Rondal? “A man does what he has got to.” And he would say nothing more, no matter how hard you shook him.
The miners were past arguments anyway. If Rondal had tried to dissuade us he could not have. On the Fourth of July, a vaudeville troupe came to Annadel. Isom persuaded them to give a series of free shows. (No one asked what means of persuasion Isom used.) They performed in each camp, but Albion and I saw them at the Roxie. We hunched together in the dark and held hands. A sing-along time followed the last act. Slowly, rhythmically, everyone sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” rocking from side to side, shoulders touching. I walked home with Albion in the moonlight, swinging his hand in mine and softly sang, “In the Good Old Summertime.” Ahead of us in the camp, firecrackers snapped and spat. Behind the tent flaps, men perched on the edges of spindly cots and cleaned their rifles.
Two days after Labor Day, trainloads of strikebreakers arrived, accompanied by more Baldwin-Felts guards. Miners on strike were fired and their names placed on the blacklist. The scabs moved into the company houses at Felco, Winco, Carbon, and all the Davidson mines. Only Jenkinjones remained closed.
Rondal organized the men into small bands who took turns laying out on the hillside and firing at the scabs as they went to work. Some of the strikebreakers, especially the Negroes, deserted. They hadn’t been told that a strike was going on. Most of them had nothing to go back to, so they joined us in the tents.
Other strikebreakers stayed and tried to work. They were immigrants from the cities who believed they would make their fortunes digging coal, or they were farm boys from Kentucky. Oh, my Kentucky. Their families would be the poor ones, and they would have heard there was money in the mines. They didn’t know about how the companies had taken the land, for it hadn’t happened to them yet. They didn’t know about the union and they didn’t like being told they couldn’t work. They stayed on.
Albion lay on his cot with his long arms dangling over the side. He had just returned from shooting at scabs for the first time.
“They may have been Thornsberrys and Whitts and Slones out there,” he said.
I tried to feel hard about them. “They claim they’re just feeding their families,” I said. “They think we aint got to eat? They’ll break the strike. They’ll sink themselves and us along with them.”
“I fired over their heads,” he said. “I kicked up the dirt in front of them. Everyone else was doing the same. You know how well our boys shoot. But they werent a scab kilt, only one hit in the arm. Sam Gore said hit werent like shooting at gun thugs. These fellers is just ignorant. Let them work a while and they’ll learn. Anyway, I dont think I could never shoot one.”
I knew Albion would never even shoot a gun thug. When I said once that gun thugs deserved to get shot, he answered that if we got what we deserved, God would mash us all flat like a passel of bugs.
He was tired all the time and he coughed a lot. He developed the cough in the mines and sometimes he spit up black phlegm. His cough worsened after we moved into the tents. Although the days were warm, the tents were wet with dew in the mornings. I fretted about the consumption. Doc Booker offered to let us move into his house, but Albion wouldn’t hear of it. We must suffer what everyone else suffered, he insisted. We were all in this together.
He made rounds with Dr. Booker and me, and after we were done with each patient, he prayed with them while we moved on. In the evenings we ate supper together, usually soupbeans. Afterward we’d sit before the tent and talk while the gray twilight stole over the camp. Sometimes Rondal and his brother would pass by like ghosts, banjo and guitar tucked under their arms, on their way to pick on the Justice’s front porch. Albion would watch them until they melted into the dusk.
In all our years of marriage I had never been pregnant. We both wanted a baby. Inside the tent, we often pushed our cots together and made love gingerly so as not to tip over onto the ground. But Albion always withdrew before we were done, frightened to have me expecting a child while we lived in such a state.
In mid-October the leaves turned and the nights grew colder. The tents in the morning were stiff with frost. Two scabs were shot to death at Felco, and the Number Eight tipple burned to the ground. The camp buzzed with rumors the next day.
“When the leaves fall we wont have no cover to shoot from,” one man said. “Our women and babies will freeze. Hit’s time to shit or git offn the pot.”
His name was Cecil Nunally. He was talking to Dr. Booker while I bathed his little girl. She had a fever of 104. After I towelled her dry, her mother took her up in a blanket and pressed her to her chest. The lint from the woman’s shawl clung to the child’s dry lips.
