They were heading toward the common. Rosa, careful not to make herself part of the actual parade, clung to the buildings, somehow compelled to shadow the line of marchers until they reached the common, where they merged with hundreds of people already milling about on the snowy ground.
Rosa had just found a spot on the edge of the crowd when a band struck up and the mass of people began to sing—not Mamma's song but a different one, this one in English. A thrill went through Rosa's body. How did everyone know the words? How did they know the English? The tune was easy. It was one they sang at school, to Mrs. Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," but these words were not "Glory! Glory! Hallelujah" but something about solidarity and the union.
There was an improvised platform at the end of the common closest to Jackson Street. There in the center of a group of men, whom she knew by their worn clothes to be workers, was a stranger with a bright red bow tie sticking out of his overcoat. The crowd roared at the sight of him. "Ettor! Ettor!" they cried. So this was the dangerous Joe Ettor. He seemed hardly threatening to Rosa. He was not so tall as Papa had been, but he did have the same mass of curly dark hair, and he smiled at the marchers as he raised his hands for silence. Immediately, the crowd was still, and Rosa could hear his voice ringing in the cold air.
"We will march down to the mills," he said. "And they will meet us in force. The governor is so afraid of us that he has called out the militia, including these beardless Harvard boys. But they cannot weave cloth with bayonets!" The crowd roared its approval. He held up his hands again for silence. "My fellow workers, by all means make this strike as peaceful as possible. In the last analysis, all the blood spilled will be your blood. And above all, remember they can defeat us only if they can separate us into nationalities or skills. If we hold together no matter what they do or threaten to do, no one can defeat us. Not even the governor of Massachusetts and his thousands of militia men and Harvard boys."
He spoke more, in languages Rosa could not understand, but others could, for there were more roars of approval. "Division is the surest means to lose this strike. Never forget! Among workers there is only one nationality, one race, one creed. Remember always that you are workers with interests against those of the mill owners. There are but two races: the race of useful members of society and the race of useless ones. Never forget that in our cause solidarity is necessary."
"Solidarity!" a voice cried out, and the word ricocheted about the great common. "Solidarity forever!" Another word besides "Short pay! All out!" and the words to the songs that everyone in the crowd knew either in English or in their native tongues.
"Now let's join our brothers and sisters already at the picket lines!" Joe Ettor cried, and the crowd, roaring and singing another new song, began to move out from the common, heading down Jackson toward Canal Street.
"We shall not be, we shall not be moved.
We shall not be, we shall not be moved."
Mamma and Anna were in the first line of marchers, but they didn't notice Rosa standing at the edge of the common. Someone had given Anna a huge American flag, which she was holding high above her head. Rosa found herself melting into the crowd. There was something burning inside her that wanted to march, that wanted to sing. She wished she had a flag like Anna's to wave high above her head as she walked.
What would Miss Finch think of her now? Her star pupil caught up in the excitement of the mob, seduced by the outside agitator, the anarchist Ettor? She would be alarmed and deeply disappointed, Rosa knew. But at that moment, the snow falling heavily and covering her hair—she'd forgotten her thin worsted cap—she felt no longer alone but a part of something huge and powerful and right. Yes, at that moment, no one could have persuaded her that what she and the thousands about her were doing was wicked. No. Like Mamma said, it was better to fight and starve than to work and starve.
And then she saw them at the bottom of the hill: not a single frightened Harvard boy or even the familiar Lawrence policemen but a veritable army of militia, dressed in their heavy blue woolen uniforms and leather boots. No danger that they would feel the snow and the cold. Their guns, with the swordlike bayonets attached, were pointed directly at the line of marchers.
There was a jostling in the crowd, and the singing trailed off, as if the cold steel of the bayonets pointed at their bodies had brought them back from the joy of the parade to the deadly seriousness of the threat they were facing.
Cries and jeers rose up behind Rosa, and she saw that members of the crowd were breaking away, some heading east toward the Prospect and Everett mills and others west toward the Atlantic and Pacific mills. She could feel the stir about her, rather like the classroom when Miss Finch left the room, and it frightened her. She wanted to get out of the middle of these thousands of restless bodies and go home, but she couldn't move; she was trapped by marchers pressing this way and that about her. She couldn't see over the heads of the people around her, though she could see the top of the flag and knew it meant that Mamma and Anna must be standing right in front of the armed militia. If the crowd pushed too hard...? She wanted to cry out a warning to Mamma, to Anna, to everyone. What are you doing here? They will kill you. You're nothing to them! Nothing! But the screams were strangled in her tight throat.
The singing had stopped entirely. The marchers in front of the Washington Mill were so quiet that Rosa could hear the shouts and screams from far down Canal Street. What was happening there? Then a whisper swept through the crowd. They've stabbed a boy! They've stabbed a boy! She thought for a moment that she might faint and realized, if she were to, she'd never fall to the street. There was no room. She was suffocating. She had to get out of this trap of bodies. She had to go home.
Then someone began to sing:
"Like a tree planted by the water,
We shall not be moved."
Another voice shouted, rather than sang, "Let him call out his militia!"
"We shall not be moved," the marchers responded.
"Let them shoot and stab us," another voice said.
"We shall not be moved."
And everyone around her was singing now:
"We shall not be, we shall not be moved.
We shall not be, we shall not be moved.
Like a tree planted by the water,
We shall not be moved."
The singing went on and on. Above it, she could hear the bull horn-amplified demands that the crowd disperse. There were occasional scuffles when someone tried to work his or her way through the marchers toward the mills. "Scab! Scab! Go home!"
Eventually, Rosa could feel that the crowd had loosened its grip on her. She began to ease her way sideways until she was
able to slip out of the crowd and into a side street, where she found herself suddenly looking up at the dark brick exterior of Newbury Street School.