From the Bottom Up Part 24

"Mule boy!" I roared with all my vocal power into what looked like an ugly rent in the rocks. A moment later, I saw a glimmer of light, then a mule shot up out of a hole and a black boy brought up the rear, clinging to the tail of "Emma," the mule, our sure-footed locomotive.

We were handed a huge sledge-hammer each and the work began. My hammer bounded off the rocks as if it were an air ball. It bounded for a dozen heavy strokes.

"Turn that rock over and look for the grain!" the foreman shouted in my ear. Then he took the hammer, turned the huge boulder over on its side, struck it twice or thrice and it flew into splinters.

We acquired the knack of things quickly, and instinctively struck the working pace. It was the limit of human strength and endurance. My jacket came off first, then my overalls, then my shirt, leaving trousers and undershirt only. The others followed suit. The sweat oozed out of every pore of my body. We smashed, filled and ran out the full cars. We worked silently, doggedly and at top speed. Several hundred men were doing likewise in other pockets; they were less b.l.o.o.d.y, perhaps, but the work was the same and they did it without knowing that it was brutally hard. There was a halt of fifteen minutes for dinner. Then we went at it again. Our best fell short of the demand. For every car of ore blasted, the foreman got fifty cents and for running out each car, we got twenty cents--a little over six cents each.

"---- ---- your souls to h--l," the foreman shouted. "Why don't you get a move on you ---- hey?"

We moved a little faster.

"You muckers ain't goin' t' get ten cars out t'day if ye don't mend yer licks!"

We "mended our licks."

He looked like a wild beast. Short of stature, but his arms were hardened and under the red skin the muscles were hard as whip-cords and taut as a drum. His eyebrows were heavy and bushy and over his strong chest grew s.h.a.ggy ma.s.ses of black hair. Our car slipped the track once and when he heard the smash he came thundering along, ripping out a string of oaths as he came. Putting his powerful body to the lever, he lifted the car almost alone. As he did so, his lamp came in contact with my hand. Unable to let go, I screamed to him to move.

As he did so, he saw the seared flesh.

"Too bad! Too bad!" he said, as he dropped the truck. I gazed into his eyes.

"Look here!" I said, "if you will look as human as that again, you may burn the other hand!"

The human moles who empty these pockets of ore are inured. Life down there is normal to them. After a few years' work, the skin becomes calloused and tough. The hands become claws or talons--broken and disfigured. The muckers laughed at us. They saw we were concerned about trifles. b.l.o.o.d.y sweat and hot oil held the red dust around us like a tight-fitting garment. Our scanty clothing was glued to our bodies. Our shoes were filled with water, but that was a luxury--it was cool.

What a hades of noise and dust! The continual noise and clatter of the pumps, the rattle of the drillers, the hissing of steam and the ear-splitting roar of the dynamite explosions are matters that one gets accustomed to in time. The frenzied desire to get cars filled and run out leaves little time for novel sensations--for that, brute force _alone_ is needed.

At the end of the first day we had filled and run out ten cars. Our pay for that was sixty-six cents apiece. During the same time, Philo, the mule boy, made seventy-five cents and Emma--she had earned what would enable her to return to-morrow to repeat the work of to-day.

About five o'clock in the afternoon we were sandwiched into the big iron skip with a score of others--black and white. Eight hours had taken our newness away. We were as others in colour and condition. We looked into their faces and felt their hot breath. Then a signal was given and the panting, squirming ma.s.s was jerked to the surface.

As we pa.s.sed over the hill to the camp I was in an ecstasy. The sense of relief under the open sky was intense. Others seemed to have it--for they joked and laughed boisterously over trifles as we went "home."

Seven of us together went to the big wash-house. It was rather crowded. I marvelled that n.o.body was using the shower-baths. I soaped myself, stood beneath the big iron water-pipe and waited, but there was no response. There was a loud laugh, then a miner asked:

"Air ye posin' for yer photo, mister?"

"No. What's the matter with the water?"

"Fits, b.u.t.tie--it's got fits!"

There was plenty of food, of a kind. The supper, at the close of the day was a brief function, but brutal as it was brief. It was something of a shock, the first night we were in camp, but at the close of my first day's work I found myself on a level with the grossest. The finer instincts were blunted or gone and I was in the clutch of a hunger like that of the jungle, where might and cunning rule. At a signal from the cook, we rushed in, crushed by main force into a seat, seized whatever was nearest and began. Scarcely a word was spoken--heads down, hands and jaws at top speed. The disgusting spectacle lasted but a few minutes, then up and out to smoke and talk.

Beside me sat a strong, powerfully built German boy, who joked about the age of the pork for supper.

"What you guff about?" the burly steward asked.

"Schmell, py gee--its tick mit bad schmell!"

"Vell, you shut your ---- maut or I smash your ---- head, see?"

