The doctor looked from H to the crippled boy and back again. “Money’s nice, don’t get me wrong. But mining can be a whole lot safer than what it is. Lives are worth fighting for too.” He cleared his throat, then continued to speak about the signs of black lung.
On his walk home that night, H started to think about the crippled boy, how easy it had been for H to make up his story. How easy it was for a life to go one way instead of another. He could still remember telling his cellmate that nothing could kill him, and now he saw his mortality all around him. What if H hadn’t been so arrogant when he was a younger man? What if he hadn’t been arrested? What if he’d treated his woman right? He should have had children of his own by now. He should have had a small farm and a full life.
Suddenly H felt like he couldn’t breathe, like that decade’s worth of dust was climbing up his lungs and into his throat and choking him. He hunched over and started to cough and cough and cough, and when he’d finished coughing, he stumbled his way to Joecy’s house and knocked on the door.
Lil Joe answered with sleep in his eyes. “My daddy ain’t back from the meeting yet, Uncle H,” he said.
“I ain’t here to see your daddy, son. I—I need you to write me a letter. Can you do that?”
Lil Joe nodded. He went into the house and came back out with the supplies he needed. He wrote as H dictated:
Deer Ethe. This is H. I am now free an livin in Prat City.
H mailed the letter the very next morning.
—
“What we need to do is call a strike,” a white union member said.
H was sitting in the front row of the church house where the union meetings were held. There was an endless list of problems and the strike was the first solution. H listened carefully as a murmur of agreement began to rush through the room, as hushed as a hum.
“Who gon’ pay attention to our strike?” H asked. He was becoming more vocal at the meetings.
“Well, we tell ’em we won’t work until they raise our pay or make it safer. They gotta listen,” the white man said.
H snorted. “When a white man ever listened to a black man?”
“I’m here now, ain’t I? I’m listening,” the white man said.
“You a con.”
“You’re a con, too.”
H looked around the room. There were about fifty men there, over half of them black.
“Whatchu done wrong?” H asked, returning his gaze to the white man.
At first, the man wouldn’t speak. He kept his head lowered, and cleared his throat so many times, H wondered if there was anything left in his mouth at all. Finally the words came out. “I killed a man.”
“Killed a man, huh? You know what they got my friend Joecy over there for? He ain’t cross the street when a white woman walk by. For that they gave him nine years. For killin’ a man they give you the same. We ain’t cons like you.”
“We gotta work together now,” the white man said. “Same as in the mine. We can’t be one way down there and another way up here.”
No one spoke. They all just turned to watch H, see what he would say or do. Everyone had heard the story of the time he’d picked up that second shovel.
Finally he nodded, and the next day the strike began.
Only fifty people showed up on that first day. They gave their bosses a list of their demands: better pay, better care for the sick, and fewer hours. The white union members had written up the list, and Joecy’s boy, Lil Joe, had read it aloud to all the black members to make sure it said what they thought it said. The bosses had answered back that free miners could easily be replaced by convicts, and one week later a carriage full of black cons appeared, all under the age of sixteen, and looking so scared it made H want to quit the strike if only it meant more people wouldn’t be arrested to fill in the gap. By the end of the week, the only thing both sides had agreed to was that there would be no killing.
And still, more convicts were rounded up and brought in. H wondered if there was a black man left in the South who hadn’t been put in prison at one point or another, so many of them came to fill the mines. Even free laborers who weren’t striking were being replaced, so soon more of them joined in the fight. H spent hours at Joecy and Jane’s house, making signs with Lil Joe.
“What that say?” H asked, pointing to the tar-painted wood at Lil Joe’s side.
“It say, more pay,” the boy answered.
“And what that say?”
“It say, no more tuberculosis.”
“Where you learn to read like that?” H asked. He had grown so fond of Lil Joe, but the sight of his friend’s son only made him ache for a child of his own.
The smell of the tar Lil Joe was using to write clung to the hairs in H’s nostrils. He coughed a little and a black string of mucus trailed from his mouth.
“I had a little school in Huntsville ’fore they took my daddy. When they arrested him, they said he and my whole family was gettin’ too uppity. They said that was why Daddy didn’t cross the street when the white woman passed by.”
“And what you think?” H asked.
Lil Joe shrugged.
The next day, Joecy and H took the signs out with them to the strike. There were about 150 men standing out in the cold. They all watched while the new crop of cons walked by, waiting to be lowered down into the mines.
“Let them kids go!” H shouted loudly. A boy had peed himself waiting for the shaft, and H suddenly remembered the one who had been chained to him as they rode the train over, who had wet himself and cried endlessly when they stood before the pit boss. “They ain’t but kids. Let ’em go!”
“Are you gonna stop this foolishness and get back to work?” came the reply.
Then, suddenly, the boy who had wet himself started to run. He was nothing but a blur in the corner of H’s eye before the gunshot went off.
And the people on strike broke the line, swarming the few white bosses who were standing guard. They broke the shafts and dumped the coal from the tramcars before breaking those too. H grabbed a white man by the throat and held him over the vast pit.
“One day the world gon’ know what you done here,” he said to the man, whose fear was written plainly across his blue eyes, bulging now that H’s grip had tightened.
H wanted to throw the man down, down to meet the city underneath the earth, but he stopped himself. He was not the con they had told him he was.
—
It took six more months of striking for the bosses to give in. They would all be paid fifty cents more. The running boy was the only one to die in the struggle. The pay increase was a small victory, but one that they would all take. After the day the running boy died, the strikers helped clean up the mess the fight had made. They picked up their shovels, found the boy who’d been gunned down, and buried him in the potter’s field. H wasn’t sure what the others were thinking when they finally laid the boy to rest among the hundreds of other cons who had died there, nameless, but he knew that he was thankful.
After the union meeting where the raise was announced, H walked home with Joecy. He saw his friend off to his house, and then he went next door to his own. When he got there, he saw that his front door was swinging open, and a strange smell was coming from inside. He still had his pick on him, caked with the dirt and coal from the mine. He lifted the pick over his head, certain that a pit boss had come to meet him. He crept in lightly, ready for whatever came next.
It was Ethe. Apron tied around her waist and handkerchief wrapped around her head. She turned from the stove, where she was cooking greens, and faced him.
“You might as well set that thing down,” she said.
H looked at his hands. The pick was raised, just slightly, above his head, and he lowered it to his side and then to the floor.
“I got your letter,” Ethe said, and H nodded and the two of them just stood there and stared at each other for a moment before Ethe found her voice again.
“Had to get Miz Benton from up the street to read it fo’ me. First, I just let it sit there on my table. Every day, I would pass it, and I’d think ’bout what I was gon’ do. I let two months go by that way.”