Consequences yet hanging in the stars
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
Even on the Keweenaw Peninsula, winter does not last forever. Mountains of dirty snow erode and melt in the sun. Patches of weedy grass appear. When the temperature climbs even a little above freezing, children refuse to put on coats and hats and boots, insisting, “It’s warm, Ma!” as they dash outside. “You’ll catch your death!” their mothers shout, and regret the phrase as the words die in their mouths.
Even the little kids know not to flaunt their lively spirits near families with black ribbons on the doors, so they spend their hours of freedom roaming the town’s outskirts, searching for mushrooms and wild asparagus shoots, or collecting chunks of coal along the tracks, or picking through the wreckage of bulldozed company houses, hoping to find a button or a hair ribbon or a broken plate. The boldest prowl around recently emptied homes. Peeking in the windows. Daring one another to try to go inside and see what’s left. Company watchmen patrol the neighborhoods to keep them out. At night, a big searchlight sweeps the streets to discourage looters. MacNaughton’s Eye, they call it.
The town is hollowing out. Down in Detroit, the Ford Motor Company is offering five dollars a day with a bonus plan for those who sign on to build the Model T. Even non-union miners are leaving on those southbound trains; Michigan copper companies are finding it difficult to hire workers with the skill and stamina needed to replace experienced men underground. Up and down the fine streets of the Paris of the North, storefronts are emptied out and boarded up. Nominally independent businesses that made it through the strike are now shuttered, for one-man drills don’t buy groceries or lunch pails, or heavy jackets and boots and gloves, or bolts of cloth and children’s shoes. Sales are down by half. Time to cut losses, businessmen are thinking. It’s all going to get worse. Michigan is being underpriced by new open-pit mines out west. Copper’s not dead, but this town is.
There is only this to provide cold comfort to Calumet: down in West Virginia, the coal strike has gotten worse than anything that happened in Michigan. Miners in West Virginia have been machine-gunned by American troops sent to protect the property rights of men who live far from the coal fields. The newspapers are calling it a labor war.
Too bad for them, the cynics mutter. Strikes are a big damn mistake. You’re worse off than before it started. “And I’d tell that to Annie Clements’s face!” they declare, though they don’t know where she is. Not for sure.
There are plenty of rumors about her and that photographer fella. Some snicker that Big Annie finally found herself a man who could get her pregnant. Some think maybe Joe Clements killed her and Mike. In the bars, they razz him about it and Joe snarls at them, though in all honesty, he seems more like a bereft husband left behind than an enraged murderer who strangled his wife for cheating.
The women of the Copper Country know more about Annie and Mike than their husbands and brothers and sons. Not everything, but enough to keep their hopes up for a time. Quietly informed about the baby by Carla Caretto, a majority voted to empty the Auxiliary’s meager coffers and give the proceeds to Annie.
They didn’t dare go to her house with the cash. They didn’t dare visit to say good-bye before she slipped out of town. Anything out of the ordinary might have made Joe suspicious. It might have given MacNaughton the excuse he needed to have her arrested and sent back to the workhouse. So they brought the money to Father Horvat, who brought it to Moishe Glass, who was going to hide Annie in his delivery van and get her south to Wisconsin, someplace beyond even James MacNaughton’s long reach.
“Give her this envelope,” Albin Horvat told Moishe. “Tell her it’s from the Auxiliary. Tell her she can write to me when she finds a safe harbor, and I will pass the word.”
* * *
“Eva, she’d write if she could,” Carla says when months have passed with no news of Annie Clements. “This ain’t no fairy story, cara mia. The goons mighta got her, cara. She might be dead. Michael, too. Annie’s gone and she ain’t coming back.”
Gone. All right. Eva is willing to accept that much, but she refuses to believe that Annie Clements is dead. Although Joan of Arc came to a bad end. And she won’t believe that Michael Sweeney is dead, either. Because she liked Mike, and she doesn’t want to think of Annie alone, penniless and pregnant, fending for herself and her baby. So she decides that Annie and Mike have become like Mother Jones: going from mine to mine, giving people hope and bucking them up.
Except they’re doing it secretly, maybe.
Eva knows that’s probably not true. Still, that’s what she decides to believe. Because she is tired of feeling sad about everything. She wants to believe that someday, she’ll see a photograph by Michael Sweeney on the front page of a newspaper. A picture of Big Annie leading a picket line, head high and carrying an enormous American flag. Or . . .
Maybe they’re safe up in some little town in Canada, making a new life for themselves and their child. That notion makes Eva feel better about everything for a while. In the end, though, Eva decides to believe they’ve gone to Chicago. Because that’s where Eva wants to go. To Chicago. Of course, most people say Chicago is the worst place in the country—violent, loud, lawless, ugly, stinking—but Eva has been in love with the idea of going there ever since Ella Bloor sent her a copy of a book by Jane Addams.
