Bread and Roses, Too by Katherine Paterson

staring up at her as she was being introduced, or he guessed that it was an introduction. It was all in French. She looked him in the face and smiled...
smiled
right at him, Jake Beale. He felt faint and was too befuddled to smile back. At last, she began to speak. To his delight, she spoke in English and then waited patiently while one of the women strikers turned it into French. She would have to leave Lawrence right away, she said. The women protested. "I don't want to leave you," she explained, "but I have to go and collect money from other chapters of our union. This may be a long strike, and your brother and sister members of the Industrial Workers of the World will want to support you. You must have food for yourselves and your children. You must have money to buy fuel for your stoves in this cold weather. Your job is to stand together, to oppose all who would weaken your resolve—to march, to picket. My job is to gather the funds to support your cause." She smiled at them all. "But I will be back, I promise."
    There was no point in going to meetings if she wasn't going to be there. Without her presence, all the light was gone from those gloomy halls. For the rest of the week, Jake went back to spending nights in garbage piles and stealing food, and he went to the various halls only when he knew there would be soup. While there, he always kept his mouth shut so no one would guess he was native-born and not one of the immigrant strikers. The one time he dared go to the Italian hall, he thought he saw the shoe girl ahead of him in line. He left quickly, before she could see him, though why should he avoid her? Hadn't he left good money—a whole penny—behind the last time he slept in her kitchen? Sometimes he didn't understand himself.
    By Friday it seemed to him that Mrs. Gurley Flynn, as he now knew she was called, had forgotten her promise, that she would never return. He was tired and bored and wretched. Why not go back to work and earn some money? The bosses were paying the scabs good wages. So he started for work that morning, only to be stopped two blocks above Canal Street by a huge woman who screamed threats in his face in Italian, ending with a large hand soundly slapping his bottom and a command in English: "No scab! Go home!"
    Somehow he was more afraid of these big women than he was of the police on their horses or the little tin-soldier militia with their guns and bayonets.
    All that day, as he walked wearily around the town, he heard the rumor that Joe Ettor had gone to Boston to meet Billy Wood and demand a fifteen percent pay raise for all the workers. Hah! Not that Jake could figure what fifteen percent of five dollars and twenty-five cents would amount to—but why should it matter? He might not be able to do much figuring, but he could figure well enough to know that Billy Wood was not going to add a penny to his wages.
    By Sunday he was so cold and tired that he went to every Mass in Holy Rosary Church just so he could get some sleep. He was too tired to trot up to the altar with the hope of getting one of those little paper crackers, but he could doze through the Latin gibberish. He would have stayed longer, except that one of those Italian papists must have spotted him. At any rate, the priest came down the aisle after the church had emptied following the noon Mass and asked him what he was doing sleeping through three Masses in a row. Jake hurried out, giving a backward glance at the poor box. The lock looked flimsy enough to warrant a return visit.

Anarchy
    The scant dozen children left in Rosa's class sat at their desks, puzzled into silence. The bell had rung some time ago, and still no Miss Finch. There was an almost sepulchral solemnity about her absence. Teachers, in the students' experience, were always in the classroom. They had no life outside that room. Therefore, they were never tardy, much less absent. Tardiness, to hear Miss Finch expound on the subject, was one of the seven deadly