The Invisible Line (40 page)

Outside were hollows crisscrossed with tracks and crammed with mine tipples, workmen's cottages, and the company store. Creeks ran foul and were littered with garbage. And everywhere, in the miners' homes and on their stoops, in their hair and teeth and eyes, was the coal dust, “like sand on the desert. It was in their food,” wrote a folklorist who would travel throughout coal country. “Their clothes grated with it . . . The white satin ribbons for their children's christenings were soiled by company-store clerks who measured with grimy hands.” In the middle of the mountains, they might as well have been in Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Detroit.
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Jordan Spencer had established himself in his community and created relationships and alliances in part by borrowing money from neighbors and local businessmen and paying them back over time. Miners, by contrast, stayed in hock to the mining companies, for their housing, food, clothes, and supplies. It was as if the railroad and mines were creating a new world in the hills, a new beginning, and a new history. In Kentucky, towns were established bearing the names of executives from faraway corporations: Miller's Creek, about five miles from the Jordan Gap, would become Van Lear, Kentucky. In Virginia, Roanoke was not the failed colony that Sir Walter Raleigh had tried to establish in the late sixteenth century; after 1882 it was the Norfolk & Western's gateway to the mining areas of the southwestern Virginia mountains, a town formerly known as Big Lick. Pocahontas was no longer the princess who saved John Smith's life. Now it was the giant coalfield spanning the border between Virginia and West Virginia.
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With policies set hundreds of miles away, the coal companies controlled the kinds of relationships that miners and their families could form among themselves. In large part this control stemmed from their ability to select who worked in the mines. They balanced locals with outsiders to create communities where it was difficult to develop norms and values and rules that conflicted with maximum productivity—communities where no one had roots.
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Many of the mine workers came from far away: Virginia and Alabama, but also Italy and Hungary and Poland. For the first time ever, appreciable numbers of blacks would live in Johnson County. Until then many local residents would have said they had never seen a black person before. Within fifteen years the federal government would be investigating whether the coal companies were moving blacks in from the Deep South in order to tip coal-mining states Republican in the 1916 presidential election. Aboveground, the area began to resemble the rest of the South, with freshly painted “whites only” signs and housing and schools and religious services segregated by race. But in the darkness and dust, the rules were relaxed. The imperative to extract as much coal as possible trumped the discipline demanded by Jim Crow. Although blacks were excluded from management jobs, down in the mines they labored side by side with white miners. They called whites by their first names, and at the end of the day they earned the same wages.
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Filled with outsiders and confronted with the task of separating blacks and whites, coal-mining communities were far from Rockhouse Creek, if only a few ridgelines away. Even in this unsettled world, however, the Spencers remained white. The camps were places where memories were lost—no one would take the time to explain who Jordan Spencer was, or find someone who would listen. It was hard to tell what Jordan's descendants looked like inside the mines or in the dusty twilight outside. Their status was fixed as locals, and as far as anyone was concerned, the locals were all white.

 

 

THE HORIZONS WERE NARROW in the creek valleys and bottomland that wound through the hills. Every moment brought a new turn, a new outcropping, a rise or fall, an obstacle to overcome. It was a landscape that put people in blinders, demanding complete attention to the present moment. There was little future to contemplate when one had no way of seeing what waited ahead. Nor was there anything to look back to. An old man and woman standing by a path would not be visible long. Within steps they would blend into the wilderness, obscured first by trees, then by rock.

Jordan Spencer Jr. and his wife, Alafair, had lived nearly twenty years along Rockhouse Creek. They raised their oldest children nearly to adulthood there. The neighbors knew and would remember them fondly. Now Young Jordan's family was moving slowly through the hills. Their horses and mules staggered with everything they owned, food for the journey, and eight children. Their five boys all shared names with Jordan's brothers; their three girls were Virgie, Mary, and Liengracia. With George age sixteen and Mary a few years younger, the oldest could wrangle the babies. Alafair was probably pregnant with their ninth, a boy they would name Paris.
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South and east up the Levisa Fork, the hills peaked higher, and the hollows cut steep. It would be years before the railroad would extend that far. Around 1900 the paths were at best treacherous, often too narrow for wagons. The difficulties of riding through the area became the stuff of legend for the would-be coal barons trying to convince local farmers to sell them mining rights in the area. In any season but summer, the creeks would have been too high and fast for a family to cross them. At most the family might manage to move a mile every hour. It was impossible to travel in the dark. South of Paintsville the Spencers might have stayed with Jordan's brother Jasper and his family. But their journey was just beginning, and they probably slept outside most of the way.
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Unlike Old Jordan and Malinda, Jordan Jr. and his family did not strike out for a new life because anyone disapproved of them. Still, they prepared to travel far away. It was unlikely they would ever see their parents, brothers, sisters, and cousins again. Perhaps Rockhouse Creek was getting too crowded for the family to feed themselves. Across Appalachia, what had once been sparse settlements in remote creek valleys were becoming dense neighborhoods, as dozens of children of the original settlers were having dozens of children themselves. There was less available land, and it was higher up in the hills. It was harder to grow food or hunt for it in the woods. If Jordan Jr. had expected to inherit land from his parents, their remarkable longevity was forcing him to wait decades for a better life. With so many siblings nearby, he would not inherit much.
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Instead of going downriver to Louisa or Catlettsburg, Cincinnati or Louisville, the family went farther into the hills, through Floyd County and Pike, into Virginia. As they rode up the Levisa Fork, rafts of hardwoods floated down. While it was impossible to extract coal by the ton without the railroad, large timber companies were clearing the hills and moving logs out by the creeks and rivers. In the years before the cutting started, locals and outsiders anticipating the timber and coal boom and rising land values had rushed to buy property. The fields and hunting grounds of many small farmers in the hills shrank or disappeared. Jordan Spencer Jr. may have been similarly constricted by new realities.
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At Pikeville the steamboat line ended. In the late 1880s Pike County and nearby Logan County, West Virginia, had fascinated the nation, as the Hatfields and McCoys waged a legendary feud. With a public hanging of one murderer, Pikeville officials had declared to the world that the area was ready for coal and timber investment, that law had conquered the mountains. In reality, the coming of railroads and timber and coal was making the hills increasingly violent, as uprooted locals adjusted to new lives and jobs, fewer opportunities, and competition from newcomers. The violence, in turn, allowed outsiders to develop the area without regard to the effect on local lives; if the mountaineers were savages, whatever industry did to them would only be an improvement.
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The Spencers kept moving, and the land became almost impossibly rugged. They rode to the end of Kentucky, to the point where, in one writer's words, the mountains themselves “crumble[d].” The Breaks of the Sandy were a stretch of rapids cutting through canyons a quarter-mile deep. With two sandstone towers rising sixteen hundred feet at the entrance of the Breaks, the area seemed defiantly wild. But just downriver was the place that investors already knew would become the Elkhorn coalfield, with some of the largest and purest deposits in the mountains. In only a few years the Breaks, a “shrine of things primeval,” would confront the “furnace, ore-mine, coke-cloud, and other ugly signs of civilization.”
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The Spencers passed north and east of the Breaks and continued higher into the hills, following the Levisa Fork into Buchanan County, Virginia. After seventy-five miles of steep struggle, the state line was the easiest of boundaries to cross. Although Old Jordan regularly traveled to Virginia, no one knew him here. Young Jordan and Alafair had enough children to establish a successful, productive farm, but they would have to start over to become part of a new community. About four miles in, they branched off the river and walked up a narrow valley with an auspicious name: Home Creek.

