THE EIGHTH OF APRIL found the Merrimack River running sure and fast with thawing snows, which set the wheels of the cotton mills turning again after the freeze of last month; the agent Mr. Boott devoted his entire evening’s correspondence to sharing this felicitous news. The Boston gentlemen whom he addressed had built the industrial city of Lowell, not with their hands but with more mystical faculties like “ingenuity” and “entrepreneurship.” And money, of course. Most mystical of all.
Textile production, the agent wrote, now proceeded at a pace to match last November’s. With the minor adjustment to the mill girls’ rent, the owners could expect returns of twenty-two percent again by mid-August. Mr. Boott signed the final letter with a confident flourish of his pen, extinguished the lamps in his study, and retired.
* * *
As this God-fearing man greeted his bed, the young women of Mrs. Hanson’s boardinghouse were leaving theirs. Groping along the banister or holding fast to the girl in front of them, they deserted the dormitories and climbed to the attic, where the taller among them had to stoop to avoid knocking skulls against the eaves.
Creaks and cracks on the staircase, and the susurration of whispers up and down, would have surely roused the house’s matron from her own bed on the first floor, had she not been awake since supper. Indeed, Mrs. Hanson herself had progressed to the attic an hour before, where she took up a stool in the corner, while two of the mill girls, Judith Whittier and Hannah Pickering, made preparations.
“Have you any siblings living?” asked Hannah, as she sliced a lock of coppery curls from her head, then dropped it into the collection that lay before Mrs. Hanson’s ancient spinning wheel.
“Yes, four. One brother. Three sisters,” said Judith, the shorter and sturdier of the two. The pile already contained a lock of her own brown hair, as well as blacks and blonds, in every texture from pin-straight and fine to tightly coiled curls. “True. And you, your siblings?”
“None living. Five dead in childhood, one brother lost at sea.” Hannah’s voice was as thin and reedy as she was, weak from frequent coughing. “True!” she announced, after clearing her phlegmatic throat.
“Try something harder,” Mrs. Hanson suggested, as the two girls set to spinning the motley locks into thread. “Something you’ve reason to lie about.”
“Very well.” Judith sniffed as she set the wheel spinning with her palm. She would have preferred to leave the matron out of it entirely, but Hannah had said they must have Mrs. Hanson’s permission if they meant to use her wheel and loom, and she was sure to scent out any mischief in the house.
Fortunately, this seemed to be the sort of mischief Mrs. Hanson liked.
“Why did you leave Dover?” Hannah asked.
“Half the girls there promised never to strike again,” Judith replied. “I wouldn’t take that pledge. And no corporation for miles would hire me.”
This history came as no surprise to the matron. Judith resembled an animal bred to fight, like a mastiff or bulldog, and her character so far only matched her countenance.
“True,” she admitted. “My turn: are you a witch, Hannah Pickering?”
From the way her narrow shoulders stiffened, Judith knew Hannah disliked the question. Which Judith regretted, but which also made it useful for their purpose.
“I have always had an unusual gift,” Hannah answered, speaking to the spindle. “But I haven’t made a spell before today.”
Judith nodded, even before Hannah pronounced her words truthful.
“I have one,” said Mrs. Hanson. “Judith Whittier, who are you in love with?”
Judith scowled and shook the loose hair that hung down her back. “Who says I’m in love with anyone?”
“She’s only bound to tell me the truth, Mrs. H. To you, she can lie as much as she likes.”
“Then you ask her,” replied the matron, saucy as any of her young charges.
But the attic was filling with more girls. From the dormitory where Judith and Hannah slept also came Lucy, who was flaxen-haired and sunny whether it was midnight or not, singing “Barbara Allen.” Beside her, Lydia bore herself stiffly and with great dignity, her rosebud lips pursed. Because Lucy worked as a “drawing-in” girl in the factories, stringing the looms, and Lydia had a deft hand despite her disposition, Judith set them to threading the harnesses of the foot loom in the center of the attic. Meanwhile, Georgie Hempstead took over spinning from Hannah, and Abigail North—tiniest of the boarders in Mrs. Hanson’s house but two years senior to Judith—wound bobbins.
