This is the first of three installments for Sharon Chou’s story titled “Goliath.”
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1844
Ida drops the shuttle into the loom and yanks her fingers back as soon as it launches. The loom’s monstrous jaws crunch down, three rows of teeth gnashing together.
In an action as familiar as the shuttle’s path, she runs a thumb over the inside of her sleeve to feel the comfort of raised thread. Before she left for Lowell, Grandmama had embroidered initials on all three of her dresses. I.W. Ida Wolcott from Andover, Maine. If God answers the prayers she sends every night, she will not be in Massachusetts much longer.
Ida feels a tug at her skirt. She turns to see Lucy, blue eyes shining with unshed tears and blond hair escaping from the knot Ida had pinned this morning. Lucy’s lips form rapid words.
“What?” Ida mouths. The heddles of countless looms crash down around them, metallic thunder ringing in her ears as if a thousand stallions are galloping by in steel horseshoes.
Lucy’s lips still move too fast for Ida to read. Lucy has been at Lowell barely a fortnight, not long enough to learn the coded gestures they use to talk in the din when Mr. Randall turns his back.
Ida shakes her head, eyes pulled back to her four looms. The shuttles zip back and forth at dizzying speeds. They will both get the strap if she falls behind. The only crime worse than chatter is an idle loom.
Another bobbin nearing empty. She grabs a fresh one from the basket with one hand and removes the shuttle with the other. Place. Shove. Bang! She slams her fist down on the shuttle. New bobbin secure, she sucks the thread through the shuttle’s eye and feeds it to the loom.
When she turns back, Lucy’s hand is outstretched. Ida squints through the white haze of cotton dust smothering the room. Blood wells up from a gash in Lucy’s tan skin, a crimson stream trickling along the curve of her palm.
She had been crawling under the spinning mules to collect loose cotton, a job for the younger girls and their small bodies. Perhaps she had misjudged the rhythm of the machine, or perhaps she had been startled by one of the many stomping booming banging parts in this room, and been mauled.
Lucy’s chin wobbles.
Place. Shove. Bang! Suck. Drop. Snatch.
Ida wipes her brow with her sleeve. At least Lucy knows better than to bother an overseer with this. Ida grabs her hand and turns it toward the feeble light of the window, inspecting the wound with a critical eye. About 2 inches long, no sign of tendon or bone, but jagged at the edges. Much worse has happened in Ida’s first year at the textile mill. Just last week, the iron teeth of a carding wheel had pierced straight through a poor operative’s hand. It had happened in the upstairs room, a few rows away from Sarah, who had told her about it in great detail. Last they heard, the doctors had been forced to amputate.
Ida pulls the cotton cap off her head and binds the wound with the weary efficiency of a woman twice her seventeen years of age.
Despite Lucy’s best efforts, tears flow down her cheeks. She is twelve years old, just a girl. Ida squeezes her shoulder and sends her back to work.
By a stroke of luck, Mr. Randall had not spotted them conversing. Despite supervising over forty girls, he has a keen eye for trouble. Ida had worked beside Sarah for the first few months before Mr. Randall caught them gesturing and making faces at each other and sent Sarah to the upstairs room.
Mr. Davies had not noticed Lucy’s absence either. The younger girls begin to clean the looms. The weaving doesn’t halt for the cleaning, so Ida hopes Lucy has learned the importance of deftness. Every second of stillness costs the mill, they have been told again and again.
Place. Shove. Bang! Suck. Drop. Snatch.
The angle of the sunlight streaming in through the closed windows means she has at least a few hours of work left. Their shifts start at five in the morning and end at seven in the evening, marked only by the tolling of the colossal bells in the tower.
She wipes her brow again. If only they would open a window, just one. Then perhaps she wouldn’t have to choke down every breath of muggy, thick air. But a stray breeze could snap the threads and ruin the fabric. So Ida chokes and wipes and places and shoves and bangs and sucks and drops and snatches.
In the rare moments of stillness, her eyes catch on her window gems. The poem she pasted on the glass this week is starting to peel, though she has already memorized it. The various poems, hymns, and newspaper clippings surrounding it have also been committed to memory, recited over and over in the long hours when she is alone with her own mind. Today, though, her mind wanders from those flowery lines.
As Ida reloads shuttle after shuttle, she longs for the pudding Grandmama made her as a girl. If she tunes out the deafening clatter, she can almost taste the molasses Grandmama would barter her best cloth for and smell the kitchen fire Grandmama wove beside. Any moment now, Mother will call everyone in for supper and chide Grandmama for ruining Ida’s appetite. Father will amble inside, overalls dusty from a long day of farmwork, and apologize for ruining Mother’s floors with a kiss. Ida will pick chicken feathers out of little Ann’s hair, Grandmama will step away from her loom, and they will all crowd around the table.
