by Gina nahai
They had their first three children, all boys, in Corbin Glow. Rose worked through each pregnancy, breathing the coal dust and pulling the sledge until she felt the baby about to drop. Then she went home and drank a cup of boiling water mixed with black pepper—to open her womb. She stuck an ax, blade down, under her bed—to help ease labor pains—and she did not even bother sending for the midwife because the babies pushed right out without any prompting from mother or nurse. They were in God’s hands, Rose told her husband, and they had no need for human intervention.
After their third son was born, the mine at Corbin Glow was stripped clean, and Cecil realized he must move to another camp. By then he had been in the mines for over twenty years, and he was coughing the dreadful miner’s cough, suffering the depression and hopelessness that came from working in perpetual darkness, under constant danger, without the possibility of escape. He was making the pit with an auger now, sometimes even shooting the coal, and he spoke with bitterness of his memories of the mountains when they were green and lush— before mining had turned them into lopsided, hollow wastelands that threatened to cave in and bury everyone inside them.
Still, Rose Watkins claimed that it was not the hard work nor the harsh conditions of life that in time drove her husband to prison: it was the company scrip.
As in other states, the coal camps in Kentucky were run by the same company that mined the land. The company sent a camp operator to choose a site near the mines. He hired men to clear the area near a stream so that the waste from outdoor latrines and communal washhouses would be transported away. They cut enough hemlock, poplar, or oak trees to build a few rows of cabins, then imported workers from neighboring mountains.
The camps were overcrowded and filthy, their wells and water supplies polluted and teeming with disease. Most workers who lived there were separated from their families, as they abandoned one mine in search of a job at another. To keep them working for the company, and to prevent them from ever making enough to leave the mines, the mine bosses paid them in scrip.
Every company cut its own aluminum and brass coins, embossed with its logo and redeemable only at the company store. The stores, also situated on the campsite, sold everything from foodstuffs to clothing to magazines, but they offered substandard merchandise at grossly inflated prices, and they sold on credit at high interest rates. The coal company also deducted the cost of coal used for heating the miners’ cabins from their paychecks, leaving the miners perpetually in debt, their pockets empty of real money, so they could not venture beyond the camp. If workers tried to buy anything outside the company store, they were fired from their jobs, beaten, and often killed by the mine bosses and their hired thugs.
Cecil Watkins had lived with the company scrip all his life, but in the years after his children were born, he started thinking about leaving the coal camps and getting out from under the company’s debt. He told Rose he wanted a green patch of land, a sky where he could see birds fly, a stream of water that wasn’t black from coal residue. To buy the land he needed real money, but he knew that the mines in Kentucky would never pay with anything but scrip. He had heard that in West Virginia a law had passed forbidding the use of scrip. When his wife became pregnant for the fourth time, Cecil left Rose and the children in Corbin Glow, and set off for West Virginia.
He got work at a camp belonging to U.S. Secretary of Treasury Andrew Mellon, in the southern part of the state. Cecil figured that a man at the top of the government hierarchy would have no choice but to the observe the law, and that he would therefore have to pay his workers with real money. He worked at Mellon’s camp for four weeks. At the end of the month, the mine boss handed him company scrip.
Right then, with the brass coins burning holes in the palms of his hand, Cecil Watkins began to head for jail.
He returned to Corbin Glow in the dead of winter and found his children walking barefoot and half-naked on the frozen ground. With her husband away and her stomach too big to strap the harness around her chest, Rose had been laid off from her job at the mine. She had lived on credit, put her older boy to work at the mine, sent the younger ones looking for roadkill to eat and bits of coal that fell off the tops of sacks to use as heating fuel. She had also been going to church more often than ever.
The mine boss gave Cecil his old job back, but told him he could only work two days a week. He also said Cecil needed a new auger to cut the seam.