As their labors continued and more girls joined in, Judith thanked Mrs. Hanson for the loan of her stool, set it before the loom, and climbed atop. “My sisters,” she addressed them, “to make our stand against the greed of our employers is of course noble and just.” Her voice carried through the attic as well as any preacher’s, whether Methodist, Unitarian, or Universalist, and inspired nods of agreement and exclamations of “Amen!” just the same. “But as you may know—as you know now—I was in Dover before Lowell, where the mill owners are not so enlightened even as here. We struck. We lost.”
The attic grew quiet. The only sound was the scraping of chalk against the floorboards as Hannah drew a circle around the loom. Crowded though it was, any girl not engaged in some task drew her feet beyond this ring, as surely as if it marked a picket of bristling bayonets.
“We were crushed,” said Judith, “for lack of resolution more than lack of numbers. A strike is nothing if a worker may pledge herself to it today and return to the factory tomorrow. So we gather here, tonight, to unite and entwine our fate.” Around her she could count thirty-one weavers and spinners, elbow-to-elbow below the eaves. “Emelie and Sarah have already left—”
“I’m here,” protested Sarah Payne, from among the press of operatives.
“So am I,” called Sarah Hemingway.
“Sarah Adams and Emelie have already left—”
“Only until we’re back at work,” said Lucy, from Judith’s right.
“Some of us,” Lydia sniffed, “have families to think of.” She touched the shorn patch of scalp on her own head regretfully. Yes, yes, thought Judith, impatient: Lydia had beautiful hair, sable dark; under other circumstances, it would have been a crime to damage it, but—
Her chalk circle complete, Hannah pressed close behind Judith, and Judith steadied herself atop the stool by reaching for the taller girl’s shoulder. This assembly of mill operatives would listen to her if she spoke with assurance. “When we strike, we are thinking of our families. All of us are sisters of the mills, or we soon will be.”
Lydia had not finished. “And you’re sure this—kitchen magic will do the job?”
“Kitchen magic has its uses,” Mrs. Hanson called from the corner.
Others spoke up in agreement. Every one knew a country wife who twisted charms for a child’s health or a sweetheart’s loyalty, and not a few had swallowed Mrs. Hanson’s tonics. Judith looked at Hannah, wondering if she would add her voice. Only someone with the Sight could say if the charm truly made the difference.
“These aren’t the Dark Ages,” Lucy coaxed Lydia. “There’s no Witchfinder General to come after us.”
“But Mr. Boott is sure to.”
“Hannah,” Judith urged softly, hoping her word might put an end to debate.
Instead, Hannah had a coughing fit. Judith passed her a handkerchief, and when she had done and wiped her mouth clean, she turned toward Lydia. “It will work,” she said. Though her voice was strained, her pale face had an authority that surpassed schoolmasters, overseers, and most clergymen. “I have Seen it.”
“Oh, you claim to know the future now?”
“No. But I know your soul.”
In spite of herself, Lydia gave a little shudder. She truly was the model of the mills, Judith reflected: with a little money in her pocket and a little leisure at the end of her days, she had become the belle of Lowell, coiffed, ribboned, and rational. She was the very sort of girl Mr. Boott and the Boston gentlemen would parade before capitalists and working men alike, as if to say: Behold! Modern industry shall set your daughters free!
They’d soon see how much freedom an industrious woman might claim.
Judith climbed down from the stool, offering it to Hannah, but the ginger-haired girl remained on the floor as she spoke to the ring of operatives surrounding the loom. “I’ve been in Lowell as long as anyone, and I know all of you. When we make our pledge tonight, we weave ourselves together as surely as our wages and our board. Once we act, we can’t turn our backs on one another.”
This time, as all the girls in the attic grew quiet, the shudder went through Judith as well.
In the corner, Mrs. Hanson shook her head. “A true Seer. I never thought I’d meet one in my life. If I had her gift, lambs, I’d be living in London or Paris, nice as a queen.”
At that, Georgie piped up. “We’d miss you so, Mrs. H!”
“Not her cooking,” said Sarah Payne.
Laughter having brought the girls together to one mind again, Lucy took Hannah’s directions and began lighting five candles at the five points marked on the chalk circle.
Unassuaged, Lydia slid close to Judith. “We don’t know what will happen,” she hissed. “No one’s done this before.”
“She has,” said Judith. “This very night.”
Lydia’s rosebud mouth became a tiny O.
