To counter the rumored union activity, Lytton Davidson built a model coal camp at the mouth of Marcums Branch. Main Davidson had tennis and basketball courts, paved streets, a theater, YMCA, and a new high school built by the company. Smaller branches of the new town clustered around the mine portals on down Blackberry and up Marcums Branch. These last towns had no names and were called by the numbers of the portals—Number Ten, Number Eight, Number Six.
“Aint that just the way a coal operator would name a town?” C.J. complained.
It near killed him to watch all this going up on his land. Davidson miners weren’t allowed to come to Annadel, and the postmaster kept out the Free Press and other questionable materials, including Ermel’s Democratic Party campaign literature.
“Your mommy wants to move down there,” Daddy said. “She wants Kerwin in that new high school. I reckon we could. I got good standing, far as I know. I hate to leave this land, but hit aint been ourn for a good while. Likely wont never be.”
“You’ll go without me,” I said. “I aint moving.”
“They take care of you better down there.”
“I’d rather take care of myself.”
I told the union about all this when I wrote my letter. Nothing happened.
“You should have wrote the Socialists,” Doc Booker said. “That union gits lazy.”
I came away from the payroll window one winter evening and a colored man fell in step beside me. He was a new man who had been around only a few months.
“You Lloyd?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“You the one that wants to ride the goat?”
I stared at him and he grinned. He had a large nose shaped like a triangle and a gold tooth.
“What you mean? This some kind of Masons?”
“Naw! I talking bout the goat, man. Aint you the one hollered for the goat? It’s a fearsome thing you done. You best recall it.”
It began to dawn on me what he meant, and it near took my breath away.
“Oh, lordy,” I whispered. “You’re here.”
A gun thug saw us talking and walked toward us.
“Up on the hill behind Cesco Thompson’s,” the Negro said. “Tonight at ten. Bring a few good men.”
He walked on into the evening, fading into the grayness.
“What did that nigger want?” the gun thug demanded.
“Borrow money,” I said.
“Aint it just like a nigger?”
One by one we arrived on the hill behind the tavern. We were seven in all. The Negro, who called himself Johnson, was already there.
“Yall here to ride the goat?”
We mumbled that yes we were ready.
“But how do you know you’re ready till you know what it is?” said Johnson. “Let me tell you about it. Some of you belongs to the Redmen, the Odd Fellows, and the like. You got all them secret words, all the mumbo-jumbo. But brothers, this aint no club. We got to stay secret for a while to survive, and when we finally show ourselves, we got to stick together to live. This here is life and death. This aint no Mason lodge, this is the United Mineworkers.”
I shivered at that name, to hear it spoken aloud in that place. Johnson paced slowly, stopped in front of each of us.
“The union means brotherhood. That’s something them operators cant never take away—brotherhood. I worked the mines down in Pocahontas, Virginia, twenty year. I know what it is. My daddy was a slave. I know what that is. When a man got the money, a man got the land, a man got the guns, you cant beat him. No, you cant. Unless you got brotherhood. When you stick together, the man cant beat one down cause he knows they’s more where that one come from and they’ll whip his ass.”
He lapsed into silence. We waited. A cold wind rustled the dead leaves. I strained to see if anything moved; the darkness pressed against my eyeballs.
“You scared, aint ye?”
I started at the sound of his voice.
“You scared,” he said again. “You wondering, did any gun thugs foller us out here. I’m scared too. But dont we risk our lives ever damn day in that mine? And why should you risk your life, git your body broke up, see your little children go hungry, just so Mister Davidson can live high? You digging the coal! He setting in a big house on his ass! He run your life! He do your thinking! And you as good a man as him.”
He reached into his pocket.
“I got cards to sign. Thirty-five cent dues. Take the pledge, sign the card, you in the union. It aint easy. You got to be ready to die for each other. We dont want no yellow-bellies in the union. You in that Klan, we dont want you in the union. Union is for white and Negro alike. Union is for foreign. Union is for Catholic. Anybody want to be a free man and fight for it, union is for him. Here is the cards, boys. Take the pledge and they are yours. Who want the pledge?”
I stepped forward. “Me.”
“Raise your hand.”
I repeated the words after him. I pledged that I would not reveal the names of union members to the boss; that I would not take the job of a striker; that I would cease work when called on to do so; that I would never wrong a brother or see him wronged. The others hesitated.
“Thirty-five cent is a lot of money,” said William Thomas.
“Union cant operate without money,” Johnson answered.
“Ifn I git put out, where will I go?” asked Amos Toler. “My old woman’s expecting. Aint them operators got a blacklist?”
“We all taking a chance,” said Johnson.
“Theys some of the boys aint interested.”
“We got to change their minds,” I said.
In the end they all took the pledge, the Pinkards, Junebug Slater, Homer Knox, Amos Toler, William Thomas. We left the way we had come, silently and separately.
We agreed that only Johnson and I would recruit new members at first. It was a frightful thing to approach a man, to read his eyes as you talked to him and wonder if you had misjudged him. It was even more worrisome to learn from Johnson that union officials in Charleston didn’t think the Levisa coalfield was ready to be organized.
