by Gin Phillips
“Hi, Henry,” I said. “Nice to see you.”
“Hello, Virgie.” He smiled and nodded like a grown man. “I thought I might walk you home if you wouldn’t mind.”
I’d never been walked home, and I was sure Papa wouldn’t allow it. But Henry was marching up the steps toward Papa before I said another word. I guess I’d looked like I wouldn’t mind. Papa was halfway down the steps himself, with his hat tipped back to get a better look at Henry. Tess was nearly stepping on his heels.
“Mr. Moore, sir, good afternoon. My name’s Henry Harken, Jr., and I’d like to walk Virgie home if you’d allow me.”
Papa didn’t answer right away, standing there in the middle of the steps with the whole church filing out around him. “I know your father,” he said, people streaming around him like this conversation wasn’t even happening, sometimes slapping his shoulder. “You gone walk through town, bring her straight home? Don’t want to be holdin’ dinner for her.”
“Yessir.”
Then Mama was there, her hand light on Papa’s arm, watching Henry with her dark, warm eyes.
“’Afternoon, ma’am. Pleasure to meet you…” he started, but Papa cut him off.
“Henry Harken’s boy,” he said. “Wantin’ to walk Virgie home.”
Mama smiled at that and nodded. “Nice to meet you, Henry.”
Papa tipped his hat back down to where it shaded his eyes. “You’ll have her back shortly? We’ll be drivin’ home, so we’ll beat you by a good bit.”
“Yessir. We’ll go straight to the house.” He turned toward me, then looked over his shoulder. “You have a good afternoon, sir. Ma’am.”
He almost got a smile from Papa, but it turned into a nod. Mama and Papa both looked straight at me when Henry’s back was turned to them, Mama looking like she’d love to tell me something, and Papa looking—well, I couldn’t guess then, but it was probably uncertain. I didn’t recognize the expression on him.
So we started toward Front Street, and I knew my shoes would lose their shine. Only Front Street had sidewalks and paving; everywhere else was covered in red rock—some sort of leftover dust from the mines. It didn’t muddy easily, but it settled from nose to toes. Even with all the red rock, I liked the walk down the hill. Carbon Hill proper was ugly, all brick, standing as plain as a set of blocks lined up. But no churches were on the main street—you had to turn left and head up the hill to get to our church, and just a few blocks over was First Methodist and a few blocks over from that was First Baptist. The shiny white marble and the stained-glass windows of the Methodist church seemed like they suited Henry Harken to a T. And really I liked it myself—not as much as Tess did, though. The Holy Spirit really called to her from those stained-glass windows. Myself, I liked best of all to walk past the neat rows of houses, yards swept clean and little fences sometimes separating neighbors.
But at the bottom of the hill, the happy houses stopped and stores started. All the same brick, no trees, no grass, no color. Just that red dust everywhere. You could taste it on your tongue.
Home was just a mile or so from town, but the house shone white, repainted by Papa and his men every few years. The front yard had great dollops of red and pink from the roses, and out the kitchen window you saw nothing but oaks and pines, dogwoods, and two massive sweet gum trees. We had soil, not dust. Downtown made me thirsty.
“You’re quiet,” said Henry, which made every word I knew fly out of my head.
“I was thinking,” I finally said. We crossed one of the small wooden bridges over a ditch at an intersection, our last block until Front Street. All the ditches were filled with weeds and water, and I could hear the hum of mosquitoes and flies and whole clouds of winged things.
“You mind me walking you home?”
“No,” I said quickly, knowing how rude he must think I was being. He wasn’t bad looking, and he was awfully clean. Even his fingernails were clean. His shirt looked stiff and smooth, not like cloth at all. His skin was blotchy, though, like all the boys, and that made me feel a little better.
The sidewalk was crowded with after-church traffic, and we had to dodge people. And nod “hello” as we were weaving. And I was trying not to look embarrassed, wanting to seem like, no, Henry Harken was not walking me home and really we’d just bumped into each other accidentally and happened to be moving along the same patch of sidewalk.
But I tried to make it easier for him. “It was real nice of you. Real nice.”
I ran out of words again just as a car rolled by, hiccupping over a rut. Henry, walking next to the street, put a hand on my arm and nudged me a little closer to the storefronts.
