Coal Black Heart (18 page)

The Pier—with its substandard housing, lack of amenities and services, poverty and crime—was as elemental as any turn-of-the-century frontier town. Overshadowing everything: the hulking coke ovens, open hearths and blast furnaces that spewed flame and noise, that tainted the sky with an orange chemical cloud noxious enough to strip houses of their paint.

Yet when I think of Whitney Pier in 1924—around the time Jack Briers and Margaret Brown were getting hitched—I’m elated,
not depressed. In this apocalyptic setting, amongst this grab bag of humanity—which, within a few square blocks, seemed to contain more life than all of Halifax or any other Maritime industrial hub—some dazzling alchemy occurred. You didn’t have to look far. Walk down the street and you’d hear the exotic tongues of the Syrians and Lebanese, and the Italians who’d arrived to build the steel mills and never left. You’d hear the drawl of the black steelworkers from Alabama, Pennsylvania and Tennessee who showed up to supply experience and expertise in the early days of the steelplant. You might see a middle-aged Chinese man who came for the steel mill but discovered that he was only allowed to work in laundries and restaurants. (Between 1903 and 1923, ten laundries and two restaurants owned by Chinese families operated in the Pier.)

In the Pier the different nationalities and groups had their own places of worship, like the Adath Israel Synagogue, St. Phillip’s African Orthodox Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, St. Mary’s Polish Church and St. Stephen’s Hungarian Church. They had their own community centres and clubs, like the West Indian Cricket Club, the Croatian Club and the Italian Club. Benevolent societies, created to address the spiritual, cultural, social and financial needs of new immigrants, abounded: the Daughters of Jacob Aid Society (for Jewish women over eighteen), the St. Rita Society (for members of the St. Nicholas Italian Church), the Brotherhood of the Holy Ghost (Polish), the St. Michael’s Polish Benefit Society, the Knights of Columbus (Catholic), the Protestant Society of United Fishermen, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the African Community League and the Menelik Ethiopian Hall (named after Emperor Menelik II), where Marcus Garvey one night extolled his vision of Africa for Africans, before a packed house.

Using a local history as my guide, I like to imagine walking through the Whitney Pier commercial district when the older Celtic business names from Cape Breton and Newfoundland were suddenly mixed with handles like Rosenbloom, Lubchansky, Bonavitsky, Lee and Wong. Victoria Road was lined with photography shops, drugstores, livery stables, laundries, restaurants and other businesses supplying groceries, clothing, hardware and the other necessities of a burgeoning working-class population. The rest of the community was expanding too: a French shoemaker, a blacksmith named Manchevsky. Lebanese folks ran grocery stores and barbershops. Up Lingan Road, Gallivan’s store stood between the Mendelbaums’ and Eli Hirsh. West Indians owned a bookstore, a jewellery store, a tailor’s shop, a shoe repair and a bakery. The Oriental bakery on Tupper Street was owned by the DiPentas. There were also bakeries owned by Bernie Kokowska, the Martinellos and a man named Sappatalonia.

Strolling through the Whitney Pier streets—past the golden Byzantine globes of the Holy Ghost Ukrainian Church, and the descendants of Caribbean slaves marching through the streets with their brass bands and “Back to Africa” banners—you’d have to wonder if you were really in some scruffy steel and coal community on the edge of the continent. In those days you could walk through your own front door and not know precisely what was in store for you. You could pay a nickel and see a silent picture at MacLeod’s Building. You could visit one of the pool halls, an outdoor bowling alley (two cents a string), or the Mt. Pleasant Turkish bath (five cents a bath). There might be a concert, dance or vaudeville show at one of the church halls or community centres. There could be a play at the outdoor amphitheatre on the Maclennan estate. If it was fight night, you might climb the stairs above Mike Martinello’s store to where boxing matches were held. Though women were in
relatively short supply in the early days of the Pier, a trio of dance halls thrived on Victoria Road.

