Sherilyn Decter's Blog

In 1919, one of every five American workers walked off the job.

Let that number settle. Not one in fifty. Not one in twenty. One in five. More than four million people — steelworkers, coal miners, garment workers, telephone operators, police officers, streetcar drivers — decided, in the same impossible year, that the conditions of their work were no longer acceptable. It was the most turbulent year in American labor history, and it’s the year The Promise Trilogy walks directly into.

I didn’t choose 1919 for the drama, though there’s plenty. I chose it because 1919 is the year when all the forces that had been building for decades — the labor exploitation, the immigrant surveillance, the gap between what the country promised and what it delivered — collided at once. Everything that had been simmering boiled over, and the country had to decide what it believed about the people who built it.

The Daily Math

The history books remember the strikes by their names: the Great Steel Strike, the Boston Police Strike, the Seattle General Strike, the coal strikes that shut down mines across Appalachia. The numbers are staggering — 365,000 steelworkers alone, walking out of mills in six states.

But what the history sometimes misses — and what I wanted the novels to capture — is that these weren’t radical revolutionaries. They were men who wanted shorter hours, safer scaffolding, and wages that kept pace with the price of bread.

In The Promise Trilogy, Pavel files a safety report about the scaffolding at his construction site. The report goes nowhere. The scaffolding collapses. Viktor studies for his citizenship exam while working nights in a subway tunnel that could kill him — because the clean jobs don’t exist for men whose names are in federal files. These aren’t dramatic inventions. They’re the daily math of immigrant labor in 1919: the calculation every working family made between the danger of the job and the danger of having no job at all.

The steel mills ran twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week. A steelworker’s annual earnings barely covered the cost of feeding a family of four. When workers asked for an eight-hour day — not a revolution, just eight hours — the companies called them Bolsheviks and sent in the police.

The Machine That Broke Solidarity

The federal government’s response to the 1919 strikes was not to address the conditions that drove workers to the picket lines. It was to call them dangerous and treat their organizing as a national security threat.

The Palmer Raids targeted immigrant workers with particular ferocity. A man who attended a union meeting could find his name on a deportation list. A woman who organized a relief kitchen for strikers’ families could find a federal agent at her door. The machinery of surveillance — Bureau of Immigration agents, Pinkerton detectives hired by the companies, informants recruited from inside the communities — was designed to make organizing so costly that workers would choose silence over solidarity.

Companies exploited ethnic divisions with professional efficiency, using Black workers as strikebreakers against white picket lines and immigrant workers against native-born ones. The strategy worked because the divisions were real — reinforced by hiring practices, neighborhood boundaries, and old-country suspicions that didn’t dissolve at the American shore. The cross-ethnic solidarity that organizers dreamed of — Italian construction workers standing beside Polish steelworkers beside Russian garment workers beside Irish dockmen — was attempted in 1919 and rarely achieved.

In the novel, Lucie writes rally speeches that have to do three things at once: inspire the workers in the room, persuade the public reading about it tomorrow, and give the federal agents taking notes nothing they can use. She frames workers’ demands in constitutional language — the same amendments she taught in her citizenship classroom — because wrapping a labor demand in patriotic cloth is the only way to make federal interference look like overreach rather than protection.

The Women Behind the Line

Behind every strike in 1919, there were women doing the work that made the picket lines possible. Feeding the families of striking workers. Organizing childcare so mothers could stand on the line themselves. Tracking which families needed coal, which needed medicine, which needed a lawyer who wouldn’t charge. This infrastructure — informal, dispersed, run out of kitchens and church basements — was as essential to the strikes as the picket signs, and it was almost entirely invisible in the newspapers.

The Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903, had been building cross-class alliances between working women and wealthy reformers for more than a decade. But in 1919, the most important organizing happened closer to the ground — in the mutual aid networks that immigrant women had been running since they arrived. Lillian Wald knew these networks existed because her nurses walked through them every day. When she proposed the women’s auxiliary in the novel — officially tasked with flu relief, unofficially a system for documenting what was happening to working families under surveillance — she was describing something that already existed in dozens of kitchens across the Lower East Side.

A Family Story

I should be honest about something. This history is not entirely abstract for me.

In June 1919 — five months before Lucie’s fictional rally — the Winnipeg General Strike shut down an entire Canadian city. For six weeks, thirty thousand workers walked off the job in solidarity across every trade and craft. Streetcars stopped running. Mail stopped moving. On June 21 — Bloody Saturday — the Royal North-West Mounted Police charged into a crowd of strikers. Two men were killed. Dozens were injured.

My grandfather was a striking streetcar operator, active in the union. The family story — the kind that gets passed down at kitchen tables, polished by retelling but never losing its sharp edges — is that he was injured in the horse charge and had to walk home through the back streets and shadows, trying not to be seen. I don’t know every detail of that walk. I know the family kept the story. I know they thought it mattered enough to tell.

When I wrote the scene where mounted police advance on the women at the docks — when I wrote the women stepping forward instead of back, because a horse trained for crowd control won’t trample a line that holds — I was thinking about Winnipeg. About what it costs to stand still when horses are coming. About the walk home afterward, through the shadows, when standing still has consequences.

What 1919 Built

The strikes of 1919 mostly failed, in the narrow sense. The steel strike was broken. The coal miners were ordered back to work by federal injunction. The Boston police who struck were fired and never rehired. The Palmer Raids picked off organizers and terrified their communities into silence.

But failure in 1919 planted seeds that grew. Frances Perkins, shaped by the Triangle fire and the labor battles that followed, would become FDR’s Secretary of Labor and the architect of the New Deal. The eight-hour day the steelworkers demanded in 1919 became law in 1923. The social welfare policies that emerged from the Depression — Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the right to organize — were built by people who had been in those rooms in 1919, who had done the arithmetic on scraps of paper, who remembered what it cost.

In The Promise Trilogy, the rally at the docks doesn’t solve anything. It’s one day. But it’s a day when people who had every reason to stay apart chose to stand together, and the choosing mattered more than the outcome. That’s what 1919 was — not a victory, but a rehearsal for the victories that came later, paid for by people whose names most of us will never know.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026.

The post The Year Everything Stopped: 1919 and the Workers Who Walked Out appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

“My unit came home through Newport News. Still in uniform. Marched off the ship and straight into a colored waiting room.” A pause. “Same uniform as your brother, Miss Santoro. Different parade.”

That’s Clarence Washington speaking — a Pullman porter and one of the most quietly important characters in Book Three of The Promise Trilogy. He says it in a basement meeting where Italian construction workers, Polish steelworkers, Russian garment workers, and Irish dockmen are trying to build the kind of cross-ethnic solidarity that has never fully succeeded in New York. Clarence is the only Black man in the room. He’s also the one who understands the machinery best, because he’s watched it operate in places where it wore no disguise at all.

Clarence is fictional. His world is not.

The Red Summer

Historians call 1919 the Red Summer — not for Bolshevism, but for blood. More than two dozen race massacres erupted across the United States between April and November. In Chicago, a Black teenager swimming in Lake Michigan drifted past an invisible boundary into white-designated water and was stoned. He drowned. The violence that followed lasted a week: thirty-eight dead, over five hundred injured, a thousand Black families left homeless. In Elaine, Arkansas, Black sharecroppers who tried to organize a union were met with a massacre that killed as many as two hundred people — the exact number remains disputed because the dead weren’t all counted.

Black veterans who had served in France — who had fought in the same war as their white neighbors — returned home to find that their service had earned them nothing. Not safety, not respect, not even the right to walk freely through the towns they’d left. Some were attacked still in uniform. The message was explicit: the democracy you fought for overseas does not apply to you here.

This was the America Clarence Washington came home to. And it was the same America where four million workers were walking off their jobs in the largest wave of strikes the country had ever seen.

The Arithmetic of Division

The connection between racial violence and labor organizing in 1919 was not coincidental. It was structural.

Companies facing strikes had a reliable playbook: hire Black workers as strikebreakers to undermine white picket lines, then abandon those same workers when the strikes ended. The strategy accomplished two things at once — it broke the strike and deepened the racial hostility that kept workers from organizing across the color line. As Clarence puts it in the novel: “Down South, they hire Black men as scabs to break white strikes, then turn around and hire white men to beat the Black organizers. Same company. Same invoice.”

The Great Steel Strike of 1919 — 350,000 workers walking off the job across six states — was broken in part by this tactic. Steel companies recruited Black workers from the South with promises of good wages and steady employment, then placed them in the mills the strikers had emptied. The white strikers, many of them immigrants themselves, saw Black workers crossing their picket lines and drew the conclusion the companies intended: that solidarity had a color line.

