In addition to standardizing time, railroads ordered space in novel ways, introducing new encounters with outside authority. A train might roll through the Big Sandy Valley, but each railcar enclosed a different world, with rules set by faraway corporate officers and state regulators and enforced by conductors. These rules dictated how people could act: whether they could talk loudly or play cards, smoke or chew tobacco. They also dictated where people could sit—in first class or in the ladies’ car, the smoker, or the colored car.5
For nearly thirty years after the war, blacks in central and western Kentucky demanded equal access to trains and streetcars, protesting and repeatedly suing over racial segregation. By the time the railroad was within sight of Paintsville, however, the state had resolved the issue in favor of absolute separation. In 1892 the legislature required all railroads, on pain of heavy fines, to provide separate coaches or compartments for black and white passengers, marked by “appropriate words in plain letters indicating the race for which [they are] set apart.” Four years later the United States Supreme Court held that such statutes were constitutional, and the Southern landscape was transformed with signs labeling everything white or colored.6
Johnson County did not experience the critique of white supremacy and display of black political energy that developed during the years of Reconstruction, nor was it gripped by the white majority’s harsh backlash, its rage for separation and purity, that swept far beyond Kentucky. The county responded to Jim Crow by declaring everyone white. But each day the railroad brought a new occasion for train conductors, unfamiliar with the local accommodation, to disagree. Some state courts helped preserve local customs by allowing whites to sue railroads for being assigned to the wrong car; in essence, these suits forced conductors to give ambiguous passengers the benefit of the doubt. Kentucky courts, however, shielded railroads from defamation suits. “What race a person belongs to cannot always be determined infallibly from appearances,” the state supreme court held in 1906, “and mistakes must inevitably be made.” The importance of maintaining racial purity outweighed any individual right to be recognized as white.7
Despite the changing times, Jordan Spencer traveled every spring to a place beyond the C&O’s grasp. He was as old as men got, but he could still handle a horse. Well into his eighties, he rode a fine stallion into the hills toward Virginia. No train conductors asked him where he was going or made a judgment about who he was. His children presumed he was returning to somewhere he had known as a young man. Given the impossibly rugged terrain, their father could have managed the journey and returned home only on horseback.8
In Virginia, Spencer rode from farm to farm, offering his stallion’s services as a stud and collecting fees for the previous year’s successes. Breeding horses required no modern technology, but new imperatives increasingly held sway. “At one time in Virginia horse-breeding, blood and record was everything,” reported Virginia’s agriculture commissioner in the 1890s. “Now a more utilitarian time has come, and the horse that will produce the greatest profit ... whether for the turf, the road, the farm, or the team, will be sought for in the section to which the breed is suited.”9
Whatever the bloodlines of Spencer’s stallion, it thrived in the mountains. Jordan made enough money to leave a good deal of it behind at stills and speakeasies known as “blind tigers” on the ride home. After a certain point on the road, the horse knew the way back to Rockhouse. It carried him along the creek bed and up the path to Spencer’s cabin, where it stood calmly, waiting for someone to pull the old man down and put him to bed.10
