Kristina Horton

This is a tale of a many-sided tragedy.

In 1929, the textile mills in North Carolina's Piedmont district were engaged in a systematic campaign to drive down costs as far as possible. Since their main expense was their employees, they made a number of changes to working conditions -- demanding that workers manage more machines, reducing their pay rates, and shifting more of them toward "part-time" pay even though they worked full shifts. The effect was to cut pay -- which was already very low -- by thirty percent or so, sometimes more. It was barely possible for a man to live on it, if the work didn't kill him; for a single woman, who was paid a lower rate, it was hopeless.

The workers hated it. The situation was a powderkeg. And both sides took matches to it. On one side was the American Communist Party, which tried to form a union in the region; on the other were the owners, who were your standard industrial fascists.

The Communists frankly did a lousy job. They didn't prepare well for the strike, and they wasted a lot of time on indoctrination rather than trying to actually support the strikers. The strike would fail, with one policeman, Orville Aderholt, and one striker, Ella May (Wiggins), killed along the way.

This book is Ella's story, told by her great-granddaughter. Ella May was not an organizer; she was simply a twenty-something mill worker who had already borne nine children (and had four of them die of the effects of poverty) and seen her drunken, crippled husband abandon her. She was a little odd and unworldly -- but she was also a gifted poet, who took old folk songs and set new words appropriate to the strikers' situations.

As the strike failed, she and others tried to go to a rally to help support the cause. The truck they were riding was turned back, then rammed by one of the cars of the anti-strike forces; the mill owners' goons came out firing, and Ella was killed.

No one would ever be brought to justice for what was pretty clearly murder, even though there were witnesses who said they knew who had fired the fatal shot.

Horton's book is mostly a well-told story, pro-Ella but not so biased as to become propaganda (as some of the Communist accounts were); it reads well. I have only one concern. Author Horton, although she has clearly has some knowledge of popular folk music (Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie), displays some ignorance about traditional folk music, the music from which Ella drew her tunes and her inspiration. This isn't rare, and doesn't really detract from the book unless you are truly an expert in the field. But it makes me wonder, just a little, about similar errors in areas where I can't detect it.

Still, I can say based on other readings about the Loray Mill strike, that the general tale told here is accurate. And, because it's about a specific person rather than The Loray Mill Strike in general, it becomes much more real.… (plus d'informations)