Cecil knew that any piece of equipment used at the mine had to bear the company logo, but he was too far in debt at the company store to be extended any credit. On Sunday, when Rose took the boys to church, Cecil hitched a ride out of the camps, stopped at the first family-owned store he came to, and traded two days’ future pay for a new auger. The next morning he was hard at work when the mine boss stopped him and asked to see the company logo on the auger.
Cecil Watkins pulled the tip of the auger out of the coal seam, and drove it into the mine boss’s larynx.
ROSE Wat KINS NEVER saw her husband after that morning when he left for work with his non-company auger in hand. For many nights before the murder she had dreamed of white objects and seen dead people parading through the dark. She had even heard the death rattle—that peculiar sound emitted only by dying men as they exhaled their last few breaths through channels already filled with mucus. Once she had woken up to see a crow flying through their cabin—a sure sign of imminent death—but as much as she wanted to, she was too afraid to see the future for what it was and so she had let it happen— she let Cecil leave that day knowing he was headed for disaster.
By midmorning Rose heard a commotion, and looked out her front door. She saw people running toward her cabin and she knew, without needing to be told, that her husband was in trouble. The mine boss was still alive when the workers carried his blood-soaked body out of the shaft and laid it on the black dirt. Before the blood had even gelled around his throat, he got the shakes and died. Locking her front door, Rose gathered her three young sons into the far corner of the cabin and knelt to pray.
People knocked on the door and screamed for her to come out, but she stayed put and kept praying. She heard Cecil’s name, heard the company’s thugs threaten the miners to stay back and return to work. And she heard the silence—the terrible silence of her husband as he walked bloodied and smeared with mud and coal dust, the auger still in his fist, and went off with the sheriff who would take him out of the camp, through the mountains, and into the city, where he had never been and which he would not survive.
Cecil’s trial lasted less than a day. The judge sentenced him to death by hanging. The court-appointed lawyer told him about his right to an appeal, but Cecil believed that a man should take his punishment with the same courage he took his actions. Besides, he said, a mountain man like himself, who couldn’t even write his own name, could never prove a judge wrong. He was shipped off to Kentucky’s only maximum security prison—the Castle at Eddyville—to await execution.
The DAY after Cecil killed the mine boss, Rose and her children were evicted from the camp. Without a job or a husband to support her, about to give birth to her last child— Rose wandered outside the coal camp looking for the nearest shelter. Across the rickety old bridge at Corbin Glow, there by the side of a creek where the water ran black from soot, she found a rusted old train car. It was the kind used to haul coal away from the camp, but it had veered off the rails in an accident and split in half. When Rose found it, the ends of the car were stuck in the ground and the middle part of it was raised and open in the shape of a V, allowing rain and wind and any kind of element to hit the inside which was black from coal and filled with rust. Rose and her children had to struggle to climb into the car, then fight to keep from sliding toward the ends. She decided she would stay there long enough to have the baby, then move on.
She began to take in laundry—workers’ soot-covered shirts and overalls, which she gathered in a large canvas bag and washed for twenty-five cents a load. She walked to the camp and b
ack with her boys in tow, crossing the creek on foot, knee-deep in water and shoes barely hanging on, up the path along the train tracks, toward the mountain that was already lopsided and hollowed out from mining. Back at the train car she drew water from the creek, heated it on a coal stove she had built outside— a few rocks stacked together in a circle, the middle filled with coal that her sons picked off the ground along the tracks. She washed the clothes with her bare hands and Fels Naphta soap, dragged them wet and heavy into the side of the train car that served as her kitchen, and hung them on a line in front of a stack of wood that she lit for cooking and heating. As the clothes dried the sharp, sour scent of Fels Naphta filled the car and stuck to Rose’s hair and skin.
Late at night Rose sat up in the train car, feeling the baby about to drop, and imagined Cecil standing before the judge in his work overalls—the mine boss’s blood having dried and hardened and smelling sour—while Cecil tried to find the words, to explain to the judge the desperation he had felt the day of the killing, the sense that all was lost before the battle had begun.
