“Well, I-I hadnt even thought about something like that. Hit wouldnt pass my mind.” I twisted my hands in my lap, afraid I had hurt his feelings.
He grinned. “I know, honey. You was scared to death of this nigger when you first come here.”
“That aint quite true!”
“Not quite?” He stood up and patted my shoulder. “I aint trying to make you feel bad. I aint trying to say anything against the white folks around here. I’m just trying to say goodbye to twenty good years of my life. It’s easier to leave with all these questions tormenting me. If these aint the best people, maybe they’s better somewhere else.”
“Where will you go?”
“Thought I’d head for Charleston. They’s a Negro community there, and a Negro college nearby. I got friends there. It will be just fine.”
“You wont have no newspaper.”
He hoisted his suitcase. “Naw. Have to read somebody else’s. But you know what? I may just find old Rondal up there. I bet he aint gone too far away.”
Ermel raised bail money for Albion and Isom after they had been a month in jail. Albion was pale and thinner, with purple bruises on his ribs.
On our first night back in the camp we managed to make love despite three layers of clothing. His face was gray in the moonlight, and cold to the touch. It was like loving a ghost, a memory.
We did everything we could to protect ourselves from the winter cold. We dug holes several feet deep inside the tents. A lucky few managed to find cast-iron stoves, which must be watched closely to keep the tents from catching fire. Bonfires were built at various places; the air around them shimmered and smoked.
It was difficult to sleep at night. Albion and I laid awake and shivered until we fell into a kind of faint from exhaustion. A few hours later we woke up numb. Then we took turns massaging each other until needles of pain stabbed our feet and the feeling returned.
The union tried to ship food from Charleston but the shipments were often intercepted by Baldwin-Felts guards and there was never enough. The Red Cross was supposed to send us aid, but the local chairwoman was the wife of a coal operator, and we never received a thing. We ate soupbeans for days on end and walked hunched over from bellyaches.
On Christmas Eve a delegation of Episcopal and Presbyterian churchwomen from Justice town visited us. They walked through the camp with a state police escort and hovered over crates of oranges to make sure only the children received them. They also left a small turkey and a bag of walnuts outside each tent. Then they gathered in the middle of the camp to sing Christmas carols for half an hour. I recognized Miles’s wife in a red coat and hat. Her collar was some kind of fur with the animal heads left on, each one chewing on the tail in front of it in a circle of frozen viciousness. After singing, the women departed for the trains, blew on their gloved fingers as they stumbled over chunks of red dog in their heeled shoes, grimaced when they twisted their ankles.
We had no ovens so we brought out iron skillets coated with hard gray bacon grease and fried the turkeys like chickens.
The day after Christmas, the Justice Clarion carried a front page editorial expressing shock at the living conditions in the camps and condemning the union for its “monstrous inhumanity, as it forces women and children to suffer hunger and cold in order to advance its un-American and, ultimately, doomed goals.”
A four-year-old Hungarian girl took frostbite in both feet. I wrapped her in blankets and carried her to Grace Hospital on the train. At the hospital, both her feet were amputated. During the operation I waited at the Tic-Toc Grill on Court Street, drank two cups of coffee and fretted because I had coffee while all the world was cold.
Miles entered the Tic-Toc. I ducked my head and hoped he wouldn’t see me but he sat down at my booth.
“Been a long time, Sis,” he said.
“Whose fault is that?”
“For Christsake, can’t we talk civil now?”
“No. I dont talk civil no more. I dont act civil. I’m a trouble-making red agitator out to tear down civilization and that’s what I act like these days. You want civil talk, you go home to that mealy-mouthed wife of yourn.”
“Carrie, you look awful. You’re just skin and bones. I know what you been through.”
“No, you dont. You dont know a thing about it. They’s a little girl named Sonia up in that hospital gitting her feet cut off because of good Christian people like you, because you dont know nothing about it, nor care.”
“I saw Albion in jail. I went to see him once a week, took him things.”
“He told me. I werent interested.”
“I let my people back in their houses for the winter.”
That surprised me and I didn’t know what to say.
“I couldn’t stand it, seeing them in the cold. I opened up all the Vulcan houses. And I let them dig coal for their stoves.”
“What about your scabs? Where they living?”
“Aw, I got a bunch of Italians in here that was redder than Karl Marx. They worked two days and then they left.”
I smiled.
“Boston wasn’t happy,” he said.
“I bet the whole damn city was heartbroke,” I said.
“That isn’t nice language, Carrie, not coming from a preacher’s wife. Next thing I’ll hear you took up smoking.”
“Only chewing,” I said.
My head swam from all the coffee on an empty stomach, and I let him buy me the Blue Plate Special—baked steak, mashed potatoes and corn.
“So your heart was touched and you’re trying to be kind,” I said.
“We aren’t monsters, Sis.”
“No. But your people, as you call them, still aint got money for food. And they aint your people, Miles. They aint your kin. They are their own people. A miner shouldnt have to fret over whether his boss is a good man or not. Hit’s all up to you whether that man freezes or keeps warm. Hit’s up to you whether his family eats or starves. He’s at your mercy. Why should he be?”
