THE SECRETARY OF WAR’S reception room was a massive chamber of rich mahogany and ornate chandeliers. Winged griffins shouldered the heavy fireplace mantel and a vibrant fresco adorned the milk-colored ceiling: Mars, god of war, seminude beneath his plumed helmet, holding the reins of two rampant warhorses. The flags of various military branches hung diagonal from the walls, tipped with martial spades and spear points. Beneath them, a slick-haired clerk sat behind an oaken Federalist desk the size of a baby buffalo.
Mother had been waiting the better part of an hour for her appointment with the Secretary. She looked at her reflection in the mirror over the grand fireplace, then at the portrait of George Washington hanging on the textured wall behind the clerk’s desk. The revolutionist general was adorned in full military regalia, a small mountain of navy wool and buff lapels and gilt buttons. Fringed gold epaulettes adorned his shoulders; the white waterfall of a ruffled shirt crashed down his chest. The old cherry-tree killer, who could not tell a lie.
Mother clucked. “Somebody must’ve chopped down a whole forest to decorate this room.”
The clerk folded his hands across his desk, interlacing his fingers. “The rooms of the Secretary of War have more wood than any other office suite in the building. Mahogany, maple, black walnut. The wainscoting is cherry.”
“How appropriate,” said Mother. “Tell me, sir, what do you think of the trouble in West Virginia?”
The clerk had a small, sharp nose; it twitched slightly at the question. He took his fountain pen from the brass holder on his desk. “I think that is beyond my purview, Mrs. Jones. I am not hired for my opinions.”
Mother Jones approached his desk, wading wide-legged over the parquet floor, her swollen feet straining her pumps. The hard rasp of her stiff-starched dress audible in the grand room. She paused at the very edge of the giant desk—a cannonball of a woman, her shadow splashing across the man’s desk blotter.
“But surely you do have them, son. Opinions?”
The clerk paused in the scratching of his pen and cocked his head, as if he’d heard something in the silence of the chamber she had not. Perhaps one of the fae folk had whispered in his ear.
“The Secretary will see you now.”
“YOU MIGHT AS WELL try to sweep up the Atlantic Ocean with a broom,” quoted the Secretary of War, reading from the intelligence report on his desk. His office was even more opulent than the reception room, a vast chamber of polished battle regalia, walls of gleaming swords and oiled rifles. He frowned, lacing his fingers. “This is from one of our sources on the ground, Mrs. Jones, asked whether he thought the Union leadership could dissuade these miners from further violence.”
Ocean with a broom. Mother felt a hot sting in her breast, remembering how her boys had marched past her, sure as a king tide. Still, she had more than a pinch of pride in them—they’d called her bluff, they had. Her phony telegram. And they were rising up now, as she’d always preached they would. The only problem with rising up was getting cut back to ground—especially when the man with the reaping blade thought you weren’t but a bunch of weeds.
Mother leaned forward in the overstuffed leather chair. “And what source on the ground would that be, Mr. Secretary, pray tell?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“A source on the side of the miners, or the coal companies?”
“On the side of the United States of America, Mrs. Jones.”
“Ah,” said Mother, patting the chair arms, slick with polish. “And have you been down to West Virginia lately, Mr. Secretary? To coal country?”
“I have not.”
“If you had, Mr. Secretary, you’d know the United States of America isn’t the same to everybody. No, sir. Folks down there, on both sides, they’re fighting for their country. Their America. Their vision of who she is and what she’ll be. Same’s this country did sixty years ago when it rent itself in two. Same’s it did not a hundred years before that, when it broke the thumb of the Crown and folks from all over the world wanted to come here, to this place where such a thing was possible.”
The Secretary nodded. “That’s exactly why we have to stamp out this revolt as quickly as we can. We have several million unemployed in this nation, Mrs. Jones. If this Appalachian uprising were to catch fire and spread beyond the state’s borders, we could find ourselves with an insurrection beyond our means to contain.”
Mother leaned forward, gripping the brass knobs of the chair arms. She’d found herself in such armchairs many a time, in the high offices of judges and governors and magnates. Old white men, all of them. But if there were one good thing about being nearly a century old, it was that all these old men hiding behind their desks weren’t but schoolboys compared with her.
“I assure you, Mr. Secretary, that everything in West Virginia will turn out all right without the nation’s armed forces being sent.”
The man folded his arms across his desk. His thin white jowls were cleanly shaved, his gray mustache small and trim. His navy tie was knotted hard against his plump throat. “You’re fond of calling these men your boys, are you not?”
“I am, sir.”
“And did you not try to persuade your boys to lay down their rifles some few days ago, before this violence began?”
“Aye, I did.”
“Tell me, Mrs. Jones, what was the end result?”
Mother felt that sting again—a hard little jag in the heaving of her heart, as if the man had delivered his question at the end of a barb. She gritted her teeth. “I was unsuccessful then, I was. I don’t approve of their course of action. But they had to make themselves heard, Mr. Secretary. And they have done.”
The man’s face darkened. “This is a civilized republic, Mrs. Jones. Armed rebellion is not how our citizens are heard.”
Mother glanced at the portraits on the office walls, heroes of the American Revolution scowling in their powdered wigs and high coat collars—men who’d thrown off the yoke of the most powerful king in the world. “Our forefathers hanging here on your walls, Mr. Secretary, they might beg to differ.”
“Those men were fighting against tyranny.”
Mother leaned forward again in her chair, making it groan. The old ire was rising in her chest now, the thunder. “Tyranny, Mr. Secretary? I wonder what you might call a system in which a skilled labor force the size of a small nation are made to work in conditions more dangerous than armed service in the Great War, are paid not in legal tender but company scrip, housed not in personal homes but company camps, where they and their families are given zero compensation for job-related injury or death, and any drive for better wages or safer conditions is back-broken by a private army of company spies and hired gun thugs who regularly throw families out into the cold and beat fathers with brass knuckles, who have fired machine guns into tent colonies and done cold-blooded murder in broad daylight on the front steps of an American courthouse—just last month. If not tyranny, what would you call such a system, Mr. Secretary? Certainly you wouldn’t call it American.”
“Miners are not slaves. They are not forced to work in the coalfields. It is a choice.”
“A choice, aye. To work or starve. You’ve said it yourself, Mr. Secretary, there are several million fewer jobs in this country than working men. Join or die.”
The Secretary’s cheeks reddened. He folded his hands across his desk. His fingernails were trim and square, gouged clean. “Regardless, Mrs. Jones, my job is to preserve peace. If this Redneck army does not stand down by the President’s deadline tomorrow, we will have no choice but to send in the United States Army to put them down.”
Mother sniffed. “I have it on good authority that bombs have already fallen on West Virginia. American civilians, bombed by American warplanes, on American soil. Surely a first for the republic. What do you make of that?”
“Those were not our warplanes, Mrs. Jones. Not yet. But they may be soon. You say your boys wanted to be heard. I say it’s time they start to listen. If not to you, Mother, then to Uncle Sam.”