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Mining Life
Coal Queen
“Do not let words put the message in your heart but let your heart put words on paper," a strong message Jack Conroy would give to writers. From his life in the mines, he was able to convey it through his writings. The special relationship between man and minerals defined the parameters of the mining life. Although coal mining was dark, dirty, and dangerous work, something about it appealed to many a hardworking coal loader.
Before the widespread introduction of sophisticated underground machines into the process around World War II, coal mining was a highly labor-intensive industry. Thousands of workers laboriously extracted the mineral from the unwilling earth. Yet the desolate hills and hollows of many pre-industrial areas were still largely uninhabited, offering no such teeming workforce. Thus as the railroads snaked along the river bottoms into the coal fields in the late 19th century, companies were forced to import their labor and set up mining communities, literally overnight replacing silent mountains and roaring streams with a boisterous new society of steel, smoke and sinew. The ever-present danger from gas and dust explosions and roof falls helped to strengthen the special relationship between man and mine, for only the most skilled men could be trusted to perform the delicate operation skillfully and safely. Coal miners tempted death each workday, and the men knew that their survival depended upon the skill of their fellow workers on the shift. Also helping to build close ties among the workers was the very nature of the small and isolated mining towns, which clung to hillsides, dotted ravines, and sprawled promiscuously along creek beds throughout the coal fields. In these tiny "walking communities," work and home were closely inter-related. Often the railroad was the only way into or out of the towns, whose miners houses perched neatly in terraced rows on the steep rugged hillsides. This isolation bred close-knit ties of family, neighborhood, church, and home. Forbidden by a hoary superstition from entering the mines, coalfield women built elaborate support networks based around the work rhythms of the weekly household chores.
Everyone knew everyone else, and today old-timers especially miss this fierce sense of community. Although the towns were segregated by race and ethnicity, such distinctions vanished at the two most predominant institutions in the community, the mine and the company store.
The depiction you provide of
The depiction you provide of coal mining life is very interesting to me in comparison to the travel habit theme of the class. The nature of everyday life in this small, tight-knit community of workers is almost the antithesis to that of the traveling hobo. The coal workers found themselves facing the same dangers everyday and working to avoid death just as the bands of hoboes did, but the continuity of their work and the fact that they were geographically fixed allowed them to band into tight communities rather than remaining isolated like the bum wandering from place to place never knowing what the next day would bring or where he might wake up. To the hobo, as the many recent novels we’ve read have depicted, time and place became almost irrelevant, to the miners it defined their existence. While everything was unexpected and unpredictable in the life of the bum, the miner’s life was like clockwork, predictable and repetitive. It is interesting that Conroy decided to leave that certainty and explore the unknown world, and portray the transient nature of life and work on the road.