The Last Ballad

The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash                 Audio Book:  14 hours, 6 minutes      Paperback Book:  592 pages                 

I could hear the tunes of Woody Guthrie in my mind while listening to this audio book.    The story is all about poor people working in Mills in the 1920s, pulling 12 hour and longer shifts 6 days a week and clearing $9.00 to pay their rent and feed their families on.      The times were rough and so were the Mill owners.     In this story the American Communist Party sends representatives down to get the workers to organize and join together to form unions to force the Mill owners to pay better wages and better hours.    One of the workers Ella May, is contacted and is convinced the union is the right way to go.    The setting of the story is Bessemer City, North Carolina and the bosses pretty much own the town and between their fraternization with the local constables and the backing of the Klan they keep people knuckled under in fear and accepting their lot as just the way it is and ain’t no changing it.    One of the gals from the Communist Party befriends Ella May while continuing to chat her up to get her to help get the word out about unionizing to all the local workers.    Since Ella May is so poor and has her own hard luck story of how life and work are in this Applachian-like setting is so filled with tragedy and hardship the Unionists ask her to speak at the rally they hold just outside of town.   She is a down to earth soul and hasn’t a clue what to say but agrees to do so.   When Ella May gets up to speak everyone falls silent as she tells of trying to live and feed her 5 children and how they have to eat biscuits and grease and stretch it to last as long as they can and how her last baby died because she wasn’t able to adequately support the family while recovering from childbirth.   Everyone can relate because almost every family has lost a child or more trying to get by on the low wages and high prices at the company store.    Ella May told stories to her children at night and sang them songs.    She wrote a song to sing at the rally about being a mother with starving children crying for food and not being able to afford any.   Not a dry eye in the house and many people signed up for the union everywhere the unionists took her to speak, always asking for her to sing “The Mother’s Ballad,” as they came to call it.   The story is filled with violence as you can imagine   but the story is a good one, kind of like Norma Rae but more in her grandmother’s life time.    A good story if a sad one.   

Audacity

Audacity by Melanie Crowder, 389 pages

Clara is a young Jewish girl whose family has escaped the Russian pogroms in the early 1900s and come to America.  In Russia, Clara was interested in learning but her family felt that education for a girl would be a waste of time.  Clara’s role was to learn to be obedient and to find a good husband.  Clara hopes that in America things will be different.  She wants to become a doctor.  She realizes quickly that nothing will change how her family feels but that she may be able to make her own decisions.  Forced to work in a factory sweatshop, Clara still finds time to attend classes but also realizes that she is interested in the unions that some of her coworkers are trying to organize to create better working conditions.  Despite her family’s objections, Clara becomes instrumental in the organization effort.  Told in a series of poems, this book is loosely based on the real life of Clara Lemlich, a young Jewish woman originally from Russia, who fought valiantly for the worker’s rights and the establishment of the unions.  Although books in verse are still not really my thing, this was a good story and a lot of teens will like the fact that, because of the format, it is a quick read.