If only he had had more faith, Rose thought.
She did not want Cecil to die in dirty clothes, certainly not in another man’s blood, so she stayed up extra late and sewed him a new shirt and a pair of slacks, then walked with her new baby all the way to the company store which also served as the coal camp’s post office. She asked the clerk if he knew where the law was keeping her husband.
“The Black Hole of Calcutta,” the clerk replied without mischief. “I hear it’s worse than hell. If the rats don’t get you, scurvy will.”
She asked if the clerk could take dictation.
“I can, but who’s going to read the letter to your husband at the other end?”
Rose decided God would provide.
“The baby is a girl,” she asked the clerk to write.
“I’m working again.
“Will try to bring the children for the hanging.”
She WORKED harder than anyone she had ever known, cut corners everywhere she knew how, and yet she realized quickly she would not be able to feed all her children alone. So she went to church more often, and she always took the children because it was there, after the services when everyone brought food to share, that the kids got their only square meal of the week.
The rest of the time they lived on corn bread and pig lard: in late fall every year, some families in Corbin Glow butchered a hog and stored its meat for winter. They would trim the ham, then bury it in a salt box underground. A few days later they would dig up the hog, wash and trim it some more, then smoke it.
Rose went around with her children asking if the families would let her catch the small trimmings of fat that fell from the meat as it was being smoked. She gathered the fat into a kettle and dragged it home. Lighting a fire under the kettle, she boiled the fat until bits of meat previously stuck to the fat rose to the surface. She caught the meat and added it to her corn bread mix, saved some of the lard for cooking, and took the rest for making soap.
She made brown lye soap and used it instead of Fels Naphta to save money. She mixed lard with water and ashes from her cooking fire, then let the mixture cool until it coagulated into something smelly and unattractive but efficient enough for her purposes. She made all the children’s clothes, their sheets and drapes and even underwear, out of feedbags. She created dye out of roots and barks and sea grass—walnut for brown, red sassafras for red, yellow root for yellow—then boiled a feed bag in the dye to give it the desired color before cutting and sewing it.
She planted her own corn and potatoes, did not consider buying shoes, never spent money on a doctor or a medicine man.
When the children were sick, she rubbed lard from the oil lamp on their chests to cure tonsillitis, gave them coal to eat or blackberry juice to drink for stomachaches. She stopped bleeding from cuts by rubbing soot from the coal stove on their open wounds, boiled yellow root and made the children drink the liquid for croup. If they ran a fever, she wrapped them in quilts and gave them ginger tea to help them sweat the fever out. If their bladders malfunctioned, she spread a cloth soaked in water and turpentine over their stomachs or forced them to drink sulfur and molasses to clear their blood. She chewed tobacco and spat out the juice, then smeared it over a bee sting to counteract the venom, made onion poultices to treat a cold, mixed kerosene with yellow root for strep throat.
Still, the money she took in from the wash was not enough to keep them fed.
She begged the new mine boss for a job, even offered her seven-year-old son as a laborer, but the company would not take the wife or son of a man who had killed one of its own.
One night during the social hour in church, Rose stuffed her pockets with all the corn bread and chicken that would fit, and told her boys to do the same. Back at home she wrapped the stolen food in a piece of cloth and gave it to her oldest son, Harvey. Then she sent him on the road with some workers who were going to a nearby camp to look for work.
“Don’t tell them who your father is,” she warned Harvey.
“Come back when you have money.”
It broke her heart to see him go.
Harvey sent word that he had found a job at a camp two hours away, working as a canary in return for meals and a place to sleep.
In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the biggest danger in coal mining was the possibility of explosions that buried miners alive. Up until the time when the entire industry switched over to battery-powered electric cap lamps, the miners wore open-flame lamps on the front of their caps. The flame was usually powered by carbide, and produced by striking flint. But coal mines naturally accumulated methane—a flammable, colorless, odorless gas that ignited instantly and set off explosions. Sometimes, the gas formed an explosive mixture, known as firedamp, merely by mixing with certain proportions of air. Sometimes, too, it exploded the moment a miner lit a match.
