BIG FRANK HUGHAM, MISS Beulah’s grandson, stood among the strikers who’d walked, ridden, and hitched to the county seat to hear Mother Jones speak. Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, once called “The Most Dangerous Woman in America,” who waded the creeks when the mining companies controlled the roads. Mother Jones, black-clad like Death’s own grandmother, who once held the bloody trench coat of a Baldwin-Felts agent before a crowd of miners: The first time I ever saw a God-damned mine guard’s coat decorated to suit me.
So the rumors said.
“I hear she’s more than ninety now,” whispered one of the miners. “Still walking these same hills since 1899, where angels feared to tread.”
“She come out of Ireland in Black ’47,” said another. “Same year as my great-gran, and her and her ten siblings ten years dead afore Mother Jones even stepped foot in this state.”
In West Virginia, the old woman had found shoddy company-built villages where the rain fell black with coal dust and gaunt men white and brown and Black worked ten hours a day in the three-foot-high rooms of the mines. Men like Big Frank and his comrades, who undercut the coalfaces with their picks, drilled holes with hand augurs, and inserted black-powder cartridges, lighting squibs of waxed paper as they yelled “Fire in the hole!” and scrambled for cover at the nearest crosscut, shoveling the black wreckage of the blast into mine cars.
Sometimes they loaded ten tons per day, back-bent three hundred feet underground. They were killed in droves, by roof falls and explosions and years of coal dust in their lungs. Wage slaves, Mother called them, and their bosses she compared to the Russian czars.
Big Frank and his comrades were waiting before the county courthouse for the woman to appear. The strike was on and the crack of gunfire could be heard echoing along the Tug—quick, bloody skirmishes between strikers and Baldwin mine guards. Rifle slugs sparked against coal carts and hoppers. Sniper rounds pocked the automobiles of mine bosses; bullets punctured miners’ shacks or spat up dirt at the feet of scabs. Now and then a mine guard or striker or scab staggered and fell, clutching himself, some part of him blown red in the dirt. Only in Matewan, where Sid walked the streets, did the gun thugs fear to tread.
Miss Beulah hadn’t wanted Frank to chance the journey to the county seat. “Listen to it out there, Grandboy. It’s death zipping through the air every second, looking to feed the worms. You asking for trouble, you go out there today.”
But Frank had to get out of the sour-smelling canvas tent, out of the fly-ridden encampment where they spent their days. He was not a man built for idling. The chunks of muscle that encased his bones needed work, sweat, exertion—or else a sort of acid built up inside him, a bodily distemper worse to him than heat or cold, hunger or fear.
“I’m-a go crazy I don’t get out this camp, Mama-B. Besides, it’s Mother Jones we talking about. The Miners’ Angel. How many chances might I get to hear her speak?”
It was more than that. Mother Jones had been a hero of Evie’s. His wife had followed the fiery Irishwoman’s speeches and exploits. He couldn’t bear to miss her.
Now the crowd of miners fell silent as the old woman climbed onto the bed of a truck parked in front of the county courthouse. Her stage. She had white hair and wide hips and a black dress, frilly and handspun, a little black hat pinned on top of her curls. She looked like someone’s prim grandmother, heavy-bodied, making her way to church or market. Then she cleared her throat, like jacking a shell into the chamber of a gun, and her Irish brogue boomed over the crowd.
“Boys, I am here to tell ye that we stand at the dawn of a new civilized state. Two thousand years since the Roman lords nailed Christ to that rugged old cross, the condition of wage slavery, worker exploitation, and child labor is sounding its death rattle, dying into history, and a new dawn shines before us.”
Hurrah! cried the miners. A new dawn!
“That’s right,” said Mother. “We stand in the last bastion of nonunion mines in coal country. The other coalfields have been organized. Miners have leverage there, they have rights. No longer can they be bullied to work under loose tops, in gassy rooms. No longer can they be forced to toil fourteen hours each day, only to have their loads nitpicked by a company shill. Here we face the same enemy we faced in those other fields. Mine guards. Gun thugs. God-damned Baldwin bloodhounds. I say damn them all, by Jesus Christ.”
Down with dogs! cried the miners. God damn them!
“I tell ye, boys, they don’t scare me. Been facing them for nigh on twenty years, I have. A troop of them came into the New River fields back in ’02, wearing their new suttler-cut uniforms and gray hats and big dragoon pistols, repeater rifles propped on their knees. Looked like the cavalry of some nation their own. Like hell they were. I came into a strikers’ camp after a posse of Baldwins raided the place and heard the keening and the sobbing. I pushed open the door of a bullet-riddled cabin to find a miner with his brains blown across his bed, killed while he slept, and his wife wailing like a banshee, holding her husband’s broken head in her lap.”
No! cried the miners. The poor woman!
“So I was none pleased when I faced down that same Baldwin gang myself. On my way to Red Warrior to speak, I was, riding up a creekbed in a mule-cart with a forty-man escort of miners when I heard shots from the railbed above us. I crawled up that slope to find the Baldwins pushing a flatcar fortified with sandbags and a machine gun. I walked up to that car and set my hand over the muzzle of the gun. ‘Ain’t nobody dying today,’ I said.”