Any moment now.
*****
“Have you heard?” Sarah demands. A blotchy red flush marrs her pale face. She has been waiting for Ida outside, leaning against the factory doors.
Ida shakes a heavy head. Her shift has only just finished, with Mr. Randall tending to keep them a few minutes late. Besides, the other girls do not include her in the daily gossip.
“They’re cutting our wages,” Sarah spits. “Fifteen percent.”
Ida’s stomach clenches like a fist. Her family is already struggling to afford the medicine and physician’s visits for Grandmama, who her mother writes is only worsening. Losing fifty cents a week means the farm’s mortgage payment will not be paid, or the barn will not be mended, or the rusted plows will not be replaced.
“You’re certain?” Ida asks. Her breathing echoes loudly in her own ears.
Sarah’s hand is clenched tight around her work apron. She storms off in the direction of the boardinghouse, not looking back to check if Ida is following.
Ida is slow to catch her on aching feet. “Sarah, we must wait for-”
Sarah whirls. “Wage cuts!” she explodes. “The machine took the hand off another girl, and they are speaking of wage cuts!”
Poor girl. What would she do now? She could not operate the machinery with one hand. Nor could she work as a servant, nor weave at home. Women could do little else to earn coin.
“They could box off the wheels for a few dollars,” Sarah says. “Two hands lost, and nothing has been done.” Her voice rises again. “They have no souls, no souls at all!”
“Sarah!” Ida admonishes. She looks around, but the girls on her shift have departed.
Sarah’s chest heaves. “Damnation,” she curses, yanking off her cap and raking a shaking hand through her brown hair. The rapidly darkening twilight casts her face in shadow.
The door opens, and operatives spill out. Lucy will soon find them.
“Let’s speak of happier subjects,” Ida says quietly. “We don’t need to fill children’s heads with such terrible things.”
Sarah scoffs. “The world is full of terrible things. At her age, I was already well aware.”
The years in which Ida had been too young to understand the pinched look on her parents’ faces and the meagerness of the crop had been the best of her life. That was before she had lengthened her hem and put her hair up.
Before Ida can respond, Lucy appears at her elbow. Ida gives Sarah a meaningful look. Sarah rolls her eyes but stays quiet.
They walk past the large, stately houses of the corporation agents. Surrounded by lush gardens, these mansions are the furthest from the boardinghouses. Lucy looks longingly over the high fence, but they do not linger. If they hurry, they will make supper.
The girls walking in front of them peek back and giggle. Ida’s ears burn.
Lucy’s brows draw together.
“Don’t worry,” Ida tells her. “They’re not laughing at you.” She can imagine what they are saying. Luddite. Granny. Country. Nothing she hasn’t heard. Unlike the other farm girls who shed their homespun dresses and buy factory cloth the moment they receive their first wages, Ida wears the same dresses she arrived in Lowell with. The mills advocate for “proper” dress, but Ida’s work apron has hidden it well enough from Mr. Randall so far.
She knows her dresses are plain and old-fashioned, but the cotton was grown on the farm, the thread spun by her mother, the cloth woven by her grandmother.
She runs her finger under her sleeve. I.W. Ida Wolcott from Andover, Maine.
The laughter cuts off abruptly. Ida turns to see Sarah making a vulgar gesture.
“Sarah!” She swats Sarah’s hand down before Lucy can see it, but she’s smiling. Her mother would be horrified at what Sarah picked up at the orphanage and now passed on to Ida. Her mother is not here.
The day they met, Sarah glanced over at the whispering girls across the dining table and asked whether she needed help buying factory cloth. Ida, jutting out her chin with every ounce of courage she had lugged to Lowell, replied that she was keeping her current dresses. She liked them and she did not care what they thought. She waited for abandonment. Instead, the surprise on Sarah’s face was chased by something akin to respect. She stuck out a hand.
*****
Lucy is sprawled across their bed when Ida finishes washing, face lax in sleep. Soft candlelight flickers across her coltish limbs and golden hair, flung across her half of the mattress and a portion of Ida’s.
Ida’s old bedmate Lovey passed during the same outbreak of consumption that had taken their house-mother. The disease swept through the overcrowded boardinghouses every few months. She and Lovey had not been close, but the thought of Lowell being her final resting place left Ida cold. When their new house-mother Mrs. Kemp arrived with her daughter Lucy in tow, Ida was glad for the warm presence beside her. She had never slept alone on the farm.
The other three girls are motionless lumps under their blankets. The lone flame burns from the neighboring bed, where Sarah is scribbling furiously on a sheaf of paper. She lifts her head when Ida trudges by. “She tried to wait for you,” Sarah whispers. “It was a valiant battle.”