All of Jordan and Malinda’s children were dead or grown. Malinda, now in her seventies, had survived fifteen childbirths. Eight sons and daughters—mostly sons—were still alive. Their youngest girl, Lydia, had married in 1895. Their youngest boy, Jasper, was thirty-two and had been married twice, with two sons and a daughter. Jordan Jr. was the father of nine. For a time the old couple probably lived alone in their cabin, in silence they had never known as children or adults. Even though Old Jordan took pride in doing hard fieldwork until the end of his life, he and Malinda could survive with just a cow, some hogs, and what they grew in gardens by their home. They started selling off small pieces of land to neighbors. Jordan and Malinda lent them money to complete the purchases, just as their neighbors’ parents and grandparents had helped the Spencers finance their own acquisitions half a century earlier.11
But Jordan and Malinda’s cabin did not stay silent more than a few years. Shortly before 1900 their son Tobe moved back in after his wife died, with two teenage boys and two younger girls. The five of them gave Jordan and Malinda a workforce. The farm had new life, and the cabin was crowded again.12
When Old Jordan went visiting along Rockhouse Creek and elsewhere in the hills, people saw a dignified man. He sat tall on his horse, walked strongly, and still paid meticulous attention to his appearance. A handful had known him from the time the Spencers moved to the hollow. Most could not remember a time without him; none was his elder. He reminded them of their parents, long-dead brothers and sisters, lost days.13
No one seemed to think about Old Jordan’s race—that had been something for the bygone generation to puzzle out. His children and their children were white, without question. Many of them were kin by marriage. When the 1900 census-taker looked at Jordan, he initially marked a B by his name. But then he had second thoughts—perhaps after gauging community opinion—and wrote a W over it, retracing the letter again and again until it was bolder than any other classification on the page. The old man had become emphatically white.14
Although Spencer was well composed in public, his grandchildren remembered someone different at home—a man who had spent decades working children hard in the fields, remained able to do heavy lifting, and, when he got drunk, stayed strong enough to administer beatings. Like their parents, the grandchildren living with Jordan worked instead of going to school. They never forgot the man, and as they grew older, they repeated stories about him that their children, in turn, never forgot. In one telling, Spencer was so full of rage, so uncontrollable one night that a grandson reached into a coal bucket, grabbed a rock, and beat Jordan until he collapsed to the cabin floor, bloodied and unconscious but still terrifying in a coal fire’s glow. He would be a new man for the neighbors the next day.15
EVERY EVENING AN ARMY of Kentucky men sat in washtubs and tried to scrub themselves white. They scoured their cheeks and eyelids and ears and hands, under their fingernails. Their skin was dull black, head to toe. The black had worked through their sleeves and pants and long johns, burrowed into their arms and legs like the little red chigger bugs that infested the hills—perhaps the reason some called it “bug dust.”16
In the last minutes of light, the men washed themselves with lye soap until they tasted it and felt it burning their eyes. The tub water grew dull and dark and sulfurous as it cooled. Some of the black never came out. When coal dust got into a cut, it dyed the skin like a tattoo. Even after their nightly baths, the men could still smell coal, and they still spat black.17
The railroad had come to Paintsville for one reason: to tap eastern Kentucky’s millions of tons of bituminous and cannel coal. People in Johnson County had been mining bits of it for as long as Jordan Spencer had lived there, but mainly for their own use, picking away at their hillsides when they had some spare time. Without an easy way to ship to the large factories, blast furnaces, and gasworks that needed it, there was no use in doing anything more. Rising industries in the North could rely on coal from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; as late as 1900, western Kentucky’s mines still produced more than the Appalachian counties. Once the railroad snaked up the Big Sandy Valley, however, the massive fields between Paintsville and Elkhorn Creek near the Virginia line would yield cheap, high-grade coal by the mountainful.18
It was common knowledge that eastern Kentucky was rich with coal. It jutted out of the ground in large rock formations, plainly visible to people passing by.