“Somebody’s got to make the decisions,” he replied. “A business can’t make money if there’s no chain of command, and those men won’t have jobs if this mine goes under. Educated men have to say what’s what.”
“And make the money.”
“Nobody will run a coal mine for charity,” he said. He bought me a slab of apple pie. “Go back to the Homeplace, Sis. I’m worried sick about you, and so are Ben and Florrie.”
“I got a husband on strike, and I got sick people to tend.”
He drove me up the hill to the hospital in his car and left me at the front door. The child had come through surgery all right, so I returned to Annadel. Five days later I fetched Sonia back from the hospital. Her mother boiled water and wrapped the stumps of her legs continually with hot rags.
The ungrateful, lazy miners held in the jails were warm, and ate two meals a day at taxpayers’ expense. The better sort of people grumbled about this in letters to the editor of the Justice Clarion. The men were released to a more fitting punishment, to freeze and starve, and to look into the faces of their wives and children.
We were not allowed to speak with one another outside the camps. Anyone who ventured into Annadel must do so silently, and shy away from any other person. To disobey was to risk a beating and arrest. But these restrictions did not apply to the better sort of people. They assembled daily to drill in militia companies and gathered freely to discuss the red menace in their midst.
I walked to the Justice farmhouse each day to tend the sickest people. The entire downstairs except for the kitchen had been turned into a hospital. Nine or ten people died each week and were buried in a new cemetery on the mountainside.
One morning I arrived to find Gladys in tears.
“Who died?” I asked.
“Hit aint that. Hit’s what happened this morning.”
“One of them gun thugs showed hisself to her,” Annadel explained.
“Where was Isom?”
“He was right there,” Gladys
sobbed. “He was walking me over here. That man was yelling at me, saying Isom’s werent as big as what hisn was, and what all he would do to me. And I knowed Isom wanted to kill him. But they wasnt a thing he could do. And he’s the chief of police.”
“Where’s Isom now?”
“He went on back home. I’m scairt he might do something to git hisself kilt. Or if he aint done nothing, he’s laying drunk up at the house because he’s so mad.”
“I’ll send Albion to see.”
“They wont let him go to our house.”
That was true, but he was able to wander around town long enough to know that Isom hadn’t shot anyone. For Gladys there was relief in knowing Isom had taken to a bottle instead of his gun.
The trial for Isom and Albion was not set for that court term, and so would not take place until summer. I could only think they had set the date so far away to prolong our worrying, but Ermel said it wasn’t so.
“We done it a purpose,” he declared. “Them operators want it over with, git my boy hung. Hit demoralizes them to see him free. Shows them they aint got all the power yet.”
The circuit judge was Ermel’s man, the only Democratic official in the county. The coal operators still controlled the sheriff’s office and the rest of the courthouse. But Ermel had taken in hand a popular bootlegger from the northern part of the county, paid for him to study the law, and run him in the last judge’s race. Northern Justice County had few coal mines. The people up the hollers still farmed, and “farmed in the hills,” as Ermel called moonshining.
“They’s still boys back in there can make as good as what Dillon Lloyd does. You git into politics, you got to know you some moonshiners. Hell, they was even Republicans in Justice town voted for my man for judge. They didn’t want their liquor to dry up.”
Ermel talked a lot. Annadel said it made him feel like he was still in charge of things. He was the only person who looked forward to the trial.
Albion mentioned the trial only once. When he heard nothing would be done until early summer, he said, “Leastways hit will be warm.”
Albion Freeman at that time seemed to me the most precious person in the world. I loved him with the guilty love of one who has had to be convinced, and with a smothering love, for he would not watch out for himself. Worrying over him tired me more than my nursing. I was forever draping his scarf around his neck and cautioning him to stay near the fires. He never listened to me, but seemed not to mind my scolding.
I only saw him falter once, and that was at a preaching service. Albion preached twice a week, on Sundays and Wednesdays, to our camp, and the Negro pastor from Jenkinjones did the same for the families at the Annadel baseball field. Only the foreign miners were left out. The Catholic priest at Davidson was a company man who’d threatened excommunication for joining the union. The men did not seem to mind, but as we gathered for church on Sunday mornings, the women lingered in front of their tents, their rosaries dangling forlornly from their hands. Albion invited them to join us, but they never did.
On one bitter cold February morning, Albion preached from Deuteronomy. He yelled to be heard above the roaring bonfire.
“The children of Israel was forty year in the wilderness. And they suffered from hunger. And it werent cold, but lord, it was so hot they suffered as much as we do here. They died from the heat. But the Lord God preserved them, and led them home to the Promised Land. Only he had hard words for Moses. Now Moses led the children of Israel through hardship and suffering. But the Lord wouldnt let Moses enter that Promised Land. God required his life before Moses could enter. God said to Moses, ‘Thou shalt not go over this Jordan.’ Them is hard words after so much suffering. ‘Thou shalt not go over this Jordan.’”