Ida’s lips quirk. Her first night at Lowell, Lucy’s sniffling only stopped when Ida draped an arm over her shoulder. Apparently, the corporations required mill girls to sleep in the communal quarters, no matter if their mother resided in the same building. An unnecessarily cruel policy, Ida thought in private, especially for a little girl who had just lost her father. A farming accident, most likely. Ida had thought of Ann, with her night terrors but without her older sister’s comfort now, and reached out without thinking. Ever since, Lucy has refused to sleep until Ida does. The fatigue of factory work has a way of wearing down convictions, though.
Ida opens her chest, digging out her book. She runs her hand over the embossed blue leather of Irving’s The Sketch Book, gifted to her by Grandmama years ago. When she has the energy, she rereads some of its tales before curfew. She finishes “Rip Van Winkle” and makes it half-way through “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” before Sarah breaks the silence.
“We’re meeting in Laura’s room in a half-hour,” she says without looking up. “I’ll say the same thing I always do. You should join me.”
“Sarah…” Ida does not feel up to rehashing an old argument tonight. She rubs gritty eyes. Their arguments have a tendency to end in cold silences and missing toothbrushes or hairbrushes or pens that only reappeared once peace has been declared.
“These conditions are not fit for the daughters of freemen,” Sarah says. Her dark eyes bore into Ida’s. “You know it as well as I do. What I cannot understand is why you are doing nothing about it.” Ida hates this tone of hers. Sarah is only one year older but pretends to be many years wiser. Sarah’s bedmate Aseneth shifts in her sleep, and they both quiet.
Ida opens her mouth, reaching for well-worn reasons. Closes it. Thinks of shattered hands and gnashing teeth and scalding air and aching feet. Thinks of what you can buy with fifty cents. Thinks of the hunger she sees in the operatives’ eyes, that of starved street dogs. Hunger for something more. Recently, she’s been recognizing it in the mirror.
She feels like the old barn right before the roof had caved in with a sigh. The accumulated weight of rainwater had been too much, the weight of weary day on weary day on weary day. She closes her book.
“Alright,” she says, “alright.”
*****
Girls are sitting cross-legged on the edge of beds, against headboards, and even on the dusty floors. Letters and half-sewed dresses scatter every surface, an attempted pretense. A flimsy one. Even though Lucy has taken to following her around like a duckling, her mother is still on the corporation’s payroll and will probably not hesitate to report them. Ida strains her ears for footsteps.
Would they be fired and blacklisted? Cautionary tales of past strikes swirl within the boardinghouses, stories of how they failed, how their leaders were banished from Lowell. Ida wonders where those girls are now, if they regret being quite so daring.
A young woman clears her throat. Her dark blonde hair is neatly coiled and her muted blue dress free of wrinkles. She looks a few years older than them. “Welcome,” she says, “to a meeting of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. My name is Hannah Tarlton, and I am your president.”
Sarah leans close, breath tickling Ida’s neck, and whispers, “The daughter of a Unitarian clergyman. Received an excellent education. She’s the most well-read person I’ve ever met.” Ida imagines Hannah is much more learned than her. She can read, write, and do arithmetic competently enough after attending the village school until she was twelve, but she is no great student of literature.
“We formed last year from the same sentiments that have no doubt drawn many of you here today for the first time,” Hannah continues. “We labor for too little reward and for far too long.” Nodding heads around the room. “The wage cuts will be our immediate focus, but I invite you to join us for our larger project: the ten-hour workday.” Murmuring.
Sarah, the association’s secretary, pulls out her paper and pen.
“The Fathers of the Republic championed our right to the pursuit of happiness, to the pursuit of a higher existence.” She sweeps a glance over the gathered girls. “It now only remains for us to throw off the shackles which are binding us in ignorance and servitude, which prevent us from rising to that scale of being for which God designed us.”
Ida mutters to Sarah, “She certainly preaches like a clergyman.” Sarah snickers.
Hannah gives them a stern look, and they straighten. “But how shall the masses become educated? With the present system of labor it is impossible. There must be reasonable hours for manual labor, and a just portion of time allowed for the cultivation of the mental and moral faculties.” Would they not earn less if they worked less, though?
“The improvements in machinery mean that we need labor but a few hours a day to produce the comforts of life.” Hannah’s voice rises with feeling. “Why is it then, that the corporations are obliging us to toil fourteen hours a day for bare subsistence?” she cries. “Greed is the only answer! It is an answer we will not accept!”
A smattering of applause. Ida looks around. Some girls have leaned forward while others seem to still be chewing over the words.
It is a nice dream, but a dream nonetheless.
Another girl unfolds from a mattress. “I am Clumena, the vice president,” she says. “You may contribute to this opposition by writing for our weekly journal or our series of factory tracts.” So that is what Sarah has been scribbling past curfew for the past month. “And of course, our first order of action is to turn out against these wage cuts.”