“Wouldn’t want you to get mud on your Sunday dress,” he said, even though the street was dry. Still, it was thoughtful.
We passed the Elite Store, with its fancy hats straight from New York, all the latest fashions, and I barely glanced in the window. I didn’t know a soul who could actually afford one of those hats. I moved toward the storefront when a little boy in checked short pants barreled between Henry and me. His mother, not much older than me, followed close behind him, snatching at his waistband to slow him down.
“I am so sorry,” she said to us. “He’s like tryin’ to hold hands with a tornado. Theodore, say you’re sorry for nearly running into this lady and gentleman.”
As she clamped her hand around his wrist—not even bothering with his wiggling fingers—and he forced out a “sorry,” I got a better look at her face. She’d been a few years ahead of me in school. Christy something. She had a run in her stocking and her shoes were scuffed at the toes.
“Say ‘Sorry, ma’am’ and ‘Sorry, sir,’” she corrected the tornado.
Still hunched over the boy, she smiled up at us. I tried to look behind her eyes. What was there besides politeness? Was she miserable or something worse? She had dark circles under her eyes and not much color. Definitely tired, but would she rather get rid of this boy altogether than deal with him for another day? Had there been another little one at home that she had decided to get rid of?
She was gone then, and when I looked over my shoulder, I saw her smile at Theodore even as she dragged him so that his feet left the ground every few steps.
“Handful,” Henry said, looking back at them. He was only making conversation, but it irritated me that he thought he could sum them up in one word. I tried to shake the feeling.
“So what time did y’all get out of church?” I asked.
“We usually get out about a quarter ’til twelve.”
We did, too, but with the visiting preacher, we’d run late. Papa’s pocket watch had said 12:30. “Thank you for waiting.” I thought of another question pretty quick, even though I knew the answer. “You don’t live in town, do you?”
He shook his head. “Our place is east of town, opposite end of yours.”
Across the street I saw Annie Laurie Tyler, who always looked like she was on the verge of some nervous collapse. Mama always seemed tired after Annie Laurie came to visit. The woman had too much emotion. She didn’t see me, and I angled myself so Henry was between me and her. Now, Annie Laurie—that was the kind of woman I thought might up and lose her mind completely and drown her baby. But her youngest was around Jack’s age.
We covered a couple more blocks, coming up to Dr. Strickland’s Drug Store. Henry stopped suddenly, looking pleased with himself. “Would you like some candy?”
I didn’t have any money, and I didn’t feel it was right that he should buy me anything. “Oh, we’ll be eating dinner soon as I get home.” I started down the street again.
“I’ll buy you a piece of whatever you want,” he said. “Just to eat on the way.”
There was a wheedling in his voice that irked me. “No, thank you.”
“I can get free candies from the commissary anytime,” he said. The Galloway commissary had big barrels of penny candies—caramels, licorices, gum drops. Sometimes Papa gave us each two pennies and we’d spend an hour deciding. I didn’t
think it would taste as good if it was free.
“Don’t you get sick of it?” I asked.
“Nah. Too many kinds.”
In the corner house, Maxine Horner stood in her doorway with a broom and dustpan, wearing a stylish jacket the color of buttercups. She and her husband, Bob, ran the Pastime theater, which was two streets up. She hadn’t had a baby recently.
I’d only been in the Pastime once, for a Saturday afternoon Western.
“Afternoon, Virgie,” she said. Her eyebrows arched a little, and she smiled when Henry turned toward her enough for her to get a good look at his face. “And afternoon to you, Henry.”
We both smiled and waved, and I knew everybody’d know he’d walked me home by tomorrow morning.
“Did you see Frankenstein?” he asked after a bit.
“No, I haven’t been to the theater in a while.”
“Dracula’s coming next week. With Bela Lugosi. Do you like vampires?”
“Don’t know as I’d say I’m fond of them.” I was afraid he’d ask me to go with him, but he didn’t. Just went on about vampires for a while. Awful—whoever heard of liking such things.
The Brasher Hotel seemed busy enough, and men were standing in line to get into the restaurant on the top floor. I looked up and had a clear view of a man’s behind perched on the railing. From my angle, it didn’t look like a behind at all, all misshapen and smooshed, and I craned my neck a little as I kept walking. I didn’t crane it for too long.
