The Journey

Heirloom Memories The Journey Helen Mann Behnken I was born to a very poor family during the Depression. My father was a school teacher, but his salary was insufficient to feed a large family of seven children and a wife; it was a big responsibility back in those days to keep food on the table and clothes for the family. My mother and father decided he should go to work in the coal mines. They had heard that the work was steady and the pay was good and so they left the farm and moved to the coal camp. I remember two things about that time, saying goodbye to my grandparents, and the two wagons that moved us—one held all the house furniture; the other held the children. It was a long trip ofabout thirty miles with stops along the way. The country road was rough but we enjoyed the scenery. It took us two days to get there. We stopped at homes along the way for food and water and the first night we found a family who let us spend the night. We talked and wondered what our new home would be like in the town of Carver. The second day of our trip we could not find a home to take us in, but were told we could sleep in the big barn in the hay loft. We had never slept in a barn before. They hung a lantern at each end of the opening, and we settled down for the night. My mother slept at the house, but father slept with us. It was kinda scary, when all my brothers and sisters were settled down and we heard the hoot owls, and whipporwills, and a black bat dashed through the barn one time. The next day our long journey ended at the coal camp, and the miners came to greet and welcome us to our new home. They unloaded the wagons, placing our goods in a four-room house. Helen Mann Behnken was born and raised in the Eastern Kentucky Appalachian Mountains, an experience she still remembers fondly in her advancing age. Her book ofpoetry, Reflections of My Life, waspublished when she was seventy years old. 39 We ran excited, looking for adventure. The railroad was nearby, the coal company smokestack, as well as the trestle and tipple where they dumped the black coal into the coal cars. Our lives changed drastically after we moved from the country to the small town where everybody lived in company-row houses. My father started his new job in the mines—the mines deep underground, damp, dark, cool in summer, warm in winter—and pay was good. He wore coveralls and a coal miner's hat with a carbide light on the front that would shine very bright in the dark mines. Life was good and on payday we all got a package of chewing gum. We treasured that so much. I was very saving and tried to make my gum last until payday came around again. I was five years old. I went with mother to wash clothes at the sawdust pond. Many women came there, where water was plentiful. They washed all day on boards and boiled white clothes in huge pots. I played in the damp sawdust , made forts, castles, and buried my feet up to my knees. It was my favorite place to play. I went with mother to the company store, where she purchased yard goods, soda, lard, thread, coffee, sugar, and other necessary things. Mother was very busy taking care ofher seven children and we all were a happy family in Carver. Then one day my father left the coal mines early in the day, came home and said he had a very bad cold. He went to bed and mother gave him hot teas and treated him with old-fashioned remedies, but nothing seemed to help him; his cough and fever persisted. The company doctor came and said that my father had the flu and gave him some medicine, but nothing made him feel any better. He complained of a severe headache and in the early morning he died. My mother...