It was a lie. But it was an effective one, and it worked because the racism was already there — in the hiring halls that kept Black workers out of skilled trades, in the neighborhoods where housing covenants drew invisible borders, in the unions themselves, many of which excluded Black members by constitution or by practice. The companies didn’t create the division. They weaponized it.

The Pullman Porters

Clarence Washington is a Pullman porter — one of the most distinctive and important positions in Black working-class life in the early twentieth century. Pullman porters staffed the sleeping cars on America’s railroads, serving white passengers with a level of attentiveness that was both professional and enforced. The work required education, composure, and the ability to navigate white expectations with a precision that left no room for error.

The porters occupied a paradoxical position. They were among the most well-traveled and well-connected Black workers in the country — they moved between cities, carried newspapers and ideas across state lines, and built networks that stretched from Chicago to New York to Atlanta. They were also completely dependent on white passengers’ goodwill for their livelihood, working for tips in a system designed to keep them grateful and compliant.

In 1919, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters didn’t yet exist — A. Philip Randolph wouldn’t found it until 1925. But the porters were already building the relationships and the organizational infrastructure that would make that union possible. They were doing it quietly, carefully, in the spaces between service — the same way women organized in kitchens and attics, under cover of work that was already expected of them.

I wanted Clarence in the novel because the labor story of 1919 is incomplete without the people who were told that solidarity had a color line. His presence at the rally — his men holding the south bays in their pressed uniforms — represents a fragile, imperfect alliance that was real in its aspiration even when it fell short in practice.

The Alliance That Almost Was

The cross-ethnic, cross-racial solidarity at the heart of The Promise Trilogy‘s final act was the dream of 1919 labor organizing — and its greatest failure. In city after city, the divisions between groups ran deeper than language or neighborhood. Companies exploited those divisions with professional efficiency. Federal agents, surveilling immigrant communities during the Palmer Raids, added another layer of pressure — the threat of deportation made immigrant workers afraid to organize, and afraid workers make poor allies.

But the dream wasn’t entirely a fantasy. In some cities, in some strikes, the lines did hold — briefly, imperfectly, long enough to glimpse what was possible. The 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, brought together workers from more than forty nationalities. The 1919 steel strike, for all its failures, saw immigrant workers from a dozen countries stand together on the same picket lines.

What these moments had in common was someone doing the work of translation — not just linguistic, but moral. Someone standing in a room full of people who had every reason to distrust each other and finding the words that made the common ground visible. In the novel, that’s Lucie’s job: writing rally speeches in five languages that “stir without setting fires,” framing workers’ demands in constitutional language that makes federal interference look like overreach rather than protection.

Clarence understands what Lucie is attempting, and he understands its limits. “Could lift us higher than we’ve ever stood,” he says of the planned rally. “Or it could break us clean in two.” Then, quietly: “And when trouble comes — it won’t come evenly.”

The room hears what he means. Nobody argues.

Why This Story Belongs in the Trilogy

I wrote The Promise Trilogy as a story about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America — Italian immigrant women, specifically, navigating the distance between the old world and the new. But a story about immigrant workers in 1919 that doesn’t include the color line isn’t honest history. It’s a comfortable excerpt.

Clarence Washington isn’t in the novel to check a box. He’s there because the world Lucie moves through — the settlement houses, the union halls, the docks where the rally converges — was shaped as much by the people who were excluded as by the people who were welcomed. The same federal agents who surveilled Lucie’s classroom also surveilled Black organizers. The same companies that exploited her students’ labor also exploited Clarence’s. The machinery didn’t care about the distinction. It only cared about keeping the parts from connecting.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026.

The post A Different Parade: Black Labor and the Color Line in 1919 appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

“This amendment you teach — it protects us when authorities ask questions about missing men, ya?”

When, not if. The grammar of experience.

That question comes early in Book Three of The Promise Trilogy, asked by a Russian immigrant studying for his citizenship exam at the Henry Street Settlement in the fall of 1919. His teacher, Lucie Santoro, writes the Fourth Amendment on the blackboard while five chairs in her classroom sit empty — because the constitutional protections she’s teaching haven’t held for the men who used to sit in them.

It’s a fictional scene. The empty chairs are not.

The Raids That Had No Name Yet

In the fall of 1919, the United States government launched a coordinated campaign to identify, arrest, and deport immigrants suspected of radical political beliefs. The Palmer Raids — named for Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer — would eventually sweep through more than thirty cities, targeting union organizers, socialists, anarchists, and anyone whose politics could be described as dangerously foreign. In practice, the definition of “dangerous” proved remarkably elastic. Speaking Russian was suspicious. Attending a meeting was evidence. Reading the wrong newspaper was enough.

But the raids didn’t arrive all at once. They were preceded by months of surveillance so quiet that most of the people being watched didn’t know it until the knock came.

What struck me most in my research wasn’t the midnight arrests or the deportation ships — I expected those. What I didn’t expect was how thoroughly the federal government used education as a surveillance tool. Citizenship classes, literacy programs, night schools — the very institutions designed to help immigrants become Americans were infiltrated by Bureau of Immigration agents looking for evidence of radical thinking. A man who learned enough English to organize his coworkers was, in the government’s eyes, a man who had learned too much.

Inside the Classroom

Federal agents attended citizenship classes. They sat in the back rows and took notes — not on the teaching, but on the students. Who asked questions about labor law. Who could read well enough to understand a union contract. Who spoke to whom after class, and in what language. The information went into files, and the files went into folders, and the folders went into the machinery that would produce arrest warrants, deportation orders, and the particular terror of a knock on the door at four in the morning.

The settlement houses where these classes took place — Henry Street, Hull House, and hundreds of others — were built on the principle that education was a public good. Lillian Wald had founded Henry Street specifically to serve immigrant families, and her citizenship classes were among the most respected in the city. But the same classrooms that taught immigrants their rights also made those immigrants visible to a government that increasingly viewed those rights as threats.

The surveillance followed a pattern that Wald recognized from experience. In the novel, she describes it to Lucie in terms that carry the precision of someone who has watched the machinery operate before: incentives first — funding, credentials, access — the kind of offers that make cooperation look like opportunity. When incentives fail, isolation: discrediting the teacher, pressuring the institution, making the work itself look dangerous. And when isolation fails, removal. Students first. Then the teacher. Then the program.

That scene is fiction. The pattern is not.

The Soviet Ark

On December 21, 1919, the transport ship Buford sailed from New York Harbor carrying 249 deportees to Russia. The press called it the “Soviet Ark.” Among those aboard were Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman — genuine political radicals who had spent decades advocating for anarchism and labor reform. But many others on the ship had committed no crime beyond holding political opinions the government found inconvenient, or attending meetings that federal agents had decided were subversive, or simply being foreign-born in a country that had decided foreignness itself was a threat.

The Buford was supposed to be a warning. Instead, it became a symbol of how easily the machinery of deportation could be turned against anyone — not just radicals, but workers, students, teachers, neighbors. The man studying English on Tuesday could be on a list by Wednesday and on a ship by December.

In the novel, one of Lucie’s students tells her he’s been placed on the Buford list. His crime: learning English well enough to organize his coworkers. He asks her what he should pack.

The Ones Who Stayed

What gets lost in the history of the Palmer Raids — what I wanted the novel to recover — is the cost to the people who weren’t deported but who lived inside the surveillance anyway. The teacher who kept teaching constitutional rights while federal agents took notes in her classroom. The settlement house director who answered agents’ questions with careful precision, giving them nothing useful while knowing they’d be back. The student who walked past the man with the notebook on his way to class and came anyway, because the citizenship exam was in three weeks and he had a daughter who needed him to be an American.

The women of the auxiliary kept their records in separate notebooks in separate kitchens across five neighborhoods — looking like nothing more than household bookkeeping. Not because they were paranoid, but because they had watched what happened to centralized records when federal agents came through the door.

The courage in 1919 wasn’t always dramatic. Often it was the decision to show up — to the classroom, to the sewing circle, to the attic meeting — knowing that showing up was being recorded, and showing up anyway, because the alternative was to let the fear do what the government couldn’t quite manage on its own: make people disappear from each other’s lives without anyone having to sign a deportation order.

The Shadow in the Story

I didn’t set out to write a novel about government surveillance. I set out to write about a woman who teaches immigrants their constitutional rights and discovers that the act of teaching is itself considered subversive. But you can’t write about 1919 without writing about the apparatus that decided education was dangerous — and you can’t write about that apparatus without recognizing how familiar its logic remains.