Isom Justice sent word that Albion should come to his house at nine o’clock that night.
“You come too,” Albion said. “Hit will be warm in the house.”
“They may not want me there.”
“Ifn they dont, you can talk to Gladys.”
I went gratefully, for the nights were now so cold that the only comfort was to huddle close to those you lived with. The Justices lived in a solid brick house on the hill at the end of Main Street.
Rondal Lloyd stood by the fireplace in the sitting room. He acknowledged me with a brief nod. His brother was there, and Dr. Booker and Ermel. Gladys welcomed me in and took me to the kitchen for hot chocolate. I sat by the stove and shivered with pleasure.
I liked Gladys Justice. She had stiff brown hair wrestled into a bun at the nape of her neck, full cheeks, and dusty skin which looked like it should be freckled but wasn’t. An oval picture of her dead father dangled on a chain at her neck.
The voices in the next room grew suddenly heated. Gladys and I looked at one another, and without a word picked up our chairs and went into the parlor.
“How the hell would they find out?” Rondal was shouting. “Who would tell them?” He looked at Albion but said nothing further.
Gladys leaned over and whispered in my ear.
“Cesco Thompson called Isom on the telephone from his honky-tonk. Said some gun thugs had been to his place drunk and was talking loose. They knowed exactly where Rondal was going to sleep tonight and aim to kill him.”
“I’ll just have to sleep somewhere else,” Rondal said.
“Hell you will,” Isom replied. “You know what the rumors is. Word is, you’re a dead man ifn you aint out of here soon.”
“You’re the goddamn chief of police! You saying you cant protect me no more?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. This aint just a threat. Hit’s like they got a contract out on you. You’re going to git your ass on a train out of here tonight.”
I had never seen Isom upset. His face was splotched with red and his scalp shone beneath the thinning hair.
“We knowed from the start it would be dangerous. I’m the leader of this here strike,” Rondal said.
“Somebody else can be the leader,” Albion said softly.
“You’d like that, wouldnt you, preacher? You’d like to be in charge yourself, wouldn’t you? You’d like to stop the shooting; hit scares you. Besides, you got other reasons you want to git shut of me.”
He looked straight at me as he spoke. I knew what he thought, that Albion was jealous of him, and I hated him for thinking it, hated his arrogance. “I aint caring for what you’re implying,” I said. “You better come right out and say it.”
“Oh, Lordy, now I done got Miss Carrie riled. I’m saying somebody has set me up, and this here is the only feller in the room I cant trust.”
“Now you’re talking crazy,” Dr. Booker said. “You been set up to be shot in a whorehouse. How would this boy know about that?”
Rondal continued to glare at Albion. But everyone else in the room was watching Rondal. And it occurred to me that someone else had called the meeting, that everyone, even Albion, knew what was about to happen. Everyone except Rondal.
“I’m the organizer here,” he said as though to convince himself.
“You’r
e the organizer,” Albion said, “but they ought to be other leaders. Miners. We got to believe in ourselves. Ifn you’re the leader and you git kilt, that would take all the heart outen us. We depend on you too much. You ought to pull back, for your sake and ourn.”
“I aint leaving on your say so,” Rondal said.
“Listen to him!” Isom said sharply. “Buddy, you know I’m the last one that wants to see you leave. But when it comes to what we’re doing here, they’s safety in numbers. Folks talk about you too much. You’re starting to stand out.”
“No! I aint leaving.”
“You got no choice,” Doctor Booker said. “Telegram come this afternoon. Union is pulling you out. They got other organizers.”
Rondal leaned against the mantel and buried his face in his arm.
“You got to git, big brother,” Talcott said. “But dont worry, Ruby wont be lonesome. She done took up with a gun thug already.”
Rondal looked up. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Talcott laughed. “You stupid sonofabitch! Who do you think set you up? And you’re blaming a damn preacher. But they do say love is blind.”
Rondal swung at him, but Talcott dodged. Isom pulled Rondal away.
