“If you are big and brave enough to throw a rock, you’d better be big and brave enough not to hide your hands behind your back when you get caught. You show your hands, and you own up to what you done.”
—Buhlar Hinton
MARY LEE MINE NO. 2, 1975
Ray had never really believed he would end up working the coal mines, but there weren’t many options for a young Black man after high school graduation. No scholarship. No college. He didn’t even have the extra ten dollars to buy his class ring. The coal mines were the only place he could get a decent wage right out of high school, and he couldn’t afford to turn his back on a steady job. He had an “in”—his dad had worked the mines before him, and others put in a good word for him. Ray was known to be easygoing, likable. He didn’t have a reputation as a troublemaker or “problem.” Some men might have said they would kill for the opportunity for a decent job in the mines, even though it was a place where they could easily die. It was dangerous work, as Ray already knew. His father had literally been knocked senseless in a mining accident, and a loose boulder or razor-sharp sliver of shale could mean the end for a miner. Ray worked in small shafts and tunnels where he had less than four feet of height to maneuver in. He spent endless hours in dark, dank air, in a world with no light and no color. It was dark when he went down in the morning, it was dark all day, and it was dark when he got outside at night. He struggled with the heavy machinery; his work had to be done right or men would die. Some days it felt like the best Ray could do was pray that the roof’s weight held.
He hated every second of it.
He wasn’t meant to be kept in a small space; he didn’t like to be hunched over, to feel like walls were slowly closing in on him and there was no place to run, no place where there was light and air and space for a man to breathe. Ray felt like he was climbing into his own coffin every day. He let his imagination take him out of there, to the wide-open western skies, or up to Maine to eat lobster, to Mexico, or the warm, blue waters of Key West, Florida. In his mind, he would travel anywhere but into that black, dark pit where every breath was full of float dust that brought coal and rock and dirt into his lungs, where it settled in and took root as if to punish you for disturbing it in the first place.
Ray had grown up with old men who hadn’t gone into the mines in twenty years but their handkerchiefs still turned black every time they coughed or blew their noses or wiped their foreheads on a hot summer day. He saw other men dying before they even got a chance to retire—watched them struggling to breathe from lungs that were full of a sickness that didn’t have a name. Ray didn’t want to die in the mine or sweat coal for the rest of his life or have the mine grow in his lungs until it choked everything out, but what else was a guy to do when he was ready to work and earn his way in the world? The sad truth was, the best way to go up in the world was to go down into the mines. And the more dangerous the job, the better it paid.
But bad as it was, Ray’s time in the mines didn’t even end with the accident that left him with a concussion and his nose almost completely sliced off. Even after the twenty-two stitches, Ray spent another five years in the mines. He kept going back.
Until he couldn’t anymore.
One day, he woke up late and the sun was shining and he could hear birds chirping and the sky was the brightest blue he had ever seen. Ray just knew he couldn’t go down in that dark place again. He wanted to be in the sunshine. Lester worked at a different mine, and he had no plans of giving up a solid job anytime soon. He just shook his head when Ray told him he’d rather be poor in the light than rich in the dark. Ray dreamed of big adventures and a life where a man could be rewarded for his hard work without putting his life at risk. He imagined going to law school or even business school. He’d be a silk-suited CEO or lawyer, out-arguing anyone in a courtroom, or maybe a doctor or firefighter. At twenty-four, he’d stopped dreaming of baseball—that hurt too much. He knew that if he had been born someone else, he would have gotten a scholarship and gone to college, maybe even been drafted, and that knowledge hurt so much he put that dream away.
Ray also put away any hope of rides with neighbors to and from work.
He and his mom had been forced to move out of Praco; they loaded their house on the back of a truck and moved it to a piece of land in Burnwell, a short ways away from Praco. Ray was the youngest child and the one who was expected to stay with his mom and help her out. All but two of his siblings had left Alabama altogether. It wasn’t an easy place to live. But staying with his mom was a joy for Ray. He loved her more than anything. Her happiness was his happiness, and the other way around, and as far as Ray was concerned, that was the way it had always been and would always be. (Of course, he also didn’t mind her cooking for him. She would cook for him anytime day or night, and to Ray, that food tasted just like love felt.)
But now in his new neighborhood, Ray needed a car more than ever. He had gone from hiding in ditches away from strange cars on the road to getting into strange cars because he was desperate for a ride. It was a risk, because it wasn’t like the world had gotten any safer for a Black man.
Ray couldn’t get a job without a car, and he couldn’t buy a car without a job, so he was stuck, and sick of it. He was so tired of being without, of wanting, of struggling to make a dollar outside of the mine. Ray had always been a hard worker, but even he couldn’t walk ten or fifteen miles to a job and then back home again. Something had to give.