The Palmer Raids ended. Palmer himself was discredited when his predictions of a massive May Day revolution in 1920 failed to materialize. The deportations slowed. The surveillance, however, didn’t disappear — it evolved, changed names, found new targets. The cost of becoming American has always included the risk that the country you’re trying to join might decide you’re joining it wrong.

In The Promise Trilogy, Lucie stands at a blackboard with chalk in her hand and teaches the Fourth Amendment to men who need it to be true. That’s the bravest thing she does in three books — not because the teaching is dangerous, but because she keeps doing it after she learns that it is.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026. This post is part of a companion series exploring the real history behind the fiction.

The post The Classroom Door: When the Government Came for the Students appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

The air smelled of carbolic soap and fresh bread. Voices echoed off high ceilings — children’s laughter upstairs, chalk scratching on blackboards across the hall. In a former dining room, a black marble fireplace and ornate crown moldings remembered elegant dinner parties, but the china cabinets were stuffed with primers and notebooks now, and a chalkboard hung where a gilt mirror once reflected candlelight.

That’s the Henry Street Settlement as Lucie Santoro encounters it in The Promise Trilogy — a place where the old world’s architecture holds the new world’s ambitions. A grand house repurposed. Rooms that used to entertain the wealthy now teaching the poor to read, to organize, to claim their rights. Even the children playing in the backyard are part of the experiment — one of the city’s first public playgrounds, built because Lillian Wald looked at kids dodging horses in the street and decided they deserved better.

Henry Street is almost a character in the novels. It has rooms that transform — classroom to flu ward, parlor to meeting hall — and a front door that stays open when everything around it is closing. But the real Henry Street Settlement was part of something much larger: a movement that reshaped American cities from the inside out.

What a Settlement House Actually Was

The idea was radical and simple. Instead of sending aid into poor neighborhoods from a comfortable distance, educated young people — mostly women, mostly from comfortable families — would move in. They would live as neighbors, not missionaries. They would offer what they had — language, education, connections, organizing skills — and learn what they didn’t know, which was nearly everything about how their neighbors actually survived.

The first settlement house was Toynbee Hall, established in London’s East End in 1884 by a group of Oxford students who believed that poverty couldn’t be understood from a lecture hall. The idea crossed the Atlantic almost immediately. In 1886, Stanton Coit founded the Neighborhood Guild on New York’s Lower East Side — the first American settlement, still operating today as the University Settlement. Three years later, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in Chicago, which became the most famous settlement in the country and a model for hundreds that followed.

The numbers tell part of the story: seventy-four settlement houses in 1897, over two hundred by 1905, more than four hundred by 1911, spread across thirty-two states. But numbers don’t capture what happened inside them.

What Happened Inside the Rooms

Walk into a settlement house in 1910 and you might find, in the space of a single building, an English class for Italian mothers in the front parlor, a kindergarten in the back room, a visiting nurse packing her black leather bag for afternoon rounds, a lending library on the second floor, a savings bank in the basement, and a theater rehearsal happening somewhere upstairs. In the evening, the rooms would refill — citizenship classes for men coming off construction shifts, sewing circles that doubled as information networks, lectures on hygiene or labor law or the United States Constitution.

Settlement houses weren’t schools, exactly, or clinics, or community centers, or political organizing hubs. They were all of these things at once, held together by the idea that people’s problems didn’t arrive in separate categories and shouldn’t be addressed that way either. A woman whose child was sick also needed English. The man studying for his citizenship exam also needed a lawyer who could explain his employment contract. The mother learning to cook American recipes was also learning which landlords could be negotiated with and which couldn’t — and the women teaching her already knew.

This is the world Lucie walks into in The Promise Trilogy. When she arrives at Henry Street for a teaching interview, the first thing she notices is the building’s double life — the marble fireplace remembering wealth, the chalkboard replacing it. It’s a room that has been repurposed for people the original owners never imagined would sit in it.

The Women Who Built Them

One of the most striking features of the settlement house movement was how thoroughly it was shaped by women. Jane Addams at Hull House, Lillian Wald at Henry Street, Vida Scudder at Denison House in Boston, Victoria Earle Matthews at the White Rose Mission in Harlem — these were women who turned a lack of conventional options into unconventional power.

In the 1890s, a college-educated woman had few professional paths. She could teach. She could marry. She could do charity work under the supervision of a church. The settlement house movement offered something different: a life of serious, self-directed work, surrounded by other women doing the same. Wald called the women who lived and worked at Henry Street “the Family” — nurses, teachers, reformers, and organizers who shared meals and strategies and, in some cases, their lives. The settlement house was both a public institution and a private world where women could build careers, form relationships, and exercise authority that the wider society would not have granted them.

This mattered enormously. The women who ran settlement houses didn’t just deliver services — they became political forces. Addams and Wald lobbied for child labor laws, workplace safety standards, public health infrastructure, and suffrage. Florence Kelley, who lived at Hull House, became the driving force behind the National Consumers League. Frances Perkins, shaped by her experience at settlement houses and by witnessing the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, went on to become the first woman in a presidential cabinet and the architect of the New Deal.

The settlement house was, in this sense, a school for women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America — not just the immigrant women who came for English classes, but the privileged women who discovered, in the act of teaching, what they themselves were capable of.

The Tensions They Couldn’t Escape

The settlement house movement was not without its contradictions, and honoring the history means acknowledging them.

The women who ran these institutions were overwhelmingly white, Protestant or from assimilated Jewish families, and college-educated. Their neighbors were Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, many with little formal schooling. The power imbalance was built into the structure: the settlement workers decided what to teach, how to teach it, and what counted as progress. “Americanization” was both a service and an imposition — learning English opened doors, but the insistence on American customs often dismissed the traditions immigrants carried with them.

The movement’s record on race was equally complicated. Lillian Wald was notably progressive — she hosted early NAACP meetings at Henry Street and employed Black nurses at a time when most institutions would not. But many settlement houses, including some in New York, either excluded Black residents entirely or served them in separate facilities. When the Great Migration brought millions of Black Americans north between 1910 and 1930, most settlement houses failed to extend the welcome they offered European immigrants. Victoria Earle Matthews, a Black journalist and activist born into enslavement, founded the White Rose Mission in 1897 precisely because existing settlement houses would not serve the young Black women arriving alone in New York City.

In the novels, I’ve tried to hold these tensions without flattening them. Wald is written as a woman who genuinely believes in what she’s building — but who also operates within systems of donor money, board politics, and institutional survival that constrain what’s possible. Henry Street serves its immigrant community with real commitment, but the terms of that service are set by people with more power and more choices than the families they’re helping.

When the Rooms Changed

By 1919 — the year The Promise Trilogy is set — the settlement house movement was approaching a turning point. The flu pandemic of 1918 had stretched every institution to breaking. The Red Scare was building, and the federal government was increasingly suspicious of any organization that served immigrant communities, taught them their rights, or facilitated labor organizing. Settlement houses, which had always walked a line between service and advocacy, found that line getting narrower.

In the novels, this pressure is physical. Lucie watches her classroom at Henry Street — the room she’d spent weeks arranging into a horseshoe so her students could see each other’s faces — get converted into a flu ward. The desks are stacked against the wall. The china cabinets that held her primers now wait for gauze and iodine. The amendments she’d chalked on the blackboard — the Fourth, the Fifth — preside over a room that now exists to keep people alive rather than to help them claim their place in a country.

She asks the nurse not to erase the blackboard. The words stay.

That image — a classroom becoming a hospital, the Constitution on the wall above the sick beds — is fiction, but it captures something real about what settlement houses went through in those years. The institutions survived, but they changed. As activists came to believe that settlement houses alone couldn’t abolish poverty or bridge class divisions, they increasingly pushed for government action — the labor laws, public health programs, and social welfare policies that would eventually become the New Deal.

The Rooms That Remain

The buildings at 263, 265, and 267 Henry Street still stand on the Lower East Side — Federal-style townhouses built in the 1820s, their red-orange brick facades and original doorways preserved as New York City landmarks and a National Historic Landmark. The Henry Street Settlement still operates from these buildings and from sites throughout the neighborhood, providing social services, arts programming, health care, and education.

An original kitchen hearth from the 1820s sits next to modern office equipment. Staff work in what was once Lillian Wald’s bedroom, with its sleeping porch overlooking the former playground. The rooms have been repurposed again and again — from wealthy family home to immigrant aid station to administrative office — but they’ve never stopped being a place where someone walks through the door and finds something they need.

The settlement house movement created two new professions — social work and public health nursing — and helped shape the federal policies that defined twentieth-century American life. But its most lasting contribution may be the simplest one: the insistence that showing up matters. That living in the neighborhood, learning its rhythms, listening to its people, is not just charity but citizenship. That a house can hold more than its walls were built for.

