Power (4 page)

 

8

If I sought to reconstruct that first meeting with Ben Holt out of memory alone, it would be full of the country smell of the old farmhouse, the late afternoon sunlight striking through the windows, and the motions of Laura McGrady as she brought coffee and bread and butter to us where we sat at the table. Laura was nineteen then, finished with almost two years at normal school, tall, full-fleshed, her hair long in two thick braids, and not beautiful the way a girl is on a magazine cover, but as beautiful, I think, as any strong, handsome girl can be in the flesh and blood and movement of youth. I don't know that I fell in love with her when I saw her that first time, but I wanted her and the wanting continued, and a year later we were married.

So my own memory of meeting Ben Holt and going into the farmhouse and interviewing him is hardly to be trusted today. What I wrote at the time is plain and to the point:

Today I met Benjamin Renwell Holt, newly elected president of the International Miners Union. Our meeting took place at Mr. Holt's organizational headquarters, a mountain hide-out, the name and location of which I am pledged not to reveal. There, in an old farmhouse, surrounded by mountaineer miners enlisted as armed guards, some of them carrying rifles of Civil War vintage, Benjamin R. Holt plans and directs the organization of an industry never before organized in the state of West Virginia. Backed by a few dozen union organizers from Pennsylvania and Illinois, he has declared war on the powerful and independent coal operators of Hogan and Mingo counties. And from the looks of Mr. Holt, a dynamic, alert ex-miner himself, they have found a worthy opponent.

In the stilted newspaper language of the time, it records the moment of our meeting and something of my own impression. If it fulfills nothing of an obligation toward truth, that can be explained by the nature of what a newspaperman must write, not the subtleties of response and emotion that men exchange with each other and with their environment, but the bald declaration of a fact that can be filed and indexed into categories of facts.

I sat facing a man who was alive, alert, and so filled with a sense of his own purpose and power that it spilled out of him. He never wholly listened and never wholly inquired; he was too much with himself; but even the part of himself that he lent to another made one feel him inescapably and respond to him. All his life, he used other people and they wanted to be used by him. This is not hindsight on my part. He used me then, immediately, because I had seen the bloody gunfight in Clinton. I had come to interview him, cynical about him, with no prepared respect whatsoever, yet I found myself flattered by his attention to what I knew and what I had seen. For the most part, during the course of his life, Holt did not make friends and enemies; he chose them for whatever his purposes were at the moment, and at this moment he wanted a newspaperman. Before we finished talking, he was calling me “Al.”

He wanted to know about the fight, and I told him the whole story. He made no comment until I had finished, and then he said softly,

“That stupid bastard Flecker. I hate killers! The pleasure of killing is a disease.”

I hadn't thought of it that way, and I asked Holt, “Wouldn't you say his sympathies were with the miners?”

“He doesn't have any sympathies. He's an animal.”

“He took your side of the fight, Mr. Holt. You'll have to admit that.”

“I don't have to admit anything of the kind,” Holt replied. “God save me from friends like Flecker. Murder isn't our fight. Not one bit. Nothing but trouble comes from the kind of thing Flecker did. We would have dealt with those detectives in our own good time and in our own way.”

“Still you have your own armed guards, don't you? If you carry a gun, then it means that you are prepared to use it.”

“Defense is one thing. Murder is something else. If everyone in this country who carried a gun used it, there'd be no one left alive. A gun is a simple thing, Al, but there's nothing simple about this situation down here in West Virginia. What do you know about coal miners, Al?”

He was calling me by my first name, and I was pleased and flattered. His voice was rich and vibrant, and already then at the age of twenty-eight, he used his voice with all the skill and command of a trained actor. At that time, I was a sharp and cynical kid, but I could not have been bought for money; if I had anything that was strong inside of me, it was some sense of integrity in my work and in what I wrote. If Ben Holt had taken any other tack, it might have turned out differently, but he left me room to summon my own annoyance as I told him that I didn't know a damn thing about miners and had never seen one before today.

“Who the hell has?” He grinned unexpectedly. “Nobody knows a damned thing about the miners except the miners. Nobody gives a damn for them except the miners. Let me tell you this—it has never been any different for five thousand years. Give or take a few centuries. That's when men began to grub in the earth and dig metal, and that's when a miner became expendable. Do you know what has changed?”

I shook my head.

“They killed them quick then. A miner was good for two years—or three. Today it averages out ten to fifteen.” Laura McGrady and her mother, Sarah—the mother in her middle forties then, but dry and old, her hands gnarled with arthritis—were listening and staring at Ben Holt, who said to Mrs. McGrady, “That's right. It's an old trade, Sarah. I read every word I could ever find that was written on it.” He turned to me. “I'm a miner, Al. You want to write about me, interview me—well, that's the first thing to begin with. I'm a miner. It doesn't begin with a man—it begins with the kid, he sucks it in, like the milk from a bottle, if he's lucky enough to have milk in the bottle. He goes to bed with it and he wakes up with it. Other kids wake up in the daylight. The miner's kid wakes up before the day breaks. You don't have privacy in a miner's house. He lies in bed and listens to his father dress in the darkness. The mother—well, she's been up an hour, got the stove going and the pan on the stove and into the pan whatever there is. My goodness, was there ever a miner had enough to eat for breakfast, enough to take him down into the black belly of the earth and give him strength and courage, damn all the doors to hell—was there ever enough? Now you tell me, Sarah?”

She had been listening to him, her daughter next to her, listening to the controlled yet passionate flow of speech that was such a strange mixture of the ordinary and the poetic; and now she shook her head and replied, “No, Ben, never enough, not nearly.”

