Beat the bosses
Today: John Saward, a writer based in Chicago.
Issue No. 255
Digging Out of Trouble
John Saward
Digging Out of Trouble
by John Saward
I was watching Harlan County, USA the other day, Barbara Kopple’s documentary about the Kentucky coal miners who went on strike in 1973 and their miserable negotiation with Duke Power Co., and all the men they had working for them—from sallow, jittery chairman Carl Horn Jr., shining up one more awful platitude about business in America, down to the sort of maître d’ of the hired strikebreakers, a slob named Basil Collins, waddling out of his pickup truck every morning just to chuckle at the miners on the picket line.
It is relentlessly bleak and there are rarely any scenes you might call victorious, even when Duke Power finally agrees to a deal. But there are men in these mines, wives and sisters drinking coffee on the side of a highway in the cold dark morning, in these drafty kitchens, bathing their children in little metal buckets in houses that have no hot water, plotting, waiting, waiting, and when I watch them I am reminded of the ferocious power of the human spirit. They did that for 13 months.
Kopple rides with the miners on makeshift conveyor belts, down through passages blown into the Earth out of jagged rock and narrow as a coffin, down where no light can exist, just to hack and haul up poisonous piles of what’s down there. Back on land it’s not much better; the sky is gray and damp for months, the “mining camp housing” is a shack built along the muddy edge of a river into which the town sometimes dumps its sewage. Your boss, Nathan Yarborough, the president of Eastover Mining Company, lives far enough up the hill that he doesn’t have to look at the filth he’s left you in, and his house has an upstairs.
There is nowhere else in Harlan County to work because the mining company has elbowed every other industry out of town. They can have the cops throw you in jail overnight for even using the word scab about the people they have trucked in to work your old job, and all of them will appear to take a delicious joy in your misery.
Kopple talks to a miner who had a 300-pound piece of steel fall on his head and rip a hole through his face. They let him miss a single day of work for that. There is another who breathes now in these dire, desperate gulps that nearly lift his whole torso off the seatback. “You just couldn’t get no breath. You’d walk a little feet and you’d give out,” he told her. “Just panting for breath. And sometimes you couldn’t get it no way.” We meet a woman named Lois Scott who keeps a revolver in her brassiere, sweating on the picket lines when the summer comes just because her husband is a union steelworker one county over. In one union meeting, in a haze of cigarette smoke, she hollers to the room, “Beat the hell out of them scabs. Beat the SHIT right out of them,” and it charges out of her mouth like cavalry.
The miners all speak in phlegmy voices, hunched and bloodshot; they bear all the evidence of the miles they’ve taken these bodies, from inside the ground and back here now to the oxygen tanks next to their beds.
Keep us breathing fire!
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