That something gave on a Saturday. Ray woke up, put on his best church clothes, had breakfast with his mom, kissed her goodbye, and then caught a ride from a friend of his. Ray asked to be dropped off a few blocks away from a car lot he had seen before. It was like he was looking at himself doing something—like watching a movie. Some days Ray wanted to be somebody else so much, it was like he really believed he was that imaginary person. And on that Saturday, Ray wasn’t a poor kid who was struggling to keep a job—he was a guy just out of college who had landed a great corporate position and was shopping for a brand-new car. He walked up and down the rows of cars, and a shiny, sky-blue Cutlass Supreme caught his eye. The blue velvet seats were so soft they felt like clouds, and its four headlights made it look like the car had a face, and that face was smiling just for Ray.
“You want to take her for a test drive?” asked the salesman.
Ray nodded. “I’d like that. I’d like to see how she drives.”
And just like that, the salesman handed over the keys. “These belong to you.”
Inside the car, Ray breathed deeply. It smelled like Christmas morning, and Easter Sunday, and Thanksgiving dinner, and his birthday all rolled into one.
He drove out of the lot, feeling strong and powerful and like there was nothing in this world he couldn’t do. He got on the highway, pressed his foot down on the gas pedal, and listened to the engine roar. He drove for over an hour, and when he turned around and headed back toward Birmingham, it was easy to pass the exit that led to the car lot and instead head back toward his mama’s house.
He never went back to the lot. Just then, Ray felt a hope so big he thought his heart might jump right out of his chest. Ray couldn’t wait to show his mama his new car. He couldn’t wait to tell her that life was really going to be changing for them both. This car was his. “These belong to you,” the salesman had said. It felt so real.
Ray held on to that car for two years, kept it in pristine condition. His mom was happy he could drive her to the store and run errands. She always sat straight up in that car, with a big smile on her face. She trusted Ray, and that gnawed at him every time he drove with her at his side. What if they got into an accident, or had a breakdown, and the police came? What would his mom think of what he’d done? He wanted to return the car, but what would he tell his mother when it was suddenly gone? He was trapped in a lie that had grown so big he couldn’t find his way out of it.
The guilt felt like it was rotting him from the inside out.
He’d never been more scared to tell anyone anything, but there was no avoiding it.
“I need to tell you something. Something serious.”
His mom was washing dishes, and she turned off the sink and dried her hands on a dish towel. “Well, let’s have a sit now. You don’t talk about something serious standing up.”
She got out two glasses and a pitcher of sweet tea out of the fridge.
“And you never talk about something serious without having a drink,” she added. She poured the tea and sat next to Ray at the kitchen table. “Now, what’s all this fuss about?”
“I did something. I did something wrong.”
She looked in Ray’s eyes and took a sip of tea. She didn’t say anything. His mom could say more in silence than most people could say in a ten-minute speech. She waited. Sipped more tea. Then she nodded at Ray, and the whole story came out. He told her about the test drive and the wanting to be someone else, someone different. He told her that he had never paid for that car and now everything was crashing down and he didn’t know what to do next.
Ray’s mom looked at him with the saddest eyes he had ever seen. “Are you sorry?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to make it right?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, then, you go make it right. You go to the police station, and you tell them everything, and you face the music. I didn’t raise you to take something that don’t belong to you, but I did raise you to admit your wrongs. You aren’t a boy anymore, and I can’t protect you from this. You admit what you did to them police, and then you admit what you did to God. He will forgive you, and so will I. But you need to choose who you are, Ray. You need to choose what sort of man you are going to be. You need to choose now. I know you will choose right. I know you will.” Her eyes were so sad, and Ray vowed right then and there that he would never, ever do anything to put that look of hurt in his mama’s eyes again. He would make her proud.
Ray called a friend to drive him to the police station, where he confessed. He ended up having to spend only a few months in a work release program. He went to Kilby Prison just to be processed, but was only there long enough for them to get his name into the system.
That was definitely long enough. There was nothing glamorous about prison. The food was horrible. The smell was horrible. The lack of freedom made every cell in his body ache. No car, no money, no job, nothing was ever worth risking his freedom for. At night, away from home, he spent a lot of time thinking about who and what mattered in this life.
God mattered. Lester mattered.
His freedom mattered.
And most of all, his mom mattered.
Ray had to serve a year and a half on parole, out of prison but supervised and monitored, but he didn’t care. He could have been on parole for fifty years—he knew he would never, ever do anything that was outside the law again.
“As God is my witness,” Ray said to Lester, “I will never take something that doesn’t belong to me again.”