“Hit aint worth it, son,” he said. “Ruby aint worth it.”
“Damn straight, she aint,” Talcott said. “I had a little talk with her on the way over here. Was her daddy put her up to it. She didnt even mind to tell me, long as she saved her own ass.”
Albion said, “You aint going to hurt nobody, are you?”
Talcott laughed again. “Tell him, brother. Would I hurt anybody?”
“We aint got time for this jabbering,” Ermel interrupted. “We got to git this boy out on the nine-thirty.”
The nine-thirty freight always ran slow with an open boxcar between Annadel and the camp, because the crew members were union sympathizers.
Rondal turned to me. “What do you say, Carrie? Should I leave?”
“I dont care what you do,” I said coldly.
Isom handed him his coat. He took it and left so abruptly the others had to hurry to catch up with him. Albion wrapped me in my coat and walked with me down to the tracks. When we arrived, Rondal was standing apart from the others, refusing to speak to them. The freight rumbled through, rocking slowly and screeching. Ermel waved a lantern, and by its light I saw a red bandana dangling from someone’s hand as the engine passed. Rondal ran alongside, leaped, and the dark doorway swallowed him. The train picked up speed, whined and disappeared.
“I hate him for what he said to you,” I said fiercely to fight off the emptiness I felt.
“You know that aint so.” Albion rubbed the back of my neck. “That poor feller lost everything tonight. Still yet, I’m glad he’s gone. God forgive me, but I cant help it.”
The next morning, Ruby Day found her father, Everett, slumped in a rocking chair on the porch of their house. He was shot once through the head from long range.
I tried not to miss Rondal. He was gone, he was safe, and it was easier to forget about him. I had Albion to fret over. Then Talcott brought Rondal’s banjo to our tent.
“I got a message from Rondal. ‘Give Carrie the banjo’ was all he said. Reckon he meant it.”
I laid the banjo beneath my cot so neither of us would have to look at it.
The first we knew that the governor declared martial law was when hundreds of state policemen swarmed through the tent colony in the early morning. Screams startled me out of sleep, feet pounded past the tent. Albion leaped up, struggling into his coat, and rushed outside. By the time I followed he had been wrestled to the ground by three policemen, his arms twisted and handcuffed behind his back.
“Run for Annadel!” he yelled as they dragged him away.
It seemed everyone in the world was running, as though we were all swept along by floodwaters. The men fled pell-mell for the hills, pursued by the policemen and Baldwin guards. An Italian woman wielding a broom tripped one of the gun thugs and he flew headlong into a pile of firewood. The other thugs chased her but she escaped in the maze of tents. I followed them on toward Annadel where they caught another Italian woman, this one pregnant, threw her to the ground and kicked her repeatedly in the belly. I hurled a rock at them. It struck one man on the back and he turned toward me. I threw again and he dodged. Then I ran, and prayed he wouldn’t draw his pistol. From far up the mountain I heard the popping of gunfire.
I reached Annadel in time to see the police toss Dr. Booker into the back of a truck parked in front of the newspaper office. His forehead bled. Isom Justice stood nearby with three rifle barrels pointed at his neck. Shards of broken glass littered the streets like frozen puddles.
I could do nothing except return to the tents and treat those who had been hurt. The Italian woman delivered a stillborn baby and died herself the next morning.
The state police and Baldwin thugs occupied Annadel. They turned Ermel out of the hotel and roomed there. The Free Press office burned to the ground and the FREE ANNADEL signs were tossed onto the fire. They burned several houses as well, including Talcott Lloyd’s. Talcott escaped into the hills and Pricie moved back to the farmhouse with her children.
Pricie asked what martial law meant. Ermel Justice said it meant the police ruled, that we had no more civil liberties.
“Coal miners never had nothing like that,” said Pricie.
“But Annadel did,” her mother said. “Now hit’s gone.”
I listened to them talk in the kitchen while I tended sick people in the front room. They talked mostly of how to get Isom and Albion out of jail. Over four hundred men had been arrested, most with no charge. But Isom and Albion were held for the murder of the Baldwin-Felts guards in May.