In The Promise Trilogy, Henry Street is where Lucie becomes a teacher, where she learns what she’s willing to fight for, and where she discovers the cost of keeping doors open in a world that keeps trying to close them. The house doesn’t save her — it gives her a room to stand in, and the rest she does herself. That’s what settlement houses were always for.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026. This post is a companion to “The Woman Who Built the House: Lillian Wald and the World That Made Lucie Possible.”

The post The House That Held the World: Settlement Houses and the Rooms Where Everything Changed appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

She came down the stairs with the unhurried confidence of someone who owned the ground beneath her feet. Perhaps fifty, tall and angular, silver threaded through dark hair pulled back in a practical knot — no ornament, no vanity, just efficiency. Her hands were a working woman’s hands, square and capable. But her voice, when she spoke, carried the cultured tones of drawing rooms and university lecture halls — the kind of education that cost money she’d chosen to spend elsewhere.

That’s how Lucie Santoro first sees Lillian Wald in The Promise Trilogy — descending a staircase at the Henry Street Settlement, switching between three languages in thirty seconds, reading a room the way a doctor reads a patient. It’s a fictional entrance, but it’s built from a real woman who lived exactly that way for forty years on the Lower East Side.

A Privileged Daughter Who Chose the Tenements

The real Lillian Wald was born in 1867 in Cincinnati to a comfortable Jewish family — her father a successful merchant, her childhood filled with books and music. She grew up in Rochester, New York, attended private school, and spent her early twenties enjoying the social rounds expected of young women in her position. Nothing about her early life predicted what she would become.

At twenty-two, she entered the New York Hospital School of Nursing, graduating in 1891. She worked briefly at a juvenile asylum, then enrolled in courses at the Woman’s Medical College. It was during this period — while teaching a home-nursing class to immigrant women on the Lower East Side — that a child tugged at her sleeve and led her through the tenement streets to a sick mother lying in a filthy room. Wald would later describe that walk as the moment everything changed — not a gradual awakening, but a single, clarifying shock. She left medical school, moved into a tenement on Jefferson Street with her colleague Mary Brewster, and began what would become a life’s work.

By 1895, she had settled at 265 Henry Street — a building purchased by philanthropist Jacob Schiff — and founded what she called the Nurses’ Settlement. The name mattered. She wasn’t running a charity. She was living in the neighborhood, as a neighbor, offering care to people who couldn’t afford a doctor and wouldn’t have been seen by one anyway. Her nurses carried black leather bags through tenement hallways, and they operated on a sliding fee scale so that no one was turned away.

Building an Institution from Nothing

What Wald built at Henry Street over the next three decades was staggering in its scope. The Settlement offered English classes, job training, a savings bank, a library, clubs for children and adults, and one of the city’s first public playgrounds. She coined the term “public health nurse” and pioneered the profession — by 1913, ninety-two nurses were making roughly 200,000 home visits a year. She persuaded the city’s Board of Education to hire nurses in public schools, launched a school lunch program, and established what became the Neighborhood Playhouse for theater and the arts.

But the nursing was only the beginning. Wald used Henry Street as a launchpad for causes that reached far beyond the Lower East Side. She co-founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, helped establish the National Child Labor Committee and the Women’s Trade Union League, and spearheaded the creation of the federal Children’s Bureau. She campaigned for suffrage, advocated for racial integration at a time when most settlement houses did not, fought for workplace protections years before the laws caught up to the need, and led the American Union Against Militarism during the First World War — a position that would cost her politically when the Red Scare arrived.

She was, in short, a woman who refused to be small — who looked at a system built to keep certain people invisible and decided to dismantle it, one tenement staircase at a time.

When the Flu Came

By the autumn of 1918, when the influenza pandemic swept through New York, Wald and her nurses were among the first to respond. The Lower East Side was already stretched thin — overcrowded tenements, wartime shortages, exhaustion. When the virus hit, Henry Street’s visiting nurses were caring for hundreds of diagnosed cases in the first days of October alone.

Wald was appointed chairman of the Nurses’ Emergency Council, coordinating the response across the city’s private nursing agencies and public health inspectors. She barely slept. She recruited volunteers by posting flyers outside Altman’s and Tiffany’s on Fifth Avenue, calling for “stern women” to answer humanity’s call. Wealthy shoppers who might have fled to their country homes answered instead — hundreds of them, trained and untrained alike, stepping into tenement rooms where entire families lay sick with no one to bring them soup or change their sheets.

The nurses delivered linens, medicine, and thousands of quarts of soup and custard into homes where the healthy had no energy left to cook. Wald later wrote about the epidemic in an essay she titled “When the City is a Great Field Hospital” — a phrase that captured both the scale of the crisis and her unshakable belief that a city could organize itself to care for its own.

New York City lost over twenty thousand people to the pandemic, but its per capita death rate remained lower than most comparable cities. Wald’s existing infrastructure — the nurses already in the neighborhoods, the relationships already built — made the difference. She had spent twenty-five years preparing for a crisis she couldn’t have predicted, simply by insisting that poor people deserved care delivered with dignity.

The Wald Who Lives in the Novel

In The Promise Trilogy, Lillian Wald is not a historical cameo. She is a major character across Books Two and Three — mentor, protector, political strategist, and the woman who gives Lucie Santoro a chance when no one else will.

When Lucie arrives at Henry Street looking for a teaching position, it’s Wald who reads the room, understands that Joe Santoro has neglected to mention his candidate is a woman, and decides this is no reason to close the door. She extends her hand — firm grip, brief, no nonsense — and says simply, “I’m Lillian Wald.” Then she walks Lucie into a confrontation with a union foreman who doesn’t want her there, offering advice that is practical rather than comforting: Don’t waste his time with modesty. Show him what you can do.

That’s the Wald of the novels — warm but unsentimental, politically sophisticated, always thinking three moves ahead. She stakes her own reputation on Lucie’s teaching program, faces down board members who want to shut it down, and navigates the impossible mathematics of institutional survival during the Red Scare, when federal agents are building files on the Settlement’s teachers and students.

One of the scenes I kept returning to while writing was the moment Wald tells Lucie what’s coming. She lays out the pattern she’s seen before — incentives first, then isolation, then removal — with the stripped-down honesty of someone who doesn’t have time to soften the truth. She’s not trying to protect Lucie from reality. She’s making sure Lucie understands the system well enough to survive it.

That scene is fiction, but the pattern Wald describes is not. During the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, settlement houses across the country came under surveillance. Teachers were monitored, students were questioned, and the line between education and subversion was drawn by men who had never set foot in a classroom. Wald herself was a target — her pacifism during the war, her advocacy for immigrant rights, her insistence that the Constitution applied to everyone made her suspicious in the eyes of an apparatus that equated dissent with disloyalty.

The Cost of Keeping Doors Open

What I find most compelling about Lillian Wald — and what drew me to write her as a character — is the tension between her ideals and the compromises she had to make to keep Henry Street alive. She was not naive. She cultivated powerful donors, managed a board of directors with political ambitions, and made tactical decisions about which fights to pick and which to postpone. When the Board voted to convert classrooms into flu wards, she chose to keep the doors open rather than lose everything. When federal agents came to her office, she answered their questions with careful precision, giving them nothing useful while giving away nothing she couldn’t afford to lose.

The real Wald understood something that idealists often don’t: that the money keeping the lights on doesn’t always come from clean hands. Jacob Schiff, her earliest benefactor, was a man of genuine generosity — but not every donor was. Wald navigated those relationships with her eyes open, accepting what she had to accept in order to keep the nurses in the hallways and the teachers in the classrooms. It’s a tension the novels explore directly — what happens when the woman who built an institution for the powerless discovers that the institution’s survival depends on the powerful, and that the powerful have their own reasons for keeping it alive.

This is the cost of becoming — not just for the women who walked into Henry Street looking for a new life, but for the woman who built the house itself. Wald’s legacy isn’t a story of pure heroism. It’s a story of sustained, strategic, often exhausting work done by a woman who understood that institutions survive through compromise, and that compromise is not the same as surrender.

She was connected to everything. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911 killed women from the neighborhoods her nurses served, and the Settlement became a gathering place for the grief and organizing that followed. The suffrage movement that finally won New York women the vote in 1917 counted Wald among its allies — a woman who believed that political power was inseparable from the right to decent working conditions and clean water.

