SID SHOVELED SNOW FROM the front of the store each morning, white cheeks blown hard and red over a dark wool coat and muffler. Soldiers in heavy Mackinaws stood on rooftops and water towers, breath smoking against the cold gray sky. Patrol horses clopped through the streets. The Regulars stood guard at the mines and train depots; they patrolled both sides of the river. Trainloads of scabs arrived daily, taking over the houses in the coal camps and company towns.
Sid’s trial loomed. He and twenty-some townsmen and miners were up on murder charges for the Matewan shoot-out. Rumors came drifting down the street like smoke.
You hear? The judge’s resigned, joined the prosecution instead.
This new judge, word is he don’t allow no women nor Negroes on his juries.
They’re gunning for us, Sid. High-hat thugs in hundred-dollar suits.
Sid said nothing, flashing his teeth at the news.
Meanwhile, at least two witnesses wouldn’t be taking the stand. One, a state trooper, had been killed in what was said to be a drunken pistol-fight with some local bootleggers. Two miners came to tell Sid and Ed the news as they sat huddled at their checkerboard.
“Word is, this state police tried to skin some likker boys out their Hi-Po, thought his badge meant he ain’t have to pay for it.”
The second miner sniffed. “Reckon he did pay at the end.”
“Course,” said the first, “recall that rifle-kilt innkeeper, sniped off his front porch a few weeks back? Heard he aimed to testify, too, same as that trooper.”
The other miner shrugged. “A shut mouth swallows no lead.”
MOTHER JONES RODE SHOTGUN in one of the Union relief trucks, a beribboned stack of presents in her lap. The road was a mess, a steep slog of mud and snow that threatened to beach the one-ton chassis on its undercarriage. Again and again, the convoy halted for the drivers to rock one of the vehicles out of the muck and mire. They jammed duckboards beneath the wheels for traction and secured heavy tow chains to bumpers and axles. Their breath smoked from their mouths as they worked, pale in the chill air, while the coke ovens fumed from the hillsides.
It was Christmas Eve.
Mother watched them work to dislodge a truck full of country hams. Far below them, down the sheer slope of the ridge, a mine tipple stood over the railroad tracks, smoking beside a dark green bend of the Tug Fork River. She could see the scabs down there, small as ants, climbing the catwalks and working the conveyors, while the Regulars stood guard with their rifles, ensuring the coal kept running.
Mother shook her head and looked back to the road, where the drivers and relief workers were standing in knee-deep muck, rocking one of the trucks on its axles. There was a time when she would’ve hiked her skirts and rolled up her dress sleeves and worked right alongside them, helping to unstick the mired rigs, but she was past those days. It wasn’t that she was getting old; she’d been old for twenty years and more. Most women her age weren’t but skulls and bones coffin-nailed six feet underground, or else a million grains of ash spread to the four winds or jammed in a mantel urn. She reckoned God just kept her around to raise hell on the coal kings and robber barons, and that’s what kept her going.
Still, the holidays seemed bleaker of late, bluer. She kept going back to her Memphis days, golden days—a fire burning in the hearth and babes on every side of her, fine-haired, glowing like peeled potatoes. Her husband, George Jones, home from the ironworks, where he forged parts to repair steam engines and sawmills. A man well respected in his trade, who carried the thick swell of the work in his arms and shoulders. A real man, he was. They had a small freestanding house and went to Mass in a little converted schoolhouse where the priest was Irish and the light of Sunday mornings was a thing to behold—enough to lift the sorest heart.
But they lived near Bayou Gayoso, a swampy offshoot of the Mississippi where wild Kaintucks moored their flatboats and floating shanties packed the marshy banks—a place the high-class Memphians didn’t visit. When the yellow fever came, it hit the poorer neighborhoods hardest. People called it the “strangers’ disease” since Yankees and immigrants had no immunity to the mosquito-borne plague. The city burned barrels of tar in the streets and the infected were made to wear yellow jackets and Mother watched her four little ones die one by one, jaundiced and gum-bleeding, spitting up the black blood of the disease in their final throes, and she could do nothing. Then it took big George himself.
The banshee shrieks sounded ceaselessly from the other homes along her street, and for a time Mother became one of them—a spirit of uttermost woe, wrapped alone in her cloak, wailing without end. Even now, more than fifty years later, she could hardly turn her mind’s eye upon that time, like the haunted or accursed room in an old manse—a door best kept shut.
George’s union local had held a service in his honor, and then Mother had gone north to Chicago. Thirty years old, she’d lost four children and a husband. But she’d gain another family in the years to come—a whole people, hardworking and poor, worked to the bone and spat out in the dirt. A people who swung picks and molded iron and rolled steel, who kept the lights on and boilers burning.