“While the rest of you were washing up supper, we pledged, she and I, never to lie to one another, and it worked.” Judith showed Lydia where she’d tied the thin braid of dark brown and copper-colored hair—hers and Hannah’s—around her pinky finger.
At last, “We’re ready,” said Lucy, gesturing to the loom grandly, as if she were revealing it to them for the first time. Within the five candles’ glow, now the assembled workers could appreciate the motley hair-spun threads that were strung through the harnesses.
“Everyone,” Hannah called, suppressing a cough, “keep your hair loose and your arms uncrossed. No one must leave this room until it’s done. Lydia, why don’t you begin it?”
Lydia’s mouth opened again in surprise, but she stepped forward, taking the shuttle and a bobbin from Hannah. In the motion all the weavers knew well, she tucked the thread into one end of the corn husk–shaped shuttle, and raised the other end to her lips to suck it through.
She sighed like a swooning heroine. “The only man I’m allowed to kiss!”
All the girls shared a gallows laugh. In the mills they called it “The Kiss of Death” because each time, they must suck some cotton lint into their lungs along with the thread. If the whale-oil smoke and cotton dust didn’t give them a cough like Hannah’s, enough kisses would.
Lydia was already placing one foot on the pedal. “Like this?” she asked. With Lydia’s foot pressing down, one harness popped up, raising half the warp threads, leaving a gap to pass the shuttle through.
“That’s it,” said Mrs. Hanson. “Keep going.”
With more confidence, Lydia pressed her foot up and down, and the loom’s gears turned. The harnesses went up-down, up-down, pulling the warp in a familiar dance, while the weaver passed the shuttle to and fro. The operation was not so lightning-fast as the power looms inside the mills, nor so thunderously loud without a hundred others going at the same time, yet the sound and the rhythm felt the same—the music no mill girl could keep from following her home, thrumming through her dreams and all her waking hours. Ka-thunk ka-thunk ka-thunk.
Against its accompaniment, Judith waited for Hannah to speak the spell. But Hannah shook her head gently. “You,” she said. “My voice won’t carry.”
Judith sucked her teeth. Very well. She took the page Hannah put in her hands.
“Unbound, we come
to bind ourselves.
By hair of head,
we make a vow.
We form this now:
Fact’ry Girls
Union of Lowell.
No work we’ll do,
in mill, at loom,
until our demands
are heard and met,
and sisters agree
our strike’s at end.”
“Is that it?” Sarah Payne whispered to Mrs. Hanson. “It’s not very . . . mystical.”
“It doesn’t rhyme,” remarked Lucy.
“It will do,” the matron replied. “Action and intention matter more than poetry.”
“Until our demands are weighed and met,” Judith repeated, raising her voice to be heard over the crashing loom. “To wit”—she raised the copy Lucy had written out over supper—“there shall be no increase in the cost of boardinghouses without commensurate increase in the wages of the operatives.”
The girls cheered, as Judith had thought they might. This was the fresh wound—an extra quarter that would disappear at week’s end, allegedly to pay for the costs of their board. While other boardinghouse keepers were more circumspect, Mrs. Hanson confirmed that no part of the twenty-five cents would see the matrons’ pockets but instead set out for Boston posthaste.
Around the room, Judith saw teeth biting anxious lips, alongside scowls and clenching fists. Good. She read on.
“Time must be kept fairly and honestly. Clocks shall be visible and prominently displayed, and no working girl shall be required to give over more than ten hours, out of every twenty-four, in her employment.”
“Ten?” asked Sarah Hemingway with a snort. “Why not nine? Why not eight?”
The workers laughed, some loudly and some with faces shamed by the audacity.
“Factory owners must make arrangements for the proper ventilation of work rooms so that”—she glanced at Hannah solemnly—“no operative endangers her health in pursuit of her livelihood, and so shortens her life.
“And lastly”—she smiled, for this part was most delicious—“the wages of females shall be equal to the wages of males, so that no woman shall be obliged to marry solely to maintain her own upkeep.”
“Hear, hear!” shouted Lucy. Several of the girls stamped their feet or beat on the floor to show their approval, while Lydia pedaled fast enough to make the shuttle fly. Someone passed a bag of sweets, while four girls gathered near the lone window and lit Egyptian cigarettes.
In the corner, Mrs. Hanson muttered something about the ill habits of youth. But she took the cigarette Sarah Payne offered her.