By 1919 — the year Lucie walks through her doors — Wald had been doing this work for twenty-six years. She was in her early fifties, gray-haired, tireless, and fully aware of how fragile the whole enterprise remained. The laws had improved since the Triangle fire. The nurses were in the schools. The playground was built. But enforcement was uneven, the flu was still claiming lives, and the federal government was rounding up the very immigrants her programs were designed to serve.

She kept the doors open anyway. That’s the woman I wanted to write.

Wald retired from Henry Street in 1933, her health broken by four decades of work that never slowed. She died in 1940 in Westport, Connecticut — far from the tenement rooftops and hallways and the staircase where she’d once descended with the unhurried confidence of a woman who owned the ground beneath her feet. The Settlement she founded still operates on the Lower East Side today, still offering the education, health services, and community support she insisted every neighborhood deserved. The visiting nurse service she created became the Visiting Nurse Service of New York — an institution built from one woman’s refusal to walk past a sick mother’s door.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026. Lillian Wald is one of several women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America who appear in the novels alongside fictional characters like Lucie, Carlo, and Mamma Santoro.

The post The Woman Who Built the House: Lillian Wald appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

The trumpet sounded three sharp blasts. The band stopped. The crowd went quiet — the kind of quiet that comes just before something begins, or just before something gives.

Then the command, first in dialect, then in English:

“Aizati i spalli! Lift your shoulders!”

“Accongi i cosce! Tighten your legs!”

“Alza! Lift!”

A collective grunt as one hundred and twenty-eight men pushed upward, muscles straining, faces contorted. For a terrible moment, nothing happened. Six tons of wood and plaster and painted saints pressed down on their backs, and the weight wouldn’t yield. Then — gradually, with a groan that seemed to come from the earth itself — the tower inched off the ground.

The Giglio rose.

That scene sits at the emotional center of Book Two of The Promise Trilogy, and writing it nearly broke me. Not because the research was difficult — the Giglio is one of the best-documented festivals in Italian-American life — but because the weight of it kept revealing itself as more than physical. The tower is heavy. But so is everything the men carrying it have been holding up all year.

A Festival Carried from Naples

The Giglio — il giglio, the lily — honors San Paolino di Nola, the fifth-century bishop who, according to tradition, offered himself as a hostage to secure the release of his people from North African captivity. When he returned home to Nola, the townspeople greeted him with lilies, and the celebration has continued for centuries. In the small towns around Naples — Nola, Brusciano, Barra — the Giglio festival involves enormous wooden towers, elaborately decorated with papier-mâché saints and musicians, carried through the streets on the shoulders of teams of men.

Italian immigrants brought the tradition to New York. In East Harlem, the Giglio became associated with Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on 115th Street — the spiritual heart of the Italian community — from around 1908. The tower in East Harlem grew to extraordinary proportions: a multi-story structure of wood and plaster, decorated with carved saints and flowers and ribbons, topped with a band of musicians who played while the whole thing swayed through the streets.

The Giglio is still carried today — most famously in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and still in East Harlem itself — organized around parish needs and community schedules, and being named capo — leading the lift — was one of the highest honors a man could earn.

What the Lift Really Means

I could describe the mechanics. The paranza — the team of lifters — trains for months. The poles are distributed across shoulders according to height and strength. The capo directs with his voice and his cane, calling the commands that synchronize more than a hundred bodies into a single movement. When the tower turns — gira! — the men’s feet shuffle in unison, heels grinding into stone. When it bounces — salta! — six tons of wood dip and rise in time to the music, and the crowd loses its mind.

But the mechanics don’t explain why it matters. The Giglio matters because it’s the neighborhood made visible. Every family that contributes money, every man who trains as a lifter, every woman who prepares food for the days of celebration — they’re performing their belonging. In a community where standing was earned and reputation was everything, the Giglio was where you showed the parish who you were.

For the Santoro family in The Promise Trilogy, Papa’s appointment as numero uno capo is the culmination of years of service and sacrifice. It means the family name means something. It means they’ve arrived — not in the American sense of wealth and mobility, but in the Italian-American sense of buon nome, good name, the currency that keeps your children fed and your neighbors respectful and your enemies at a distance.

Which is why the Giglio chapters are where everything converges in Book Two — not just the spectacle, but the private grief underneath it. The tower goes up. The crowd cheers. And nobody watching can see what it costs the people carrying it.

The Artichoke King at the Edge of the Frame

I should tell you about the artichokes, because otherwise you’ll think I made them up.

The Terranova family in the novel shares a name with a real crime family that dominated East Harlem from the 1890s through the 1930s. The Morello-Terranova organization ran extortion, gambling, and counterfeiting operations out of the blocks around 116th Street. Ciro Terranova earned a nickname that sounds like fiction: the Artichoke King.

He cornered New York’s artichoke market, buying the small variety popular with Italian families from California suppliers and reselling them at enormous markups. Vendors who refused his prices faced consequences. In 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia actually banned the sale of artichokes in New York City — showing up at the Bronx Terminal Market at dawn with a fanfare of trumpets to announce it. The ban lasted three days, just long enough to arrest the men running the racket.

In 1919, the Terranovas were consolidating power. The street tax, the protection money, the way organized crime wove itself into the daily commerce of immigrant neighborhoods — those were facts of life in East Harlem. In the novel, they’re part of the world the Santoros navigate every day: the toppled artichoke stand, the beaten vendor, the basket of apples that arrives at the family home with a single artichoke perched on top like a crown — a gift that is also a claim.

I wanted Lucie to see these things clearly enough to understand what they cost. Because the Giglio and the racket existed side by side, in the same streets, often involving the same families. The cost of becoming someone in East Harlem meant knowing which debts were visible and which were not — and which ones you were carrying whether you chose to or not.

The Weight That Isn’t Wood

What I kept coming back to while writing the Giglio scenes was the word carry. The men carry the tower. The women carry the food, the preparations, the family honor that the tower performance makes public. The capo carries the responsibility of every man under the poles. And underneath all of it, the community carries its own contradictions — the beauty and the racket, the faith and the fear, the tradition that holds people together and the obligations that won’t let them go.

The Giglio is still celebrated today — still carried, still heavy, still beautiful. The men who lift it still train together, argue together, and hold each other up when the weight shifts. If you’ve never seen it, I hope you will. And if you have — you already know what the tower means. Not just what it weighs, but what it holds.

The Giglio chapters sit at the center of The Promise Trilogy‘s second book because the festival is where everything the Santoro family has built becomes visible — and where everything Lucie has been hiding becomes impossible to carry alone.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026.

The post Six Tons of Faith: The Giglio Festival and the Weight Men Carry appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

 

Eight women. Five languages between them. Three babies, two toddlers, and a girl of six who pressed herself against her mother’s side and watched the strangers with enormous dark eyes.

That’s the first meeting of the women’s auxiliary in The Promise Trilogy — not in a union hall or a lecture room, but in an attic above the Henry Street Settlement, with a samovar someone had carried up three flights of stairs and a circle of mismatched chairs beneath a single bare lightbulb. The women sew flu masks. They share bread and tinctures and information about which clinic nurses will see patients without paperwork. They keep their own records in their own kitchens, in their own hands, looking like nothing more than household bookkeeping.

It’s fiction. But it’s built on a reality that runs through the entire history of women’s organizing in early 20th-century America — and it’s one of the threads I kept pulling while writing Book Three of the trilogy.

The Work That Looked Like Nothing

The history books remember the strikes. The Uprising of the 20,000 in 1909, when tens of thousands of shirtwaist makers — mostly young Jewish and Italian immigrant women — poured into New York’s streets demanding better hours, safer conditions, and the right to organize. The Great Steel Strike of 1919, when 365,000 workers walked off the job in mills across six states. The Bread and Roses strike of 1912 in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where immigrant women shut down textile mills and sent their children to live with supporters in other cities to keep them fed while their mothers held the picket line.

These are the events that made the newspapers. But behind every strike, every labor action, every community that held together under pressure, there was another kind of organizing — quieter, less visible, and almost entirely run by women. It happened in kitchens and parlors and sewing circles, in the conversations that took place after the men left for the picket line, in the networks that moved information from household to household like water through roots.

Women’s auxiliaries, mutual aid societies, mothers’ circles, relief committees — the names varied, but the work was consistent. When a steelworker’s family had no income because their father had been on the line for six weeks, it was women who organized the soup kitchens, coordinated the clothing drives, and tracked which families needed coal. When a garment worker was injured on the job, it was often a neighbor — not an institution — who knew which midwife could be trusted, which grocer gave credit, which lawyer would take a case without fees.

This wasn’t charity. It was infrastructure — the infrastructure that made labor organizing possible in communities where formal institutions were either absent, hostile, or under surveillance.

