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My roommate is from Columbus, Ohio. The first week of school I told her I'd be late because I was
going to carry my dinner to the library, and she didn't know what I was talking about. So this is
for her, and for anybody else who didn't grow up up a hollow. These are the words Pappaw used every
day, the way he explained them to me, checked against what Uncle Wilbert remembers (he worked two
summers in the mines before he went in the Army and Pappaw made sure that was all).
Mining words Dinner bucket. A miner's lunch pail. "Dinner" is the noon meal; supper is at night. Water in the bottom, food in the tray on top. You always leave some of both in it, in case you get trapped. (See the first page.) The check. A small brass tag stamped with your number. You hang it on the board at the lamp house going in and take it off coming out. If your check is still on the board at the end of the shift, you're still in the mine, and everybody knows it. Lamp house. Where the cap lamps are kept on their chargers. You pick up your lamp and hang your check there. Cap lamp. The light on the front of your hard hat, with a cord to a battery on your belt. Underground, that's the only light there is. Pappaw said if you turned your lamp off you couldn't see your hand touching your nose, and he made me try it in the root cellar, and he was right. Bathhouse. Where the men change clothes before and wash up after. Your clean clothes go in a basket and you pull it up to the ceiling on a chain so the dust won't settle on them. Pappaw came home clean every day of his life. The coal dust around his eyes never quite came off, though. Portal. The entrance to the mine, cut into the side of the mountain. Man trip. The low rail cars that carry the men in and out of the mine at the start and end of a shift. In some of his mines it took most of an hour to ride to where they were working. Motor, motorman. The motor is the electric locomotive that pulls the coal cars and the man trip on the track. The motorman runs it. That was Pappaw's job for years. The face. The very end of the tunnel, where the coal is being cut. "Up at the face" is where the work is. The top. The roof of the mine. All that mountain is sitting on it. "Bad top" is roof that's cracked or loose. The bottom is the floor, and the ribs are the walls of coal on each side. Sounding the top. Tapping the roof with a bar and listening. Solid rock rings. Loose rock sounds hollow, "drummy," and you don't stand under it. Kettle bottom. A stump of a tree that turned to stone millions of years ago and is sitting in the top. It can drop out without warning. Pappaw hated them worse than snakes. Roof bolter, pinning top. The machine that drills holes up into the top so long steel bolts can be put in to hold the layers of rock together. The man who runs it is a bolter or a pinner. That was Pappaw's job for the rest of his career. Continuous miner. A big machine with a spinning drum covered in steel teeth that tears the coal right off the face and loads it onto a conveyor. When it came in, it did the work of a lot of men with shovels, which is good for backs and bad for jobs. Pappaw had opinions. Shuttle car. Carries the coal from the continuous miner back to the belt or the cars. Fire boss. The man who goes in before the shift and checks for gas and bad top, and writes his initials and the date on the rib in chalk so you know he's been there. Rock dust. White powdered limestone they spread on the ribs and bottom so the coal dust can't catch fire and explode. Pappaw came home white on the knees some days instead of black. Curtain, brattice. Heavy cloth hung across a passage to steer the fresh air up to the face. Low coal. A seam so thin you can't stand up. You work on your knees, with knee pads, for eight hours. Some of Pappaw's mines were under forty inches. Daylight, evening, hoot owl. The three shifts. Hoot owl is the one that starts around midnight. Pappaw said on hoot owl in the winter you could go a week without seeing the sun, in the mine all night and asleep all day. Tipple. The big building at the mine where the coal is cleaned and sorted and loaded into railroad cars. Company house, company store. When he was a boy, the coal company owned the houses, the store, the doctor and sometimes the church, and some of it they paid you for in scrip, money that was only good at the company store. That was mostly gone by the time I came along. Pappaw never forgot it. The union. The United Mine Workers. In our family you don't joke about it. Things Pappaw said "Leave something in the bucket." Don't use up everything you've got. Save a little for a bad day. He said it about money, about work, about arguing with Mamaw. "If it sounds drummy, don't stand under it." About loose rock, and about people who talk big. "Use your head so you don't have to use your back." Said to every one of his grandkids, about school. He did not want any of us in the mines, and none of us are. "The mountain don't care." It doesn't care how strong you are or how long you've worked or how bad you need the money. Pay attention. "Daylight's a gift." After all those years on hoot owl, he'd sit on the porch in the morning with his coffee and just look at it. "Proud of you, kid." He said it a lot. He meant it every time. What black lung is I'm only a sophomore, so this is the plain version. The real name is coal workers' pneumoconiosis. When a miner breathes coal dust, shift after shift, year after year, the finest dust gets down into the deepest parts of the lungs and stays there. The lungs scar around it, and scarred lung can't take in air the way it should. It gets worse even after a man leaves the mines. It makes you short of breath, then shorter, and in the end a lot of men need oxygen just to sit in a chair. There's no cure. The only real fix is keeping the dust down in the first place. For most of Pappaw's working life nobody official would even admit it was a disease. Miners and their doctors fought for years, and in 1969, after thousands of West Virginia miners walked off the job over it, Congress passed a federal law that set limits on the dust in the mines and set up black lung benefits for miners who were disabled by it and their widows. That law is one reason Pappaw lived to see me graduate from high school. But getting the benefits has never been easy. A miner has to prove that he has it, and that the mines gave it to him, and the companies and their doctors argue about the X-rays and the breathing tests, and the rules have been tightened since the law first passed. Pappaw applied after he retired and it took him years and more than one appeal. Men he worked with died while their paperwork was still in somebody's in-box. If you have a granddaddy or a daddy who mined coal and can't catch his breath, help him with the paperwork, and keep copies of everything. And if you are ever in a position to vote on a mine safety law, please think of my Pappaw on his porch with fifty feet of tubing, looking at the daylight. |