To detect the gas before it killed them, miners used the Davy lamp. This was a regular open-flame lamp with a wire gauze screen that allowed the methane to reach the flame and burn, but that prevented the flame from exploding the gas outside the lamp. When dangerous levels of gas were present in a mine, the flame burned blue rather than yellow. But in more primitive mines, the Davy lamp was not available, or the mine’s fire boss could not be trusted to detect the right color on the flame. So miners sent canaries, and sometimes other animals, into the mines as methane monitors: if the canaries died inside the shaft, the miners knew methane was present.
In some camps the mine boss hired people—often small children—known as “cannoneers” or “canaries,” to do the birds’ job.
Rose’s son Harvey was sent in to crawl along the tunnel floor under a wet canvas before the start of each shift. He held an upraised candle near the roof of the mine, hoping to detect puffs of mine gas with the flame. He was told that methane did not have a color or a scent, but that it did make a hissing sound—like a swarm of bees in flight—and that if he heard the sound, he was to crawl out of the tunnel as fast as he could. What he wasn’t told was that by the time the canary heard the hissing sound, the flame from his candle would have set off an explosion.
To ensure that her son did not perish in a mine fire, Rose Watkins felt she needed to have more faith. She began to travel farther from home, and she became a true Holiness woman— following preachers Sherman Sizemore and Lewis York and Garrett White to a brush arbor in Greasy Ridge, a barn in Poly Lot, a home or tent in Sand Gap or Hazel Green. She traveled sometimes for eight hours—all night in a fellow believer’s truck, with her children asleep at her chest or on her knees. They arrived in time for a Sunday morning service in which the preacher wailed and sobbed and spoke in tongues, decried the world’s ills—poverty and hardship and disease and deception—all the works of the devil and of his agents on earth.
Holiness people washed one another’s feet to prove their humility, rubbed oil on one another’s foreheads to give blessing or cure illness, but everyw
here they went, they were confronted with nonbelievers who taunted and mocked them, threw eggs and stones at them, and sometimes even shot at them. The nonbelievers laughed at the mountaineers’ appearance and at their language, set fire to tents and barns where meetings were held, or blew them up with dynamite. Believing that the attacks were a test of her faith, Rose kept her eyes locked on her Bible and her mind focused on the business of God. Still the winter remained as long and cold as ever, and the children were hungry.
The year after Harvey left, she sent her two younger sons on the road to find work as well. She made them jackets out of feed sacks, gave them whatever food she had in the house, walked them up the creek and across the bridge into Lynch.
“Stay together,” she begged, knowing she would never see them again.
She went back inside the split-open train car then, knelt on the ground to pray, and did not get up for two days running. One of the women from the coal camp heard about the boys’ departure and came over to check on Rose. Finding her despondent, the woman brewed a cup of elm bark and forced Rose to drink it to cure her sadness. Then she knelt next to Rose on the floor and started to pray along with her.
They prayed through the afternoon—the baby, Clare, asleep next to them on the floor. Rain fell through the opening in the top of the car, but they did not feel it and did not stop praying. Just when the sun was about to set, Rose looked up and saw God approach in the shape of a tiny man with rolled-up sleeves, faded overalls, and a rattlesnake wrapped around his neck.
LITTLE Sam Jenkins’ ancestors had been settlers from Pennsylvania who had migrated down the Shenandoah Valley in the 1830s and eventually settled in Tennessee. His father, Jeremiah Jenkins, was a womanizer who continued philandering even after he was married and had children. Sam’s mother, by contrast, was a religious woman so devoted to God and her church, she had once sent her last five dollars to the Church of God Tabernacle to help their building fund. She gave her husband ten children and a lifetime of obedience before he left her for another woman when he was seventy-nine years old and almost dying.