The Cross-Class Alliance

One of the most remarkable features of women’s organizing in this era was the unlikely alliances it produced. The Women’s Trade Union League, founded in 1903, was built explicitly on the idea that working-class women and wealthy women could make common cause. Its members included both factory workers like Rose Schneiderman and society figures like Anne Tracy Morgan — the daughter of J.P. Morgan — who walked the picket lines alongside striking shirtwaist makers in 1909.

These alliances were imperfect. The “mink brigade,” as the press called the wealthy women who supported the garment strikes, brought resources and public visibility that working women desperately needed. But they also brought assumptions about how organizing should look, what counted as respectable protest, and whose voices should lead. The tensions between the League’s well-heeled supporters and its working-class militants — tensions that Rose Schneiderman articulated with devastating clarity in her speech after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire — were never fully resolved.

In the novels, this tension lives in the relationship between Lillian Wald and the women of the auxiliary. Wald comes from money. She chose the Lower East Side, but she could unchoose it. The immigrant women in Lucie’s circle have no exit. When Wald proposes the auxiliary — officially tasked with flu relief, unofficially a network for documenting what’s happening to working families under federal surveillance — she’s offering protection and structure. But she’s also asking women to trust an institution with a board of directors and donor politics that the women themselves cannot control.

The Genius of Domestic Cover

What fascinates me most about women’s mutual aid networks in this period is their strategic invisibility. Women organized under the cover of work that was already expected of them — sewing, cooking, visiting the sick, minding children. A mothers’ circle at a settlement house looked like a sewing lesson. It was, in fact, a classroom without desks where women taught each other which landlords could be negotiated with, which foremen were stealing wages, and how to write a letter in English that would make a building inspector actually show up.

During the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, the most powerful organizing tactic wasn’t the picket line — it was the decision by striking mothers to send hundreds of their children to live with supporters in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. This solidarity action kept children fed and safe while their mothers faced arrest, eviction, and violence. But it also did something the factory owners hadn’t anticipated: it made the strike visible to middle-class families in other cities, who saw the children arrive thin and poorly clothed and understood, in a way that newspaper accounts could not convey, what the strike was actually about. When authorities tried to stop the children from leaving, public sympathy swung decisively toward the strikers.

The women who organized the children’s evacuation weren’t recorded as strike leaders. They were recorded as mothers making arrangements for their families. The distinction mattered — not because it was honest, but because it was safe.

In the auxiliary scenes in The Promise Trilogy, I tried to capture this double life. The women sew masks for the flu — real masks, needed masks, work that protects families. But while they sew, they listen. They document. They build a record of what’s happening to working families across five neighborhoods, each woman keeping her own notes in her own kitchen, where the pages look like grocery lists and household accounts.

“Every woman keeps her own records,” Lucie says when she understands what Wald is proposing. “What she sees, what she hears, what her family endures. It looks like household bookkeeping.”

“It looks like exactly what it is,” Wald replies. “Women surviving.”

When the Records Mattered

The tradition of women keeping records — informal, dispersed, hidden in plain sight — has a long history in American labor. During the 1919 steel strike, wives of steelworkers organized relief efforts that sustained families through months without income. Their work was essential to the strike’s duration, even though the strike ultimately failed. The women who ran the relief kitchens, tracked family needs, and coordinated donations across ethnic lines weren’t recognized as labor organizers. But without them, the men on the picket lines would have gone home in weeks instead of months.

In 1919 alone, one of every five American workers walked off the job in a wave of strikes that included steelworkers, coal miners, garment workers, police, and telephone operators. Behind each of these actions stood women who did the work of keeping communities together — feeding children, negotiating with landlords, sharing medicine, and carrying information through networks that were invisible to the employers, the press, and the federal agents who were increasingly surveilling immigrant communities during the Red Scare.

The Women’s Trade Union League, the settlement house mothers’ circles, the neighborhood sewing groups, the informal mutual aid societies that operated in every immigrant community — these were the structures that made it possible for families to survive the gap between what the law promised and what the world delivered. They weren’t written into the history the way the strikes were. But the strikes couldn’t have happened without them.

The Room They Left Behind

When the auxiliary is disbanded in The Promise Trilogy — shut down by a board under federal pressure — Lucie climbs to the attic one last time to clear the room. The chairs still hold the shape of the women who sat in them. A child’s red mitten lies forgotten on a seat. The coffee tin where women dropped in whatever coins they could spare still sits beside Clara’s tincture bottles.

She packs the ledger, the attendance sheets, the workplace testimonies — wrapping them in a clean dishcloth at the bottom of a flour sack, where they would look like nothing if anyone stopped her on the street.

She leaves the coffee tin. The work could travel. The ritual couldn’t.

That scene came from thinking about all the rooms women have filled and emptied across the history of organizing — the parlors and kitchens and church basements where the real work happened, where the records were kept in hands that knew how to make them look like nothing, where the soup was both sustenance and strategy. Women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America didn’t always do it at the podium or on the picket line. Sometimes they did it with a needle in one hand and a notebook in the other, in rooms where the only evidence of what they’d built was a circle of empty chairs and the warmth they’d made together.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026. This post is part of a companion series with “The Woman Who Built the House” and “The House That Held the World.”

 

The post Cupboards and Common Sense: The Women Who Organized When No One Was Watching appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

I should tell you about the artichokes, because otherwise you’ll think I made them up.

In 1935, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia showed up at the Bronx Terminal Market at dawn — with a fanfare of trumpets — and announced that the sale of artichokes was hereby banned in the City of New York. Photographers captured the scene: the Little Flower himself, standing among crates of vegetables at five in the morning, looking genuinely delighted to be declaring war on a thistle.

The ban lasted three days. Just long enough to arrest the men running the racket.

The man La Guardia was targeting was Ciro Terranova — known to the press, and to anyone who bought vegetables in an Italian neighborhood, as the Artichoke King.

The Family on 116th Street

The Morello-Terranova organization was one of the most powerful criminal enterprises in early twentieth-century New York. Founded by Giuseppe Morello and his half-brothers — including Ciro Terranova — in the 1890s, the family operated out of the blocks around 116th Street in East Harlem. Their business was extortion, gambling, counterfeiting, and the systematic control of legitimate commerce in immigrant neighborhoods.

Ciro Terranova’s particular genius was the artichoke. He cornered the market on the small, thorny variety beloved by Italian families — buying from California suppliers, controlling the distribution through the city’s wholesale markets, and reselling at markups that made the vegetable a luxury in the neighborhoods where it should have been a staple. Vendors who tried to source artichokes outside his network discovered that their carts had been overturned, their stock destroyed, their willingness to negotiate suddenly sharpened.

The artichoke racket sounds almost comic — and La Guardia, a showman who understood the value of a good headline, played it for maximum theater. But the underlying system was anything but funny. The street tax, the protection money, the daily shakedowns of pushcart vendors and shopkeepers — these were facts of life in East Harlem. Every transaction carried an invisible surcharge, paid to men whose authority derived not from law but from the neighborhood’s understanding of what happened to people who didn’t pay.

Where the Racket Meets the Kitchen Table

In 1919, when The Promise Trilogy takes place, the Terranovas were consolidating power after years of violent conflict with rival Camorra gangs from Brooklyn. The artichoke stand in the novel — the toppled pyramids, the beaten vendor — is fiction, but the world it describes is documented. La Guardia’s intervention was still sixteen years away. In 1919, there was no one coming to fix it.

What interested me as a novelist wasn’t the crime family at the top. It was the families at the bottom — the ones buying artichokes at inflated prices, paying the street tax folded into every purchase, navigating a neighborhood where the line between legitimate commerce and criminal enterprise was drawn in pencil and erased whenever it suited the men holding the pencil.

For the Santoro family, the racket is atmospheric — it’s the air they breathe, the cost they’ve absorbed so thoroughly they barely notice it. Until a basket of apples arrives at the house with a single artichoke perched on top like a crown. A gift that is also a claim. An offering that is also a reminder of who owns what — and who owes whom.

The artichoke isn’t about artichokes. It’s about the cost of becoming someone in a neighborhood where power operates through the same channels as groceries.

The Invisible Tax

What the artichoke racket reveals — and what I wanted the novel to make visible — is how organized crime embedded itself in the daily economy of immigrant neighborhoods. It wasn’t a separate world that respectable families could avoid. It was the price of bread, the cost of a pushcart license, the fee for doing business on a particular block. It was the man who loaned you money when the bank wouldn’t and collected interest in ways the bank never could. It was the cousin who got your son a job and expected silence in return.