The boy laughed, then the steward removed his plate and refused to give any more. n.o.body took any notice. We were too busy and too brutally selfish to interfere. The steward was the camp bully and the men were afraid of him. They must not even laugh at his provisions. We had pork for breakfast, we took pork chops to the mines for dinner, and the staple article--the standby--of every supper was pork. Pigs in Alabama are like turnips in Scotland--there are no property rights in them. They breed and litter in the tall dog-fennel; they root around the shanties and cover the landscape.

"Who owns these pigs?" I asked old Ransom Pope, a Negro.

"One an' anoder!" he said.

The gullies and the weeds were full of them and the steward found them easy and cheap feeding.

"You come yere for breakfast to-morrow an' I smash your dam head!" the steward said to the boy, as we left the dining room. There was no reply. Each man went his way. They were tired--too tired to think.

Though a stranger to even the taste of liquor, I had an intense craving for it and it seemed as if I had used it all my life. An hour after supper, I lay down on my sodden pile and went to sleep.

I was awakened next morning by a Norwegian mucker who was organizing a strike over the incident of the tainted pork. Five minutes later, every man in the shed was around the stove in an impromptu indignation meeting. It was agreed that Max, the German boy, should go in first; if the steward put him out, we were all to leave with him and refuse to work. He was allowed to take breakfast but was refused a dinner pail. We dropped ours and marched to the office in a body. An investigation was made and it was discovered that the steward was feeding us on his neighbour's pork and charging it to the company. He was discharged and we went back to the camp to make merry for the rest of the forenoon. The fun, for most of them, consisted of an extra demand on their physical force--rough horse-play, leap-frog and wrestling. One man went to town for extra stimulants. Another, a big Swede, stripped nude, drained at a single draught a bottle of whiskey and lay down to sleep himself drunk and sober again before his next call to the pits. At the close of the day he lay there--a big, s.h.a.ggy animal, wallowing.

The mines were shut down on Sunday and we had an opportunity to look around. Though a place of one thousand inhabitants, it has no post-office. There are ditches but no drains; wide, deep gullies, but no streets. The moon shines there in her season, but there are no street lamps. The hogs are somewhat tame and we fed them as we went along. There is a church but it's for black folks--it's essential to them. The whites fare not so well. If they want one, they travel for it. They do likewise for a school, for the little school beside the church is for coloured children. The only "modern convenience" was an ancient style of hydrant, around which the children were organizing fire companies and extinguishing imaginary fires.

After visiting the mule boy in Rat Hollow on Sunday, I returned to the camp. The men were lounging around the stove, smoking, and exchanging experiences. In one corner, a German sailor was playing his wheezy accordion, and in another, to a group of Slavs, a Russian soldier was singing a love song. It was my last day with the muckers. Many of my gang had already gone--the rest would follow. It wasn't a matter of wages or hours--it was a question of muck. Once in it, men lived, moved, and had their being in it, but even the most brutalized quailed at the junk pile in the corner of the shed.

The sun was setting behind the red hills. Save for a long, yellow streak just above the horizon, the sky was a ma.s.s of purple billows.

The yellow changed to amber and later to a blood red. Then rays of sun-fire shot up and splashed the purple billows; the purple and gold later gave place to black clouds through which the stars came one by one, while the muckers were settling down for the night.

It seemed at first as if I would have to commit some crime to get admission to the stockade where the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had their largest convict labour force. I was seedy-looking--my beard had grown and I was still in blue shirt and overalls. I approached the chaplain--told him my story and gained admission to his night school; and for three weeks moved in and out among the socially d.a.m.ned of that horrible stockade.

In that time I got the facts of the life there and I became so depressed by what I saw that I had to fight daily to keep off a sense of hate that pressed in upon me every time I went into that atmosphere.

Here were eight hundred men, seven hundred of them coloured. They had committed crimes against persons and property. The state of Alabama hired them out to the corporation at so much a head and the corporation proceeded, with state aid, to make their investment pay.

The men were underfed and overworked and in addition were exploited in the most shameful manner by officials from the top to the bottom.

For the slightest infraction of the rules they were flogged like galley slaves. Women were flogged as well as men. What the lash and the labour left undone tuberculosis finished. Unsanitary conditions, rotten sheds, sent many of them into eternity, where they were better off.

They were cla.s.sified according to their ability to dig coal, not according to the crimes committed.

From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had been found guilty of peonage.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907]

I got a job as a teamster and took my place in the camp among the labourers as if I had spent my life at it.

In this way I got at the facts of how and why men had been decoyed from New York and imprisoned in the forests.

I was so much at home in my work and so disguised that no one ever for a moment suspected me. I obtained photographs of the bosses, the bloodhounds and the camp box cars in which the lumber Jacks lived.

Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of the camp with stories of travel, history and romance.

If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern lumber field as in any part of the world.

From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades.