MOTHER JONES BATTLED HER way through the backstage crowd, her handbag dangling from one arm. She was beset by Union officials who wanted to meet her, who’d tell her how great she was and beg her to visit their districts. She kept moving, paying them no mind. She was making for a jug-eared young man standing alone at the edge of the swarm, hat in hand. His teeth flashed in his gaunt face.
“Sidney Hatfield,” she said, taking his hand. “A God-damned pleasure.” She clasped his hand in both of her own and held it against her heavy bosom, staring him deep in the eyes. “It’s a long time I been praying for a boy like you, one who ain’t afraid of the Devil. One who can show these boys how to stand up like men.”
The young police chief rocked back and forth slightly, as if unsure what to say. He just smiled, showing his pink gums and capped teeth. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
Other men were pushing forward, pressing for her attention. Mother ignored them, keeping his hand clutched tight against her chest, squeezing it, searching him out with her eyes. She was making him uncomfortable but didn’t care. She had to know. Had to know if this boy had the steel in him she hoped, the mettle to stand up to what was coming down the pike.
Plenty of people could be brave once, even several times over their lifetimes, but it took rare nerve to keep it up for weeks, months, years, while the kings of state and industry tried to grind you down in their gears and machinations. While the gun thugs haunted your waking hours and the bloodhounds crept to your door at night. While the reporters scandalized you in their papers and the spies wormed their way into your brain and bank account.
They’d been after her for decades, they had, the coal kings and steel barons, siccing their thugs and underlings on her, but they hadn’t cracked her, not yet. Though, lying in her bed at night, she sometimes wondered how much longer she could hold up. Every day another fight.
It took the faith of a true believer to survive it, someone who loved their cause and people enough to die—or, rarer still, a born rebel, hard as Christ and mean as the Devil, who’d die before they broke. A fly on the back of an iron bull—someone who didn’t know but to fight. Mother didn’t sense a lick of quit in this boy, in his deep-set eyes and metal mouth. He seemed like the kind who didn’t crack when you hammered into him, just turned harder, denser, meaner.
Blood would tell.
She squeezed his hand a last time, lowering her voice. “Give them hell, boy.”
Later they were lined up for a photograph, a row of unionists staring straight-backed at the camera, as if before a firing squad. In the ashy grain of the image, Sid’s head was cocked slightly over his stiff white collar and dark suit. His face cut hard and sharp, his cheeks dark, his killer’s eyes aimed far over the photographer’s shoulder, as if on a distant ridgeline. Smilin’ Sid did not smile. He’d turned the dead mayor’s jewelry store into a gun shop.
On the train home, Mother watched the high ridges chug past, so high and steep they seemed the eroded ramparts of some fallen castle. She dabbed her face with a handkerchief and wound the damp linen around her hands. She was feeling her age, she was. These speeches seemed to sap more of her strength every time.
By her own reckoning, she was more than ninety now. Naught but a child when she’d left the crag and heath of Ireland, huddled in the lightless hold of a merchant ship. She’d died several times since then, or thought she had. Memphis, 1867, when she’d washed the bodies of her four little ones for burying and then her husband’s, too, as yellow fever raged through the workers’ districts of the city and death carts trundled through the streets. Then Chicago, 1871, when her dress shop burned in the Great Chicago Fire, the flames roaring from ten thousand windows while people ran screaming through the streets, the sky black as night. The new life she’d worked so hard to create—incinerated.
After the fire, in a black-scorched building where the Knights of Labor met, Mother found yet another life—what would become her home for the rest of her years: Wherever there’s a fight.
She was there for the early labor battles in Chicago, when the forces of industry decried the eight-hour workday as the work of foreign devils, agitators, anarchists. The early strikes were met with Pinkertons—the same breed of thug as the Baldwin-Felts. The skulls of factory workers were crushed beneath hooves and clubs, blown apart by pistols and riot guns.
In Chicago, Mother learned how the game was played. Then she took to the road. She’d walked these hills for twenty years in her black dress and spectacles, organizing, taking the Union into the deepest counties of thug rule. She’d waded up creeks to avoid patrols and led strings of miners’ wives over mountains in dead of night, protesting, banging their skillets like war drums. She’d clapped her hand over the barrel of more than one angry mine guard’s gun and stared him back to his runthood—God’s truth, she had—and stood in front of the state capitol calling Governor Glasscock a Crystal Peter and God-damned dirty coward to the hurrahs of the hardest men on this earth or below it.
Her boys.
Oh, but the past year had taken a chunk of her. She’d been all over the country, speaking to steelers and shoemakers, iron workers and cigar makers. She felt heartsore, thin-boned and fleshy, in need of rest, a firm floor beneath her feet—and she a woman famous for calling her shoes her home. But her old battleground was calling her back. She had to come.
Men were taking to the hills, she knew. Striking miners who refused to sign the yellow-dog contracts of the coal companies, which forbade them to unionize. They painted their faces with ash and carried hunting rifles, patrolling the ridges and folds of the hills, watching mine operations from hidden perches. They were watching the scabs imported to work in their stead. Meanwhile, mine guards stood high on the coal tipples, as upon castle parapets, armed with high-powered rifles and telescopic sights.
War, building like methane in the chamber of a mine. Any day could come the spark.