The Last Ballad
Wiley Cash, 2017
William Morrow
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062313119
Summary
Twelve times a week, twenty-eight-year-old Ella May Wiggins makes the two-mile trek to and from her job on the night shift at American Mill No. 2 in Bessemer City, North Carolina.
The insular community considers the mill’s owners — the newly arrived Goldberg brothers — white but not American and expects them to pay Ella May and other workers less because they toil alongside African Americans like Violet, Ella May’s best friend.
While the dirty, hazardous job at the mill earns Ella May a paltry nine dollars for seventy-two hours of work each week, it’s the only opportunity she has. Her no-good husband, John, has run off again, and she must keep her four young children alive with whatever work she can find.
When the union leaflets begin circulating, Ella May has a taste of hope, a yearning for the better life the organizers promise. But the mill owners, backed by other nefarious forces, claim the union is nothing but a front for the Bolshevik menace sweeping across Europe.
To maintain their control, the owners will use every means in their power, including bloodshed, to prevent workers from banding together. On the night of the county’s biggest rally, Ella May, weighing the costs of her choice, makes up her mind to join the movement—a decision that will have lasting consequences for her children, her friends, her town—indeed all that she loves.
Seventy-five years later, Ella May’s daughter Lilly, now an elderly woman, tells her nephew about his grandmother and the events that transformed their family. Illuminating the most painful corners of their history, she reveals, for the first time, the tragedy that befell Ella May after that fateful union meeting in 1929.
Intertwining myriad voices, Wiley Cash brings to life the heartbreak and bravery of the now forgotten struggle of the labor movement in early twentieth-century America — and pays tribute to the thousands of heroic women and men who risked their lives to win basic rights for all workers. Lyrical, heartbreaking, and haunting, this eloquent novel confirms Wiley Cash’s place among our nation’s finest writers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1977-78
• Where—Gastonia, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., University of North Carolina;
Ph.D., University of Louisiana
• Currently—lives in Wilmington, North Carolina
Wiley Cash is from western North Carolina, a region that figures prominently in his fiction. A Land More Than Home, his first novel was published in 2012, followed by This Dark Road to Mercy in 2014, and The Last Ballad in 2017.
Wiley holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette (where he studied under author Ernest Gaines).
He has received grants and fellowships from the Asheville Area Arts Council, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. His stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and Carolina Quarterly, and his essays on Southern literature have appeared in American Literary Realism, South Carolina Review, and other publications.
Wiley lives with his wife and two daughters in Wilmington, North Carolina. He serves as the writer-in-residence at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and teaches in the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. (Adapted from previous and current bios on the author's website. Retrieved 10/4/2017.)
Book Reviews
In the retelling of the Loray Mill strike and the courageous role of Ella May Wiggins, Cash vividly blends the archival with the imaginative. As the historian Perry Anderson has noted, good historical fiction has the ability “to waken us to history, in a time when any real sense of it has gone dead.” … Cash, with care and steadiness, has pulled from the wreckage of the past a lost moment of Southern progressivism. Perhaps fiction can help us bear the burden of Southern history, which is pressing down hard on us today.
Amy Rowland - New York Times Book Review
With his vibrant imagination, vigorous research, and his architectural skill in structuring this novel, Wiley Cash has lifted the events of the past into the present and immortalized a time that holds valuable lessons for our country today.
Charlotte Observer
Cash transports readers into the world of real-life ballad singer Ella May Wiggins, a central figure in workers’ battle for unionization in North Carolina textile mills.… [S]uspenseful, moving… [it] will resonate with readers of John Steinbeck or Ron Rash.
Publishers Weekly
Cash…writes with earnestness and great sympathy but reveals the outcome early, taking the bite out of the story's climax. Verdict: Admirers of Ron Rash's Serena and its Appalachian setting will find much to like here. —Michael Pucci, South Orange P.L., NJ
Library Journal
Wiley Cash’s third novel is a sweeping, old-fashioned saga with an inspirational but ill-fated heroine at its center… Ella May is such a rich, sympathetic character.… Powerful and moving, exploring complex historical issues that are still with us today.
BookPage
Although it is initially a bit difficult to keep so many points of view straight, it is satisfying to see them all connect.… Cash highlights the struggles of often forgotten heroes…. A heartbreaking and beautifully written look at the real people involved in the labor movement.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for The Last Ballad … then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the quality, or more like the lack of quality, of Ella May Wiggins's life and her daily struggles to support herself and children. What are the particular challenges she faced?
2. Describe the abusive working conditions in the Loray Mill, which eventually led to the workers' strike in 1929.
3. Many, if not all, of the strike leaders were communists. How did its leadership's affiliation affect the national media and general public support?
4. Even though it ultimately failed, what role did the strike play in galvanizing the national labor movement?
5. The workers were captivated and empowered by Wiggins's songs. Later, the failed strike inspired other songwriters of the era, such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Why does music hold such power over us?
6. Consider Wiggins's rise to union leadership. Her actions were incredibly risky; do you think those risks were unfair to her four children? Would any of us today have had her courage?
7. Why do you think Cash decided to use the voices of Wiggins's daughter, the mill-owner's wife, a black Pullman porter, and the old man who pulls the "dope wagon" to tell the story? What does each bring to the telling that gives it a unique perspective?
8. Today's labor movement has shrunk in both numbers and power. Use Cash's book as a starting point to discuss the pros and cons of organized labor in the U.S. — it's history, its demise, and whether or not it is needed today.
9. Does story resonate in today's world, given the growth of populism and concern over income disparity?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)