Miners' Wives in the Coal Strike By FREDA KIRCHWEY HE valley was silent and motion- valley or in a near-by coal-field. If Tless, its ugliness was without pur pose. Of what use was the black, gaping hole torn in the side of the hill? It was nothing but an unhealed wound, with a clotted mass of slate and loose coal about its edges. Of what use were the shining rails of the incline, the angular lines of the tipple, the pile of slate below it, the "empties" standing along the tracks? To what end had every green tree been torn from the narrow banks of the creek? Rows of gray shacks had replaced them, a hard, rutted road crossed and recrossed the bed of the creek, and the railroad ran close enough to the houses to serve as a sidewalk; but these were of no apparent value. Children looked from the windows of the houses or played in the cinders between the ties, men walked up and down the tracks and loafed in groups beside the company offices, and women were inside the houses, working; but the purpose of these people and their houses and the railroad and the tipple and the wound in the hillside the purpose of these and of all the treeless ugliness of the valley had somehow been lost. For the valley was on strike. The people in this part of West Virginia live by coal alone. If a mine "blows out,"-suspends operations for one reason or another, they are unemployed until it opens again, unless they hear of mining jobs in another their wages are too low, they go hungry; there are no better jobs to which they can turn. Or if they strike, they strike in the knowledge that they can find no other employment, since there is none. They know that the operators can throw them out of their houses with only a brief warning and that they will find no others, for every house in the valley belongs to the company and was built for its employees. They are prisoners, and their dungeon is a deep, green valley. They are serfs, and their master is coal. When coal is not being mined, their existence loses its meaning, and all their surroundings become senseless. If the miners are the slaves of coal, the women are the slaves of slaves. They, too, are tied to the valley and the mines; they go hungry when depression or a strike hits the coal-fields. In addition, since they cannot mine coal,-it is held to be bad luck to let a woman even step inside a mine,— they are bound to just one occupation: they do housework under the most primitive and uncomfortable conditions, they bear and rear children in great numbers. That is their whole life. At least that is their life in ordinary times; in times of strike the life of the women is more arduous and sometimes less monotonous. Housework is trans formed from a dreary round to the daily excitement of making something out of nothing. Life is more precarious, but because of that very fact it is more apparent and more precious. And then there is the fight. Thin blood congeals in the presence of danger and hardship and suspense; rich blood boils. The striking women of West Virginia, like all other women, are of all sorts, alert and apathetic, despairing and eager, bitter and blithe; and the conditions of their life bring out the facts of their character in sharp relief, for they live at the very roots of life. They have just the few clothes necessary to cover their bodies and the bodies of their children. Their food is coarse and scanty and unvaried and bad in quality. Their houses are ugly and small and bare and wholly uncomfortable. Charm and beauty and color are not in their lives except where they spring from a gaiety and courage that survive all misery. In my days in the coal country I talked with many women of all kinds. Some were on strike along with their husbands; some were on strike against their husbands. Some were goodnatured and easy-going even with hunger and death near by. Some were bitter; some just tired. But by coming close to the lives of these women on strike I came close to the life of the valley and learned more, believe, of the meaning of the industrial struggle in West Virginia than a mile of statistics and a year of research could have taught me. MRS. SOAMES I If she had lived in another age, Mrs. Soames would have been an Amazon in spirit; if she had been born into a different class, she would have turned out a militant suffragist. As things are, she is a revolutionist, although revolutionary theory has never so much as brushed the hems of her mind, and she has, no doubt, a stern abhorrence of Lenine and Trotzky. Even if she knew them, I think that she would dislike the Russian leaders, for she has little time for juggling dogmas. She sees the world going wrong, and without stopping to reason about it, she sets out to make it right. She knows that her husband and all his friends earn too little to keep their children in clothes and food and to give them an education; therefore she accepts without regret the need to fight for these obvious necessities. She has a simple, unfanatical faith in violence. She backs the union with the buoyant, whole-hearted enthusiasm of a college freshman cheering for his team at the big game; there is no skepticism or sophistication in her. Before I