“Oh, I've seen miners that kept their bellies full for a while,” he said. “Sure, Al—there have been times when Pennsylvania miners worked long enough to stock up the pantry, but not in West Virginia. These people are first cousins to hunger. They're the poorest, proudest lot in the country, so help me. Would you believe that these are the richest coal fields in the United States of America? Not to look at these lousy company towns here abouts—not by a long shot! But last year, mind you, 1919, they took seventy-nine million tons of coal out of these West Virginia fields. They undersold Pennsylvania and they undersold Illinois. Up there, most of the operators pay union wages. Down here—” He flung out his unbandaged hand in disgust. “You had a look at what's down here.”

Trying to pin the conversation down to newspaper terms, I said to him, “You were elected president of the International Miners Union two months ago, Mr. Holt. I believe you're the youngest president they ever had?”

“That's right—if you count the years.”

“What are your immediate goals?”

“West Virginia. That's simple enough, isn't it? How long will we have a union in the North if the operators down here undersell the Pennsylvania and Illinois operators and put them out of business?”

“Then you think you'll organize West Virginia?”

“I intend to try,” he grinned. His smile was large and warm and intensely personal, and he had the knack of making you feel that it was elicited by you and directed at you in approbation and flattery.

“What would you say your chances are?”

“Worse than they were yesterday.” His smile was gone now.

“In other words, that gunfight isn't to your advantage?”

“Al, how could it be?”

“Well, the dead men were your enemies, so to speak, weren't they?”

“No, they weren't my enemies, not one bit. They were cheap, hired thugs, and there's a thousand more to take their places.”

“Then you would condemn Flecker's action?”

“Of course I would!” he snorted. “Do you think it can bring us anything but trouble? And let me tell you this—there's going to be trouble now, more trouble than anyone will know what to do with. But it's not trouble that the union asked for or that the miners asked for.”

“Don't you see any way to solve this thing peacefully?”

He thought about that for a while before he said, “It could be solved peacefully. Any argument can. But one party's got to give up something. They want us to give up everything and get out of the state, and I guess that would make peace.”

We talked for another half hour, and then he indicated that the interview was over. I had been making notes, and I told him that I would try to reflect his point of view honestly. He said that was all he asked. We shook hands, and he told me that he would have me driven back to Clinton.

 

9

The car was a Model T Ford that belonged to the Miners Union. I didn't know then that Laura asked to drive me back. She did a good deal of driving for them, since she knew every road and cart track in the hill country. She was a good driver too, in her second and graduating year at normal school, and had supported herself through both years driving a school bus near Charleston—the West Virginia Charleston.

For a little while, coming down from Fenwick Crag, she was silent and attentive to her driving. The sun was low now, and the mountain road, between its walls of trees, was dark and deceptive. On my part, I began a conversation mentally half a dozen times, but whatever I thought to say became banal before I said it. I had slept poorly on the train the night before and been through a long day since then, and I was very tired. I had also been confronted with something totally new to me, met people whose existence I had been unaware of and indifferent to, and witnessed the violent death of twelve men. It added up to a good deal, and on top of that, I was sitting next to a girl I considered both beautiful and desirable. If I had known more about coal miners at that time—particularly coal miners in West Virginia—I might have reflected properly on what it means for a miner's daughter to get through secondary school and two years of normal school. But my knowledge was limited—yet not so limited that I did not have an impression, at least, of someone different from the run of nineteen-year-old girls I had known.

Down off the rutted, winding road, we came into the open valley, with the upending sweep of mountains all around us. She was able to take her eyes off the road long enough to glance at me and ask me what I thought of Ben Holt.

“I don't know—”

“Don't you have to have an opinion, if you write an interview?”

“Not necessarily. I have my questions and his answers.”

“That's not enough,” she said flatly. “You don't understand this place, Mr. Cutter, and you don't understand us. That's nothing you can help. You're an outsider, and you live in a world where coal miners are forgotten.”

“If they were forgotten, Miss McGrady, would I be here?”

“I imagine you're here because your editor sent you here.”

“Yes—he sent me.”

“Not because he loves coal miners, but because he suspected that something like what happened in Clinton today might happen.”

“Well, it's news,” I said. “He didn't know what was going to happen. But he knew that Ben Holt had come down here to organize the miners—or to try—”

“Then it seems to me that he knew him better than you do, and you've seen him and spoken to him.”

“I don't follow you.”

“At least he knew that this would be news,” she said testily. “He knew that Ben Holt would inject something here—something we needed desperately and which he could give us?”

“May I ask what?”

“A chance to live—instead of slow death. And a man who can bring that to you, Mr. Cutter, is a man you should be able to form some opinion about.”

Stupidly and bluntly, I said, “Are you in love with Ben Holt, Miss McGrady?” and her answer was no more or less than I deserved. She informed me that it was none of my damned business whether she was or was not. When I tried to apologize, she snapped,

“Don't, Mr. Cutter. I asked to drive you back to Clinton because I am interested in writing and newspaper work, and I thought it would be pleasant to have an opportunity to talk to you. I see that I was mistaken. If you wish to include it in your story, I am not in love with Ben Holt. He has a wife and a child. He is also the kind of man you might do well to think about, and perhaps in time you will form an opinion of him. He's a miner's son. His father was killed in a mine explosion when Ben was twelve years old. He educated himself, worked in the mines from the age of twelve, got through college, helped build this union, and became its president. And his first action as president—his first—was to come down here to West Virginia and to tell the whole world that he was going to build a union here. Do you know what kind of a man it takes to do that?”

I remained silent, and after a moment, she continued, “I was only trying to help you form an opinion, Mr. Cutter. I am sorry to have ruffled your feelings. If you don't take the first train out tomorrow but stay with us for a while, perhaps you'll make some sense of what I said.”

It was just beginning to get dark when she dropped me at the drugstore across the street from the hotel. I had confirmed my suspicion that she was an unusual woman, but I did not find her less attractive.