For decades everyone from a local Johnson County teacher to financiers in Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh had been busy buying up hundreds of thousands of acres of mineral rights. They took rooms at the Alger House in Paintsville and carried suitcases full of cash. They rode through the hills with saddlebags heavy with gold pieces. Mining companies were financing the railroad construction. When the line first crossed into Johnson County in 1888, coal operations immediately opened along the way. Within months Johnson County coal was burning in New York City, Toronto, Chicago, the Dakotas, and elsewhere. As Jordan Spencer was selling off small parts of his farm, his deeds stopped referring exclusively to stone markers and tall trees in delineating property boundaries. In 1895, nine years before the railroad reached Paintsville, Spencer sold a parcel that began at “a rock and locust near a Coal Bank.”19
It was less clear how life would change once the mines along the Big Sandy Valley began producing tens of thousands of tons of coal every day. For a farmer like Jordan Spencer, coal companies paid good money for crops to feed the workforce and for timber to strengthen support walls inside the mines and to build housing outside. Although Clay County’s saltworks and Johnson County’s small-scale coal and timber operations must have given Spencer some understanding of industrial life, the old man could not have foreseen how different his children’s and grandchildren’s lives would be from his own.20
Jordan Spencer had spent his eighty-plus years surrounded by forest. His daughter Lydia sold her mineral rights and used the proceeds to buy a home for her family in town. Many more Spencers wound up in the mines. Men who had spent their childhoods in the hills took jobs chiseling and blasting their way through them. Many miners almost never saw the sun. In winter their days started before sunup and ended after dark. They entered the mine through a wide mouth gashed into a hillside. The main tunnel branched off about every eighty feet into smaller tunnels, known as “rooms.” Miners claimed their own rooms and returned to them every working day. They used their own time to buttress the walls and ceiling with timbers. At the end of a room was the rock face, and each day the room grew a little longer.21
In the dim, stinking light of lard lamps, the miners picked and drilled under masses of coal while lying on their sides. Packing and lighting gunpowder charges and diving for cover, they spent hours shoveling rock into carts. Slouching under beam and ceiling, feet soaked from the slush and puddle that slicked the mine floors, throats burning from powder smoke and dust, they pushed cart after cart to the main tunnel, where mules pulled them out of the hills.22
In the early years miners were paid by the weight of what they had carted out, usually two or three dollars a day, sometimes given as scrip redeemable only at the company store. In certain ways the mining life was not unlike farming in a mountain hollow. Plowing, clearing trees and brush, splitting wood and building fences, and harvesting could be grueling, repetitive, and lonely tasks. Miners who were paid by the ton could work at their own pace, with little supervision. The timbers that framed the tunnel walls and ceilings were notched like logs for cabins. Perhaps the most visceral reminder of life outside was the steep pitch of the mine floors. In the 1870s one miner described his daily routine as “very much like asking a man to stand on the roof of a house while working.” It was a sensation familiar to anyone who had ever picked corn in the Jordan Gap.23
Outside were hollows crisscrossed with tracks and crammed with mine tipples, workmen’s cottages, and the company store. Creeks ran foul and were littered with garbage. And everywhere, in the miners’ homes and on their stoops, in their hair and teeth and eyes, was the coal dust, “like sand on the desert. It was in their food,” wrote a folklorist who would travel throughout coal country. “Their clothes grated with it . . . The white satin ribbons for their children’s christenings were soiled by company-store clerks who measured with grimy hands.” In the middle of the mountains, they might as well have been in Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit.24
Jordan Spencer had established himself in his community and created relationships and alliances in part by borrowing money from neighbors and local businessmen and paying them back over time. Miners, by contrast, stayed in hock to the mining companies, for their housing, food, clothes, and supplies. It was as if the railroad and mines were creating a new world in the hills, a new beginning, and a new history. In Kentucky, towns were established bearing the names of executives from faraway corporations: Miller’s Creek, about five miles from the Jordan Gap, would become Van Lear, Kentucky. In Virginia, Roanoke was not the failed colony that Sir Walter Raleigh had tried to establish in the late sixteenth century; after 1882 it was the Norfolk & Western’s gateway to the mining areas of the southwestern Virginia mountains, a town formerly known as Big Lick. Pocahontas was no longer the princess who saved John Smith’s life. Now it was the giant coalfield spanning the border between Virginia and West Virginia.25
With policies set hundreds of miles away, the coal companies controlled the kinds of relationships that miners and their families could form among themselves. In large part this control stemmed from their ability to select who worked in the mines. They balanced locals with outsiders to create communities where it was difficult to develop norms and values and rules that conflicted with maximum productivity—communities where no one had roots.26
Many of the mine workers came from far away: Virginia and Alabama, but also Italy and Hungary and Poland. For the first time ever, appreciable numbers of blacks would live in Johnson County. Until then many local residents would have said they had never seen a black person before. Within fifteen years the federal government would be investigating whether the coal companies were moving blacks in from the Deep South in order to tip coal-mining states Republican in the 1916 presidential election. Aboveground, the area began to resemble the rest of the South, with freshly painted “whites only” signs and housing and schools and religious services segregated by race. But in the darkness and dust, the rules were relaxed. The imperative to extract as much coal as possible trumped the discipline demanded by Jim Crow. Although blacks were excluded from management jobs, down in the mines they labored side by side with white miners. They called whites by their first names, and at the end of the day they earned the same wages.27
Filled with outsiders and confronted with the task of separating blacks and whites, coal-mining communities were far from Rockhouse Creek, if only a few ridgelines away. Even in this unsettled world, however, the Spencers remained white. The camps were places where memories were lost—no one would take the time to explain who Jordan Spencer was, or find someone who would listen. It was hard to tell what Jordan’s descendants looked like inside the mines or in the dusty twilight outside. Their status was fixed as locals, and as far as anyone was concerned, the locals were all white.
