Work Like Any Other by Reeves Virginia

Author:Reeves, Virginia [Reeves, Virginia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 16 / ROSCOE

Taylor has given me back my Fridays in the library, and Rash is the one to tell me about the end of convict leasing, a newspaper spread on his desk when I arrive.

“Governor Bibb Graves finally bowed to the pressure,” Rash says, pointing to the front page. “He signed in new legislation that makes it ‘unlawful to work any convict, State or County, in any coal mine in Alabama.’ ” It’s been seventeen years since that Banner mine explosion, long enough for a child to be born and grow to age, get taken in, and sent off to a mine. That’s a life we’ve let pass before making any changes.

What’s become of this state? I hear my father lamenting, and his voice makes me wonder—for the first time in years—about my little sister and her coalman.

I didn’t realize I was working alongside convicts when I was down in my father’s tunnels. He only told me later, after I’d left. There wasn’t any difference in our appearances, anyway, and I imagine it’s always been the same—just a host of men covered in coal dust, black and blacker. I know the mines. I know the life Wilson must have been living there.

I can see him, deep in the guts of the earth, his skin grown darker with the dust. Wilson is a farmer. He belongs aboveground, sprayed clean by the sun and air. He needs soil and growing things, seedlings just coming up in their furrows, the great blades of corn grass slipping out of their first sheaths. If either of us should’ve been assigned to the mines, it’s me with my mining history and my electrical experience. They could’ve made me a shooter, like those men who set off the Banner explosion, one of the few whites in the shaft, running the wires in, escaping back to fresh air before things blew. Though it hadn’t worked that way for the shooters in Banner. It might not have for me, either. But that fate seems fitting, too—blown to bits belowground, a death I was primed for.

Rash has stacks of newspapers and articles about the lease system—his own fascination, he’s explained, men’s twisted desire to own other men—and I sift through them as I shelve. Photos show the offices at one mine, the brick rising into a triangle of a point above the main doors. Some eight hundred men block out the rest of the building, lining up with their shovels and lamps. One shot captures the growing pile of tools, all those handles and scoops, a jumble of elbows. I look for Wilson in the crowds, but few faces are showing. Just backs, bent, dark backs. I’d like to think I’d know the pieces of him anywhere, but I don’t. The back of Wilson is the back of every man.

THE yard is overrun with newcomers, all these men to back up the papers in the library. They’re coming from mines all over the state—Banner and Flat Top, Warner and Sipsey and Pratt.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.