Power (6 page)

“Who said they're armed?”

I shrugged and shook my head, but he was firm on refusing to allow me to talk to them. “Twelve damn good detectives were murdered here yesterday, mister,” he said to me. “Do you want us to subject ourselves to the same thing? Not on your life. You want to talk—talk to these sonovabitch miners!”

Only there were no miners. The day before, the day I arrived, the streets of Clinton had been full of miners and their wives and their kids, but today not one of them was in sight, not a soul on the streets anywhere except the hard-eyed operatives who had been pouring into town. They were everywhere. They sat on the curbstones, swarmed over the hotel veranda, and pressed into the lunchroom and the drugstore; but there were no miners to be seen anywhere.

There was a garage in Clinton, and I walked over to it now. It was at the end of the business street, a ramshackle shed where a single mechanic was working under a car. He crawled out when I said “Good morning” to him, and eyed me without pleasure. He was a boy of eighteen or nineteen or so.

“I want to rent a car,” I said to him.

No comment, no reaction.

“You have a car for hire? Or a taxi service? Suppose I want to go somewhere. Could you drive me?”

“I got my work,” he muttered, turning away.

I told him that I was a reporter, and that made him pause. Then I got out my press card for him to look at. I pointed out to him that regardless of what he thought, Clinton, West Virginia, was at this moment the focal point of interest for the entire country, and was likely to remain so for some time to come. He might not give one damn for a reporter, but at least a part of the ultimate fate of the coal miners in Hogan County would depend on what reporters told of their fight.

Finally, he asked me, “Where do you want to go, mister?”

“Fenwick Crag—the McGrady place.”

He thought this over for a while, and then he nodded. “Cost you five dollars.”

I took out my wallet and paid him, and he said that he would be ready for me in half an hour. Then I went back to the hotel, paid my bill, packed my suitcase, and put in a call to New York. When I told Oscar Smith that I was checking out of the hotel and leaving Clinton, I thought he would explode. “Of all the damnfool, idiot notions!” he screamed at me. “There you are, by pure accident at the heart of the biggest story in the country, and you talk about pulling out! Either stay there or you're out of a job!”

“You sent me down here to cover a war, didn't you?”

“Forget that nonsense and stay where you are!”

“No, sir,” I replied, politely but firmly. “I think there is going to be a war after all. Everyone else will be here on the home front. I intend to be with the enemy forces.”

I explained all that I dared to explain. As far as I knew, someone might be listening in downstairs, and I didn't want any trouble. At least he began to see my way of thinking, and if I got no blessing, at least I got a warning to file material and not to think that I could turn into a bum on his money.

I went downstairs to the lobby then. It was crowded, as it had been since the evening before, and at one side of it, on a couch and a few chairs, half a dozen women were sitting. A few were women; the rest were just kids, and they were all dressed badly and cheaply, their faces covered with heavy, raw make-up. The operatives in the lobby were around them, loud and clever and making a big thing out of them. Bill Goodman of the
Times
, who had checked in early in the morning, spotted me and my suitcase and wanted to know where I was going.

“Out,” I said. “I had enough of Clinton.”

He didn't believe me, and kept pushing for some information. In turn, he described the extent of the operation here. According to him, there were some five hundred hired detectives, for want of a better name, in town already, and more coming. The batch of girls had just come in from Charleston, and they were the first of a large order necessary to keep the men satisfied. “They're doing it the French way,” he said. “My word, I never seen anything like this before. They got an army occupying this town. What for? What are they up to? I heard of strikes and labor trouble, but so help me God, I never heard of anything like this before!”

“They just don't want a union here,” I replied.

“That's an understatement if I ever heard one. Where are you going?”

“Just around. I want to look at the pits and see what's happening.”

“With your suitcase?”

“You never know where you'll end up.”

“It's damn funny,” he said, “that you got here yesterday before anyone ever knew that there was a place called Clinton on the map.”

