The Celestials by Karen Shepard Page B

Crispins actually numbered thirty-one, two of whom Alfred would have counted as near friends. The Brooklyn Street factory would be up and running by the end of the month. It would not be the first, as Crispin cooperatives dotted the eastern states from New Brunswick to Baltimore. By August, the North Adams group had applied for and received a charter from the state and had $6,000 in capital.
    The arrangement eliminated employers, and decisions on wages, hours, production levels, and other such matters would be collective ones. They employed women, all members of the Daughters of St. Crispin, though women were, by state law, forbidden to hold shares in their own names.
    When the November late-season slump arrived, only Sampson and the co-op would remain in operation. ByDecember, newspapers throughout the Northeast would hail cooperation as the sure defense and protection of labor.
    Alfred would borrow money from Lucy and Ida and become a shareholder and bottomer at the co-op two days before they commenced manufacture. For close to three years he would make less than the non-Crispins working in other factories, but more than Sampson’s Celestials, and enjoy the risks and possibilities of self-employment. It would be the most satisfying time of his life.
    That summer, when the doors to the co-op opened, the newly purchased and piled hides sending their animal odors through the building, the kits lined up against the walls like girls at a church dance, the first thing the cooperating cordwainers did was stand for a photograph. They did not stand against the wall of their own building. They walked, spilling into the dirt street, the women—many of them in their Sunday best for the occasion—stepping carefully between the ruts of wagon wheels, down Brooklyn Street, across River Street to the north wall of Sampson’s factory. Word was that Sampson himself was in Boston and the only guard was posted to the office entrance on the south wall. A sewing girl, sister to one of the Crispin cooperators, leaned out the window, waving at her brother to indicate that she would be down in a minute to unbolt the gate.
    One by one, men helping the women, the group of seventy made it through the fence and grouped themselves in front of Sampson’s north wall, most of the original Crispins at the back entrance, the sewing girl hastily passing thema few wooden stools upon which to stand so their heads would be raised above the rest in the final image.
    It was evening, the sun beginning to lower itself behind the hills with the grace of an elegant guest lowering herself into a front parlor’s best chair. As Alfred was the only one among them who had witnessed the Chinese posing for their photograph, the workers arranged themselves according to his direction, which he offered in a manner he hoped would be understood as not filled with too much pride. It was he who insisted that the sewing girl who had signaled the all clear sit in the second-story window and that she secure a friend to join her. It had been that way, he remembered, in Sampson’s photograph. In every way, the photograph mirrored Sampson’s of the Celestials, the only difference being that the Chinese had been posed at the south wall and the cooperative at the north, as if one group had arrived only to push the other out the back. The photographer was William P. Hurd, using the same equipment he had used to document the arrival of the Celestials, all pulled in the same wagon by the same aged mare, who would manage to walk this earth for three more summers before folding her awkward legs and settling down for the last time in the far corner of her favorite pasture.

Chapter Five
    Had Julia been at the Methodist church a week previous when Charlie had addressed the congregation, instead of still afraid to show her face, her failures painted there for all to see, she would have felt a kind of grace listening to his imperfect words, and she wouldn’t have