Power (20 page)

As I mounted the steps of the porch, Ben came out to greet me, offering me a warm smile and his powerful hand, nodding eagerly and telling me,

“By God, I am glad to see you, Al. I was afraid you wouldn't take me up on it after all, and I just can't tell you how happy I am that you did.”

But of course he had known that I would accept; he never had any doubts that I would accept, if the truth be told, and I think I knew it then as I said the appropriate things and moved through the door held open for me and into a lighted hallway to face the woman who stood there, three children crowding around her and behind her, the children giggling, hiding, peering out at me.

Dorothy Holt was twenty-seven then, when I first saw her in the house at Pomax, six months older than I, but so clear-eyed and youthful that I could not think of her in terms of age, not then or later. She was never a slim or delicate woman, but neither did her strength leave you with an impression of stockiness. She had a supple quality, an ease of motion that suggested repose and equanimity even when she moved. In defiance of or indifference to the style of bobbed hair—becoming so popular then in the middle twenties—she wore her honey-colored hair long and gathered at the base of her neck. Her brown eyes were wide-set and direct, her mouth full and sculptured, her manner easy and unhurried. Seeing her, you thought not of a beautiful woman but of a singularly fortunate woman. You also thought of Ben Holt as a remarkably fortunate man—possessed of a home that appeared to radiate contentment, three healthy children, and a wife of grace and intelligence.

Such, at least, was my own feeling that evening, a mixture of pleasure and envy, pleasure at being among people who were free of bitterness and poverty, and envy for all that Ben Holt had and I had lost. I was introduced to Norah, age five, Sam, age three, and Ben, Jr., approaching his second birthday, good-looking and healthy children. Dorothy Holt shook hands with me and said a few words about how pleased she was to have me there for dinner. Then she went off to feed the children and bed them down, and I noticed that there was a maid to help with this and dinner. Ben led me down the hall, past a dining room where the table was already set for dinner, into a charmingly furnished living room. The decor here was early American, mixed with a few pieces of Pennsylvania countryside furniture, which today is called Pennsylvania Dutch. There were two wing chairs, covered with bright fabric and flanking a fireplace, bay windows, upholstered and inviting, a large old couch of the Federal period, some overstuffed chairs, and with it all, appointments of taste and interest. Two large, handsomely framed Audubon bird prints dominated the walls, and to balance them some old prints and one delightful primitive country portrait. On the floor, a large hooked rug gave the room a casual unity; and the whole effect was rare and pleasant, such a room, while fairly commonplace today, being uncommon and unusual then. If the effect was not of wealth and luxury, it bespoke an undeniable elegance, but Ben Holt did not apologize for it. I think that pleased me, for I half expected some apology; but he gave credit to his wife, and said,

“I like it. It's a beautiful room.”

“It is,” I agreed.

He waved me to one of the chairs in front of the fire, and asked me what I would have to drink. Then he mixed the drinks—of good scotch whisky and not colored, bootleg sugar alcohol—and seated himself opposite me. The drink was good, and I was tired and relaxed and glad to be in front of a warm fire after the cold and rain.

“How was the trip?” he asked me.

“Fine—except for walking across your town square in the rain.”

“You must have been soaked. Yet, you know, Al, I like that square. It's the only generous, broad, handsome thing about this town. Someday, we'll rebuild the whole place, but keep that square—build a fine, modern city of coal around it.”

I nodded and smiled, hardly knowing what to say.

“I always start with the future, Al. You've got to believe in the future if you work for me. The present stinks. Right now, today, we're in a hole. That's why I like to talk about the future.” I waited, and he went on, “We took the strike vote today—today.”

Watching him, waiting, I was uncertain as to what reaction he expected on my part. I was still too new to the labor movement, and specifically to mining, to respond properly to all the implications, emotional threads, fears, hopes, and possibilities contained in the word “strike.” And I doubt whether anyone who has not passed a great many years in labor in one way or another ever hears that word the way working people do. I waited, and he asked me whether I liked the whisky.

“It's good.”