Time was, after Prohibition ended in Nova Scotia in 1930, a fellow could start drinking before dusk and still have somewhere new to go for a round when the sun was climbing over the steel plant. He could make a detour through the private men’s clubs. He could move on to the taverns, and when they closed he could hit one of the bootlegger joints at just about every corner. “Bootlegging was the same kind of enterprise as running a corner store to augment the wages of the house,” recalled Ron DiPenta, born in the Pier in the 1930s. “If you had six or seven kids to support, and earned only 45 or 60 cents an hour at the plant, that wasn’t very much money.” Eventually, a fellow might even slink up to Curry’s Lane, to a bar once run by one of the few black American steelworkers who stuck around in Whitney Pier, which for a while became a combination bar and brothel.

Places like that, where the proprietors packed pistols on their hips, were like Wild West saloons, according to old men who remembered them, with card games and fights and raucous goings-on. Sometimes on Saturday nights the ethnic divisions and old-country rivalries would bubble to the surface in brawls that ended up outside and went up one street and down the other. All the same, “an almost tribal pride grew up from within,” Whitney Pier native Mayann Francis, the first Afro-Canadian lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia, recalled on her website. “A sense of place was born, a place of connection, a place of reaching out and of looking out. The many ‘Is’ had become a singular ‘we.’”

In Sydney Mines today it’s still easy to see the settlement patterns: the Italians (Legatto Street), the Irish (Tobin Road), the Newfoundlanders
(Bugden Street). English folk like the Brierses tended to make their homes near the centre of town. They were inclined to stick to themselves—eating their meat pies and bangers and mash, going to Sunday services at Trinity Anglican, playing English football on the church grounds, visiting the Sons of the British Isles Social, Literary, and Provident Society and the Old Country Club to mark special occasions. In particular they liked to make music, which was deeply imbedded in this immigrant coal-mining community. The churches and community centres rang with it. Come Saturday night, so did the speakeasies, blind pigs and kitchen parties. There were jigs and reels from Ireland, calypso from the West Indies—music that just grew more mournful and intense, the farther geographically it got from its source.

Judging by their love of doleful old country songs and the mawkish Great War tunes sung in the parlour with their countrymen, the Briers family were just as sentimental about their old lives. The Sydney Mines brass band would have provided a little solace. By 1900 there were said to be twenty thousand amateur brass bands in the United Kingdom sponsored by enlightened mill, colliery and foundry owners interested in providing good, healthy recreation and entertainment for their workers. Naturally, the immigrant labourers brought the tradition with them. Cape Breton’s first brass band was organized in Sydney Mines in 1862 by Robert Wilson, the manager of the Low Point mine, who later formed community bands in Victoria Mines and Sydney. In time, brass bands spread to all major centres of the newly industrialized region. Religion didn’t count. Age didn’t matter. All that was needed was an ability to play an instrument, or at least a willingness to try to learn.

The immigrants wouldn’t be the first people to realize that music—particularly music played with large groups of people—has the ability to transcend, uplift and transport. My grandfather
played the church organ on Sundays. As a member of the Blue and White Serenaders he blew alto sax and clarinet for a little extra cash at local dances and during intermissions at the Strand Theatre in Sydney Mines, where he always played “Annie Laurie” just for my grandmother when she was in attendance. He played in the brass band, at picnics and store openings, civic holidays and special celebrations. Whenever called upon, the band would play Even at funerals, where they would lead the procession to the cemetery playing “Abide With Me,” then—once the ceremony was complete—break into a jaunty “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” on the way back.

Sometimes musicians played old-country coal-mining songs, because those tunes caused a nostalgic pang right there in a person’s solar plexus, but also because those tunes took their history and lives and distilled them into narrative form. Stories are our memory; songs are the recreation of that memory. Those coal-mining songs travelled seamlessly from place to place and culture to culture because they spoke of an experience that’s as true in the collieries of Wales and the coal mines of Poland as in the deeps of Cape Breton. Coal-mining songs, with their everyday language and simple melodies, called attention to injustice. They gave the poor and disenfranchised a voice. They communicated the hopes, sorrows and beliefs of working lives. “A coal miner is no ordinary man,” Nina Cohen, a Glace Bay native who started a miners’ folk society and the miners’ museum there, once told Professor John O’Donnell. “His story has a heartbeat. It should not be allowed to die.”