“It's one of those things,” I shrugged, and pushed my way through and outside. The car was in front of the hotel, the motor running, a battered specimen of a Maxwell, I think, and some of the operatives were examining it and trying to rile the boy in the driver's seat. He was nervous, for which I hardly blamed him. He was a lone native in a town whose population had melted away, and a good many of these operatives or detectives appeared to have only remote kinship with the human race. From what alleys and gutters of New York and Chicago they had been recruited, I did not know, but they were not specimens to meet on a dark night.

I climbed into the car, threw my bag onto the back seat, and we started off down the street. We drove in silence until we were out of the town, and then the boy turned to me and said,

“Mister, if you ain't a proper person to bring there, they're going to kill you. I guess you know that.”

I didn't know, but I said that I would take my chances.

“Me, too,” the boy nodded. “If they have to kill you, they are going to be mighty provoked at me.”

 

13

A different armed guard stopped us this time, and he wasn't polite. His face was dark as thunder, and he cussed out the garage mechanic and demanded to know whether he didn't have more sense than to bring a stranger, and a city man at that, up to Fenwick Crag. I talked quickly and firmly about Ben Holt being a friend of sorts, but the two barrels of the miner's shotgun listened poorly. There was more discussion before he let us through, but finally he did.

Armed miners stood aside as we labored up the road, and the area around the farmhouse looked like an army camp. There must have been over a thousand men there, and it seemed like five thousand, and there were more tents, lean-tos, cooking fires, and some twenty-five or thirty old cars parked near the barn. Many of these miners must have been overseas during the war, for almost every one of them had some scrap of uniform, an army shirt, a tin hat, a cartridge sling—or khaki tape around the bottom of blue jeans, and most of them wore an arm band with the letters IMU stitched on it or marked on it.

As we rolled to a stop near the farmhouse, a miner who wore an officer's cap came over to the car, which was already surrounded by curious and unsmiling men, and asked who I was and what I wanted there. I told him, and left just the implication that Ben Holt had invited me back. I got out of the car, assuring myself that I was not nervous and that there was nothing for me to be nervous about. Meanwhile, the man in the officer's cap talked in whispers to the garage mechanic. I was relieved when I saw Ben Holt pushing through the crowd, but there was no welcome on his face, no pleasure, no mask of conviviality for a bright young newspaperman.

“I see you're back, Cutter,” he said to me.

“Yes, sir.”

“Why?”

I decided to tell him the truth. It was a sensible beginning, and through the years that followed, I kept it that way. “There's at least a hundred newspapermen back there in Clinton now. There's none with you. Am I right?”

“You're right.”

“So that's my job. You're going to make news, and I want to write about it.”

“Suppose I threw you out of here?” Holt said flatly.

I shrugged. “That's up to you. I think you'd be making a mistake.”

“Why?” That was characteristic of Holt. If there was a chance for an explanation, he asked. “Are you on our side?”

“No. Not oh your side, not on their side.”

“Then, God damn you, mister, go peddle your lies somewhere else!”

“I don't write lies, Mr. Holt. I put down what I see.”

He pursed his lips and stared at me for a long moment, and then he said softly, “What are you after, Cutter?”

“News. That's all.”

“Crap and horseshit!” he cried. “News! What in hell is news! This is a country down here where men work like slaves and are treated like slaves! They pawn their souls to the company store, and there's a mortgage on their kids when the kids are born. We came down here to organize a union—just that—just to organize a union, which is supposed to be a right that some Americans have. And from the day we arrived, the terror never stopped, five thousand miners locked out of their jobs and their homes, kicked into the fields and the woods, men beaten, men tortured, women whipped and raped—all that because we tried to organize a union. Have you written about that?”

“A little. I suggested some of it in the interview I wrote about you.”

