Wiley Cash’s The Last Ballad is a fictional account of the last months of union worker and singer Ella May Wiggins. Wiggins was murdered on 14 September 1929, on her way with a bunch of African American mill workers to a union rally in Gastonia, North Carolina. The Last Ballad introduces us to Wiggins in the spring of 1929—along with a whole raft of characters who were her friends, acquaintances, or somehow involved in her story—before spooling out Wiggins’ increasing involvement with a textile union and the Loray Strike.
Ella May Wiggins never really got a fair shot at bettering her circumstances. She was born to a poor Appalachian family. Her father only had irregular, badly paying work. Her husband never really amounted to much. He left Ella after one of their five children died. Single, living in an almost entirely black community on the outskirts of a small town in North Carolina, with four children to feed and another on the way, Ella is almost at her wits end because her job doesn’t pay anywhere near a living wage. A textile workers’ union seemed to her like her only hope for something better. But there are hints that the union was less a shot at hope than a ticking time bomb, at least for Ella.
(Image via Old Hat Records)
There are so many introductions to new characters, after we meet Ella and get a good feed for her very hard knock life, that I started to formulate a corollary to Chekhov’s Gun for characters. There just had to be a reason for us to meet so many different people over the course of The Last Ballad. Initially, part of the reason is to give us a timeline of events from Ella’s first attending a union meeting to the last night of her life. Through their eyes, we see Ella become famous for the song she wrote, “The Mill Mother’s Lament,” and for trying to integrate the nascent Gastonia union. We also see how the Loray Strike went from a minor commercial annoyance to a powder keg.
Even with a countdown, The Last Ballad is a slow burn of a book. Perhaps it’s because the perspective kept shifting, making me learn a new character and reorient myself to the story with every chapter. Perhaps its because it took time to maneuver all those characters into position. Towards the end, however, things speed up until we all arrive at the night of 14 September and it’s all too late. Those last chapters made it impossible for me to put the book down.
The multiple character narrative turned out to be a brilliant way to tell a real story. It felt almost like reading witness statements after the fact. Normally, historical fiction that is this close to reality bothers me for taking liberties. In this case, however, I felt totally immersed in a story. (Of course, it helped that I wasn’t quite sure if the story was real or not until I did some googling after I finished the book.) Not only do the characters ring true, but The Last Ballad is so full of sensory details that the setting rang true, too. At times, I thought I could really hear Ella May sing again.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss for review consideration. It will be released 3 October 2017.