A Coal Miner

LABOR A Coal Miner Jack Justice In Pike County, Kentucky, in the first half of January 1937, a man shoveled 104 tons of coal in a black tunnel lit only by the flickering flame of a carbide lamp mounted on the front of his cap. His pay envelope for the period recorded that the gross wages for that labor, calculated at the rate of $.472 a ton, were $49.09. Of that sum he received $10.56 in cash after deductions that included $4.50 for the rental of an uninsulated house that had no plumbing other than a kitchen sink with cold running water. The largest single deduction was for $24 in scrip used to buy food and other necessities at the company store. In the second half of the month—while President Roosevelt was proclaiming in his second inaugural address that he saw one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished—the man loaded only fifty-one tons, and his pay envelope reported that deductions left him owing his employer $1.87. By June of the same year, the pay rate had been increased to $.542 a ton, and the man's pay envelope for the first half of that month credited him with gross wages of $102.98 as his reward for having loaded a back-breaking 190 tons. The deduction for scrip rose to $32, and he still received the magnificent sum of $59.45 in cash. Although the man was my father, I don't remember how we celebrated that bounty. My sixth birthday was still six weeks away. The record of my father's labors during 1937-39 is preserved in a bundle of buff-colored pay envelopes, each measuring roughly three by six inches and identifying the worker as G. E. (for George Edward) Justice. I fancy that the envelopes still bear traces of the coal dust that covered my father's hands when he tore them open. I don't know why they were saved. I found them after my mother died in 1995. They were in a shoebox with other material related to my father's employment in the coalmines. My father was not born to load coal. He began life on a farm in Martin County, Kentucky. His family had been scratching a living from the same land along Rockcastle Creek ever since my great-grandfather Timothy arrived there early in the nineteenth century. Timothy was one of five Justice brothers who crossed the Cumberland Mountains from Virginia and settled in the hollows carved by creeks that run into the Levisa and Tug Forks of the Big Sandy River. Timothy begat nine children, including my grandfather Eli, who in turn begat my father and eleven other sons and daughters. By the early part of the twentieth century, the land that Timothy had claimed could not support all of his progeny. When my father ventured away from the farm, his only marketable assets were six years of education in a one-room schoolhouse, native intelligence, good health, a willingness to work, and a gregarious personality. For a time, he rode a horse up and down the hollows selling Singer sewing machines on the installment plan and then returning to collect the installments. On one of those circuits, armed moonshiners detained him until he was able to allay their suspicion that he might be a revenue agent. He found other work as well, but he found a career only when he reluctantly entered the coalmines. The earliest artifact in the shoe box I found after my mother's death was a clipping from The United Mine Workers Journal — a photograph of my father and five of his brothers, formally posed in jackets and ties, under the caption "Six Brothers on Strike Since 1920." The clipping is undated, but circumstantial evidence indicates that the item probably was published in 1921, when the strike had been going on for more than a year. The text under the photograph quotes one of the brothers: "We are not going to scab if the strike lasts that much longer. We are only asking for our rights as allAmerican citizens are entitled to." The spokesman...