Twenty Years at Hull-House is the most thrilling thing Eva Savicki has ever read. Better than a love story, better than a made-up tale of adventure. It tells about how Miss Addams and a few of her friends took over a big old derelict house in a scary Chicago neighborhood where immigrants and the poorest of the poor lived. Miss Addams talked rich people into donating money to fix up the old Hull mansion so they could make it a place for a food bank and do clothing drives and so on, but the project grew and grew. First, Miss Addams took in a little baby who was born with a harelip because his defect made him unwelcome, even to his own family. After that, she sheltered a forlorn little Italian bride of fifteen, trying to escape her husband because she didn’t want to be married to an old man who beat her.
All kinds of people began to come to the Hull-House door. A poor young German whose tuberculosis was made worse by the alcohol he drank to mute his pain and fear. A terrified Irish girl alone in her labor because the doctor wouldn’t come and none of the honest Irish matrons in the neighborhood would touch “the likes of her and her fatherless baby.”
In the face of all that desperation and need, Miss Addams and her friends and their donors added a nursery and a kindergarten to Hull-House, so little kids didn’t have to stay home alone while their mothers were trying to earn money. They added a free school next, with a gymnasium and a cafeteria. There’s an auditorium now, and a theater, and an art studio with a gallery, and a music school, and a library, and club rooms—all for people who never had such things in their lives, who never imagined they could live in such a community.
The most exciting part for Eva was reading about how Miss Addams and her friends fixed up another building to make a co-op residence with a communal kitchen where single working women could stay. It was called the Jane Club, and it was based on a little book called Coöperation by an English lady named Beatrice Potter Webb. The idea was that if everyone pooled their money for rent, the girls could take a chance on striking for better wages. Because there were others who’d stand by them while they went without pay.
That’s where I should be, Eva thought when she read all this. I am just the sort of person who should be working at Hull-House.
She is already earning her keep. She helped Carla put in the new garden and she helps with the cooking and she looks after the Caretto cousins, making sure they get to school on time and do their chores. In April, the strike babies began arriving, so many that Lucia couldn’t handle them all, so Eva started going out on her own. The Carettos want her to stay in Calumet, to be part of their family, and she’s grateful to them, but her heart is set on Chicago. So she found work scrubbing floors for a lady in Laurium, stashing the nickels in a cigar box, counting them every night.
When at last she has accumulated enough money to buy her own train ticket to Chicago, she decided to write to Miss Jane Addams. She got that idea from Jack Kivisto. Just write a letter. Ask for a job. See what happens. And for that idea she is grateful to him. It’s like a librarian told her once: “If you learn something from each person you meet and from each book you read, you will be the best-educated person in the world.”
She labors like a trammer over that letter, rewriting it a dozen times. When it is as good as she can make it, she brings it to that sympathetic librarian, who makes sure the spelling and grammar are correct before Eva copies it out in her best handwriting.
Dear Miss Addams,
I am an orphan, fifteen years of age, but I do not ask for your aid. I have been cared for during my childhood by the Women’s Auxiliary of the copper miners’ union in Calumet, Michigan. I am sure you have read of our recent battles here. Now that the strike is over, I answer to no one and may live my life as seems best. Mrs. Ella Bloor kindly sent me your book about Hull-House, which taught me that there was a world beyond the Copper Country where I can be useful.
I have grown up among good but poor people from many nations. I speak Polish, a little Italian, a little Slovenian, and a little Finnish (very little), which skills I hope may be of help in your work with new immigrants who have come to Chicago. I know how to “wash newborn babies, and prepare the dead for burial, and nurse the sick, and mind the children,” as you wrote in your book. And now, as you once wrote, “I am through with everlasting preparation for life, however ill-prepared I might be.”
I do not have much schooling, but I have learned from many people. From Father Horvat, I learned Jesus’s warning “The poor you shall always have with you.” From Ella Bloor, I learned that we will always have rich men who never willingly share a penny of their wealth. From Annie Clements, I learned that if we work for the common good, we can make a good life more common. Annie also taught me how to organize a group to do what a single person cannot accomplish alone. From Mother Jones, I learned that when you lose one battle, you find another and fight on. From Moishe Glass, I learned that what you do when you’ve been defeated is important and that to improve a single life is to improve the world.
From your own book, I have learned that one woman and a few friends can provide education, good food, and decent housing to those who need it most.
I want to be part of that, if you will have me. Please tell me if I may come to work with you and your friends in Chicago.
Sincerely,
Eva Lucyna Savicki
She rereads it twice, folds it into an envelope, buys a stamp, and mails it to Miss Jane Addams, Hull-House, Chicago, Illinois. The answer comes by return post, just one week later, in the hasty handwriting of a woman with too much to do and not enough time to do it.
Yes, my dear. There is a place for you here. Come to us as quickly as you can. The need is great.—J. Addams
There is money for the train fare in the envelope.
For a time, Eva sits still, the note clutched in one hand. She does not cry—not from happiness or sadness or relief or grief. She stands up as tall as she can and holds her head high and says it aloud, to make herself believe it: “I will make you proud, wherever you are, Annie. I will carry the flag for you.”