Homegoing (20 page)

H had gone through all the motions of that morning, his arms achingly anchored to his sides as he refused the coffee and meat, couldn’t pick up the lunch sack to hold it, shinnied onto the elevator shaft. He had made it through the morning without drawing attention, trying to save up his energy for when he would have to start working.

Joecy was the cutter that day. He was five feet four inches tall, a small man, but he understood the ways of the rock like no one H had ever worked with did. Joecy was a first-class man they all respected, working off year seven of his eight-year sentence as fervently as he had year one. He would often say how he was going to get free and start working in the mines for pay, as some of the other black men had done. They couldn’t whip a free miner.

That day, the space between the rock was only about a foot high. H had seen men wiggle into spaces that small and shake and hyperventilate so badly they needed to leave. Once he’d seen a man get to the very middle and then stop, too scared to move forward or backward, too scared to breathe. They’d called Joecy over to try to fish him out, but by the time he got there the man had already died.

Joecy didn’t even blink at the small space. He shinnied his small body under the rock and lay down on his back and started to undercut the bottom of the seam. Once he had finished that, he drove a hole into the rock, listening to it, he liked to say, so that he could find the spot that wouldn’t crumble on top of him and kill him straightaway. Once the hole had been placed, Joecy put in the dynamite, lit it. The coal blew apart, and Thomas and Bull picked up their picks and started breaking the rock into manageable pieces so that they could all start to load the tramcar.

H tried to lift his shovel, but his arms would not budge. He tried again, focusing all his mind’s power and energy on his shoulder, his forearm, his wrist, his fingers. Nothing happened.

At first, Bull and Thomas just stared at him, but before he knew it, Joecy was shoveling his pile for him, and then Bull. And then, finally, after what seemed like hours, Thomas too was pulling weight, until everybody in the room of that mine had shoveled his own pile and H’s too.

“Thank you for your help the other day,” Thomas said once they had finished.

H’s arms were still aching at his sides. They felt like immovable stone, forced to his sides by some gravitational pull. H nodded at Thomas. He used to dream about killing white men the way they killed black men. He used to dream of ropes and whips, trees and mine shafts.

“Hey, how come they call you H?”

“Don’t know,” H said. He used to think of nothing else but escaping the mines. Sometimes he would study the underground city and wonder if there was somewhere, some way, he could break free, come out on another side.

“C’mon. Somebody must have named you.”

“My old master say H is what my mama used to call me. They asked her to name me somethin’ proper before she gave birth, but she refused. She killed herself. Master said they had to slice me out her belly ’fore she died.”

Thomas didn’t say anything then, just nodded his thank-you again. A month later, when Thomas died of tuberculosis, H couldn’t remember his name, only the face he made when H had picked up his shovel for him.

This was how it went in the mines. H didn’t know where Bull was now. So many were transferred at one point or another, contracted by one of the new companies or absorbed by another. It was easy to make friends but impossible to keep them. Last H had heard, Joecy had finished his sentence, and now all the convicts told stories about how their old friend had finally become one of those free miners they had all heard about but never dreamed of actually becoming.

H shoveled his last thousand pounds of coal as a convict
in 1889. He had been working in Rock Slope for almost all of his incarceration, and his hard work and skill had shaved a year off his sentence. The day the elevator shaft took him up into the light and the prison warden unshackled his feet, H looked straight up at the sun, storing up the rays, just in case some cruel trick sent him back to the city underground. He didn’t stop staring until the sun turned into a dozen yellow spots in his eyes.

He thought about going back home, but realized that he didn’t know where home was. There was nothing left for him on the old plantations he’d worked, and he had no family to speak of. The first night of his second freedom, he walked as far as he could, walked until there was no mine in sight, no smell of coal clinging to his nostrils. He entered the first bar he saw that contained black people, and with the little money he had, he ordered a drink.

He had showered that morning, tried to rub the clench marks of the shackles from his ankles, the soot from underneath his nails. He had stared at himself in the mirror until he was confident that no one could tell he had ever been in a mine.

Sipping his drink, H noticed a woman. All he could think was that her skin was the color of cotton stems. And he missed that blackness, having only known the true blackness of coal for nearly ten years.

“Excuse me, miss. Could you tell me where I am?” he asked. He hadn’t spoken to a woman since the day he called Ethe by another woman’s name.

“You ain’t looked at the sign ’fore you came in?” she asked, smiling.

“I reckon I ain’t,” he said.

“You in Pete’s bar, Mr….”

“H is my name.”

“Mr. H is my name.”

They talked for an hour. He found out her name was Dinah and she lived in Mobile but was visiting a cousin there in Birmingham, a very Christian woman who would not care to see her kin drinking. H had just about gotten it into his head to ask her to marry him when another man stepped in to join them.

“You look mighty strong,” the man said.

H nodded. “I s’pose I am.”

“How you got to be so strong?” the man asked, and H shrugged. “Go on,” the man said. “Roll up yo sleeve. Show us some muscle.”

H started laughing, but then he looked at Dinah, and her eyes were twinkling in that way that said maybe she wouldn’t mind seeing. And so he rolled up his sleeve.

At first, both people were nodding appreciatively, but then the man came closer. “What’s that?” he said, tugging where the sleeve met H’s back until he’d made a rent in the fabric, and the whole cheap thing tore loose.

“Dear Lord!” Dinah said, covering her mouth.

H craned his neck trying to look at his own back, but then he remembered and knew he didn’t need to. It had been nearly twenty-five years since the end of slavery, and free men were not supposed to have fresh scars on their backs, the evidence of a whip.

“I knew it!” the man said. “I knew he was one of them cons from over at the mines. Ain’t nothin’ else he could be! Dinah, don’t you waste any more time talking to this nigger.”

