Power (42 page)

The word was in the air. By five o'clock, half the people in the Clinton area knew, in one version or another, what had gone on between Ben and Oswick in Macintosh's office. At collieries that worked a ten-hour day until sunset, the miners laid down their tools and walked out. There was no violence, no terror, no intimidation—but rather a strange meeting of knowledge and consent, as if the place, the time, and the motion had been miraculously blended, and, starting at about three o'clock that afternoon, miners, employed and unemployed, began to stream into the town and gather around the bandstand.

Meanwhile, the organizers who had remained in Clinton had turned Macintosh's office into temporary union headquarters. There were three empty rooms in that building, and we rented them immediately. (Eventually, the same building became the union headquarters for the entire state.) By the time I returned to Clinton, at three o'clock, two girls who could type had been found, engaged, and installed with two battered typewriters. The October wind was blowing cool, so we set up a hot-drink stand alongside the bandstand, bringing big pots of coffee from the hotel across the street and purchasing, at one clip, the town's entire supply of doughnuts and packaged cake, an act which awakened among the local merchants fond memories of a time when real money had actually circulated in Clinton.

Framed by the high, sloping mountains, gaudy and unreal in their brilliant fall colors, the town took on a carnival air. Not in all the memory of the people of Clinton had there been a day as carefree and triumphant as this one—Main Street thronged with men and women and children, an increasing crowd around the bandstand, where the kids were proudly blowing their hearts out, coffee and cake passed out until the supplies were exhausted, our own men struggling with the components of a loud-speaker system we had brought with us from Pomax, talking to miners, holding impromptu meetings here and there on the street, and passing out leaflets everywhere.

By five o'clock, when we were ready to begin our main meeting, there must have been almost five thousand men, women, and children packed into the area between the hotel and our platform. There was an increasing chill in the crisp mountain air, yet half of the crowd were barefoot, women with no other covering than their shapeless, patched gingham dresses, men in faded work shirts and ancient overalls, children huddled against the legs of their parents, infants cradled in the arms of their mothers, old, toothless crones, and miners wearing their lamps and carrying lunch pails. The musicians had stopped playing and were satisfying their thirst with soda pop.

Max Macintosh climbed up on the platform and spread his arms for silence. A hush settled over the crowd.

“Good friends,” Macintosh said, “this is a festive moment, but it is also a solemn moment. That is why I have asked the Reverend Arthur Boone to give the invocation at the opening of the meeting and the Reverend Clement Harper to give us his blessing at the close of it.”

Boone was the Methodist minister and Harper was the Baptist minister. Macintosh had picked up both of them on his way back from the pits, and between them, they covered most of the religious persuasion of the crowd. It was the first time a public-address system had ever been heard in Clinton, and the force of the amplification sent the speaker's voice echoing through the valley. It had a fine effect, and there was a good deal of whispering about it. Then the whispers quieted as Boone, old and thin and shivering a bit in the cold breeze, said,

“Brothers and sisters, we are met here in peace not in rancor, and we ask the Lord God to look kindly upon our efforts. Too long have we been afflicted with poverty and privation—” He paused, taken somewhat aback at the majestic echo of his voice, cocked his head to listen, and then said, with the simplicity of a child, “We have given thee our faith, oh Lord, and we beseech thee to give us back our hope.”

Standing next to the platform, I found that my eyes were wet, and I wanted only to get away somewhere into a dark place and put my face in my hands and weep. All the years came to nothing, and in some peculiar way that was past my understanding, I was home, the only place that was anything of home in all truth, weeping inside of myself for the one woman I had been able to love, my heart going out dumbly and futilely to these skinny, stoic, almost animal-like people, who had squeezed everything human inside their skinny bodies and out of sight, so that they might suffer silently according to their own long tradition of suffering.

Ben Holt, standing next to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “How about that, Al? Mac's a genius when it comes to these little touches. He knows these people—by God, he does!”