Mother’s voice was a crackling Irish storm, thundering across the crowd.
“And you know who it was behind that machine gun? Albert Felts himself, it was. ‘You God-damned hellcat,’ he says to me, ‘it’ll be you gets killed you don’t take your hand off my gun.’
“‘Your gun?’ I says to him. ‘It’s my boys bring up the ore makes this gun. My boys melt it in furnaces and roll it into steel. It’s my boys dig the coal that fuels those furnaces. Hell, this gun is mine.’
“‘Well, it’s my finger on the trigger,’ says he.
“‘These men, they ain’t at war with you,’ I said. ‘They’re battling them that pay you, rich men in high houses never touched a trigger in their whole coddled lives. Coal barons whose fortunes come from even higher places, old men in boiled shirts in London and New York City, plump-fed on the stolen wages of a thousand thousand men who sweat when they work.’”
Damn right, said the miners. There’s the truth.
Mother shook her head. “‘We’ll kill them all and you, too, you God-damned hellcat,’ he says to me. I took off my black pot hat. I says to him, I said, ‘Son, you touch a single white thread of hair on this here head of mine and that creek there will run red with blood, and it will be yours that crimsons it. I am leading a band of five hundred men up to my meeting at Red Warrior, every man jack of them armed with a rifle-gun. They’re taking the high route along the ridge, and they’ve heard your shooting, they have. Their sharpshooters have got you dead to rights. You may start the shooting, but my boys will end it.’
“Well, I watched those Baldwins lift their eyes up the steep side of the ridge, where the vegetation grew thick enough to hide whole battalions. I watched them hunker behind their sandbags. ‘You see,’ I said, ‘I hauled my tired bones up out of that there creek to save your lives. I don’t want killing today. I got a meeting to hold.’”
What happened? asked the miners. What did he say?
“Didn’t say a damn word, did he? Though I thought he might bust for fury. He let my boys cross the tracks to safety, he did, but I kept my hand on that gun. Didn’t trust him no farther than I could throw him.”
The crowd of miners looked at one another, eyes wide. They’d heard the story of Mother Jones and the machine gun before, but never from her own mouth. Her voice cracked and growled with power, coarsened by long, hard years spent on the road, facing down thugs and crooked lawmen who didn’t kill her simply because she was an old woman. Who still might.
Mother wiped the lather of sweat from her brow and squinted into the crowd, rocking on her overburdened feet. “But the Baldwins ain’t the only enemy we face, you know that. It’s the men that hire them. The coal operators. King Coal. They like to call me an agitator. Hell, wasn’t Washington? Weren’t the pilgrims on the Mayflower? They like to ask me if I have a permit to speak. Sure, I got one. Patrick Henry gave it to me one hundred and forty-four years ago. Him and Jefferson, Adams, and Washington. And I damn well intend to use it.
“Now you men who fought in the Great War, you were told it was a war for democracy, were you not? A war to end all wars. You went Over There, you took down the Kaiser and the German Reich. You saved the world from oppression and came home and found what? More oppression. More autocracy. A new bunch of American kaisers, men who made their fortunes on the war, on coal and steel, arms and machinery, on the blood and muscle of American fighting men, only to abuse those same men back here at home, exploiting them in their mines and mills, factories and stockyards and killing floors. Robber barons and coal czars who use gun thugs and murderers to keep you in subjection, bent-kneed before them, your voices unheard. Same as the kings of the Old World.
“But these American kings, they know their time is coming, boys. They do. They know a great storm’s upon them, ready to knock them from their high and mighty thrones. Oh, they’ll fight, they will, but they don’t know who they’re fighting with. No, my boys. Some call me a humanitarian. The hell I am. I’m a God-damned hell-raiser, that’s what, and we are going to clean up West Virginia. Not with any guns, no, but with the American flag. We are going to make West Virginia the leading state of Americanism. We’re going to take that flag bought from British tyranny with seven long years of American blood, rip it from the hands of King Coal and his thugs, and plant it hard in the ground here. We are going to live beneath it. That flag is our banner, and no rotten robbers or gun thugs can take it from us, because I will just raise hell on them!”
Hurrah for America! Hurrah for the Union! Hurrah for Mother Jones!
Frank didn’t cheer with his comrades, but the old woman’s words had moved him deeply. A wind through a high forest, lifting his branches. His lungs felt wide and full, his bones double-strong. Around him, the miners began to sing the Union anthem, sung to the same tune as “John Brown’s Body” and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
It is we who plowed the prairies, built the cities where they trade,
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid,
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made,
But the Union makes us strong.
Solidarity forever, solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever, for the Union makes us strong …
Big Frank raised his own heavy bass—what a teacher during his short stint of coal-camp schooling had called a basso profundo—a rare voice, rich and rolling, which he let fly with the others. He rocked back on his heels, singing, imagining their voices weaving and meshing like hundreds of songbirds, even as the hills cracked and echoed with guns.