Stories from Suffragette City

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  For the women of the past who fought so hard for the Nineteenth Amendment, and those who continue fighting today to secure voting rights for all.

  Introduction

  KRISTIN HANNAH

  I still remember the first time I voted for the president of the United States. It’s such a crucial rite of passage, a pivotal pause on the road to adulthood. I remember reading newspaper articles in detail, listening to speeches, asking opinions of everyone I respected. I wanted desperately to be informed. I was in college at the time, at a large public university, and the upcoming election was big news. We painted posters and canvassed neighborhoods and put politics first in the school newspaper. Groups gathered after class to galvanize voters and encourage others to get involved. And then there was the actual day: walking into the room, presenting my voter registration card, and—at last—casting my vote.

  But did I think about how I came to be casting my vote? At that age, I doubt it (although I’m sure my mother tried to tell me). Now, so many years later, I know how important a moment that was, both for me personally and in the context of women’s history in America.

  This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” Like all movements of its kind, the push toward gender equality has been, and remains, a multifront challenge, but there is little doubt that the right to vote—and to have a voice in the democratic process—is fundamental for success. There can be no equality in a democratic society in which the government listens to only some of its citizens.

  In the past one hundred years there has been so much change in lifestyle, in technology, in transportation that the “old days” can seem distant and a little unreal. It’s all too easy to forget the battles fought along the way and take for granted the hard-won victories. That’s why it’s especially important to remember and celebrate the women who fought bravely and paid dearly for their cause, and to teach our sons and daughters about the past.

  Change in any political system comes at a cost, and women’s suffrage is no exception. Words weren’t enough to change the status quo and upset the long-accepted tenets of the system. Many women chose the dangerous practice of civil disobedience: they put their lives and their freedom on the line for their beliefs. Women were arrested and thrown in jail. They were force-fed when they went on hunger strikes. In many parts of the country, the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment was only the beginning. It would take years before all women in America, especially women of color, had both the legal right to vote and the actual ability to cast ballots in every state. The ability to vote, and to access the polls, are fights we still face. But the passage of the amendment allowed women to have a voice in the democratic process for the first time and caused a seismic shift in the political landscape.

  The difficulties women faced in gaining the vote, like much of women’s history, are often overlooked or forgotten or marginalized. Many younger women do not even know the story of the movement. It behooves us all to make a concerted effort to commemorate the triumphs of women and to tell their stories to the next generation. Victories cannot be taken for granted. There are still battles to be fought for the advancement of women’s rights, and in remembering the women who came before, and how far we’ve come, we find the strength to continue.

  Legislation is an important first step. The opening of the gate, so to speak. But in times like these, when the country is deeply divided, more is required of people. It is not enough to have the vote. We must exercise that right with conviction and keep in mind the great power that lies within the right to vote. Simply, we must honor the women who fought for this right by voting in our elections and continuing the fight for equal rights.

  This collection, written by some of the most celebrated authors writing today, commemorates and celebrates the battles women faced in fighting for the Nineteenth Amendment. The stories focus on women of different ages, different backgrounds, different ethnicities, as well as on the contributions made by men who supported the cause. These talented authors bring the powerful, important, emotional tales of the suffrage movement alive. In reading these stories as a collection, I was struck by the importance of the message. We are often reminded that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and I believe deeply in the truth of that sentiment. Few things are as vital as remembering and passing on history to future generations.

  History is not a set of dry facts in a dusty old book. We keep the past alive by remembering the people who lived it, who fought for a more equal world and who paid for their convictions. This short story collection celebrates the women who fought for our voices to be heard. By voting, we join the ghosts of the women who came before us in the fight to make the world a better place for our children and grandchildren.

  Apple Season

  LISA WINGATE

  It is, at least, apple season. That one thing might save them. Although whether it can is yet uncertain. The orchard Grandmother planted long ago on the mountain’s craggy slopes has gone wild and spindly, without enough hands to tend it for three seasons now.

  Still, the hardy little trees have done their part. As September slipped into October and New York’s Berkshire foothills donned their scarves of fog, the ragged orchard came in heavy-laden. Branches bowed to the ground, sometimes split at the forks under the weight of the ripening fruit. The trees once again proved themselves to be the kind of scrappy, determined things able to survive on the rough-hewn hillsides high above the Hudson Valley, hidden away to themselves, never having much need of outsiders.

  Except this season, there is need. Little else but need.

  Outsiders won’t come to the apples. That was what Ashmea had told herself weeks ago when the apples began bursting with color. Something’s got to be done before the crop goes to waste.

  She knew, without anyone telling her, that not one apple can be lost when apples are all you have to get by until …

  Until …

  Until always ended in a question she couldn’t answer, and so she had tried not to ask it, even to herself, as she’d taken out the tattered baskets and prepared for the harvest.