On the platform, Macintosh said, “I don't have to tell you about Johnny Clarke. He's been digging coal in these hills just about half a century—and there was never a day he didn't cry out, ‘Give us a union!'”

Clarke, a big, rawboned man in his sixties, climbed onto the platform—only an arrangement of planks and crates—looked suspiciously at the microphone, and then boomed into it,

“By golly, I don't expect you to applaud a preacher, but right now I feel like a stranger up here. I must have a few neighbors in this here crowd.”

Slow at first, the clapping and shouting began, then swelling up to a roar. It was a new way. They had to learn about it, it was so long since they had had anything to applaud.

“Thank you kindly, then. Mac should have taken out of those fifty years the past nineteen weeks I ain't set foot in a pit. My condition ain't so strange. It's called unemployment when I don't work and starvation wages when I do. Back in 1920 or so, a man come into these valleys to do something about that. I think maybe some of you knew him then. Well, they run him out, but it took an army of gunmen and the United States Army to do it. He said then that he'd be back to see us again, and that took a little time, but here he is—and this time the United States Army is on our side, not on theirs. Brothers and sisters, I want you to listen to some words from Benjamin Renwell Holt!”

This time they had learned, and a roar went up that echoed and re-echoed through the dusky valleys. I learned later that just about at this moment, two cars of state police drove into Clinton. But they parked at the railroad station and stayed in their cars and listened.

The sun dropped behind the hills as Ben climbed onto the platform, and as he spoke, the shadows crept on us and the air chilled. But no one moved, not one soul in all that crowd. The edge of the long shadow touched the platform, but from his waist up, Ben was still in the sunlight, the golden-red light striking him at an angle, setting his great shock of gray hair aglow and softening the folds of his big, fleshy face, washing away the ravages of time and physical neglect and overeating. Bathed in the golden glow, Ben loomed like a giant, spread his arms for silence, and then let his deep, resonant voice beat at the microphone with all the portent and rhythm of some old prophet. A thing electrical and magical happened, a transmutation I had observed to one degree or another every time Ben Holt stepped onto a platform and spoke. He transcended himself. From somewhere deep inside of him, somewhere lost and unremembered by his day-to-day self, there was awakened a beat and pulse of ancient music, an eloquence that gripped his audience utterly and made of them a single instrument upon which he played with consummate skill.

In any case, he would have been a fine speaker. Practice, plus his intelligence and his rich voice, had given him a great deal of skill; but this was something beyond professional ability, and even I, knowing him so long and well, responded emotionally as he cried,

“What are we, my brothers and sisters? Are we strangers in this rich and fruitful land? Are we cursed that in a place so bountiful, we must starve? Are we interlopers?

“Or was it our own fathers who opened this land, who came across the passes with their long rifles, and trod where no white man had ever trod before? They fought the red men and made a road through the wilderness, and then they opened their arms and their hearts to all the people, and said to them, Come because we have made a road and opened the way! Come through the wilderness because it is wilderness no longer! We have made it safe! We have opened the way to the rich pastures and the boundless plains!

“Is this fanciful, brothers and sisters? Then I give you the thought to comfort you when you work ten hours in the tunnel's darkness for fifteen cents an hour! I give you the thought to comfort you when your children tell you that they are hungry! I give you the thought for those long winter days, when the snow lies four feet deep on the ground, and because your children's feet are naked, they cannot set foot out of doors or go to school!

“No! No, enough of that! I am not here to enumerate your miseries, to catalogue your suffering, to recollect your hunger. You know me better than that. I came here once to build a union. I have come back to build a union, and so help me God and in His holy name, I take an oath that I will not leave here alive until a union exists! I will not leave here alive until every digger in these valleys locks arms with his brother and cries out in a voice they can hear a thousand miles away, I STAND BY MY BROTHER AND I WILL DIG NO COAL UNTIL I AM PAID FOUR DOLLARS FOR AN EIGHT-HOUR DAY!”

The last lines exploded from him. He threw up his arms as he cried it out, and from the people facing him, the people conditioned by years to silence, there came a wild, angry roar, a roar that thundered up and smashed from hillside to hillside.