Italian immigrants in East Harlem didn’t choose the racket. They inherited it — brought from the old country in some cases, grown in the new one in others, fed by the same conditions that fed everything else: poverty, exclusion from legitimate institutions, a justified distrust of the police, and the knowledge that the law protected some people and extracted from others.

The women of the neighborhood understood this calculus with particular clarity. They were the ones who handed over the street tax at the market. They were the ones who noticed when the price of artichokes went up and the quality went down. They were the ones who kept the household books and knew exactly what the invisible tax cost their families — in dollars, in dignity, in the slow erosion of the belief that things could work differently.

La Guardia’s Trumpet

Fiorello La Guardia’s artichoke ban was a stunt, and he knew it. Three days of theater didn’t dismantle the Terranova organization — the family’s power eventually declined through a combination of federal prosecution, internal rivalries, and the neighborhood’s own slow transformation as Italian families moved to Brooklyn, Queens, and the suburbs.

But the stunt mattered because it named the thing. It said, publicly and loudly, that the artichoke racket was real, that it cost real people real money, and that the men running it were criminals, not businessmen. In a neighborhood where the racket had been as invisible as the air — because naming it was dangerous — La Guardia’s trumpets at dawn did something the law alone couldn’t: they made the invisible visible.

That’s what novels can do too. Not solve the problem, but name it clearly enough that the reader sees what the characters have been living inside all along.

In the world of The Promise Trilogy, the artichoke on top of the apple basket is the racket made visible — small, specific, sitting in a family’s kitchen where it can’t be ignored. The rest of the story unfolds from there.

The Promise Trilogy launches August 4, 2026.

The post The Artichoke King: When Organized Crime Came to the Produce Market appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

There’s a scene I keep coming back to in the third book of The Promise Trilogy — the moment when Lucie goes to Sister Agnes for advice and realizes her mentor is exhausted, overwhelmed, and paying a price Lucie never fully understood.

Sister Agnes has been coordinating sick visits during a flu outbreak. She’s operating on three hours of sleep. The rectory is filled with lists of families needing food, blankets, care. And Lucie walks in worried about her own problems — about teaching, about Carlo, about whether she’s making the right choices.

And Sister Agnes, exhausted as she is, still shows up for her.

“Do you think I’m free?” Sister Agnes asks.

It’s a devastating question. Not because of anger — there’s no anger in it. Because of clarity. Sister Agnes has never pretended that her vocation came without cost. But this is the first time Lucie hears the cost named aloud, and it changes everything she thought she understood about the woman who taught her to want more.

When I was researching the world Sister Agnes inhabits — Catholic parish life in immigrant neighborhoods around 1919 — I expected to find stories of devotion. I did. What I didn’t expect was how precisely the system was designed to make women essential while keeping them powerless.

In neighborhoods like East Harlem’s Little Italy, the parish wasn’t just a church. It was the organizing center of community life — school, social services, moral authority, cultural identity, all housed under one institutional roof. And the pastor held final authority over all of it. Curriculum. Sacramental preparation. Finances. Every formal activity conducted under the parish’s name ran through him.

This wasn’t arbitrary cruelty. The hierarchy was designed to maintain unity of doctrine, protect the parish from controversy, and reassure immigrant families — many of them deeply anxious about what America might do to their children’s faith — that their daughters and sons were being educated within accepted moral and religious bounds. It was a structure built for order. And like most structures built for order, it worked best for the people at the top.

The women religious — the nuns — were the ones who made the whole thing function.

By the early 1900s, Catholic parochial education in the United States was expanding at a staggering pace. By 1920, more than six thousand Catholic elementary schools served nearly two million students, and the vast majority of their teachers were sisters. These women managed classrooms of forty to sixty children. They taught reading, writing, arithmetic, and catechism. They maintained discipline and provided moral instruction. In immigrant neighborhoods wracked by poverty, labor unrest, and waves of disease, they were often the most consistent, stable adult presence in a child’s daily life.

And they did all of it under obedience.

Curriculum decisions required clerical approval. Textbook choices were not theirs to make. Subject matter — particularly anything touching on science, hygiene, or the female body — had to pass through the pastor before it reached the classroom. A sister might have decades of experience, might know her students’ needs better than anyone in the parish, but her authority was considered delegated, not autonomous. She taught at the pleasure of the priest who supervised her.

This tension was especially sharp in the 1910s, when public health knowledge was advancing rapidly. Germ theory, basic sanitation, nutrition, women’s health — these subjects were increasingly relevant to the daily lives of immigrant families. But in a parish school, teaching them required navigating a minefield of clerical gatekeeping. What counted as “appropriate” for girls depended not on the sister’s professional judgment, but on the pastor’s comfort level. And comfort levels, as Sister Agnes could tell you, were not always calibrated to what the girls actually needed to know.

The Language of Correction

Here’s what fascinated me most in the research — and what I tried to get right in the novel. When a teaching sister overstepped, the correction almost never looked like punishment. It looked like concern.

“Not appropriate for young women.”“Beyond the scope of our mission.”“Parents might misunderstand.”“We must be careful.”

She wasn’t accused of wrongdoing. She was accused of poor judgment. And then the consequences arrived wearing the mask of practicality. Her lesson plans now required weekly submission for “review.” A book disappeared from her classroom shelf. She was reassigned from older girls to younger ones — a demotion presented as a better fit. Or she was moved to “service work” under the guise of parish need, her classroom handed to someone who understood the boundaries more intuitively.

The punishment was framed as protection. As care for her wellbeing. As wisdom she hadn’t yet acquired.

But every woman who witnessed it understood exactly what had happened. And every woman who witnessed it recalculated what she could say, what she could teach, and how much of herself she could bring into her own classroom.

This is the world Sister Agnes navigates every day. And when she tells Lucie, “I’ve had to fight for every book in my classroom, for every minute of science instruction” — she isn’t speaking in metaphor. She’s describing the daily negotiation between conscience, obedience, and the knowledge that the girls who sit in her classroom need things she isn’t always permitted to give them.

Essential, Invisible, Indispensable

The flu scene in the novel draws on something real. During the 1918 influenza pandemic, Catholic sisters across the United States stepped into roles that went far beyond teaching. In Philadelphia alone, over two thousand nuns — roughly two-thirds of the noncloistered sisters in the archdiocese — took on nursing duties during the crisis. Most of them were teachers, not nurses. They had no medical training. They went into homes where entire families lay sick in bed with no one to care for them. They bathed the ill, cleaned houses, prepared food and medicine. They worked twelve-hour shifts in makeshift hospitals set up in parish halls and gymnasiums. Twenty-three sisters in Philadelphia died of the flu they contracted while caring for others.

And when it was over, many of those same sisters asked the archdiocesan newspaper not to publish their names.

That detail stopped me cold when I found it. Not the heroism — I expected the heroism. The instinct to remain invisible even while doing extraordinary work. That was the part that made me understand Sister Agnes at a level I hadn’t before.

She doesn’t want recognition. She doesn’t need Lucie to see her sacrifice and validate it. What she needs is for Lucie to understand that constraint and purpose can exist in the same life — that choosing a path doesn’t mean you love every step of it, and that peace isn’t the same thing as contentment.

“I’m at peace with what it costs me,” Sister Agnes says.

That line is the heart of her character. And it’s the lesson Lucie carries forward when she has to make her own impossible choices — not because Sister Agnes told her what to choose, but because Sister Agnes showed her what it looks like to choose with your eyes open. To know the price and pay it anyway. Not because it’s just. But because the vocation — the calling, the work, the children who depend on you — still aligns with who you are.

Why Women Learned to Speak Carefully

By 1919, many women within the Church understood — often painfully — that speaking openly carried risks. Disagreement wasn’t framed as dissent. It was framed as a failure of humility, of prudence, of tone. A sister who pushed too hard didn’t become a rebel. She became a problem — a woman whose judgment couldn’t be trusted, whose influence on young minds required closer supervision.

This didn’t mean women lacked conviction or courage. It meant they learned to navigate authority with precision, choosing when to speak and when silence preserved their ability to serve. They became experts in the indirect, the oblique, the carefully timed question that planted a seed without triggering a review. They learned which battles to fight in the open and which to wage so quietly that no one noticed until the ground had already shifted.

Sister Agnes is that kind of woman. She’s not a revolutionary. She’s not trying to tear down the Church or escape her vows. She’s a teacher who believes in what she does, who loves her students, and who has made her peace — imperfect, costly, real — with the institution that both sustains and constrains her.

