So That's How You'll Start?

For several days, Mother and her coworkers shuttled between the police station and labor support organizations. Their aim was to reclaim ownership of the sewing machines now that the dead boss's fraud had come to light — but it turned out exactly as they had feared.

Even with Blank's con exposed, the sewing machines were a separate matter. Not only the loan sharks but the dead boss's surviving relatives had thrown themselves into the ownership dispute. Fighting them in court would take a fortune in legal fees, more than any poor worker could hope to shoulder.

A bleak situation all around.

Then, late one afternoon, Mother came home with hopeful news.

"The ILGWU has agreed to stand with us!"

"What's that?"

"The International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union."

The ILGWU — founded in 1900 by seven local unions ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠in New York City, a labor organization whose backbone was workers in the women's garment industry.

"What about the WTUL? Weren't they the ones who showed interest first?"

"They're going to watch how things develop a little longer before they step in."

The WTUL and the ILGWU. Both existed to protect the rights of women workers, but they were not the same. The ILGWU confined itself to women in garment manufacturing; the WTUL reached women across every industry. Their leadership differed, too. The ILGWU was largely run by people who had come up from the shop floor, while the WTUL was packed with society women of the upper class determined to practice noblesse oblige.

Their most famous joint campaign had been in 1909 — the Uprising of the 20,000, a strike that carved itself into the history of American labor. The ILGWU led from the front; the WTUL allied with them and bankrolled the strike from behind the scenes.

"In four days we're holding a street demonstration in Union Square, on the Lower East Side. We have to make our situation known!"

The moment a cause for protest appeared, the ILGWU had seized the case. What gave it weight was the venue itself: Union Square was where the Uprising of the 20,000 had once shaken the entire country.

"How many people are they expecting?"

"I don't really know. We might have to start with just ourselves."

"If the turnout is small, it could be dangerous."

"We can't just sit still, either."

Eight bodies had been found in that abandoned warehouse, yet the story barely registered. The papers treated it as little more than a gang shooting born of internal strife. Coverage of the dead boss was no better. Nowhere in the newspapers was there a word about his fraud — no interest in why scams like this kept happening, or in the suffering of the workers they ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠left behind. Or the silence was deliberate.

In the end, the only way for the workers to make the damage known was to take to the streets themselves.

With the ILGWU joining the fight over the sewing machines, the affair entered a new phase.

The Garment District of Midtown Manhattan produced seventy percent of America's clothing. The owners of its manufacturing houses liked to hold unofficial gatherings at the Manhattan Club on Twenty-Sixth Street.

Today, however, a man who did not belong in such a place came calling.

"Johnny Spanish is here."

"Johnny? Our Johnny?"

"The same."

The bosses reacted in a range of ways to the news of Johnny Spanish's visit.

"I heard he got out of prison. Why show up here all of a sudden?"

"It certainly won't be for anything pleasant."

"Still, we ought to see him. If we turn him away and he decides to hold a grudge, can any of us afford that?"

Johnny Spanish — gangster by trade. Narcotics peddler, armed robber, assailant and killer, a labor slugger who smashed union strikes. Every clothing manufacturer in that room had hired him at least once to break a walkout.

"Some of you would rather not deal with him, so I'll meet him as our representative. There's no sense in all of us trooping in together."

"That seems best."

The man who had volunteered as spokesman moved to a private room for a closed conference with Johnny.

Short of stature, close-cropped hair, hard, protruding eyes. Johnny Spanish — Italian father, Spanish mother — drained a whiskey in one swallow and spoke.

"While I was locked up, the whole damn world turned upside down. Streets crawling with fancy automobiles. Looks like people are eating well these days."

"Seven years is long enough for a world to change."

"Looking at your face, boss, I can believe it. I hear business has been good."

Good hardly covered it. At this rate, the man looked ready to buy Manhattan outright.

Since the turn of the century, the way people lived had been transforming at a gallop. New styles of clothing appeared by the dozen; products of every kind poured off the lines and into shops. The greatest upheaval of all had been the great war in Europe. With European factories in ruins, massive military contracts for uniforms, tents, and blankets had flooded into the United States. Raw material prices soared, and the clothing houses used that as an excuse to jack up their own prices and rake in outrageous profits. The garment trade was enjoying a boom without precedent.

"Without the obstacles, this place would be paradise," Johnny said.

The boss stroked his chin. A devil visiting paradise, suddenly talking about obstacles?

"Something on your mind, then."

"Nothing major. Just a headache."

"There's never just one of those."

"Still, there's usually one that worries you most, isn't there?"

For clothing manufacturers — for bosses of every kind — that shared anxiety was always the same: a union strike.

Johnny brought up the recent business of a sweatshop owner on Eldridge Street.

"We're not eager to defend a crook like Blank ourselves. It was a messy personal affair, nothing more than one man's misconduct."

"For a 'personal' matter, the garment trade is crawling with crooks like him. And because of trash like that, decent men like yourself get painted with the same brush. Hardly fair, is it?"