At dinnertime they invited me into the kitchen for a bowl of soup. The carrots, cabbage, peas and tomatoes were the first I’d eaten in two months. Beads of fat glistened like jewels in the broth.
“That preacher man of yourn never even toted a gun,” Pricie said. “How can they call that murder? Besides, hit were self-defense. Look what happened to Gladys’s daddy.”
Gladys swirled her spoon aimlessly through her soup.
“Ermel says he’ll git Isom out of jail,” she said. She looked at me. “He’ll git the preacher out too.”
“Damn straight,” Ermel declared. “Ifn it werent for me that there judge would be slopping hogs up Coon Creek. We’ll git them out on bond, and after that, they aint no jury in Justice County would bring in a guilty verdict. Them boys will be back in your beds before long, younguns.”
Gladys blushed and smiled at me. Annadel spooned more soup into my bowl.
“Speaking of that,” she said to me, “aint you freezing to death in that tent by yourself?”
“Hit gits right cold,” I admitted.
“Why dont you move in with us?”
“No, with me!” Gladys cried. “I git so lonesome in that big house. We can talk about our men.”
“Albion dont want me to put myself above the others,” I said.
“Now aint that silly?” Annadel said. “And you a-sitting up all hours nursing the sick. You’ll do poorly yourself and then you wont be worth nary a thing to nobody. You look right peaked as it is.”
I wasn’t hard to convince. The first night at Gladys’s house, I took a hot bath. The enormous tub rested on four porcelain lions’ paws. I stretched out full length in the hot water, pretended I was an Egyptian princess borne upon a chaise, and fell asleep.
Ermel Justice traveled to the county seat each day to check on Isom and Albion. Albion’s face was bruised, he said, but they were fine otherwise. They would be out any day.
I was reassured but I couldn’t rest easy until Albion was back. I feared that his very gentleness would be an affront to the guards, that they would take pleasure in abusing him. He was content to let God protect him. But sometimes I thought it was a point of honor with God to abandon the faithful ones.
Dr. Booker came home first
, but only briefly. He was not a miner and, in the eyes of the state police, only a Negro who took up space in the jail. They ordered him to pack and leave Justice County or he would be sent to the penitentiary. I found him in his office, packing his medical books in a green suitcase.
“Child, I hate to leave you with all this,” he said.
“I’ll manage. I learnt a lot from you.”
“You put these medicines in boxes and git somebody to help carry them down to the camp.” He lifted his framed diploma off its hook, studied it with his forehead furrowed. “Howard University. I went to Howard all the way from Greenwood, Mississippi, where the delta start. I ever tell you about that?”
“No,” I said.
“Had a uncle lynch in Leflore County. After that, I couldnt git away fast enough. Couldnt git far enough away from that place so I went all the way to Washington, D.C., and worked my way through Howard. That’s where I heard about West Virginia. You know how this here state was started? It seceded from Virginia when Virginia joined the Confederacy. West Virginia didnt want to be no slave state. I heard that and I liked it. And I heard tell a Negro could vote in West Virginia, and they was lots of Negroes needed a doctor around these mines. So I come.”
He sat on a white chair beside the examining table.
“Course they aint no paradise for a Negro. Every place but Annadel got the Jim Crow.”
“Annadel is different,” I said. “I wonder why.”
“C.J. Marcum, he was here before the town was. Sometimes a good man can make a difference in a little place like this here.” He sighed. “My old buddy C.J. He was a good friend, even if I never could git him to read Marx. And they’s other good men. That Isom is a fine one. Oh, they’s only so far you can go, being friends with a white man. I know that. They’s always things a Negro cant say or do, else he’ll risk losing that friendship. Now, I’m not married. Suppose, just suppose, that I thought Violet Marcum was the finest woman in the world, and her a widow lady, needing a husband. Suppose—just suppose now—I took a notion to court her. Me, her dead husband’s best friend, a respected doctor, the former mayor. What would Isom Justice say to that, and Violet his mama’s cousin? I aint even sure how C.J. would have took to it.” He leaned forward. “What would you say to it?”
Storming Heaven Page 21