  The question had nibbled at her even before that, as summer waned and inched toward autumn, and there’d been no sign of her pa’s usual homecoming. And so with no one else to take charge of the harvest, she’d done so herself. She’d prodded her stepma, Clarey, from the bed and dressed the seven-year-old twins who were neither Clarey’s blood nor, in general, Clarey’s concern. In Clarey’s defense, she hadn’t come to the mountain expecting or prepared to be a stepmother. She was only double the age of the seven-year-old twins, Dabine and Blue, and just three years past Ashmea�
�s eleven.

  Only fourteen, and already Clarey had birthed a baby that now lay buried out past the orchard, where Ash’s mother rested under a marking stone that Ash and the twins had rolled there themselves. They’d selected a pretty one with flecks that glimmered russet in the sun like apple skins. Like Ma’s hair. Her real ma, who’d fed the children, and stitched together clothes from scraps gathered or traded for, and had taught Ash, Dab, and Blue about the orchard … and had sent them there to hide anytime hiding was needed.

  It’d been hard to say, when Clarey’s baby was lost, whether Clarey would’ve done the same for her tiny daughter if it had survived. There’d been no way of knowing whether Clarey had mourned or thought ahead about how she’d slip the baby away to some safe place when Pa took to the bottle and the leaning board-and-batten house turned into a bad place.

  Clarey spoke in some strange language none of them understood. What little English she did know was poor enough that she couldn’t have possibly explained where Pa had gotten her from or if there was a home or a family out there, or anybody she missed. Clarey had the raven hair and dark eyes and high bones of the Indians who’d claimed these mountains before getting chased off to Ohio or married in with white farmers and timbermen. Her strange looks had been Ash’s only clue to who, or what, she might be. Pa had just led her in the door one day last spring and said, “This is your new stepma. Name’s Clarey. You show her where things are.”

  The girl had stood there stoop-shouldered and trembling a little, her gaze darting uncertainly toward the twins and Ash, as if she was more than surprised to end up in a two-room house with three half-grown kids in it.

  And that was that. Pa had doted on Clarey like a new prize for a while. It’d given Ash the feeling that if things got too crowded and somebody had to go, it’d be Ash and Dab, and maybe Blue, too, though Pa would be more likely to hang on to Blue for work, since he was a boy. Ash might’ve gone to the woods and figured out how to get by on her own—she could hunt and she could fish and forage—but with Dab and Blue being just seven, and Blue having a foot that’d healed lame after getting caught in the wagon spokes, there wasn’t much way.

  Things had gone better for a month or two, with a new stepma around. Clarey could cook and she hadn’t turned out to be lazy. But then Clarey’s thin body had started thickening and rounding. Pa had gone off timbering and left them all there to sort things out on their own. Then the baby had come early and died, and Clarey had taken to the bed.

  The last of the buckwheat flour had played out first, and later the cellar goods. All there’d been for a while was whatever Ash and the twins could trap or gather or catch in the streams … and the apples working their way toward ripe, promising better times ahead.

  They’d started picking as soon as they could, a harvest crew of four, fighting off the birds and squirrels and the other creatures that would steal the bounty. Black bears had come at night and roared and grunted, bouncing their weight against the cellar doors, while the twins cried and huddled in their bunk. Ash had sat up in the rocking chair, the old rifle propped in her lap, but the long days and fitful nights had proven worthwhile, as had the trouble of hitching the rawboned bay mule and driving him slow and easy down the mountain to find just the right places.

  The sorts of places where there were people with money and a taste for apples.

  Places where a wagon with three little hill kids and a strange, solemn, dark-eyed girl wouldn’t be chased off by people who throw rocks and wave their fists and stab their fingers through the air, pointing away from their houses and storefronts and shade trees.

  “Hillbillies! White trash! Go on. Get away!”

  It’s not that Ash hadn’t heard the words before. In the far back of her memories was the time she went off to school one fall, riding double on the mule with the brother who was just a year older. The children there called them names and pulled her hair, but the teacher was kindly.

  She said Ash was a very pretty little girl, with her chestnut hair and green eyes. And she said that Ash was smart. The teacher sent home books and fat pencils and pads of paper with big lines to write on. Magazines for Ma, too. And even a sewing pattern one time, neatly traced onto butcher paper, ready for Ma to cut out.

  But by early spring, Brother had caught a fever and died, and nothing was the same after. Not with Pa, or with Ma, or with school. The books stayed, though. The teacher never came up the mountain to get those. If Pa wasn’t around to yank the books away and tear them up, Ma and Ash leafed through the pages together. That was how Ash learned letters and words and saw pictures of places far away from the mountain, like the factory towns and mills along the Hudson, and the big city where Grandma and Grandpa got off the ship from the Old Country before they came north to the Berkshire foothills.