reached the valley, Mrs. Soames had been "set out." With her furniture and bedding and her eleven children she had been moved out of the four-roomed company house where she had lived for eight years and had been dumped beside the road. I found her living in a tent on a bare patch of ground between two forks of the creek several miles up the valley. Three other evicted families occupied tents on the same narrow island, and in the four families there were thirty children. A narrow suspension-bridge connected them with the mainland; the steep sides of the hill closed down on them. They looked like a small beleaguered army encamped. On the tent nearest the bridge the word "Uniontown" was lettered in bold black paint. Mrs. Soames cannot be described in terms of beauty or ugliness. That she That she know anything, they know about the was small and thin and weather-worn union an' the bosses an' what this and had black teeth had nothing to do fight 's about. They 're born to this with the effect she made. She was, fight." She was, fight." She looked at the pale baby rather, composed of quick motion and in her arms, and her voice grew a shade easy, shrill laughter and a sort of more metallic. "I'd rather see this humming, vibrant life. The blue of baby die than see the union die," she her eyes was steely; her nose was bold. said. "If we lose this strike, he might At her breast a six-months-old baby as well be dead. They ain't going to nursed industriously; the eldest child, be no security for him, nor for any of a girl of eighteen, sat near by, patting us, if they kill our union, like they 're the puffs of hair over her ears and lis- settin' out to do. Every man an' tening admiringly to her mother's woman of us is as helpless as this baby militant, dramatic talk. Her other without we band together an' fight children, shrieking and laughing, together. S'pose there ain't no union? played about the tents, except for a two-year-old baby who lay naked on a blanket, undisturbed by the noise, or by the flies that walked over him. "If them sons of down to the company offices thought they could throw a scare into us by settin' us out, they guessed real bad. This is my third time in a tent, an' I like it fine. We reckon maybe we 'll advertise this here Uniontown as a health resort; get city folks down here to give the place tone. Soames an' I got two tents for the thirteen of us, but Mrs. Lightfoot, next door there, she 's got nine all in one. But it don't sour us none. If we don't live real good or eat real good, we know what we 're doin' it for, an' we 'll stick as long we got to. We eat fat meat an' corn-bread mostly, an' some days we don't eat nothin'; but we know why, don't we, Sis?" Sis smiled and blushed and nodded. She was too pretty and too young to be marooned on an island ten miles up a coal valley. "I'm afraid those babies don't know why," I said, "when they get hungry." "They get to know pretty quick," said Mrs. Soames. "Soon 's they Who's to get us enough pay to live on? Who's to say, 'Eight hours is enough an' too much for men to spend underground."" Mrs. Soames let loose a stream of speech, racy, vehement; and then, with a fine instinct for effect, ended quietly: "My babies may be hungry now while the trouble is on,it ain't easy to send 'em to bed with nothin' only a piece of dry corn-cake in their hands, but if we don't fight now, they'll be hungry all their lives; an' if we lose, they 'll die, like as not.” Soberness could not hold Mrs. Soames long; she was too happy a warrior. I heard the story of how a company guard-the names he received were rich and unrepeatablehad "shot up" the tents the night after the family moved in. He had stationed himself on the hillside across the creek and fired over their heads against the opposite shore. The bullets had nicked off twigs and leaves from the trees beside the tents, and one had cut down the union banner improvised by Mrs. Soames. "But it kep' the babies awake all night," she said. "That was bad enough. An' it give us a mean feelin', hearin' them bullets whine by so close to." I heard the story of the unwary "scabs" who had walked up the tracks past the tents and dared to "get fresh" about the "red-necks" (the strikers) and their living quarters. "Soames an' Tom Lightfoot an' Jimmy Carson they laid for 'em, and when them scabs got home to their mamas, they was all mussed up, seems like." I heard the story of the march into Logan County, when an army of miners crossed the mountains to put the fear of the union into the operators' hearts. Scores of legends have grown up around that march. To Mrs. Soames it was a crusade and a piece of necessary house-cleaning combined. "They call it treason now," she said. "My man only got home last week after them keepin' him locked up over there three weeks on a charge of treason." She laughed at the word. "Soames ain't no traitor," she said. "Anyhow, he wa'n't in the march; got hisself laid up with an arm broke' just a week before the boys started. I guess he 'd 'a' give' a year in jail to of gone. Young Jimmy Lightfoot he went. He drove a Ford car acrost them mountains, totin' ammunition to the army. Back an' forth he went over