The door latch clicked, breaking her reverie, and the driver hauled himself back into the cab. When he removed his flatcap, the balding dome of his head steamed in the small cab; his galoshes were mud-caked to the knees. “Now I know why old Saint Nick had him a sleigh,” he said, wiping the fogged-over windshield with a red bandanna from his back pocket. “And a team of them flying reindeer.”
Mother looked down at the mine tipple straddling the railroad tracks far below them. The hopper cars were moving slowly beneath the chutes, each receiving its fifty tons of lump coal. Up Lick Creek, the strikers were shivering in their canvas tents, their belts cinched down like nooses, while the coal operators kicked up their stockinged feet at home, smoking one-dollar cigars and drinking brandy before the roaring fires of stone hearths.
“Give me old Donner and Blitzen, and there are some sons of bitches I’d like to dump a load of coal in their stockings this Christmas, that’s for damn sure.”
“Maybe light it on fire, too,” said the driver.
Mother grinned. “Aye, they never seen a Missus Claus like me.”
THEY DISTRIBUTED THE CHRISTMAS hams and gifts beneath the cold gray light of afternoon. The children danced and shrieked with glee over the marbles and building blocks and checkerboards. Mother had bought most of the presents with pocket money the Union gave her, along with donations from supporters who’d read of the conditions of the tent cities in the United Mine Workers Journal.
It was no day for speechifying; Mother sat back and watched the people enjoy themselves. The menfolk were erecting a spindly Christmas tree in the middle of the camp, heaving like synchronized sailors on an array of thick hemp hawsers secured to the upper trunk, chanting as they worked. Heave, ho. Heave, ho. A hunk of a man worked one of the ropes all by himself. Not tall but broad, stout as a bull, and working with a wide-legged ferocity, a near violence. He coiled the rope around his forearms, doing the work of two men at once.
The Union driver knelt down beside her. “That’s the man them McDowell thugs kidnapped and beat down,” he said. “Big Frank Hugham, strongest hewer in the Tug.”
Meanwhile, some of the children were building a mine tipple, erecting it out of wooden blocks and tin cans and mismatched pieces of metal erector sets. Barefoot children, Black and white and brown, working side by side, tonguing their cheeks with concentration—Mother wondered where else in the country you might see such a sight on Christmas Eve. Even in the company coal camps, there was segregation. The men were all paid the same—so many cents per ton, no matter their skin—but some companies gave better houses to white families, and the schoolhouses were often separate, sometimes the churches.
Here in the tent colony, left to their own devices, the people seemed well mingled, unified in common cause. Clusters of Italians, Spanish, Slavs, Blacks, and whites. Mother worried over the day when the operators and Baldwins would find a way to drive wedges between the workers, to divide them color from color, tongue from tongue—to crack the solidarity that gave them strength. Black versus white, native versus foreign, Protestant versus Catholic. But that day was not today.
A cry rose and Mother looked up to see the ax-sharpened base of the Christmas tree slide down into the posthole they’d dug, the evergreen fronds shivering into place, dumping powdery ledges of snow. The colonists clapped and cheered and whistled between their fingers. The children skipped and ran circles around the tree.
Later the big miner came up to her. He took off his cap, rolling it between his hands. “Mrs. Jones?”
“I am,” she said. “You’re the one they call Big Frank, are you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“The one those thugs took to the woods?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m sorry for what you went through, son. I reckon they wanted to make an example of you. Find the strongest man they could and knock him down.”
The big man nodded, his wide jaw muscles flickering.
Mother took his hand. “You gave them one, too, a powerful example. You, son, you showed those thugs it’s a damn sight harder to put a coal miner in the ground if he don’t want to go.”
The big man blinked, his eyes wet. “I never thought of it like that, ma’am.”
Mother squeezed his hand. “Do,” she said. “Do think of it like that.”
The relief workers were loading the trucks to go when Mother noticed a little girl off on her own, hunched over an exposed rock a little distance from the other children. Mother ambled over, holding her skirts in her fists. “And what are you building here, my girl?”
The girl leaned back and Mother saw a wooden blockhouse, windowless but for slits where straight little twigs stuck out. “It’s a fort here like what old Devil Anse lives in,” she said. “It’s to keep us safe from the gun thugs.”
“You don’t feel safe up here, my dear?”
The girl looked up. She had enormous blue eyes and a pointed chin. “They’re gonna hang Smilin’ Sid from the neck till he’s dead. Then who’ll protect us?”