Coal Black Heart (19 page)

Many of them were about the events of 1922, when the miners—led by a radical leadership that had swept the recent union executive elections—went out on strike to resist a one-third wage cut ordered by Besco. Wolvin begged Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King for military intervention. Dan Willie Morrison, the mayor of Glace Bay, refused to send a requisition for troops. But a sympathetic judge was found, and the first troop train left Halifax a day later.

Within days, with Prime Minister King promising that “full protection” would be accorded the strike areas, “practically the whole Canadian army” was en route to Glace Bay. The province formed a
special thousand-man provincial police force to go into the coalfields and patrol the mines. Two Canadian destroyers, the
Patriot
and the
Patrician,
received orders to proceed to Sydney to render assistance. The general in charge in Sydney requested that airplanes from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, be deployed, and also tried to dragoon some British battleships then in Newfoundland waters into service. Mercifully the fighter planes and warships never arrived, but Fraser’s poems still burst with admiration for how the miners and their families persevered.

Fraser also wrote about the events that occurred the following year, after the Sydney steelworkers went out against Besco in an attempt to win union recognition and the coal miners also walked off the job in support and to protest the military rule in Cape Breton’s industrial area. One of Fraser’s favourite subjects was the arrest and jailing of union secretary-treasurer James Bryson McLachlan and miners’ president Dan Livingstone for their part in promoting the sympathetic strike. “Merry Christmas to you, Jim,” Fraser wrote of McLachlan on the “smooth board unpainted wall” of a flophouse where he was staying. “In your prison dungeon dim/ What although the bars are cold/ They have sheltered hearts of gold/ Fit companions they for you—/ Steel is strong and steel is true.”

I’m told he was right on about the prison being “dim” and the bars “cold.” At least, so said Eva MacKeigan, the union’s secretary. My great-aunt’s duties, it’s reported, included delivering McLachlan’s supper while he was in jail in Halifax, along with smuggled messages from his union buddies. Later on, if memory serves me right, she would gather up the dirty dishes, along with any hidden correspondence headed the other way, and leave the jailhouse. They told that story at her funeral in Halifax more than sixty years later. People shook their heads, as if it was the most amazing thing they had ever heard.

Jimmy and the Wolf

W
e are not stupid people. At least no stupider than most. Nonetheless, most of the Demonts and DeMonts I know grew up thinking their family was French. Some of us—well, at least one of us—spent long decades bragging about a shared kinship with the Huguenot nobleman Pierre Du Gua, Sieur de Monts, who was given the original charter to settle “the countries, territories, coasts and confines of La Cadie” and put up the cash for Champlain’s 1604 voyage to New France. It was the kind of thing that made a person feel mighty important in grade six history class. And deeply mortified to discover, forty years later, that I was almost certainly descended from a stocking weaver—an occupation that doesn’t exactly conjure up images of derring-do—hailing from some unknown canton in German-speaking Switzerland.

My ancestor’s main virtue was that he was Protestant at a time when the French and English were still bitterly contesting dominion over what would become Nova Scotia. The English, wanting to counteract the Roman Catholic presence throughout French-speaking
Acadia, recruited “foreign Protestants” from southern and central Germany, Switzerland and the Montbéliard region of France. One August day in 1751, the
Gale
made port in Halifax. The 205 passengers included a thirty-one-year-old male, first names Frantz and Joseph, with a surname that has variously been translated as Demone, Dimon, Timming, Timon or Timmon, depending upon which source you consult. (The confusion over how to spell the last name continues to this day: my grandfather, one of my uncle’s families and even my brother spell it Demont, while my father and I, along with another uncle and his people, choose DeMont.) Chances are that he spent time working on the fortifications in Halifax to pay off the cost of the voyage. Then, in 1753, he headed south until he reached a place named Lunenburg where they were handing out land grants.

From there it’s the usual story: his offspring put down roots in the area and became farmers, fishermen, sea captains and businessmen. By the mid-1800s it seems that one of them—quite possibly because he was illiterate or, at the very least, a bad speller—had changed the name to Demont. The family still didn’t stray too far. In 1855 my great-great-grandfather, Jacob Demont, and his new wife, the former Leah Vaughn, migrated north to the Annapolis Valley. When Jacob died at thirty-two, after being crushed by a molasses barrel, Leah and the seven kids moved across the Avon River to a farmhouse in a place called Wile Settlement. Eventually her second son, Edward—Ned—moved to Windsor, a bigger centre nearby.

