Review: The Last Ballad

The Last Ballad by Wiley Cash
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a fascinating look into the history of a place I knew well a few years ago. I lived in Gastonia for a few years, and you can't live there without learning something of the Loray Mill. But, once again, Cash takes something that seems cut and dried and makes it into a story, complete with people both moral and flawed.

Ella May Wiggins hadn't planned to be a poster child for anyone or anything. It was all she could do feed her kids on the $9 per 6 day work week she made at a textile mill in 1920's Gaston County, NC. But when members of a labor union convince her that they can force the mill owners to provide better working conditions, she's drawn into a situation that quickly gets out of control. Everyone has their own interests and their own beliefs about what's right, but Ella had no idea that hers might light the initial spark in a fire for social justice.

Ella was a real person, and the Loray Mill strike was a true turning point in the history of the labor movement. I had no idea that the movement was thought to be so closely associated with communism and a desire to destroy the success experienced in the south after WWI. By describing Ella's contribution in a novel, Cash has made the event more personal than it was even when I lived in the town in which it happened 90 years ago. The answers aren't as easy as it might seem. Cash offers perspectives from a variety of the people surrounding Ella to demonstrate that even what seems obvious isn't always simple.

This is not a story of worker's rights, or women's rights, or racial or southern rights, but basic human rights.

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