His voice broke and he looked down. “Maybe we wont go over.” He dropped his Bible into the snow and covered his face with his hands and sobbed. Someone moaned, “Sweet Jesus!”
Then Albion pulled himself together.
“But God let Moses see!” he cried through his tears. “God took Moses up on the mountaintop and Moses seen the Promised Land. Hit is there! And ifn we dont cross this Jordan, we may still yet see it. And ifn we see it, maybe our younguns will cross over. Maybe them younguns standing there in that snow drift a-shivering will enter the Promised Land.”
He wept again in our tent. “Hit was you talked me into learning to read,” he said. “I wanted to so’s I could read the Bible. I aint so sure now hit’s a blessing. They’s hard sayings in there.”
I heated a washtub of water and washed his feet. Then I put three pairs of socks on him and snuggled onto the cot beside him.
“Have you seen the Promised Land?” I whispered.
“I seen too much.”
I began to think it was a great joke to call myself a nurse. There was really nothing I could do for the sick. They weakened, took the influenza or pneumonia, we poured soup and whiskey down their throats, and they either died or survived to return to the cold. What they needed was food and warmth, and I could give them neither. Nor could the miners give these things to their families, and so they turned once more to their guns. Three scabs were killed on their way to work at Winco, and the state police returned to make arrests. They marched Cecil Nunally to the railroad tracks with his hands above his head and forced him to kneel.
“You’ve been identified,” one policeman said. “You got anything to say for yourself?”
“Lord, have mercy,” he said.
The policeman shot him in the back of the head while his wife and children stood by and screamed. Then the police threw his body on the back of a truck and took him to Justice town. We heard the local militia drove through the streets with Cecil’s body on display.
Talcott Lloyd, who had managed to evade capture once more, jumped the slow train for Huntington that night. He planned to join Rondal, who was in Charleston, take a job in a union mine on Campbells Creek, and send for Pricie and his family as soon as he raised the money.
The day after the raid, one of the Negro children died. His mother, a tall, long-necked woman with her head wrapped tight in a yellow kerchief, carried him out of the farmhouse without making a sound or shedding a tear. She walked to her tent at the Annadel ballfield and laid him on a cot. An hour later, she returned with four hundred Jenkinjones women, all of them carrying iron skillets, broom handles, axes, hoes. They fanned out through the camp, stopped at each tent.
The Negro woman came to the farmhouse.
“We going to Felco,” she said. “Yall come too.”
Pricie snatched off her apron and threw it in the corner, went for her coat.
“I’m coming too,” Gladys said.
Isom, who had come by for soup, stood up.
“You sit down,” the Negro woman said. “They know what it take to beat you men. We doing this our own way.”
“What if they shoot at you?”
“Wont they look brave?” She turned and left.
I looked at Annadel.
“You go on,” she said. “I’ll watch here.”
The women milled around the tents. They had on shapeless wool coats worn smooth to the threads. A few had scarves and gloves. The Italian women wore black lace hairnets over tightly wrapped buns. The tall Negro woman strode through them, down the creek. We followed her bobbing yellow head, drifting at first, then closed ranks and walked faster as the bottom land narrowed and twisted. The day had warmed just enough to melt the snow, and we traipsed through black sludge to the tops of our boots. The air smelled like the remains of a wood fire that has been doused by rain. No one spoke. No one sang. We walked, and listened to the squishing sounds of our feet.
Two state police cars blocked the road just above Felco, and armed men waited behind them. But the yellow head still went forward. We pounded our hoes and broomsticks on the ground as we walked, and stamped our feet. The sound gathered in the narrow hollow and echoed from the hillsides.
They were two dozen policemen, and we were over a thousand.
/> A man’s voice carried in the crisp air. “What do we do? Can we shoot women?”
A hoe hung suspended above the yellow kerchief, then dropped with a crash and a tinkling of shattered glass. The policemen fled down the road and on out of sight. The women in the front beat on the cars, then rocked them back and forth until they trundled clumsily down the creek bank, snapping bushes and small trees as they went, and came to rest on their roofs. We stumbled, bumped into one another, but went on.
We passed by the boarded-up houses of upper Felco and Hunkie Hill, by the iron bridge and the new grade school, past the red brick superintendent’s mansion with its white pillars, gardens and ponds, reached the company store. Without any words being spoken, we seemed to agree that this was our goal. A machine gun squatted on the concrete front porch, an iron spider balanced on skinny metal legs. No one tended it. It was midday and the scabs were all in the mine; the Baldwin guards had been replaced by the state policemen, who were nowhere in sight. We picked up hunks of red dog, flung them at the plate glass windows and clapped excitedly at the noise. The door was forced open and women poured inside.
They grabbed as much food as they could carry and hurried back outside. Italian women and hillbilly women bartered, offering cans of yellow corn for sardines and hard cheese. By the time I made it inside many of the shelves were clear. The board floor smelled of oil and coal dust. Rank after rank of dark wooden display cabinets lined the walls. Most of the glass doors on them had been broken. I pushed toward the walk-in freezer where they were hauling out slabs of bacon and sides of beef. Pricie grabbed me by the arm. She had Gladys with her.
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