“Fine, fine—Hell, Al, I'm not going to beat about the bush. Do you think I tricked you into this because I never really explained about the strike down there in West Virginia?”

I shook my head and confessed that I didn't have the vaguest notion of what he meant. He stared at me peculiarly, and then the telephone rang—as it rang again and again through the dinner. His wife came in to tell him that it was for him, and then she remained with me for a moment, pleasant and smiling, and said,

“I do hope you'll stay with us, Mr. Cutter. From what Ben said, I know you'll be good company. Pomax is not New York, or Chicago or St. Louis—”

“I've been in coal towns before,” I nodded.

“I know—” She paused uneasily, and then forced herself to say, “I do offer my condolences. I never knew your wife, Mr. Cutter, but I know she was a wonderful woman. I'm so sorry.”

I thanked her, and then Ben returned and said that there would be a meeting that night and there was no way out of it. Dorothy's face fell, but she made an adjustment quickly. “Dinner in fifteen minutes, give or take a few,” she said, and I made some remark about how much I was impressed with the room and its decor. She left. Ben Holt paced away from me and back. He said he kept forgetting that I was new to this whole thing.

“I'll learn,” I shrugged. “I'm not a kid, Ben. I didn't come out here like a boy scout or a visiting congressman. I'm not a socialist or a communist, and I have no great desire to save the world or change it. I'd rather be here than working on a newspaper in New York, and that's it.”

“Good!” He sat down facing me. “There's no time for you to learn your job—you'll be doing it, starting tonight, because we have half a dozen men to do the work of a hundred. Now I'm just going to fill in a background for you very sketchily, and you'll complete it yourself in good time. Do you know anything about my union?”

“What I've read, and I've read everything I can find.”

“Then you know the general background and something of my own history here. The union, as it is today, actually came into being in 1882—it began here in Illinois. Tom Hennesy was the first president, and no finer man ever lived. That's not in the way of praise. I'm explaining something. Hennesy was a decent, honest, modest man who lived for no other purpose than the miners, and he gave them his life, and they crucified him. Why? Because a miner trusts no one, because they've been sold out too much, too long, because at heart they're anarchists. And the three presidents who followed Hennesy finished the same way. They weren't either as devoted or as honest as Hennesy, but in the end it was the same. When they set out to do something and fell short of what they had promised, their own miners destroyed them, threw them out and maligned them. Believe me, Al, it's no joy to be president of this union. My own father organized the first local in Ringman, and they voted him out of office after one term because some damn fool said he saw him talking to an operator in town.

“That's the disease this union and this industry suffers from—fear, suspicion, hatred, and mistrust. We've never had any unity. We break our own unions and we break our own strikes—and not this union and not one goddamn miner in this country will amount to a row of beans until someone is strong enough to unite the union and hold it together and lead it. I don't want anyone to work with me and hold any illusions about me. No one handed me the leadership of this union. It didn't come through virtue and talent, like the chairmanship of a debating society. I fought and clawed my way to the top, and I hurt a lot of people and I made a lot of enemies. But I did what had to be done. I lead a union. It doesn't lead me—I lead it. That's the plain fact of the matter, which you have to take or leave. What about it?”

“I knew that,” I nodded. “A lot of people know that.”

“All right. That clears the air somewhat. Next, I'm building a machine. You don't do what I did without a machine. I know what I'm after, but I can't do it alone. I talk to communists and socialists, and I can see something of what they're after. That's not what I'm after. There's not going to be any workers' republic of social democracy here; there's only going to be more of the same as now, and it's the way the pie is cut that decides things. And it is power—power pure and simple—that will tell how the pie is cut. I have a very simple goal, higher wages and better working conditions, and that's it.”

“It makes sense,” I agreed.

“Hell, yes, sense without simplicity. The fact is, Al, that it makes no sense. Every local in this union still claims the right to make separate agreements with the operators. One local undercuts the next—in effect, the union scabbing against the union—and the whole thing becomes chaos. An operator who signs an agreement with the union for higher wages, finds the operator in the next county underselling him and underpaying too. And on top of it all, West Virginia—pouring seventy million tons of coal into the market every year—and paying slave-labor wages with no union at all. That's what we face, and either we face it or we're finished. Well, we decided to face it, and we called a strike—forty-eight hours from now, and once and for all, we're going to see this thing through and establish uniform and tolerable rates—here in the North, if nowhere else. That's what you've walked into, and it's going to be your job to sell this strike to the press and the people—and to make them understand that for us, it is survival, pure and simple.”