 

 

 

 

 

I
N THE MOMENTS BEFORE sunrise, as signs of life filtered through the blackness outside—roosters crowing, strays howling, farmhands calling as they loaded horse carts for market—Stephen Wall could have imagined that he was far away. The feeling that he was living a different life from what he had known before persisted in the light of day. Walking to the streetcar down a rutted dirt road, he passed small farms, dense woods, cottages, and houses under construction much like the one he had built over the past year for his family. The landscape was more like the Oberlin of his early childhood than Washington, D.C. It was a quiet walk. The air was fresh.
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Some of the sights along the way were familiar: men dressed like Wall in three-piece suits, carrying briefcases or lunch pails, checking their pocket watches. These were men entrusted with keeping the government running, having sworn an oath, as Wall had, to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” But Wall might also pass monks in cassocks and nuns in full habit, people walking in a different world, speaking languages he didn't understand. Brookland was not the city, nor was it the country. Ringed with cloisters, seminaries, and Catholic universities, the neighborhood was sometimes called Little Rome. It was a new place. No one had lived there long or quite knew whether it would be rich or middling, respected or just respectable.
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The streetcar to work rattled Wall back to Washington. Three miles south and west, and he could see the Capitol dome, its clean line wavering in the heavy air. The area around the Government Printing Office was barely recognizable to him. Over the past few years, the notorious shantytowns called Swampoodle had been cleared to make way for Union Station. The foul waters of Tiber Creek ran underground now. Goats no longer foraged in mounds of garbage. The poverty, suffering, and rot had been bricked over.
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Even from the outside, the Printing Office's enormous new building—twelve million bricks, six thousand tons of steel, miles of cable and wire—buzzed with industry. Day and night, the presses never stopped running. The walls contained gas, water, electricity, steam, and compressed air—enough to illuminate ten thousand Edison bulbs, operate fifteen elevators, melt pigs of lead by the ton, and provide cold drinking water from seventy-five fountains spread over more than ten acres of floor space. The building was a monument to the Republic's limitless productive capacity. It was a machine.
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Thousands of workers filed in for the morning shift. Inside, hundreds of presses were printing more documents, faster, than anywhere else in the world. As an apprentice in 1880, Wall learned the art of typesetting as it had been practiced for four centuries. He spent his days on his feet assembling lines of type on his composing stick, letter by letter. The conversion to automated typesetting that began in 1904 changed Wall's work life. Now he sat during his eight-hour shift inputting thousands of “ems” of text—for patents, Treasury reports, the
Congressional Record
—into an enormous keyboard, creating perforated paper rolls that would enable the newly invented Monotype machine to cast an entire page out of molten lead.
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In the Monotype composing room, row after row of keyboards mechanically clacked over a baseline hiss of compressed air through the pipes overhead. Whistles periodically blasted, loud and shrill enough to be heard over the largest presses. Submerged in this deafening sea, Wall had no way of knowing whether he had composed his pages correctly until they were cast. The compositors' skill was total concentration, an ability to shut out the entire world, everything except for the next letter to be keyed in. Wall's supervisors monitored his speed and accuracy, and the tidiness of his work space.
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Though Wall was one of hundreds of men and women performing the same tasks in a giant room, he knew he did not blend in completely. In the three decades since he started at the Government Printing Office, he had been fired twice, both times for five-year stretches, by newly elected Democrats. Seeking his second reinstatement in 1899, Wall would remember the “reductions in force” as mass purges of skilled black printers—“prejudice, pure and simple because I am a colored man.” By 1909 the number of black compositors could be counted on one hand. Wall had reason to feel secure in his job. He had a high civil service score, and there had been successive Republican administrations during his ten years back at work. He had survived the much-feared transition from hand type to machines. And his bosses warned that racism had no place at the Government Printing Office. “I wish to declare with all emphasis,” the public printer would say in 1911, “that any employee of this department who tries to precipitate the devilish stricture of race prejudice will be immediately dismissed and will not again be employed!”
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