them roads, that ain't hardly roads at all; traveled nights mostly, so's the airplanes could n't get him and blow him an' all the stuff he carried into kingdom come. Two, three times by day-light they did bomb him, an' one time he got a stream of shot out of one of them machine-guns they carried. Jimmy says they tipped like they was comin' down, tipped till the nose of the gun pointed straight to earth, an' then let loose on him. "That was an army," said Mrs. Soames, "union men every one of 'em. Men from Pennsylvania an' Illinois was in it; they come clear from Colorado, some. If they had n't of stopped for talk, they ain't nothin' those boys could n't of done. They 'd of cleaned the gunmen an' the dirty scabs right plumb out of Logan County. They ought n't never to of stopped, not for President Harding nor nobody. Logan County could be a right decent place for folks to live if the boys had gone ahead an' finished the job. It was a black, stinkin' place then, an' it still is. If they had n't of stopped, they could of cleaned it out right." "Cleaned it out," I repeated. "Killed all the gunmen and scabs?" "Sure enough," said Mrs. Soames, plainly. "Shot the hell right out of 'em." I shall always see Mrs. Soames as she was at that moment, nursing her baby quietly in her arms and smiling, with a look in her sharp eyes that was humorous and bold, but not in the least ferocious, and saying words that still thundered in my mind many days after I had left her. MRS. SWEET In West Virginia the size of families can be measured with a fair degree of accuracy by the length of time people have been married. So when I met Mrs. Sweet and saw that she was nothing more than a tired child, I showed no surprise at the baby she held to her breast. She smiled at me rather wanly. "He's four weeks to-day," she said. "Your first?" I asked. "No," she said; "we been married two years. Tommy he 's crawlin' round outside." She was as pretty as any one of this year's débutantes and she may have been eighteen. Her cheeks were pale, but her lips were softly modeled, and her eyes were clear blue. She told me nothing but the story of the last month of her life, but I felt that I knew a good deal about her when she had finished. "It was hard before the baby come, she said, “because first there was n't no work, an' then, soon as they got workin', seems like, the strike come along. Tom he went out like the rest. The baby come four weeks ago. I had a real hard time,-seems like I ought not to, don't it, with the second?-an' then when baby was twelve days old, Tom went off. I can't make it out. I think an' think about it. He seemed to care about me; he was real decent to me most times. Sometimes I think maybe he could n't stand to watch us get hungry an' not know how to help it nor do nothin' different. But sometimes I think he was pretty mean, seems like, to go off like that just when he did. Says he was goin' to see a sick uncle, but his uncle 'd have to be real sick to be sicker 'n what I was. I was up, but I was feelin' slim. Had to get the house cleaned an' do some washin' 'long about the eighth day after baby come; the house got lookin' like a pigsty by then. I guess I worked too hard; anyhow, I felt real ornery, an' the little feller got lookin' kind o' peaked. An' then Tom up an' left. This week the union sent me two dollars, an' last week a dollar fifty; that's the first money come into the house since the baby come a month ago. They say they'll send it right along now even if Tom has lit out. I guess we can get along somehow. Maybe Tom 'll stay away an' maybe he'll come back. I reckon he thinks he 'll come back some time when things ain't so hard round here. I thought it was awful when he went, but now I don't care if he don't show up." She hesitated a moment. "Things may go easier if he stays away-some ways. If I had money, I'd pick up the babies and go to my people, an' I 'd never in the world come back." She spoke slowly in a flat, tired voice. She seemed to have forgotten my presence; her eyes were as round and as fixed as if she were a child day-dreaming. Then she remembered me and smiled, and said without any self-pity in her voice, "Well, I ain't got much left out of that three fifty I 've took in this month, so I reckon I 'll set right here an' see what happens.' MRS. BENDISH I saw her four children first. One of them looked half-witted and had red eyes; one looked healthy; one had sores on her legs; the youngest was four years old, but could not walk. She crawled on her hands and feet, and as she went, her legs bent the wrong way at the knee. The sight of them prepared me for Mrs. Bendish. She was thin and misshapen, her eyes were red-rimmed, she had an enormous goiter, and on the back of her head was a growth as hard and as large as a door-knob. It was obvious what the disease was that had blighted the family. I could not bring myself to talk to her about herself, but her neighbor, a striker, told me all that I needed to know. "They get the usual union rations," he said, "not the best sort of food for sick folks. We get 'em a tin of milk when we can." "They don't need milk; they need a hospital," I said. "Yes," he said shortly. |