Sometimes it seems there are more songs about coal mining than about love, cars and death combined. Sometimes it seems that songs about coal miners are more popular than the miners themselves. Once, O’Donnell tried to come up with a list of Canadian coal-mining songs to provide material for the Men of the Deeps, the Cape Breton miners’ chorus that he directed. He ended up with
150 titles, even though his list includes no French and only a few Gaelic songs.

One day I sat down and read the words to every one of them. A lot of them had “Caledonia” in their title—“Caledonia,” “Farewell to Caledonia,” “When I First Went to Caledonia”—which seems perfectly fitting since, along with being the name of a mine in Glace Bay, Caledonia is the name by which Scotland was known until the tenth century. A lot of them were about disasters (“The Miracle at Springhill,” “New Waterford’s Fatal Day,” “Disaster at No. 1 B,” “Unknown Miner’s Grave”). There were loads of protest songs (“Arise Ye Nova Scotia Slaves,” “The Pluck Me Store,” “The 1925 Strike Song,” “Black Is the Coaldust”). There were union songs (“Roll Along, United Miners”), songs about scabs (“The Honest Working Man”), trains (“Little Pinkie Engine”) and individual coal mines (“No. 26,” “One Million Ton”). Some of the songs I knew well enough to sing along: “The Ballad of Springhill” (recorded by Pete Seeger and U2), “Sixteen Tons” (Tennessee Ernie Ford), “Dark as a Dungeon” (Merle Travis). A few—“I’m Only a Broken-Down Mucker,” “Jolly Wee Miner Men”—just made me want to laugh.

There weren’t many of those, though. Miners—with the exception of Dopey, Grumpy and Sneezy—seldom sang while they worked. They saved singing for the kitchen, the parlour, the union hall and the tavern. The old songs, passed down from parent to child, and the new ones, reflecting the changing reality of their lives, were like a collective moan. If I were to try to distill all of these songs down to a single theme, it would be this: life is hard and ends badly, but it’s all we have. It’s difficult not to reach for the Paxil after hearing stanzas like this: “I work in the pit, it’s a terrible hole/ Getting paid by the comp’ny for hauling the coal/ By dodging this trip it’s queer I’m alive/ For each day I work I get three sixty-five.” Or this: “I gave my best to Besco/ They gave me
their worst/ Faceless men have sucked my blood/ What can I do but curse?/ The British Vampire Company/ Sunk its teeth into my veins/ Broke my back, starved my kids/ Drove me half insane.” And doesn’t a fellow’s spirit lift to read the following, chosen at random from O’Donnell’s collection? “Deep down in the earth where we take out the coal/ The chill of the mine will soon enter your soul/ Though you long to be up where the warm sun can shine/ You just gotta be down, down, down deep in the mine.”

I picture each and every one of these songs being sung by the same bony old coot with hands like tree roots and a voice hollow and ravaged as a banshee’s. Songs about George Alfred Beckett from “Old Perl’can,” who “landed in Glace Bay,” ends up killing a taxi driver and hanging for it. Or Archie MacInnis, who was born in New Waterford in 1916 and ends up fleeing for the mainland after his buddy dies in an underground rockfall. They’re all laments—at least, the memorable coal-mining songs. The harshness of life transformed into simple, direct, powerful expression. The more stripped-down and unadorned, the better. Music isn’t even necessary. It’s all in the words:

A guy right out of the pages of Jack London wrote those words: Dawn Fraser, who was at various times a male nurse, pharmacist, labourer in the lumber and construction camps, gravedigger, circus barker, copywriter and salesman, before joining the Canadian infantry in the First World War. He immediately sailed off to Siberia in an ill-fated attempt to quell the Bolshevik Revolution, got wounded, then returned to Glace Bay, his birthplace, to sell aluminum pots and pans door to door. Along the way, he would stop people on the street and read them a verse, and perhaps even try to sell them a book of poetry. Robert Service was his literary model. At first Fraser wrote about hoboes, seamen, labourers and card players (Fraser, according to historian Donald MacGillivray, was a self-professed drifter, drinker and gambler). His sympathies lay with the workingman. And since he came to live in Cape Breton during the 1920s, his later poems read like fragments of a dark age told in rhyming couplets.