Someone in the audience pipes up, a black-haired teen lounging against a headboard. “Why would striking succeed now when it’s never done so before?”
Hannah is the one who answers. “In the past, the operatives surrendered before their demands were met. But our wages are even lower, our conditions more appalling, our determination—”
The brass doorknob turns.
Everyone freezes.
Ida stops breathing. This is it. They will lose Grandmama and they will lose the farm and everyone will be so, so disappointed at the reckless stupidity of a silly girl.
She wants to stand. She wants to hide. She wants to run.
The door opens.
“Lucy?” she breathes.
The hallway haloes Lucy in light. She twists her white nightgown in her hands, shifting on bare feet. “Ida?” she calls, eyes flickering around the room before they land on her. “I woke up and you were gone—” She seems to take in the thirty sets of eyes staring at her and shrinks back. “I couldn’t sleep,” she finishes with barely a whisper.
Hot relief pours down Ida’s spine. The tension rushes out of her so quickly she almost melts into the bed.
Movement resumes. Then, muttering. Was this not? Was this the new house-mother’s daughter? Would she report them?
Ida is going to throw up.
Sarah crosses her arms. “Ida is busy, Lucy. Could you—”
Ida jumps up. “It’s alright, Lucy. Let’s go.” She wipes clammy hands on her dress, quickly ushering Lucy out of the doorway.
She does not look back.
*****
Ida has been staring at the same page of The Sketch Book for twenty minutes. What had she been thinking? They could’ve lost everything. After Lucy slipped into sleep, Ida had studied the ceiling imagining increasingly terrible possibilities before giving up and carrying the book to the downstairs common room.
Ida blinks, and Sarah is standing before her, hands on her hips. “What was that?” she demands.
“What?” Ida croaks.
Sarah glares. “You fled like a coward.”
Disbelief rises like bile. “Sarah, do you know how close we were to being blacklisted?” Ida sits forward on the sofa, resisting the urge to strangle her. “I told Lucy we were in a sewing circle. You’re lucky she believed me. That could have been anyone, and they could have eavesdropped at the door for who knows how long.”
Ida sags. “Just-just leave me alone,” she says. She pulls her knees up and resumes her staring. Pale hands yank the book out of her lap. “Sarah, give it back!”
“What is wrong with you?” Sarah snaps. “You come back and bury your nose in the same book every night like nothing is wrong. Do you even care?”
Ida stands, snatching the book back. “Of course I do! But there is too much at stake.” Five lives in the balance, depending on a failing harvest and her meager wages. You wouldn’t understand. “I’m heading to bed.” She starts to walk past.
Sarah shoves her.
Ida’s back slams into the cushions. She gasps, winded.
Sarah crowds her, face going blotchy red again. “You think I do not know that? You think I have nothing to lose? Just because I’m an orphan?” She spits the word like poison. “I am putting my brother through college. Me.”
Ida had not known. She says the last thing she can think of. “I will not be here for much longer. I do not wish to make trouble.” Once the harvests improved, Ida could go home. She would no longer be one mouth to feed too many, and everything would be as it once was.
Sarah’s brows rise, her anger momentarily forgotten. “What? You have long to go yet. I have been here for three already, and Aseneth ten. You have been here only one.”
Ten years in this filthy, monotonous, draining place. She can’t breathe.
“Once the farm recovers, I will sell piece work,” she says weakly. Grandmama taught Ida how to weave as soon as her legs could reach the pedals, like her grandmother had before her, and her grandmother before her.
Sarah laughs, sharp and mean. “Nobody wants your homespun anymore.” Her tone verges on the one girls use to snicker at her dress. Luddite. Granny. Country.
Ida bristles. “Merchants lined up at our door to buy Grandmama’s cloth. She is the best weaver in the county.” Grandmama had woven for a living before she fell ill. She had never earned as much as Ida did, but it had been more than enough when the harvest was adequate.
“How long ago was that?” Sarah challenges. “They are building new mills every week.”
“It has only been a few years,” Ida says, defiant. The new mills could be built, but the world could not tip on its head in the span of a year, or a decade, or even a lifetime. “Before I left, I was still selling homespun. I am sure they will be happy when I return.” Not happier than her, though. At home, Ida did her work next to the kitchen fire whenever she chose to, and she suppered with her family every evening.
Sarah’s mouth flattens. “If you truly believed that, you wouldn’t have come tonight.”
Ida looks away. “That was a mistake.” A silly, dangerous mistake.
Sarah’s lip curls. She’s never turned that look on Ida before. Like she is disgusted. “It seems I misjudged you, Ida.”
Long after her footsteps on the stairs fade, the word lingers. Coward.