When she tells Lucie, “There’s a difference between constraint you choose and constraint imposed on you,” she’s speaking from the deepest part of her experience. She chose the constraint of religious life. She did not choose the specific indignities that come with it — the reviewed lesson plans, the disappeared books, the quiet reassignments. But she’s found a way to live inside both truths at once, and she’s trying to give Lucie the tools to do the same.

Not the same answers. The same courage.

I think about the real women behind Sister Agnes often. The teaching sisters who staffed parish schools across immigrant America, who shaped generations of children, who carried immense responsibility inside a system that needed them but wouldn’t trust them with authority. Who showed up during epidemics and emergencies and ordinary Tuesdays alike, and who did their work so well and so quietly that history barely recorded their names.

They were not free. They knew it. And they showed up anyway — for the children, for the work, for the version of service that still, despite everything, felt like theirs.

That tension — between the calling and the cost, between what women remaking their lives could choose and what was chosen for them — runs through all three books of The Promise Trilogy. Sister Agnes is one voice in that conversation. But she might be the one that stays with you longest.

The Promise Trilogy launches in August 2026. It follows Lucie Santoro from her graduation day in 1919 East Harlem through the impossible choices that will define her life — and the women who teach her, by example, what it means to want something the world hasn’t offered you yet.

The post The Price of Showing Up: Teaching Sisters, Parish Authority, and the Women Who Held Everything Together appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.

 

He spent hours on the engraving. A tortoiseshell fountain pen, and on the band, her name: Lucia Santoro. He carved each letter himself, in the back of his father’s jewelry shop, after the customers had gone and the display cases were locked. It was a graduation gift — something personal, something that said he saw who she was. A girl who loved words. A girl worth the careful work of his hands.

His mother, standing behind them at the ceremony, looked at the pen and sighed. “It’s a waste if it can’t be undone. She won’t be a Santoro for much longer.”

That moment — the gift meant to honor a girl’s name, immediately reframed as a name about to be erased — is one of the quietest and most devastating in The Promise. And it captures something real about how marriage worked in the Italian immigrant communities of early twentieth-century New York. Love was present, often genuinely. But it operated inside a structure that had very little to do with love, and everything to do with contracts, alliances, and the careful management of a family’s place in the world.

In southern Italian tradition, marriage was negotiated between fathers. The process had roots going back generations and followed a pattern as precise as a liturgy. A young man’s family would identify a suitable match — or more accurately, the mothers would identify her first, comparing notes at church, at the market, at the endless social gatherings that served as the community’s clearinghouse for information. The girl’s family would be approached. The fathers would meet. Terms would be discussed: the groom’s prospects, the bride’s corredo, the financial arrangements that would bind the two families together.

If the families agreed, the courtship could begin — but courtship, in this context, was closer to a supervised audition than a romance. Visits were chaperoned. Conversations happened in the family parlor, under the mother’s eye. The young man might be invited to Sunday dinner, where his table manners, his respect for the patriarch, and his appetite for the mother’s cooking would all be noted and evaluated. The young woman, meanwhile, was expected to demonstrate domesticity, modesty, and the kind of quiet competence that promised she would keep a good home.

By 1919, these old-world mechanics were blurring at the edges. American-born children of immigrants experienced courtship differently than their parents had — more freedom, more contact, more of the romantic expectation that American culture was busy manufacturing through novels, films, and popular songs. A young man might ask a girl’s father for permission to call on her, as Carlo does in The Promise, and the gesture could feel both traditional and genuinely affectionate. The line between an arranged marriage and a conventional courtship was no longer sharp. But the bones of the old system were still very much in place.

What made the Italian immigrant marriage arrangement so binding wasn’t just the families’ wishes. It was the architecture around it. Once the understanding was in place, it became a social fact — discussed among neighbors, blessed by the parish priest, woven into the community’s expectations. The reading of the banns at Sunday Mass made it a matter of public record. Breaking an engagement wasn’t just a private heartbreak. It was a breach of contract with consequences that rippled outward: shame for the girl’s family, insult to the boy’s family, damage to the marriage prospects of younger siblings on both sides. A broken engagement could follow a family for years.

The bride’s corredo — the trousseau of hand-embroidered linens assembled over years by the women of the family — was part of this binding machinery. Every pillowcase stitched was a stitch toward this specific future. The groom’s family offered stability, a home, a trade. The bride’s family offered proof of proper upbringing, material investment, and a daughter raised to serve. The exchange was understood by everyone involved, spoken about openly, and enforced by the same community surveillance that governed every other aspect of life in Italian Harlem.

And yet — within this system, real tenderness existed. That’s the part of the history that I didn’t want to flatten in the novel.

Carlo Colucci is not a villain. He is a young man who has been told since boyhood that Lucie Santoro will be his wife, and who has done everything his world asked of him — learned his father’s trade, presented himself to her family with respect, waited patiently through four years of high school that his own parents considered unnecessary for a girl. He brings her a pen with her name on it. He carries his grandfather’s watch, polished and restored, a symbol of the legacy he intends to build for their family. When she talks about her dreams, he listens. He doesn’t always understand, but he tries.

The tragedy of Carlo isn’t cruelty. It’s the limits of his imagination. He can see Lucie clearly — her intelligence, her restlessness, her hunger for something more — but he can only offer her what his world has taught him to offer: steadiness, security, a comfortable home, and a name that will replace her own. He is generous within the boundaries of a system he has never thought to question. And that generosity, precisely because it is real, makes Lucie’s position more agonizing, not less. How do you refuse a good man’s love when refusing it means refusing the only future your community will accept?

The other man in Lucie’s story is a different kind of trap entirely. Where Carlo offers safety, Dante Mazzarone offers electricity — the sharp, dangerous thrill of being seen by someone who operates outside the rules. He doesn’t court her through family channels. He arrives in a Packard Twin Six, smelling of Bay Rum cologne and carrying the easy confidence of a man whose power doesn’t come from parish approval. He calls her bella and means it in a way that makes her pulse race.

But I didn’t write Dante as a rescue. He is not the answer to Lucie’s question. He’s another version of it. The world he moves in — the world of the speakeasy and the back room, of men like the Artichoke King and the Morello-Terranova network — offered immigrant women a different kind of visibility, but not a different kind of freedom. In that world, a woman was still defined by her relationship to the man beside her. Still watched. Still assessed. Still, ultimately, disposable when the situation required it.

The real question Lucie faces isn’t which man. It’s whether any version of her future that runs through a man’s life can actually be hers.

That question didn’t originate with me. It belonged to thousands of real young women in 1919 — daughters of immigrants who could feel the world changing around them. Women had just won the right to vote in New York State. The war had opened doors that were supposed to be temporary but couldn’t quite be closed again. Teaching positions, office work, even factory management were becoming possibilities that a generation earlier would have been unthinkable. And yet, in the intimate world of the neighborhood — where the mothers controlled the social calendar and the fathers signed the contracts and the priest blessed whatever they decided — those possibilities could feel as distant as the villages their parents had left behind.

The marriage contract was the mechanism by which families managed this tension. If a daughter could be settled — quickly, respectably, with a good family — then the danger of her ambition could be contained. A married woman had a role, a home, a defined place in the community’s order. An unmarried woman with ideas was a loose thread, a liability, a problem that reflected poorly on everyone who had raised her.

For the mothers who pushed these arrangements forward, the urgency was often genuine. They had seen what happened to women without protection — the ones who ended up alone, or exploited, or trapped in situations far worse than a marriage to a kind man from a good family. In their calculus, an arranged marriage wasn’t a punishment. It was a rescue. The fact that their daughters experienced it as a cage was, to them, beside the point. Or perhaps it was exactly the point — the cage was the rescue. You couldn’t have one without the other.

That tension — between the mother who loves you enough to lock the door and the daughter who loves herself enough to want the key — is at the heart of every story I’ve written about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. It’s not a tension that resolves cleanly. It wasn’t clean in 1919, and it isn’t clean now.

In The Promise, Lucie stands between two men, two futures, two versions of what her life could be. But the choice that matters most isn’t the one everyone thinks she’s making. It’s the one nobody has offered her — the one she’ll have to build for herself, if she can find the courage, and pay the price.

Book One of The Promise Trilogy, releases August 2026. Set in 1919 East Harlem, it’s the story of a young woman caught between the life her family has chosen for her and the one she’s beginning to imagine — and the impossible cost of wanting both.

This is part of the world Sherilyn explores across all her fiction — read more about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America.

If you’re interested in this idea, here are a few other blog posts that you might enjoy reading:

The Wedding DayCampanilismoThe Weight of the Rosary about the corredo as part of the marriage machinery

 

The post Two Men, Two Futures: What Marriage Meant in East Harlem appeared first on Sherilyn Decter.