  Those strange places, seen only in pictures, tease Ash’s mind now as she guides the mule past farmsteads with tall red barns and through villages where all sorts of treasures wink from store windows. The twins lean over the sides of the wagon, their hands clutching the worn siderails, their thin bottoms balanced on boards propped up over the apple bushels.

  “My tummy wants somethin’,” Blue complains, and rubs his middle with a hand that’s cleaner than usual after being scrubbed with the horsehair brush. Before they left home in the barely dawn hours of morning, Ash had made sure they were all washed up and their hair was combed. Nobody wants to buy apples from dirty children, Ma used to say in the before-time, when they’d do this very thing—go down the mountain to find the sort of people who had money to trade for apples.

  “Get some walnuts from the lunch bucket, Blue, but just six,” Ash tells him. “And six for Dab, and six for Clarey.” She’s been teaching the twins to count when she has the chance, and this’ll keep them busy awhile. Other than apples, the walnuts and a few persimmons are all they could find that’d carry well on today’s trip. “Once we sell all these apples, we’ll buy something better.”

  Ash feels Clarey look over with her slow-moving, careful eyes, hears her say something in that odd, thick-sounding language. Puckering her lips, Clarey presses all five fingertips against them.

  “She says you oughta get six walnuts, too,” Dabine pipes up. Since they started the apple harvest and Clarey found her voice again, Little Sister has taken to talking for their strange stepma.

  “You don’t know what she said,” Ash snaps.

  “I do so.” Dab rises up a little and locks her bony arms over her chest, then sits back down hard. It’s troublesome, the way Dab has clung close to Clarey lately, like Dab was just waiting for their stepmother to rise from the bed and take over being Ma.

  Ash snorts. “Dabine Wolters, you better stop that lying or I’ll pop you across the mouth. That’s what dirty, rotten liars get.” It’s what Pa would say, if he were the one driving the wagon. Ash hears him in the words, and even though it’s her own voice saying it, she feels her chin tuck and her head cower between her shoulders, like a big hand is sure to come out of the air and smack her hard enough that her ears ring. “Besides, Clarey can’t tell me when to eat. She’s not our ma. Only your ma can tell you that.” Ash adds this, a little more quietly, as they pass by a farmhouse, where a woman hanging wash shades her eyes to watch.

  “You want some apples to buy?” Ash calls out. “Golden Russets, Kingston Blacks, Ashmeads, Dabinettes, Blue Pearmains. Good for eating or baking!” Those were the words Ma would yell when they’d go down the mountain to sell apples, back in the times before Big Brother died and things went bad.

  “Finest apples in three counties!” Dabine adds, and Ash’s throat prickles and tears well up in her eyes. She didn’t even know Dab had learned those words from Ma. Seems like Dab would’ve been too young to remember Ma used to say that of the apples. “’Specially the Dabinettes!” Dab tosses in.

  Blue throws back his head, his red-brown hair catching the sun. “And the Blue Pearmains!” They’ve played this game a hundred times in the orchard. Each of them has a
special love for the trees Ma picked to be their particular namesakes.

  The farm wife waits until they’re almost past the yard fence before she cups a hand to her mouth and answers, “Well … maybe a few.”

  Ash pulls the reins, but as usual, the mule responds in his own time. They’re halfway down the farm field before the wagon finally comes to a stop.

  The woman buys apples, anyway. They each hand her some, except Clarey, who sits stiffly in the wagon seat and holds the reins, keeping her eyes forward, like she’s afraid she might spoil things by watching.

  “Your sister all right?” the woman asks, and slides a glance Clarey’s way.

  “She’s our stepma,” Dabine blurts.

  Ash snaps, “Hush up, Dab.”

  The woman widens her eyes and shakes her head, and Ash is quick to tell her, “Our pa, he’s busy in the orchard, of course. Once we get all these apples sold—which ought not to take us long—we’ll go back and help pick some more. Awful fine season for apples this year.”

  “Oh, my. I hope—” Whatever else the woman says is lost in the noise as an automobile roars around the corner and startles the mule. It’s all Clarey and the wagon brake can do to hold him in place. A man in a leather bonnet and eye goggles sits at the wheel, and in the back ride three women young enough to wear their hair loose over their shoulders. White ribbons stream from their white hats, floating like tail feathers on the breeze.

  The twins cover their ears and stand with their mouths open, their faces catching a fine spray of mud. They’ve hardly ever seen an automobile, except in magazine drawings, where fancy-looking men in tall hats and tailcoats hold the gloved hands of beautiful women in long, pretty gowns and lovely hats.

  The women in the automobile are like the ones in those pictures, like butterflies and birds, something too fleeting and beautiful to be seen fully before it takes wing again and sweeps away.