The saddest day I had was in speaking at a number of points from Bluefield to Huntington, West Virginia. There had been a strike by mine workers and in the cold fall days, with a sprinkle of early snow, the miners and their wives and children had been evicted from company houses and were suffering. Worst of all, men in the Army uniform were being used by the mine owners under the pretense of “preserving order.”
–Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, 1920.
A GROWL BETWEEN THE hills, distant at first but growing louder, nearer. Sentries hollered the news from mouth to mouth, down the creeks and across the ravines.
“The Army is coming! The Army is coming!”
A military convoy. It came crawling through the valley, slow and immense, a river rising between the hills, carrying supply trucks and motorcycles, mules and wagons and a wheeled artillery gun. The governor, at behest of the coal operators, had asked the War Department to intervene. Five hundred soldiers from an infantry regiment out of Camp Sherman, Ohio—the first federal troops to step foot in the Tug Valley since the Civil War. Their canvas tents bloomed overnight, their guns oiled bright beneath the sun.
No public assemblies would be permitted, no parades. No rallies or picket lines. The soldiers patrolled the roads with fixed bayonets. They greeted every train at the station, ensuring the influx of strikebreakers—scabs—wouldn’t be harassed. They guarded every mine. Beneath their watch, men from out of state blasted and shoveled and hauled coal out of the deep bellies of the hills. The coke ovens fumed again from the hillsides, the conveyor belts rattled. The tipples, crouched high astride the railroad tracks, dumped their coal into waiting hoppers.
Soon, long trains of dark rubble were winding along the Tug Fork, car after car after car, creaking out of the cold valley.
THE THIN SMOKE OF crooked tin stovepipes rose from the tent colony, smudging the white sky. Families huddled in the chow line, hands tucked under their arms, waiting for bulldog gravy and water sandwiches—lard-soaked bread. Their faces white and pink and brown, as if shaped and fired from varying admixtures of clay. A ragged tribe, clad in chin-knotted headscarves and tatty hats. The men clenched smokeless pipes in their jaws. Shaggy dogs roamed the encampment, hopeful of scraps.
Miss Beulah sucked her teeth. The hogs, soon for the knife, were lean in their pens. A sickness had reached West Virginia. A chestnut blight. For the first fall in the history of the land, a child couldn’t hurl a stone at a tree and collect the fallen chestnuts for their mother to dry or roast or fatten the pigs.
She turned and hobbled through the flap-door of her tent. Inside, the sourish smell of people living close. Her grandboy Frank was lying on his cot, still swaddled in bandages from the knocking those thugs in McDowell had put on him.
Miss Beulah shook her head. Thought they’d killed him, they did. They didn’t know what stuff Hughams were made from. Her boy was a hewer, after all, broad-built like John Henry who raced the steam-hammer, driving spikes until his hands turned cold blue and his heart blew like a bomb. But it wasn’t just her grandboy’s body that stood up to those thugs, it was his spirit, no matter how many clubs and pipes and bootheels they laid into him. It was his soul, big with faith.
He had some new knots and lumps where his cracked ribs and shoulder blades had knit themselves back together. Doc Moo said the bones would be stronger where they broke, like when the shop men welded back a cracked axletree or track rail. Still, the sight of him shirtless pained her, the big burls of muscle welted and scarred like a butcher’s block. It made her think of her husband, the cat-o’-nine scars all ridged across his back like the very map of Hell. A world made in fury instead of love. Those scars had itched him all his life, and he’d liked her to keep her nails long so she could scratch him before bed. It helped him sleep.
“Mama-B?”
Her grandboy’s voice broke her spell. More and more, she tended to get lost in her memories, in the company of the ones who’d passed before her. Not lost, maybe. Maybe just finding her way home.
She spooned some of the thin soup for him. He sat up in bed, wincing. “Mama-B, I’m thirty-damn years old. I can feed myself.”
“Hush up, boy. Doctor Moo said good eating is the best thing for you. You got to eat not just for your belly but all the broke bone and meat of you. You ain’t been putting it down like you should.”
“Hell I ain’t. Give it here.”
Miss Beulah handed him the bowl and spoon, smiling to herself. She hadn’t spent this long on earth without learning how to deal with the mule-headed men of her line. “I’m-a watch you eat it, though. Make sure you don’t pour it out.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll see you don’t.”
In the distance, the crack-crack of gunfire. Just when they got the strike to hold, a thousand combat boots had landed in the valley, heavy as blows. Ten soldiers at every mine.
The Regulars, people called them. The governor claimed it was to maintain law and order, but Miss Beulah knew that was a hot crock of bull. The coal operators had wanted them to come, even planned it. The Baldwins couldn’t break the strike, but the Army?
Another stammer of rifle fire in the distance, echoing through the valley.
“Them high-pars been cracking all day,” she said.
The Regulars were repelling attacks at the mines, shooting and moving through the trees, up the mountainsides and along the ridges, sending the strikers to flight. During the Great War, miners had been exempt from the draft. America needed all the coal she could get to fire the boilers of troop carriers and battleships, the forges of steel mills and gun factories. Still, tens of thousands of mining men volunteered, same as her grandboy had. West Virginia had more volunteers per person than any state in the union. Shooting at Baldwins was one thing—the miners weren’t about to shoot at American troops.
“It’s guerrilla war out there,” said Frank. He was holding the spoon overhand, supping the soup between sentences. The battling seemed to stir his spirit, which both heartened and worried her.
Miss Beulah sucked her teeth. “Ain’t no war if you can’t shoot back.”
“That’s true.” Frank scraped his spoon along the bottom of the bowl. “But the Army can’t stay here forever.”
Miss Beulah looked out through the narrow slit of the tent door, shaped like a cat’s eye. Her rocker sat out there wearing a pale dust of snow, shivering slightly on the duckboards. She pulled her quilt tighter around her shoulders. She felt cold all the time now, bone-cold, like it was creeping into her marrows. A shiver went through her—her mama always said that was Death passing close.
Miss Beulah shook her head. “Neither can we, boy. Neither can we.”