Instead of answering, the boss raised his whiskey to his lips. He admitted Johnny was right: there were plenty of Blank-type vermin among the manufacturers. And when the vermin caused trouble, the stirred-up public tarred the honest bosses with the same brush. Pressuring the newspapers to bury related stories was how they dodged the wrath of that ignorant crowd. They had handled Blank's fraud the same way.

"This time, though, it could get bigger. The employees are cooking something up."

"With fifty people? Too small to cook much of anything."

At the boss's dismissive tone, Johnny's eyes curved in a knowing smile.

"That small number could swell into the tens of thousands. The ILGWU has stepped in."

Crack.

The boss set his glass down hard. Most garment manufacturers went into a fit at the mere mention of the ILGWU. It was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a perfectly natural reaction. Seven years earlier, the Uprising of the 20,000 — led by garment workers — had been the work of that union. And the nightmare had not stopped at twenty thousand; they had pulled in sixty thousand cloak makers and staged a strike the likes of which the country had never seen. A thoroughly damned organization.

"The ILGWU is sticking its nose into something that small? Is that solid?"

"You still don't know me. I've got strings everywhere."

That was what made Johnny dangerous and terrifying. Cross him and he was ready to put a gun in the other side's hands at any moment — sometimes for the union, sometimes for the company. This bat with a gun and a knife would smash whichever camp paid him, without hesitation.

"What are they demanding at the demonstration? Compensation?"

"Unpaid wages. The boss had goods he'd siphoned off in collusion with the loan sharks, and both sides got wiped out, so those machines are floating free."

"I've heard. But the sewing machines are a matter for the courts. Not something that needs the ILGWU."

Johnny shook his head, the corner of his mouth lifting.

"The deliberate bankruptcy, the wage theft, the asset dumping — all of it was a fraud. For the ILGWU, looking for a cause to rally around, it's more than enough reason to step up."

American women still had no vote. But the times were changing. As more women entered public life, the demand for suffrage grew louder by the day. The recent turn of women's labor groups — long kept at a distance from politics — toward open engagement belonged to the same current. They had learned that the ballot was the bare minimum of protection for their rights.

"In a few days, the draft will begin in earnest. When the men are hauled off, who fills the empty jobs? Women's voices are only going to get louder — which is exactly why a demonstration is dangerous."

The garment bosses had no interest in defending a fraud. What they feared was the ILGWU seizing a demonstration and dragging every grievance imaginable into a campaign of agitation. They would paint the capitalists as dogs, swell the protest, and wreck their reputations. Worse still was the threat of disrupted production and real losses — which would mean another round of suffocating deals with the workers. Go through that again?

The pressure of the age was stoking a genuine sense of crisis. Holding back an answer for Johnny, the spokesman returned to the gathering and took a poll of opinion.

"We agree the demonstration has to be stopped. But if we mishandle the ILGWU, couldn't the protest only grow?"

"That's why we need Johnny. He says he'll smash it before it even starts."

The method was simple: intimidate each individual sweatshop worker until she was too frightened to step outside, and leave the ILGWU with no one to help even if it wanted to. With so few participants, it was feasible.

"Classic Johnny. What's his price?"

"A hundred dollars a week. Not an unreasonable sum."

"Never mind the money. The man spent seven years rotting in a cell. Can he still deliver like he used to?"

The self-appointed spokesman smiled with meaning.

"I hear he's already pulled in a fairly well-known gang from that neighborhood. You know Johnny's nature."

A man infamous as a sadistic labor slugger. The price of hiring him was a hundred dollars. If that was all it took to kill a headache, there was no reason to refuse.

"Proceed."

That day Johnny took a fifty-dollar advance and began gathering his crew. The war of the labor sluggers was still very much alive — and he meant to throw the market for strikes and demonstrations into chaos once more.

"I'm back, you sons of bitches! Johnny's back!"

Johnny led his pack toward the tenement houses to kill the protest before it began.

Two days before the demonstration.

Mother and her coworkers were building picket signs in the basement workshop; I was shut up at home at my own work. I was deep into a brassiere design when the street outside the window erupted — sharp screams tangled with curses.

"Who the hell do you think you are, taking those? We made them!"

"Shut up and get lost. Get in the way and you'll regret it!"

What now? This damned tenement never saw a quiet day.

When I reached the ground floor, chaos filled the hall. Men coming up from the basement with armloads of picket signs were locked in a struggle with the women trying to stop them.

Where was Mother?

I scanned the room and locked eyes with one of the men. He looked me over the way a race classifier might, studying every corner of my face.

"A half-breed?"

"That's right."

"So what's the name of that crazy bitch of a mother of yours?"

The bastard consulted a paper in his hand and demanded her name.

"Why do you want to know?"

"Listen to this little shit talking back. Answer before I put you on the floor."

I kept my mouth shut and held my ground. The man with the furrowed brow started toward me.

Then hurried footsteps pounded up from below. Mother had heard my voice and come running.

"Kieran!"

Startled, she seized my arm and pulled me toward the stairs.