He stared at me again, as if he were trying to see through me and into me, and then he told me to follow him, leading the way around the house to the barn in back. I looked for Laura but did not see her. There were men around the barn, most of them armed, and they stood apart, not for us but to let a group of women and children come out, gaunt, prematurely aged women whose last shreds of attractiveness had been washed away in grief. They had been weeping, but it was not an act that came easily to them. We went past them and into the barn, and there on the floor, fifteen bodies were laid out. Some men at the back of the barn were sawing and nailing wooden planks for coffins. I looked at the bodies. Ten were men, miners wearing their badge of trade in the black lines etched on their hands and faces, two were boys, one was a woman, and two were little children, girls. There were more women in the barn, and they sat huddled in silent woe.

“It happened this morning,” Holt told me. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Only Jim Flecker wasn't a miner. Jim Flecker was a murderer. This is the way they tried him and sentenced him.”

I remained silent. There was nothing for me to say.

“Is this the way death should come, Cutter?” Holt asked me. “Should it come the way it does in the mines? Do you know how many miners have died in the past ten years? Do you have any idea how many tens of thousands? What are we! Jesus God, what are we? They slaughter cattle with more compunction. Are you still neutral, Cutter?”

“You showed me this. I'll write about it.”

“That's all?”

“I'm not Lazarus. I can't raise the dead, Mr. Holt.”

“No, you're not Lazarus.”

“How did they pick them?”

“Pick them? They didn't pick them, Cutter. They drove out of Clinton this morning, a carload of them armed to the teeth, and they killed the first miners they found—or men. Those kids weren't miners, those two boys. The woman was Sadie Stewart, those are her kids, and that's her husband lying next to her. Her husband ran into their shack, and those hired heroes kept firing into the shack until a roach couldn't have remained alive in there.”

“I will want their names, if it's not too much trouble.”

Holt glanced at me sharply, then nodded. “All right, their names and anything else you want.”

 

14

They let me work in one of the tents. I had no typewriter with me, so I sat on a stool and put down the story in longhand in my notebook. One of the miners brought me lunch, a tin cup of poor stew that was a thin mixture of meat and potatoes and a slice of bread. It was nothing to grow fat on, but no less than what the others got. By three o'clock, I had finished my story; and I was standing by the tent, trying to think of some way to file it without returning to Clinton, when Laura came over and said hello to me. Her tone was not unfriendly. She wore a white IMU band on her arm, and a white cross was stitched on her dress at the breast. She told me that they were organizing a corps of nurses.

“Then it will be war?”

“This is our home, Mr. Cutter. This is our land.”

“I know that.”

“But you don't believe in fighting for it?”

“This is the twentieth century in the United States of America. I don't believe in private wars—no.”

“Then what should we do?” There was no mockery in her question.

“Use the law.”

“What law? This is West Virginia, Mr. Cutter. Their law is different here, what there is of it, and in Hogan County it belongs to the mine operators. We are used to starvation, Mr. Cutter, but not to being murdered in our beds.”

I nodded, and then for a little while we stood in silence, and then she asked me what I had written and whether she could see it. I said it was not secret, and would she like me to read it to her? She nodded, and I read as follows:

“
May 27, 1920
. Somewhere in West Virginia. I am the only reporter present at the secret base of the International Miners Union. Here, at the headquarters of Benjamin R. Holt, as strange a situation is developing as American labor ever knew. Mr. Holt, twenty-eight-year-old strong man and newly elected president of the Miners Union, came down here recently to organize a union of the West Virginia coal miners. He brought with him a corps of organizers, and their arrival in the coal fields was the signal for an outbreak of violence unique even for this part of the country—an area that well remembers the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud as well as many others.

“So far as this reporter can determine, the first violence was triggered, not by the miners, but by private detectives brought in by the coal operators. The first response of the miners to the union was enthusiastic, and several thousand of them signed union cards during the first few days of organization. Then the operators began the eviction of such miners as lived in company houses and had co-operated with the union. Since none of these miners had valid leases, the operators were entirely within their rights, both in the evictions and in the subsequent closing of the pits. About 85 per cent of the local miners were affected.