“Why’d you come?” I asked.
“I knew they was a Socialist paper down here. I met Doc Booker in Charleston last year. Thought I’d give it a try.”
When I asked Doc Booker about this, he said, “That’s right. Them union officials say, ‘They’s a bear in the woods. It be too dangerous, so let’s send a colored man, see if he come out without the bear eat him.’”
After a week I had spoken to eight men. On Friday a gun thug met me and Daddy on our way to work at the drift mouth. He pointed his rifle at my head and grinned.
“Where’s your union card?”
I stepped back. The gun barrel poked me in the chest.
“What’s this?” Daddy said.
“Git on out of here, old man. This is between me and your boy.”
“I dont know what you’re talking about,” I said.
“Hell you don’t. You got ten seconds or I’ll blow a hole in you. Where is it?”
My head felt like it would burst into flames.
“In my shoe,” I managed to say. I had slit the instep with a razor and worked the card down inside.
“You kill my boy you’ll have to kill me too,” Daddy said.
The guard laughed. “Go on home, old man. We’re going to teach him a little lesson.” He pushed me with the rifle barrel. “Let’s us take a walk down to the powerhouse.”
Daddy yelled after me, but I couldn’t understand him. Five gun thugs met us at the powerhouse, dragged me inside. The boss man, Malcolm Denbigh, an Englishman, stood beside the huge coal-eating furnace that provided the electricity for Winco. Johnson was with him. His arms were tied behind his back and he stared down at his feet.
“We’ve had our eye on you for a while, Lloyd,” Denbigh said. “You run with a crowd of red agitators at Annadel. Now you’ve brought this union nigger here. What do you think we ought to do with you?”
My knees g
ave out. Hands gripped me like iron pinchers and held me up.
I tried to say, God, Johnson, I swear I didn’t tell.
One man threw open the furnace door.
Shall we throw this white boy in, cook him black as a nigger?
Their mouths opened. They were laughing.
Who else took the pledge, son? Who else?
A rifle butt struck me in the belly and I doubled over. They dragged me over to the furnace, made to lift me, then pulled me back and threw me against the wall. I struck my head.
I’d rather kill a nigger. It’s more fun.
I looked. Johnson’s face was terrible. His eyes had turned to stone.
They lifted him off the ground. He began to sing. It didn’t really sound like singing.
“No more moaning!” he screeched. “No more moaning!”
He twisted his head so that the muscles of his neck stood out like ropes. His mouth curved in a smile.
“No more moaning over me!”
An orange sheet of flame belched from the furnace. Johnson’s head fell back, I met his eyes, I knew he did not see me, that he was ripping his soul from his body and soaring away with it.
“And before I’ll be a slave—”
They tossed him inside the furnace and slammed the door.
They raised me up.
“Go on home,” Denbigh said. “You’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of Justice County or you’re dead.”
I stumbled outside and vomited. Somehow I made it back to the house. Mommy and Daddy were in the kitchen and Daddy met me at the door.
“Thank the Lord! Your head’s a-bleeding. They beat on you?”
I nodded.
“What kind of trouble you got yourself in?” Mommy demanded.
I looked at Daddy. “I got to git. Out of the county in twenty-four hours.”
Mommy came closer. “You’re a leaving.”
I gasped for air. I went to my bed and stuffed my belongings into a pillowcase. Two shirts, socks, and a change of underwear, a Bible and a copy of Huckleberry Finn that C.J. gave me, a comb, pocket knife, toothbrush, watch. I knotted the laces of my good shoes and hung them around my neck, picked up my banjo, hugged the pillowcase to my chest and went back to the kitchen. Mommy waited for me.
“You are good for nothing,” she said.
“Vernie!” Daddy said.
“You have ruint your brother over some foolishness. He’ll go down the mines. He’ll pay for your sins.”
“Vernie!”
I brushed past her. “Daddy, I love you. Tell Talcott and Kerwin goodbye.”
I went out the screen door. A gun thug stood in the yard and watched me go. I walked the five miles to Annadel, following the railroad track.
“Huntington or Kentucky,” C.J. said.
“Kentucky.”
“Huntington’s safer.”
“Kentucky’s closer.”
We glared at one another.
“What did you think?” I said. “You think they was going to let us do all this without a fight?”
He covered his face with his hands. “I dont have to enjoy it, do I?”
“So they throwed Annadel up to you?” Doc Booker said. “I reckon we got to protect ourselves better.”
“I reckon you better,” I said.
“I’ll go with you,” Isom said. “Make sure nobody bothers you on the train.”
“Your mommy and daddy must be tore up,” C.J. said.
“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “They’re real tore up.”
He raised his head at the tone of my voice.
“It’s you I’ll miss,” I said. He smiled.
“Talcott?” Isom asked.
“I aint talked to him. You better watch he dont kill nobody over this.”
“We can still yet play music in Kentucky,” Isom said. “Aint that far.”
“Sure,” I said.
We rode the train to Justice, the gun thugs following all the way. We went into a cafe on Court Street and bought some ham sandwiches. Then we gave the thugs the slip in a dark alley. Around midnight we found a swinging bridge across the Levisa.