I haven’t been able to discover much about Ned’s early life there. But while he was out cutting wood one day his young wife, Eva, died of a ruptured appendix, after just six months of marriage. Four years later Ned married Elizabeth May Armstrong, age twenty-three, also of Lunenburg County. For all anybody knows, things
were good in Windsor at the end of the nineteenth century. Then on the morning of October 17, 1897, a fire started near the riverfront. It spread down King Street to Park Street and continued to the crest of a hill. For a brief moment the blaze seemed almost under control. Then the wind shifted and increased to hurricane force and the flames began leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Soon the whole downtown was ablaze, the flames so bright that they were visible in Halifax, sixty miles away, the heat intense enough that the town’s railway tracks buckled.

No one died. Yet most people lost everything—damage was estimated at $2 million, of which only $600,000 was insured—and were left homeless and destitute. Money, food and supplies came from as far away as Boston. The military arrived with tents and supplies and erected a small tent city to provide shelter for families as the rebuilding began. A year later, 150 new buildings were standing. The
Halifax Herald
trumpeted, “she [Windsor] has been rebuilt more beautiful and more imposing and more substantial than ever.”

Ned and May Demont weren’t willing to wait around to see whether the town could really rebound. For a change, there were other opportunities in Nova Scotia. One of Edward’s brothers, Harding, left for Pictou County, where he found work in the rolling mills. Edward, at forty-one, decided to take his wife and four kids to Sydney, where he understood they were hiring at the steel plant.

Ned and May bought a house on Fairview in Sydney’s North End where, at night, they could peer out the window and see the orange plumes from the Dosco steel plant inflame the sky. The children went to school, courted, got jobs, eventually left home. Blanche, the baby, married a car dealer and set up house in Sydney. Gordon,
the second-youngest, started working as a teller for the Bank of Montreal; in 1916 he went overseas with the 36
^th
Field Battery. Three years later he returned to Sydney, joined Imperial Oil and started moving up the ranks. Florence, born in 1894, was widowed after only two years of marriage. Six years later she remarried; a dozen years after that, she was widowed again.

Her twin brother, Clarence—my grandfather—had sandy hair, gentle eyes and a heart-shaped face that narrowed to a pointy chin. He was a dreamy, amiable fellow possessing one remarkable thing: an extraordinary set of legs. By that I mean legs strong enough to outrun racehorses, to chase down enough outfield balls to single-handedly account for seventeen of twenty-seven possible outs during a single baseball game, to clamp leg scissors on any opponent in the wrestling ring and be assured of victory.

They called him Flash. He wasn’t just fast. When he ran in road races it was as if some kind of trick photography was making his legs move in a blur, like Neo in
The Matrix.
Once he false-started at the beginning of a hundred-yard dash, his specialty, which meant he was forced to start ten yards behind the other runners. He jumped the gun again and was pushed back another ten yards. The other competitors closed ranks in front of him.

“Hey,” said Clarie Demont.

When they looked back at him, he motioned for them to push to the left and right so that he could see the finish line up ahead. Around the seventy-yard mark he shot the gap, and won the race by a comfortable couple of lengths.

In my mind—amongst eyewitness accounts of him outstriding a thoroughbred horse, newspaper stories about how, at 170 pounds, he wrestled the heavyweight champion of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces to a draw, tales of his exploits on the ball field and in the hockey rink—the thing that lingers longest is a black-and-white
photograph of some long-ago race on the streets of Glace Bay. Another hundred-yard sprint. The runners are clumped together somewhere in the first third of the picture. Unless you look closely you miss him. But there, so far to the right that he’s almost out of frame, is Flash Demont, apparently running in some other race.

In 1913—according to his obituary in the
Toronto Star
—he ran the hundred-yard dash in 9.6 seconds, which, had it occurred with the proper timing device and on a regulation track, would have tied the world record. By rights the 1916 Summer Olympics, slated for Berlin, would have been his moment. They were cancelled, though, because of the Great War. Family legend has it that he could have made the team for the 1920 games in Antwerp. But that would have meant losing his job, something a young man just starting out didn’t do lightly in industrial Cape Breton.

Two years later he was living in Glace Bay, married to Mabel MacKeigan, a coal miner’s daughter who worked for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) union before their first child was born. By this time, Clarie Demont was a pressman at the
Glace Bay Gazette.
Its pages carried the usual stuff of life in a Nova Scotia town of the day: rum-running boats going down in flames, steamers missing at sea, detectives arriving to bring back wealthy Montreal girls who had eloped with young miners, big truckloads of beer mysteriously disappearing on the highway. On January 19, 1923, readers could peruse ads for dentures (“$9 for a regular $15 plate”), a class at the Savoy Dancing Academy (“55¢ admission/8:3o to 12”), fish at MacKenzie’s Market (salt July Herring/salt flat mackerel/pickled cod/kippers and digbys) and movies at the Savoy (Tom Mix
in Just Tony)
and the Capitol (William S. Hart in
Three Word Brand).
They could scan the timetable for the tramway, which left from “Senator’s Corner for Sydney Bay and points around the loop,” the schedule for the Sydney and Louisbourg Railway and last night’s score from the
colliery hockey league (5–4 for Sydney). Elsewhere, they would learn that the best way to darken hair was to steep a cup of sage tea and apply it directly to the follicles.

