Briar’s heart sank. “No. So it’s not over?”
“It’s over. Isodora is gone. Her spindle is gone. No more curses. But this remains.” He held out the wrapped bundle she’d been waiting to see. “It won’t hurt you. It’s actually a family heirloom. Made by Aurora’s father for her mother at Aurora’s birth. I’m glad it survived. It’s a symbol of love, of hope for the future.”
Briar opened the bundle under the moonlight. It was the beautiful whorl, the disk that made the spindle spin. She ran her finger over the carved roses. There were now two darkened scorch marks that marred the wood.
“This was in my apron pocket. How did it end up in the mill?”
Henry frowned. “It’s hard to explain anything with this spindle. Maybe Isodora found it in the cottage when we weren’t looking. Maybe one of the boys had it?”
Briar handed it back, but Henry refused to take it. “It belongs in your family,” Briar said. “You should keep it.”
He shook his head. “That one hasn’t been our favorite heirloom.”
She held on to it with both hands. “Thank you.” She would keep it as a reminder of what she could have lost if she hadn’t been so blind to what was right in front of her.
Author’s Note
Part of the fun of writing a historically based novel is trying to wrap a fantastical story around reality. What parts are real in Spindle?
Conditions in the cotton mills, the boardinghouses, the games they played in the 1890s, the lectures the operatives attended, the introduction of the safety bicycle…all real. (Hope you liked the quote from Susan B. Anthony about women, freedom, and the bicycle!)
Cotton mills were one of the first places where women joined together and realized the power they had to help each other when they acted together. Early mills, while not ideal places to work by today’s standards, offered young women a chance to earn their own money, a novelty for many of the hardworking farm girls who flocked to the cities. But, as time went on, good intentions gave way to deteriorating conditions, and operatives went on strike to try to change their increasingly difficult lot.
In writing this novel, I wanted to get past the photos of sad and tired mill workers (mostly taken in the early 1900s by photographer Lewis Hine, whose powerful images were instrumental in shedding light on child labor) and remind us that these were real people who lived and loved, worked and played.
At the time this novel is set, the women’s suffrage movement was well under way. However, Mrs. Tuttle and Miss Nan Whitaker are invented characters, as I couldn’t find any suffrage or WCTU speakers who were in the area during my time frame. I patterned them after several other speakers, and in Mrs. Tuttle’s case, had her quote Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s famous “Solitude of Self” speech from 1892, just two years before this story takes place. Mrs. Stanton quite coincidentally mentions an example of a girl of sixteen, which was so fitting to Briar’s circumstances I had to include it.
Sunrise Valley is my invention, but located near Rutland, Vermont, a real place and the location of the first polio epidemic in the USA during the summer of 1894. Also true to Vermont history, the Queen City Cotton Company built a new cotton factory in Burlington with 26,000 spindles in 1894.
The first of the strikes in the great railroad strike of 1894 started May 10. The issue was primarily a disagreement between workers making and repairing Pullman sleeper cars and Mr. Pullman. The conflict affected passengers, mail, and freight, and lasted until mid-late July of that year.
Lastly, did you catch the Easter eggs in the story? Briar’s last name, Jenny, comes from the spinning jenny, an invention from the 1700s that utilized a row of spindles instead of a singular one as in a spinning wheel—get it? She’s a spinner girl, a spinning Jenny. Ah, history is fun! Also, when the safety bicycle was being introduced, I mentioned Annie Londonderry, who set out on a bicycle trip around the world after the fashion of Nellie Bly’s trip around the world in eighty days. Well, that Easter egg was a nod at my novel Liz and Nellie, which was a little side project I worked on between my fairy tale stories for Entangled TEEN.
The following resources were immensely helpful in helping me ground my characters in both the late 1800s time period, and in the life of a cotton mill operative: Out of Ireland: The Story of Irish Immigration to America, DVD narrated by Kelly McGillis and written by Paul Wagner; The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women (1840-1845) by Benita Eisler; The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove by William Moran; Limping Through Life: A Farm Boy’s Polio Memoir by Jerry Apps; also, the novels Lyddie by Katherine Paterson and Counting on Grace by Elizabeth Winthrop.