“What’s your name?” Isom asked.
“Lloyd Justice.”
“Good.” Isom grinned. “They’s a passel of us Justices in these parts. One more wont make no difference. You write my daddy. Aint nobody will mess with his mail. He’s got friends, you know?”
We shook hands.
“Dont git a new fiddle player,” he said.
The bridge was an old one, not well kept up, and some of the slats were missing. I went slowly, gripping the railing and swaying, bearing on my shoulders the death of Johnson, the abandonment of my brothers, the renunciation of my mother. I stepped onto the firm ground of Kentucky. Isom was a shadow on the distant shore. I waved to him. Then I headed south toward Pond Creek.
Part Two
Nine
CARRIE BISHOP
I HAVE TRAVELED OUTSIDE THE MOUNTAINS, BUT NEVER LIVED apart from them. I always feared mountains could be as jealous, as unforgiving, as any spurned lover. Leave them and they may never take you back. Besides, I never felt a need to go. There is enough to study in these hills to last a lifetime.
Justice town, where I went to nursing school, is different from Grapevine. Grace Hospital is built so high up the hillside that I could see much of Justice and Paine counties from my window in the nurses’ quarters. I loved to rise early in the morning and watch the mists rise like ghosts from the far hilltops.
In Justice town, the houses stabbed pillars of stone and wood into the flesh of the hillside and clung there like a swarm of mosquitoes. The buildings were too closely packed for trees to grow. The clamor of trains and autos and people chased away the bullfrogs and hoot owls and other sounds of night. But I loved to wander the streets on a Saturday afternoon; to watch gentlemen and their well-dressed ladies come and go at the train depot; to poke my finger into a fresh octupus or squid at the Italian grocery, or buy a strange-smelling cheese to carry back to my room; to sit in the dark of the Odeon Theater with the gray flickering of the moving pictures teasing the faces of the people around me.
Pond Creek, where I worked for Miles after I finished school, was different yet again. The holler was narrow and twisty; it seemed to squeeze me and say, “Stay a while, but never rest easy.” Vulcan, the coal camp where Miles and I lived, was wonderfully dark, like a painting in a book I once saw of a Spanish town called Toledo, with a sky that looked as though demons streaked across it. Swaybacked houses grew right up around the tipple like toadstools about a tree stump. The camp was divided into little colonies—Negroes in board and batten shacks down in Colored Bottom, mountain people in squat four-room houses on Tipple Hill, Hungarians in tall thin double houses up Hunkie Holler. None of the houses sat on foundations, but instead balanced on small piles of bricks set at each corner. Clouds of black bug dust whipped through the streets, and when the wind was right, the sulphurous fumes from the burning slag heap above Hunkie Holler choked the air in the narrow bottom. Orange slate, called red dog by the miners, littered the streets, carelessly scattered about to keep down the mud. Vulcan was a challenge for me, an adventure, like Florence Nightingale in the Crimean.
I moved into the big house on the hill where Miles lived, above the noise and dirt, three stories and fifteen rooms, green shingles outside with white gingerbread trim and scalloped eaves. From the bottom it appeared to be a castle, floating behind its brown stone wall on a moat of green grass. I was uncomfortable living there, for we had not known chandeliers and crystal drinking glasses on Grapevine. After a few months I moved into two rooms in the clubhouse at the foot of the hill. Miners were not allowed to board there; it was reserved for the “better sort” of employee. Although I knew I should disapprove, I accepted this distinction. It added a touch of the exotic, as though I had set down in imperial India amid the sahibs and the natives, and all this in Paine County, just across the mountain from where I had been born.
I
lived an independent life in the clubhouse. Miles, noting that I was an orphan, had taken upon himself the role of guardian. When I lived with him he was insufferably bossy.
“A woman has got no business living by herself,” he said when I told him I was moving.
“Half the people in that clubhouse is unmarried women.”
“They’re old women. Spinster schoolteachers and such. A young woman is different. I know how these miners are.”
“Do you, Miles?” I smiled sweetly. “How are they?”
He turned red. “You know what I mean.”
“No. Tell me.”
“Durn it, Carrie—”
“Now you look here. I am a nurse. I seen more naked men than you got working in that mine. I give em baths. I been on my own for three year of school, nobody telling me what to do. I lived in Justice town where they’s bars and whores. Just what do you think you’re protecting me from?”
“Well—”
“I dont like rattling around in this house. Hit’s big enough for all of Scary Creek to live in. You want somebody in here with you, git married and have a passel of younguns. But I want me a place of my own.”
“What if I say no?”
“Then I’ll go somewheres else. They’s a need for nurses anywhere I choose to go. I might go to New Orleans or New York. Or Paris, France or Peking, China. You dont know where I might run off to.”
There was nothing he could say to that, and I got my two rooms on the back corner of the second floor beside the fire escape. They had high ceilings, long narrow windows, rich oak floors and walls of gray wainscoting. I hung green and blue curtains, bought a green bedspread and blue rugs. I also purchased a gray metal electric lamp from the company store, and painted pink flowers around the base. These were the first things I had bought with my own money, and I was very proud.
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