Lewes, like Wiggins, is a working women, a single mother, and the balladeer of the movement. While at the center of the "maternal solidarity" that maintains the strike, she contends on all sides with male presumption. She resists Deane's demand that he be given direction of a strike in which it is the women who “man” the dangerous picket lines, and tires of a middle-class Communist-Party activist from the north who befriends her partly, it seems, for the pleasure of hearing himself lecture. The murder of Wiggins preceded a final police descent upon the strikers' tent city that, in turn, leads to Beal and five co-defendants being convicted of second-degree murder in the death of the local police chief. In the novel (completed before Beal and his co-defendants skipped bail and escaped to the Soviet Union) the death of Lewes leads to the decisive martyrdom of an otherwise indecisive Deane: he joins in the final act of resistance and, with five other men, is killed.
