting his head on a curb?