The sidewalk and the paved street stopped there, so we were back on red rock. I watched my skirt switch against my legs, and I tried to make my feet stir up as little dust as I could manage. If I put down my toes before my heels, I barely made a puff. I could see Henry’s feet moving alongside mine. He kicked up great storms of dust, but I kept concentrating on toe-heel, toe-heel.
We walked past Nigger Town, the little group of shotgun houses that ran up the hill. No coloreds were out that I could see, but the path didn’t take us too close. The high school had a Kiwanis minstrels group that would make your sides hurt from laughing. They’d paint their faces black and dance around stage, mispronouncing things and falling all over one another. One year we had a group of real Negroes come and perform for the grammar school near Christmastime, and they weren’t nearly so funny. They didn’t seem to know at all how colored folks were supposed to act.
Tess SUNDAY DINNERS WERE THE BEST DINNERS. WE ALMOST always had mashed potatoes, piles of them, so much you could take seconds or even thirds. And Mama also made gravy. Usually I liked white gravy the best, but I loved brown gravy on potatoes. And also you could put scoops of English peas in the middle of your potatoes and make a bird’s nest. And that didn’t count as playing with food.
That Sunday Virgie walked home with Henry Harken I had fun with it. Jack, too. Soon as Virgie got in, Mama called us to dinner. Papa asked Jack to say the blessing—“Dear Heavenly Father thank you for this food this day and all your many blessings in Jesus’ name, Amen.” Girls could only say the blessing if no men were at the table.
Jack shoveled in some potatoes and said, “You gone marry him, Virgie?” Then we watched her turn red.
“Hush,” she said.
“Did he kiss you?” I asked. “I hope you didn’t let him kiss you.”
“You two don’t be talkin’ foolish,” Mama said, even though she was trying not to smile.
“No,” said Virgie, trying to look all proper.
I saw how the boys looked at Virgie, how they’d get flustered and punch each other in the arm when she walked by. Sometimes they couldn’t look her in the eye, which worked fine because she never looked at them either. It was an interesting thing to watch, and I felt sure no boys would ever act quite so ridiculous around me. They only act all stupid when you’re beautiful.
“Did you want him to kiss you?” Jack asked.
“That’s enough,” said Papa.
I just couldn’t help it. “If he does kiss you, I bet you smell pomade.”
Papa looked at me until I started shoveling potatoes in myself.
But Jack added one more before Papa gave him the that’s-really-enough look. “You could name your babies Henrietta and Henry and maybe another Henry. Those Harkens are big on Henrys.”
4 No Pay for Slate
Jack OF COURSE WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT IT WAS TO BE hungry. Not really hungry. With Papa having land, food was never hard to come by. At least not for us kids—we just ate whatever Mama sat in front of us, after she and Papa had sweated and labored to get it out of the ground and clean it and can it and cook it. No meat, but with Mama’s cooking you never noticed what wasn’t on the table.
The men with no land, the ones living in mining camps or renting property, didn’t have that cushion. When the mines started closing, there was nothing to go on the table. No other jobs, either. And there was nowhere for those men or their families to go. Maybe a handout from a church or free meals from a relative, but that didn’t last. Day in and day out, as weeks stretched into months, what hungry people mainly did was starve.
We didn’t see any of that. Not for a while. All Papa’s brothers farmed at least little patches of land, and Mama’s sisters had married men with clean white shirts who always had pens in their pockets.
Lola Lowe’s boy Mark was my age, and he had a tough time of it in school. A lot of the really poor boys had the advantage of being tough and hard and mean as snakes. No one would mess with them. But Mark was always small, and he never seemed healthy. He just seemed poor and pitiful and uncomfortable, the kid who everybody’s mother told you to be nice to. And frankly nobody was too mean to him—there would’ve been no sport in it—but nobody sat with him or asked him to play ball, either.
In third grade, he turned orange, like he’d been colored with a crayon. And he had a potbelly on him. That thin body, nothing but bones, but an inflated belly you couldn’t help but notice. He stopped coming to school, from embarrassment more than sickness, I think.
