The Women of the Copper Country by Mary Doria Russell

Author:Mary Doria Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

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The good weather holds to the end of October, and bright sunshine makes the farewells easier. Thousands of strikers come to Annie Clements’s house to escort Mother Jones to the depot, where Eva presents her with another blowsy bouquet of the season’s last wildflowers, crisp with morning frost.

Standing on the platform, the little old lady in black shakes hands with the men and hugs the women, and then listens smilingly to the union song that five hundred little kids shout out unmelodiously. She would like to get inside the train and stake out a place near the third-class coal stove on the way down to Milwaukee, but she knows her part in the drama. When the song is done, she will address Local 15 of the Western Federation of Miners one last time, exhorting them to stay together, to stay strong, to fight like hell! Although she’s said all that a thousand times, this morning she has something else to tell them, and when she says it, she will look into the eyes of the gangly, sullen Finnish boy who stands next to Eva Savicki.

“Nothing will ever be given to us,” she is going to say. “We will have to fight for every penny, for every bit of justice, every scrap of dignity, every tiny little improvement in the lives of the working class. But we will change things. Maybe the change will come little by little, like a river wears down granite. Or maybe change will come all at once, like a landslide. Those of us alive and fighting today may never get whole for what strikes cost in blood and money. You know that now. And I’ll tell you the plain bitter truth of it: we will win battles, but this war will never be over. The money men will do their damnedest to claw it all back.”

There will be sober silence then as private fears are spoken publicly by Mary Harris Jones, and then she will go on.

“Let them try! Yes, they will try to break us, to divide us, to fool us. We will not surrender. We won’t give up. We can’t. Because we’re fighting for something much bigger than our own little lives. We are fighting for those who come after us—for those who’ll be born long after you and I are dead and forgotten.”

She will find Eva’s young man in the crowd and look straight at him, and speak then with respect and apology in her eyes.

“Those who come after us will never understand how hard it is for us now. That doesn’t concern me, and you shouldn’t care, either. You and I—and unions around the world—we do what’s right because it’s right, and not because we expect a lick of gratitude. And one day, because of our sacrifices and our courage and our determination, the world will be a better place for the children of the children who are with us today.”

All that is what she will say in a few moments.

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