A.D. MacNeill, the
Gazettes
managing editor, understood what his readers wanted. So any wire story that dealt with coal mining half a world away would make the paper, and maybe even the front page. It would be joined by perhaps the first thing readers turned to when they picked up their
Gazette:
yesterday’s production tally for the Glace Bay mines—15,634 tons on January 19, 1923—broken down by individual colliery. Inside, they’d read items about new rail orders for Sydney Steel, a missing iron-ore boat bound for Wabana, Newfoundland, and announcements that “12 horses 5’0″ in height not under 1,000” lbs as well as “35 horses not over 4’4″ to 4’5” not under 500 lbs.” were required at once for pit work.

Mostly there would be stories about the relationship between the mineworkers and the owners. It was no romance. After the First World War, the ordinary Cape Breton mine-worker—like the ordinary miner in the coalfields of Pictou County, the Appalachian mountains of West Virginia or the colliery towns of Alberta—existed in the same state of servitude as had their parents and grandparents. During the Roaring Twenties, the standard of living of most Canadians improved. Not in Cape Breton, though, where many families had to raise chickens, cows and pigs to keep the children fed. In 1921 the national infant mortality rate was 88.1 per 1,000 babies born. The rates in Sydney Mines (140.0), New Waterford (148.1), Sydney (175.9) and Glace Bay (an incomprehensible 305.9) speak to the level of sanitation and poverty in Cape Breton’s coal towns.

Inside the mines, life was as dicey as ever. On July 27, 1917, a horrific explosion ripped through the No. 12 colliery in New
Waterford. The final tally: sixty-five dead including twenty-two Newfoundlanders, seven of them from one small fishing village where their bodies were returned for burial. The union found enough violations of the Coal Mines Regulation Act to take the company to court over the deaths. The company was found not guilty. It was the kind of decision that wouldn’t stand scrutiny today. Humphrey Mellish had been preparing Dominion Coal’s defence in the case. Before the trial began, he was appointed a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge. His first case: the charges against the Dominion Coal Company, in which he heard his former law partner present a defence that Mellish himself had crafted. He directed a not-guilty decision from the jury—a rare ruling, particularly for a newly-minted judge.

Miners and their families were getting tired of it all. A strike was one way to make their displeasure known. As Canada industrialized, union membership soared, and coal miners realized they held some sway in a world in which most everything of any commercial value—factories, mills, railways and steamships—depended upon coal. Some of the strikes ended happily for the Nova Scotia miners; many of them didn’t. All in all, coal miners won 35 percent of their strikes outright, and clearly lost 23 percent, during the period from 1900 to 1914.

By the 1920s, the relationship between labour and capitalism was realigning itself around the world, and miners everywhere were fighting for their rights. The most fabled battle occurred in Matewan, West Virginia, in May 1920, when the coal companies hired private detectives to evict miners from their company-owned homes after they joined the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). The locals rushed into town toting guns to confront the detectives. The mayor and the police chief, a former miner—both of whom had openly co-operated with the union drive and
protected the miners as they held organizing meetings—showed up to side with the collierymen. What ensued was the bloodiest gunfight in U.S. history. When the smoke had cleared, ten men were dead, including seven detectives and the mayor.

It wasn’t over yet; fifteen months later, the private detectives retaliated by killing the police chief on the steps of the courthouse, in a murder so brutal that it touched off an armed rebellion of 10,000 West Virginia coal miners in the largest insurrection the U.S. had experienced since the Civil War. Miners from across the state gathered in Charleston, West Virginia, and began a march south to organize the coalfields. Thousands of miners joined them along the way. At Blair Mountain, a natural barrier before the town of Logan, they were met by a reviled local sheriff and his army of deputies, mine guards, store clerks and state police. The battle that followed went on for four days. At the governor’s request, 2,100 federal troops showed up as reinforcements. So did a chemical warfare unit, a bomber and fighter planes. The miners eventually surrendered. During the fighting, at least twelve miners and four men from the sheriff’s army were killed. Special grand juries handed down 1,217 indictments, including 325 for murder and 24 for treason against the state.