Part 51

The miner's shack was perched on such high stilts that the wind whistled underneath the floor until it felt like ice to the bare feet of the children. It took a lot of coal in the grate and the kitchen stove to keep the place halfway warm. The children were sick all through the winter. Now and then the company doctor stopped in on his rounds of the coal camp to leave calomel and quinine.

With the birth of her last baby, Clate's wife got down with a bealed breast after she had been up and about for a week. "I'm bound to hire someone," Clate told his wife. So he hired Liz Elswick to come and do the cooking, washing, and ironing and to look after the children.

Out on Shoal's Fork neighbor women came eagerly to help each other in case of sickness.

Though it was not much they had to pay Liz--she took it out in trade at the store, the makings of a calico dress, a pair of shoes--it was a hardship on the Wellfords. For Liz Elswick, like other women in a coal camp, never having handled real money, knew little of cost. Nor did she know how to supply the simple needs of the family. Phoebe was too ill to offer a word of advice, poor though it would have been. So, before long, Clate was behind with his store bill. Or to put it the other way around, for the company always took theirs first, Clate had nothing left in his pay envelope on payday.

Then, when he might have had a few dollars coming, something else would happen: shoes would be worn out, he'd have to buy new ones for the children couldn't go barefoot in the winter. He himself had to wear heavy boots in the mine in order to work at all, for Clate had to stand in water most of the time when he picked or loaded. Another time the house caught fire and burned up their beds, chairs, everything. Even though he had steady work that month he had to sell his time to the script clerk in order to get cash to replace his loss. A buddy in the mine was selling out his few possessions at a sacrifice because his wife had run off with a Hunkie. The Hungarian showed the faithless creature a billfold with greenbacks in it, promised her a silk dress and a permanent.

"Why don't you buy new furniture at the commissary?" the script clerk wanted to know of Clate. "There are beds and chairs, bureaus and tables. Get them on time."

"I can't afford it," Clate said honestly.

So, after much bickering, the company's script clerk offered to give the miner script for his time.

"My buddy has to have cash money," Clate argued. "He's quitting. Going back to his folks over in Ohio."

Clate found out that when he sold his time he got only about fifty cents for a dollar.

"What you think I'm accommodating you for?" the company's script clerk wanted to know. "I'm not out for my health. Course if you don't want to take it"--he shoved the money halfway across the counter to Clate--"you don't have to. There are plenty of fellows who are glad to sell their time."

There was nothing left for Clate to do. He and his family had to have the bare necessities, bed, table, chairs.

Soon he was in the category with the other miners, always behind, always overdrawn, always selling his time before payday. Soon he was getting an empty envelope with a lot of figures marked on the outside. Clate was company-owned! If he lived to be a hundred he'd never be paid out.

Though Clate Wellford and the other coal miners never heard the word redemptioner and indent, they were not unlike those pioneer victims of unscrupulous subordinates. Men in bondage like the sharecropper of the Deep South, the Okie of the West.

How different the children of the coal field looked to those along the creeks in the shady hollows of the Blue Ridge!

In the coal camps they were unkempt and bony, in dirty, ragged garments. They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud holes.

Why do they continue to live in such squalor and in bondage? Why don't they move away?

If a miner should decide to move out, he has no means of getting his few belongings to the railroad spur some distance from the camp, for he has neither team nor wagon. All these are company-owned. The company, which controls the railroad spur, also has control too over the boxcars that are on the track. Only the company can make requisition for an empty boxcar. If a miner wants to move he cannot even get space, though he is willing to pay for it, in a boxcar to have his goods hauled out.

He stays on defeated and discouraged.

If, however, he does quit one coal camp and get out he is unskilled in other labor and if he should try to evade his store and other obligations with one coal company, the office employees have a way of passing on the information to another operation. There are ways of putting a laborer on the blacklist.

But why should he try to move on? Word comes back to the miner from other buddies who have tried other camps. "They're all the same. Might as well stay where you are."

Behind every shack is a dump heap of cans, coal ashes, potato peel, coffee grounds, and old shoes.

Rarely was the voice of the miner's wife raised in song as she plodded through her daily drudgery. Now and then the young folks could be heard singing--but not an ancient ballad. Rather it was a rakish song picked up from drummers coming through the mining camps who sold their inferior wares to the commissary manager.

There was a church propped up on the hillside. But meeting usually broke up with the arrest of some of the young fellows who didn't try hard enough to suppress a laugh when the camp harlot went to the mourner's bench, or when some old creature too deaf to hear a word the preacher said went hobbling toward the front. Sometimes an older miner, who for the sheer joy of expressing a long-pent-up feeling, shouted "Praise the Lord!", was dragged out by a deputy sheriff, along with the young bloods, on a charge of disturbing religious worship.

The limb of the law usually knew who had a few dollars left from the week's pay. The law knew too that a miner preferred to pay a fine rather than lie in jail and lose time on the job next day.

There was no pleasant diversion around the coal camp for womenfolk and children, no happy gatherings such as the play party, a quilting, an old-time square dance. In their drab surroundings, little wonder men and women grew old before their time.

That was yesterday. Today there are model mining towns throughout the coal fields. Holden in West Virginia even has swimming pools and modern cottages for its miners. A miner can work on the side too--it is not uncommon to see signs over his cottage or barn door reading, "Painting and Paper Hanging," "Decorating." There are thrifty vegetable gardens, and miners' wives vie with each other in the product of their flower gardens. Holden is sometimes called the Model Mining Town of America. It has welcomed visitors from all over the land.

In Harlan, Kentucky, once the center of many stormy battles between miners and operators, the county crowned a Coal Queen on August 23, 1941, commemorating the first shipment of coal thirty years previously. The queen, a pretty eighteen-year-old high school girl, won the title from six other contestants, enthroned on a replica of the railroad car which hauled out the county's first coal. As part of the celebration a $1500 public drinking fountain was dedicated and speakers hailed the economic progress of Harlan County since 1911. Each day 1200 railroad cars loaded with coal leave the county.