 

8

Long afterwards, Dorothy Holt admitted that her heart went out to me that first evening at the dinner table, sitting across from me and waching me toy with the pot roast. She said that I appeared alone, bewildered and uncertain, and that she could appreciate the response of a man who came not only into Egypt as a newcomer, but into the drab ugliness of Pomax in a pouring rain, into the home of Ben Holt, into a strike, and into a job that he was a tyro at. In all truth, she had come to the conclusion that our acquaintance would be of short order, that after a day or two in Pomax, I would turn away for greener pastures. Since I reminded her of some of the young men she had known before she married Ben, she judged me by them, and not with too much respect or admiration. Perhaps, to a degree, she was right. Sitting there, I was frank enough with myself to tell myself that if I had known the circumstances that would greet me, I would have turned down the job. Or perhaps not. Hindsight is never very dependable.

To ease things, she made the conversation. She described the geological history of Illinois that had resulted in Egypt, the thoughtlessness of the glaciers, pushing their rich earth deposits in front of them, stopping short of the delta, the poverty of the land in terms of anything but coal mining, and the set of historical circumstances that had created here one of the great coal-producing areas of the world. She chatted comfortably and serenely while Ben Holt applied himself to the food. His was the case of a very large man who expended enormous energy—and who ate enormously and efficiently, not as a glutton, but as a machine that had to be fueled. It was a digger's habit, and I have seen many diggers eat just that way, with intense absorption. And while he ate, his wife completed her tale of Egypt and explained to me,

“That was my mistake, Mr. Cutter—an early attempt to like Pomax. You come to a place to live, and your natural instinct is to like it, to feel for it, to identify yourself with it. But that's a mistake in Pomax. I don't think anyone likes Pomax. All you have here are differing degrees of distaste for it.”

“But the people—”

“Ah, now that's something else, isn't it? I suppose you know something of the Pennsylvania miners, and certainly West Virginia, but Egypt is another matter, wouldn't you say, Ben?”

“They're miners,” Ben Holt said.

“As Ben looks at it, if they pay dues, they're miners,” she smiled. “But these people—yes, you can become fond of them, very fond of them, Mr. Cutter, and they're polite and they live decently. You should see the gardens some of them have. But they're not of our time, Mr. Cutter.”

“I'm afraid I don't understand.”

“These are the people who started the Civil War three years before it began, and who fought it for five years afterwards. Time stands still for them. Ben laughs at me, and according to Ben, they're no different from people anywhere else. But they are—they are something strange and wild and terrible, maybe admirable too, and they won't bow their heads for anything or anyone in the world. That's why the thought of a strike out here frightens me. They tell stories of strikes here in Egypt. At home, when the miners have no work, they pull in their belts and grit their teeth—”

“Is that good?” Ben Holt broke in.

“I didn't say it was good or bad, Ben. But the other night I went over to a neighbor of ours, Mrs. Landrey, and her husband was sitting in the kitchen, polishing this beautiful old rifle, utterly absorbed—”

“Dorothy's an incurable romantic,” Ben broke in. “When miners strike they go hunting. Sure these are hard men. You can't live in Egypt and not be hard. The sun doesn't shine here—”

We talked about other things, about where I would live, the possibilities among the boardinghouses in Pomax. The Pomax House was bad enough, but the thought of a boarding-house was more than I could endure, and Ben felt that the cooking in the dining room at the Pomax House was better than anywhere else in town. They had a Chinese cook, whose name was Hop Sin. Dorothy agreed about his ability. “He can't find the ingredients here for the good Chinese dishes, but he has a sort of natural genius. Even when it's as simple as frying a pair of eggs, they're delicious. Ben and I go there sometimes to eat.”