The Well and the Mine Read Online Free PDF

brake and pulled over.
    “Ride on in with me,” I yelled as he turned around.
    “’Preciate it.” He climbed in, cap in his hand, already wearing his coveralls. The colored part of town was fairly near the mines, maybe a half-hour walk. “Doin’ alright?” he asked.
    “Fair.”
    “Heard about that baby there in y’all’s well. Family takin’ it hard?”
    “Alright, I s’pose.”
    Jonah’s father worked the mines and was still going down below when I started with Galloway Coal. Might say the father got pushed into the line of work—learned it in prison. Convict lease. Six years for vagrancy, and he spent that six years treated worse than a pit mule. Jonah’s papa served his time and made it out alright, but mining paid better than farm work, which was the only other work about any colored man could get. So he left off the prison uniform and headed back down. Union man. Jonah growed up in Dora, in what folks there started calling Uniontown. Negro strikers all of ’em, who got pitched off company housing during the strike of 1920 and cobbled together shacks out of trash, boards, rotten timber, whatever they could find. Said they’d never again live in a house they could get throwed out of. And even after the strike was over and they headed back to the mines, they never did go back to company housing. Jonah said they’d stuff paper in the cracks when it rained, watch the stars out of the holes in the roof when it was clear.
    Me and him rode on in, hearing the mine—smelling it, too—before we saw it spring up around a curve in the road. The gob pile, just a wide, long hill of the trash sorted out of the coal, gave off a heavy sulfur smell that hung low in the air. The clang of the cars bumping into each other, the clatter of the conveyor belts, yells from men hollering to one another. All the aboveground workings were clear as a bell, bared to the sunshine and anyone who happened to walk by. The tipple stood above it all, part wood, part machine, the wood supports of it seeming too tricky—like a spiderweb from a distance—to be so solid. The sorters and washers worked on the coal when it went past them on the rumbling belts, the good coal rising higher to the top of the tipple, where it got dumped into storage. Finally it’d be loaded into the coal cars to make its way down to the depot. Nothing but dust and smoke and wood and metal, nothing green or growing anywhere in sight. Nothing alive but men. And them just another part of the big machine of it all.
    All the day shift was filing in, with just a few of the men looking at me funny on account of Jonah being in my car. I reckoned it didn’t make no difference if I offered a man a ride to work as I was passing him on the road. It would have been different if I’d gone by his house and picked him up. I’d only been to Jonah’s house once, when his first child died one night in his crib. Only time I’d ever been through those Negro houses, just boards slapped together. It was a shame Jonah had to live like that—he was a good man, a hard worker, good to his family. Had my kids call him Mr. Benton, not by his first name like some boy who ain’t never shaved a beard.
    Jonah and me didn’t say a word climbing out of the car. He nodded and went on, and I hung my legs out the door while I pulled on my coveralls. Cracked my back as I stood up, trying to loosen up my spine.
    I pulled my cap off the seat and unhooked the lamp. Spit in the top chamber a few times, unhooked the bottle of carbide from my belt, and poured a bit in the bottom. The oil and spit would come together and make the gas that reflected off the face. The old kerosene lamps wobbled this way and that like a drunkard. A carbide flame was a steady thing.
    Bosses’d have you believe you were part of something special, toting the world on your shoulders at Galloway Mine No. 11, with four hundred men going into its belly every day and prying out Galloway Lump. One of the biggest coal basins