It turned out all they had growing in the garden was carrots, and that was all he’d eaten for months. And then they had the doctor bills from all the tests run to figure out what had turned him orange. A few of Lola’s other children turned splotchy with rickets. By the time I graduated, she’d lost her four youngest. Different names to what killed them, but poor nutrition at the root of it. Mrs. Lowe handled losing the husbands a lot easier than she did the children. I barely remember her from childhood, but when I was in college, Mama started having me take Thanks giving dinner over to her.
To me Lola Lowe was the stooped, thin woman who never said anything but “Fine head of hair on you, Jack. Thank you. And tell your mama thank you.”
She was two sentences to me.
Albert BIRDS KNOW FIRST WHEN THERE’S A STORM COMING up, and I could hear them hollering. I’d heard the cawing from the kitchen, and when I stepped out on the porch, I could feel the storm in the air myself, the wind whipping around the porch, smelling of electricity. The jays and crows and martins sounded their warnings to one another while I stayed out there, standing, waiting for the rain to hit. Nothing like the minutes before an electrical storm, all the force of it making the hairs on your arms stand on end, the trees nervous and shaking. I crossed my arms and waited until the sheet of rain slammed into the yard. The first line of lightning cracked. The birds went quiet, hiding.
At shift change at 6 p.m., the men coming on told us both banks in town never opened that morning. Word got around quick that they’d closed without a word of warning to anyone. Doors locked, shades down, everybody inside just gone. Supposedly weren’t going to open again period. None of us at the site had any money in ’em anyway, but the town was chock-full of fellows banging on the doors trying to get their money. A few went over to Jesse Bridgeman’s house to bang on it for a while. Figured since he ran the bank, he was to blame. They banged for most of the afternoon, though, because he went home and killed himself early that morning. Wife died a couple of years before and k
ids were at school, so nobody noticed until finally one of the fellows walked around and peeped in the back window. Jesse was laying in a heap on the ground, hadn’t even sat down to pull the trigger.
’Course in ’29, banks wobbled and shook, businesses shut down all along Main Street. Went broke. Must’ve been a quarter of those storefronts boarded up. Didn’t make much difference to me. Mines stayed open—with a few less men put to work in ’em—and life went on. No better, no worse.
I knew Jesse—not so as we’d do more than nod to each other in passing, but I’d thought he was a solid man. Didn’t under stand it. He had two boys and a girl, the youngest one of them about Virgie’s age. I didn’t know how you shrugged that off. Thought maybe it was different when there was money. Maybe the wife had rich parents who’d take care of the children.
I’d been in a few accidents, but the only one that I thought I might not get out of was in No. 5, down at Chickasaw.
I was loading then, shot the coal myself and then filled car after car. Like most things, your body fell into it after a while, scooping up the chunks of coal—slate, too, that’d be sorted out up on top. Didn’t get paid for slate. Hefting it all into the car, I didn’t hear a single voice, only coughing from time to time. Or the frustrated sound of a shovel hitting a slab of slate that wasn’t jarred loose. No clock, no such thing as time or minutes, only a shovelful and the next and the next. And you settled into the bosses’ system alright—how long didn’t matter, only how much. One ton per car. We filled them regular and smooth, me and Jonah, knowing to ignore the aches and soon enough they’d give up and quiet down.
The prop under one of the blasts wasn’t set right, and the whole side of the tunnel caved. Floor and ceiling seemed like they met each other in the middle, and I was blinking the dirt and dust out of my eyes, spitting it out of my mouth, blowing it from my nose. When I reached up to wipe it off, I couldn’t move my hands. Buried in it to my chest. It didn’t take me half a second to figure out that was the first problem needed to be solved. First I worked on wiggling my fingers, getting them loose enough that I could start to twist my hands. Then I hollowed out a bigger space by circling my wrists. That freed up my arms below the elbows some, and bit by bit I could feel the earth breaking up below my shoulders. I kept moving and shifting, pulling loose the same way the cat ate the grindstone—a little at a time. Once I had my arms out, it got easier. Then I could use both hands like a dog digging up a bone to push the dirt away from my body. I carved out a space around me until I got to below my hip bones, then I heaved myself out.