The Last Ballad

The Last Ballad (2017) by Wiley Cash chronicles the life and death of Ella May Wiggins, a woman known for her ballads, compassion, and perseverance during the labor strikes of the 1920s. Based on the real-life Ella May Wiggins, Cash takes character-rich liberties by intertwining Ella’s story with that of fictional friends and enemies. By alternating different perspectives throughout the novel, Cash captures the troubled beliefs, racial tension, and blind hopefulness of the time.

The Last Ballad begins with an anti-communist advertisement that echoes the fears of the south in the 1920s. It warns residents and mill owners that union organizers are encouraging one another to “kill, kill, kill.” Ella May Wiggins, however, finds hope in the labor strikes that the wealthy fear. Ella is a twenty-eight-year-old mother who is forced to take a job at the local Mill No. 2 after her husband abandons her and their four children. She works twelve-hour shifts nearly every day, walks two miles each way, and only makes a measly nine dollars per week. Despite her grueling efforts and dedication, Ella can barely care for her children; Cash describes her crying over her young son Willie’s grave, whom she lost to whooping cough. She fears that her job at the textile mill won’t be enough to help her last four children survive.

The conditions at Mill No. 2, like most mills, are horrendous. Ella recalls a time she gathered three fingers off the floor. A twelve-year-old boy lost them to his machine. The wealthy mill owners settled with the family to keep them quiet – a telling sign of privilege and inequality in 1920s America.



Mill No. 2 is different from other mills because the owners, the Goldberg brothers who came over from Germany, aren’t American. However, because they’re white, they’re allowed to operate in town, as long as they provide their workers the bare minimum conditions. This mill is also different because it has African American workers as well as white workers, a prominent issue in the south at the time.

Ella doesn’t possess the same racist views that other folks in North Carolina do, though; she lives with her children in Stumptown, the local black community. Despite being the only white family, she doesn’t feel left out at all. In fact, Ella becomes a leader in both union and civil rights as the novel goes on.

After attending a labor strike at the Loray Mill in Gastonia, Ella is recruited by union organizers who were moved by her story. Ella’s ballad is even more moving: she sings a song she wrote called “The Mother’s Lament,” which describes a mother kissing her children goodbye to slave away at a mill. This ballad became central to the labor movement and remains a historical artifact today, thanks to a recording done by Pete Seeger.



Union organizing in the south at this time is terrifying, but even more terrifying to Ella are the conditions she faces each and every day to barely make ends meet for her family. Becoming a voice for the movement, she begins to travel as far as Washington, D.C. to seek out allies. She invites everyone to join, whether they are black or white, which upsets people within the labor movement. One day, Ella organizes a rally that ends up with black and white workers separated. Most white workers want nothing to do with the black workers because of the racial tensions in the South, which is ironic considering a union is meant to unite people with one central purpose: humane treatment of one another.

Cash gives people of all backgrounds a voice, ensuring the issues facing all classes and races are properly conveyed. The most emotional perspective comes from Hampton Haywood, an African American train worker who grew up in the North and is now facing the prejudice of the South. He moved from New York to mobilize with the labor movement, but he now faces a completely new set of issues, like constant paranoia and a fear of being lynched. He speaks to the fear that all black people, not just black union organizers, face at the time. Yet, Hampton pushes forward, working to build up the fair labor movement alongside Ella, her friend Violet, and a white communist woman Sophia. Hampton’s passages are raw and real, serving a purpose as great as Ella’s.

Cash includes opposing views, as well with chapters focused on the McAdams family. Richard McAdams is a sad, rich mill owner; he’s so rich that a town is named after him. McAdams is working to tear down the fight for fair labor and to disrupt all union efforts, but on the inside, his feelings about the movement are indecisive. His wife, Katherine, strikes up a surprising friendship with Ella, while his daughter, Claire shares a moment with Hampton. The two McAdams women don’t have a clue what it’s like to be as tired, desperate, and overworked as those that are fighting, but their non-committal nature to a friendship with Ella sheds light on class issues in the 1920s: they don’t have to worry about a thing.



These tensions inevitably come to a tragic conclusion, as Ella arrives at the Loray Mill strike alongside three black workers. Her truck is run off the road by a mob, and she is shot and killed days before her twenty-ninth birthday, leaving behind the family she desperately wanted to succeed for.

Cash offers up one last voice in the only chapter told from the first person perspective. It is now the present day, seventy-five years later, and Ella’s daughter, Lily, is nearing the end of her own life as she sits and tells the story of her mother’s legacy to her nephew.