It's Good to Be Black

1. Du Quoln, Illinois

1. Du Quoln, Illinois The little town of Du Quoin sat in the heart of the coal belt of southern Illinois. It was as though the officials of the Illinois Central Railroad had placed a dot along the tracks between Centralia and Carbondale and said, "Let's put a town about here." But such was not the case, for Du Quoin had pulled stakes and of its own accord shifted ten miles to the east to spread itself along both sides of the tracks, even though a few stubborn souls who resented change stayed in what we called Old Town, with its crossroads general store, small-steepled church, and burying plot. The Du Quoin I knew was a frisky, healthy upstart of a town, yet there were weeks of saneness when life was as flat and stolid as the vast prairie upon whose bosom it rested. Its tempo was heightened when there was an explosion at the mines, or when the quick flash of a stiletto left a body lying in a pool of its own blood on a street comer in Little Italy. General elections, medicine men, the Ringling Brothers Circus, Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Shows were talked about long after the brilliant-colored posters had become indistinct patches of paper against the barns where they had been posted. Only the uninitiated spoke of Du Quoin as a whole. The town was divided by invisible but well-defined lines. The natives called the various sections the Bottoms, Smoke Row, 13 it's good to be blaek Little Italy, the North End, Cairo, the East Side, and Little Egypt. Du Quoin was a place of old faces and familiar scenes. There were no dirty company houses ready to fall apart at the first gust of north wind. The miners, for the most part, owned the little four- and five-room L-shaped cottages where they lived by the will of the operators, who regulated the days of work by the rise and fall of the coal market in New York. The operators in their two-story mansions, set among box hedges and rose gardens, lived by the sweat and brawn of the miners, though they never openly conceded this point. We lived in the Bottoms, in one of these little cottages at the extreme end of South Walnut Street. Dad was a coal miner. He had come up through the hard school of experience from a green "trapper" to one of the best entry drivers in southern Illinois. He was the eldest son of an ex-slave, but because mining coal was a hard and dangerous job, no one was too concerned about a miner's background. If he knew his business he was accepted as a fellow worker, and that was his admittance card into the great fraternity of free men. When I look back on my childhood, I am conscious again of the security that comes from growing up in one neighborhood, knowing everybody in town, living almost two decades in the same house, and being surrounded by the same people. I realize that there could be a tiresome monotony to this type of living, but I cannot conceive of boredom with Braxton and Sophia Berkley for parents, or Helen, Spud, Cecil, Robert, Cliff, Tom, and Frances for brothers and sisters. Life in Du Quoin wasn't for the timid or pampered. The 14 Du Quoin, Illinois men who crawled about underground, by the faint glare of a carbide light fastened onto their caps, by-passed death a hundred times during the day as they adjusted props to hold up roofs of hanging coal, side-stepped a slide, or eluded the well-aimed hoof of a vicious mule. The strength of the women matched the fiber of the men as they worked in their homes, cared for their many children , boiled their white clothes in a zinc tub over an open fire in the yard, and hustled the oldest boy off to Frank Knight's saloon for a cool bucket of beer at noon. When there was an explosion at White Ash mines, the colored people weren't too bothered. They talked about it, to be sure, but all agreed that God was venting his wrath upon the operators who never permitted Negroes to work there. Their summarization of the disaster was, "God sho' don' love ugly." But if something went wrong at Old...