THE HORIZONS WERE NARROW in the creek valleys and bottomland that wound through the hills. Every moment brought a new turn, a new outcropping, a rise or fall, an obstacle to overcome. It was a landscape that put people in blinders, demanding complete attention to the present moment. There was little future to contemplate when one had no way of seeing what waited ahead. Nor was there anything to look back to. An old man and woman standing by a path would not be visible long. Within steps they would blend into the wilderness, obscured first by trees, then by rock.
Jordan Spencer Jr. and his wife, Alafair, had lived nearly twenty years along Rockhouse Creek. They raised their oldest children nearly to adulthood there. The neighbors knew and would remember them fondly. Now Young Jordan’s family was moving slowly through the hills. Their horses and mules staggered with everything they owned, food for the journey, and eight children. Their five boys all shared names with Jordan’s brothers; their three girls were Virgie, Mary, and Liengracia. With George age sixteen and Mary a few years younger, the oldest could wrangle the babies. Alafair was probably pregnant with their ninth, a boy they would name Paris.28
South and east up the Levisa Fork, the hills peaked higher, and the hollows cut steep. It would
be years before the railroad would extend that far. Around 1900 the paths were at best treacherous, often too narrow for wagons. The difficulties of riding through the area became the stuff of legend for the would-be coal barons trying to convince local farmers to sell them mining rights in the area. In any season but summer, the creeks would have been too high and fast for a family to cross them. At most the family might manage to move a mile every hour. It was impossible to travel in the dark. South of Paintsville the Spencers might have stayed with Jordan’s brother Jasper and his family. But their journey was just beginning, and they probably slept outside most of the way.29
Unlike Old Jordan and Malinda, Jordan Jr. and his family did not strike out for a new life because anyone disapproved of them. Still, they prepared to travel far away. It was unlikely they would ever see their parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins again. Perhaps Rockhouse Creek was getting too crowded for the family to feed themselves. Across Appalachia, what had once been sparse settlements in remote creek valleys were becoming dense neighborhoods, as dozens of children of the original settlers were having dozens of children themselves. There was less available land, and it was higher up in the hills. It was harder to grow food or hunt for it in the woods. If Jordan Jr. had expected to inherit land from his parents, their remarkable longevity was forcing him to wait decades for a better life. With so many siblings nearby, he would not inherit much.30
Instead of going downriver to Louisa or Catlettsburg, Cincinnati or Louisville, the family went farther into the hills, through Floyd County and Pike, into Virginia. As they rode up the Levisa Fork, rafts of hardwoods floated down. While it was impossible to extract coal by the ton without the railroad, large timber companies were clearing the hills and moving logs out by the creeks and rivers. In the years before the cutting started, locals and outsiders anticipating the timber and coal boom and rising land values had rushed to buy property. The fields and hunting grounds of many small farmers in the hills shrank or disappeared. Jordan Spencer Jr. may have been similarly constricted by new realities.31
The Invisible Line Page 29