"That's your brat? Christ, what a—"

Obscenities too foul to repeat followed us up. Roughly: how hard up for a man did a woman have to be to take up with a coolie and whelp something like me. Mother ignored it and hauled me all the way home.

"Kieran, you have to endure it. They're doing this on purpose."

"It looked like they took the pickets."

Mother bit her lip and nodded.

"They had a list of the workers, too. They threatened to kill our families if we join the demonstration—"

"A fresh batch of trash, then."

"Even if you're angry, hold it in. Not now."

"I'm not that reckless. What am I supposed to do in broad daylight?"

Mother looked relieved, but she still would not leave my side. After two prior incidents, even when screams rose from downstairs she did not move.

"Mother — the boss is dead. Who's trying to stop the demonstration?"

"The garment manufacturers' association, of course..."

An association built around the owners of clothing factories — in other words, the capitalists. They were determined to keep a picket line from swelling into a mass movement, and hiring gangs — labor sluggers — to smash it in the first round was exactly that strategy.

Again, the problem was numbers. Mother and her coworkers together barely reached fifty. The factories that had once led the great strikes employed more than five hundred workers; this was a tenth of that. The smaller the shop, the less capacity it had to sustain a protest — which made it perfect prey for men like Blank.

The manufacturers enforced their will through violence with ease, and the same vicious cycle played out in workplaces across the city.

What I could not understand was the attitude of Mother's coworkers — especially the Italian women, who had drawn back from the demonstration into silence. When Mother asked why, they carefully offered two words.

Black Hand. Omerta.

Neither word was unfamiliar. They were burned into books and films from my previous life, and into both my memory and Kieran's.

The Black Hand was an Italian criminal network that, in the late nineteenth century, had practiced extortion, assassination, child kidnapping, and bomb terror across America. Most of them came from Naples — criminals who had slipped in among the immigrants. They took their name from the black-hand seal stamped on the threatening letters that announced a crime.

Someone had written of them:

What was astonishing was that while they spread like poisonous mushrooms across the country, almost no one knew they existed. Their true nature only began to surface in the 1900s — and that had everything to do with Omerta, the code of silence the Italians had brought from the old country.

Settle every problem inside the community. Witness a crime and never testify to outside authority. Break the rule and die for it. That law of silence would later harden into the code of the Italian mafia.

But at this moment the Black Hand itself was a fading ghost. In 1909, after assassinating Joseph Petrosino — the Italian-American NYPD detective who had been hunting them — they became public enemies and began erasing their own traces. Their true reappearance would come with Prohibition, when the Black Hand would be reborn under a more refined and intelligent name: the mafia.

What mattered now was that the men who had stolen the pickets were not the Black Hand. They were simply hired sluggers. They had only pretended to be the Black Hand, stoking the Italian women's terror and forcing Omerta upon them — while also threatening the larger number of Jewish women workers.

And the day after the pickets were taken, the sluggers' intimidation bore its grim fruit.

"We've decided to leave in three days, Nora. I'm sorry we can't stand with you..."

"Leave for where, all of a sudden, Imelda?"

"The Sacramento Valley."

"That — that far?"

California, on the far western edge of the country, opposite New York. The climate was close to Italy's, and the familiar crops — grapes, olives — made it an easier place to settle. Imelda's husband had lost his job in a waterfront strike; she herself was in the same straits. The family at the cliff's edge had chosen not a great city but a farm.

Besides Imelda's family, there were several others. Their decision was not as sudden as it looked. Ever since the boss died, these women had been weighing a move. The deaths of the loan sharks had briefly kindled hope of reclaiming the sewing machines — but violence and threats had broken that hope and hardened their resolve.

"Everyone is terrified. At this rate, there won't be nearly enough people for the demonstration... Fifty was hard enough as it was."

"Even so — once you've started, you have to see it through."

Rich bosses hired sluggers. Penniless workers reeled under the blows with nothing but their fragile bodies. Changing that would take more than killing one man. You had to crush organizations and associations with a greater force. You had to take before you were taken from.

I am justice. That was how I had come to understand this age.

And now I had found my starting point — the road toward a vigilante force.

I steadied Mother, then headed for the docks to find Tanner Smith.

‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠

"You want us to guard a demonstration of maybe a dozen people? What is a gang, a social club? A charity? And free work doesn't exist in this world—"

"How much?"

"A dollar a head!"

Tanner sneered and went on.

"You drag the thing out and the bill goes up. Can a bunch of sweatshop girls cover that? Ten men is ten dollars a day."

That was why the companies almost always won. The power of money. Tanner treated me like a green kid who didn't even grasp that much, and laughed in my face.

So I put the cash on the table.

"Here. One day's wages, to start."

"Well, well. Prepared in advance again?"

Tanner smacked his lips and eyed the money. Then something seemed off; he glared at me.

"That's nine dollars. Head count's short. Make up the last dollar—"

"One of them is me."

"...What?"

"You said to build from the ground up."

His pupils wavered. His mouth fell open. Then the corner of Tanner's mouth curved up.

"So that's how you'll start, is it?"