She didn’t. She walked away with the man to stand on the other side of the bar. H rolled his sleeve back down and knew that he couldn’t go back to the free world, marked as he was.

He moved to Pratt City, the town that was made up of ex-cons, white and black alike. Convict miners who were now free miners. His first night there, he asked around for a few minutes until he found Joecy, along with his wife and children, who had moved out to Pratt City to be with him.

“Ain’t you got no one?” Joecy’s wife said, frying up some salt pork for H, working hard to make up for the fact that he had not eaten a good meal for ten years, maybe more.

“Had a woman named Ethe, long time ago, but I reckon she ain’t gon’ wanna hear from me now.”

The wife gave him a piteous look, and H figured she was thinking she knew the whole story of Ethe, having married a man herself before the white man came and labeled him con.

“Lil Joe!” the wife called, over and over, until a child appeared. “This our son, Lil Joe,” she said. “He know how to write.”

H looked him over. He couldn’t have been more than eleven years old. He was knobby-kneed and clear-eyed. He looked just like his father, but he was different too. Maybe he wouldn’t end up the kind of man who needed to use his body for work. Maybe he’d be a new kind of black man altogether, one who got to use his mind.

“He gon’ write yo woman,” the wife said.

“Naw,” H said, thinking about how Ethe had fled the room the last time they were together, fled like a spirit was chasing her. “Ain’t no need.”

The wife clucked her tongue twice, three times. “I ain’t gon’ hear none of that,” she said. “Somebody gotta know you free now. Somebody in this world need to know at least that.”

“With all due respect, ma’am. I got myself, and that’s all I ever needed.”

Joecy’s wife looked at him long and hard, and H could see all the pity and anger in that look, but he didn’t care. He didn’t back down, and so, finally, she had to.

The next morning, H walked with Joecy over to the mine to ask for work as a free laborer.

The boss man was called Mr. John. He asked H to take off his shirt. He inspected the muscles on his back and on his arms, and whistled.

“Any man what can spend ten years working at Rock Slope and live to tell about it’s worth a-watching. Made some deal with the devil, have you?” Mr. John asked, looking at H with his piercing blue eyes.

“Just a hard worker, sir,” Joecy said. “Hard and smart, too.”

“You vouch for him, Joecy?” Mr. John asked.

“Ain’t none better but me,” Joecy said.

H left with a pick in his hands.

Pratt City life was not easy, but it was better than
the living H had known anywhere else. He had never seen anything like it before. White men and their families next door to black men and theirs. Both colors joining the same unions, fighting for the same things. The mines had taught them that they had to rely on each other if they wanted to survive, and they had taken that mentality with them when they started the camp because they knew no one but a fellow miner, a fellow ex-con, knew what it was like to live in Birmingham and try to make something of a past that you would sooner forget.

The work H did was the same, only now he got paid for it. Proper wages, for he had once been a first-class man, contracted by coal companies from the state prison for nineteen dollars a month. Now that money went into his own pocket, sometimes as much as forty dollars in a single month. He remembered what little he had saved sharecropping for two years at the Hobbs plantation, and he knew that in some dark and twisted way the mine was one of the best things that had happened to him. It taught him a new skill, a worthy one, and his hands would never have to pick cotton or till land ever again.

Joecy and his wife, Jane, had been gracious enough to let H move in with them, but H had tired of living off of and around other people and their families. So he spent the better part of his first month in Pratt City coming back from the mine and then heading straight to the plot of land next to Joecy’s place to start building his own house.

H was out there one night, hammering wood, when Joecy came to see him.

“Why ain’t you joined the union yet?” Joecy asked. “We could use somebody with your temper.”

He had gotten good lumber from another old friend from the mine and the only time he could work on building the house was between 8:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. At every other waking hour, he was down in the mines.

“I ain’t like that no more,” H said. Though he had no scar on his neck from that day the pit boss had sliced him, he still ran his hands there from time to time as a reminder that a white man could still kill him for nothing.

“Oh you ain’t like that, huh? C’mon, H. We fightin’ for things that you could use too. Ain’t like you got anybody to keep you company in this here house you buildin’. Union might do you some good.”

H sat in the very back of the first meeting he
ever went to, his arms folded. At the front of the room a doctor spoke to them about black lung disease.

“The mineral dust that covers the outside of your bodies when you leave, well, that gets inside your body too. Makes you sick. Shorter hours, better ventilation, those are things that you should be fighting for.”

It had taken about a month, but it wasn’t just Joecy’s talk that finally convinced H to join. The truth was, he was scared of dying in the mines and his freedom had not erased his fear. Every time H was lowered down into the mine, he would picture his own death. Men were getting diseases he had never before seen or heard of, but now that he was free he could make the danger worth something.

“More money’s what we should be fighting for,” H said.

A murmur started to pass through the room as people craned their necks to see who had spoken. “Two-Shovel H is here,” “Is that Two-Shovel?” He’d gone so long without attending a meeting.

“Ain’t no way to keep from breathing the dust, doc,” H said. “Hell, most the men in this room are halfway to death as it is. Might as well get paid ’fore we go.”

Behind H, the meeting door started to rustle and a child who’d had his leg blown off hobbled in. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old, but already, H felt like he could picture the entire course of that boy’s life. Maybe he’d started out as a breaker, sitting hunched over tons of coal, trying to separate it from slate and rock. Then maybe the bosses moved him up to spragger because they saw him running outside one day and knew that he was fast. The boy had to run along the cars, jamming sprags in the wheels to slow the cars down, but maybe one car didn’t slow down. Maybe that one car jumped the track and took the boy’s leg and his whole future with it. Maybe what saddened the boy most after the doctor sawed it off was the fact that he wouldn’t ever get to be a first-class miner like his father.

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.