He called them to silence, his big hands over them like the hands of a giant at a giant piano. There is a maxim in the labor movement that you do not call an important mass meeting with a few hours' notice, but rather prepare for it days and sometimes weeks in advance. But we had come into Clinton less than twelve hours before, and here the street was packed from side to side and backed up at each end with a solid mass of people, stretching from the railroad station to the outskirts of the town, and still more arriving, men and women on foot, in ancient trucks, crowded onto hay wagons, on bicycles and in old buggies. From how many miles away they came, I don't know, any more than I know exactly what curious network of information brought them, but come they did until it seemed to us that half the miners in West Virginia were packed into the narrow street in front of the hotel. And Ben stretched his arms over them and quieted them until the hush was as meaningful as the roar had been.

“I went into the White House,” Ben said. “There it stood, so proud and pretty, enough to make you want to weep, and I walked into it because I was invited there. I, Ben Holt, a digger, with a digger's hands”—holding his big hands out to them—”and a digger's mind, in these same clothes I wear today. I walked into the White House because the President of the United States had asked me to come there and talk to him about the miners. I talked to him, and I told him about the miners. I told him the truth. I held nothing back. And as it says in the Book that the truth shall make you free, so this truth faced him and he faced it. He said to me, Well, Mr. Holt, what is there to do? And I said to him, Mr. President, give us a law that will give the miners the right to organize into a trade union. But who can enforce such a law? he asked me, and I said to him, Mr. President, give us the law—only give us the law, and we will enforce it! The miners will enforce it!”

Again he quieted the swelling roar of the crowd, and when the hush came, his voice exploded it,

“And he gave us the law! Yesterday, the law was passed! The right to organize is the law of the land! Organize! the President says to you! It is your holy, sacred, inalienable right! Organize!”

The last bit of the sun passed across Ben Holt's face as the crowd went wild, a roar of sound that rocked back and forth until it seemed to become the substance of the space that filled the darkening valley.

 

18

We had not planned what happened. We had not anticipated that it would happen or even in our wildest dreams imagined that it might happen, but it was happening, not only to us, but at the same time in Alabama, in Pennsylvania, in Pomax, and in the Rocky Mountains—not always the same, differing in the specific nature and conditions of each place, yet also the same everywhere our organizers were.

There was no sleeping that night. We took over the Traveler's Mountainside Hotel and the little wooden office building, and still hundreds had to wait shivering in the street but would not leave until they were a part of the International Miners Union.

We enlisted volunteers until we had over fifty men and women filling in questionnaires and issuing union books. We ran out of union books—a shipment had been mailed but not yet arrived—and bought out the entire stock of school supplies in every store in town. The hotel kitchen was set to cooking huge pots of stew, and by midnight, we had served stew, bread, and tea to over a thousand people. We had issued over fifteen hundred union books then, and by dawn, still working, the number of books issued passed the three-thousand mark. We set up locals. We appointed temporary executive committees and turned our hotel rooms into committee meeting rooms, where they caucused and elected their own temporary local leadership. A whole structure, a whole state-wide union came into being that night in Clinton, a miracle that could not properly be explained, only witnessed and noted.

And strangely enough, at least half of the miners insisted on paying their first dues. Facing the necessity of creating a whole slate of officers immediately, Ben appointed Max Macintosh state treasurer. He sat in his office all night, with three helpers, a set of books, a cigar box, and all the miners the room could hold, and hour after hour, out of these poverty-stricken people, the money poured in, old, worn dollar bills, treasured silver dollars, jars of pennies, disability checks, Liberty bonds, postage stamps, and even dues in kind, sacks of potatoes and corn and turnips, a side of bacon, and two lean chickens. The dues in kind went into the stew pots. The manager of the hotel, torn between avarice and anxiety, complained that we were turning his hotel into a shambles, and Ben told him to go soak his head and come back next year and the local would buy his lousy hotel.