I was awakened next morning by a Norwegian mucker who was organizing a strike over the incident of the tainted pork. Five minutes later, every man in the shed was around the stove in an impromptu indignation meeting. It was agreed that Max, the German boy, should go in first; if the steward put him out, we were all to leave with him and refuse to work. He was allowed to take breakfast but was refused a dinner pail. We dropped ours and marched to the office in a body. An investigation was made and it was discovered that the steward was feeding us on his neighbour's pork and charging it to the company. He was discharged and we went back to the camp to make merry for the rest of the forenoon. The fun, for most of them, consisted of an extra demand on their physical force—rough horse-play, leap-frog and wrestling. One man went to town for extra stimulants. Another, a big Swede, stripped nude, drained at a single draught a bottle of whiskey and lay down to sleep himself drunk and sober again before his next call to the pits. At the close of the day he lay there—a big, shaggy animal, wallowing.
The mines were shut down on Sunday and we had an opportunity to look around. Though a place of one thousand inhabitants, it has no post-office. There are ditches but no drains; wide, deep gullies, but no streets. The moon shines there in her season, but there are no street lamps. The hogs are somewhat tame and we fed them as we went along. There is a church but it's for black folks—it's essential to them. The whites fare not so well. If they want one, they travel for it. They do likewise for a school, for the little school beside the church is for coloured children. The only "modern convenience" was an ancient style of hydrant, around which the children were organizing fire companies and extinguishing imaginary fires.
After visiting the mule boy in Rat Hollow on Sunday, I returned to the camp. The men were lounging around the stove, smoking, and exchanging experiences. In one corner, a German sailor was playing his wheezy accordion, and in another, to a group of Slavs, a Russian soldier was singing a love song. It was my last day with the muckers. Many of my gang had already gone—the rest would follow. It wasn't a matter of wages or hours—it was a question of muck. Once in it, men lived, moved, and had their being in it, but even the most brutalized quailed at the junk pile in the corner of the shed.
The sun was setting behind the red hills. Save for a long, yellow streak just above the horizon, the sky was a mass of purple billows. The yellow changed to amber and later to a blood red. Then rays of sun-fire shot up and splashed the purple billows; the purple and gold later gave place to black clouds through which the stars came one by one, while the muckers were settling down for the night.
It seemed at first as if I would have to commit some crime to get admission to the stockade where the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company had their largest convict labour force. I was seedy-looking—my beard had grown and I was still in blue shirt and overalls. I approached the chaplain—told him my story and gained admission to his night school; and for three weeks moved in and out among the socially damned of that horrible stockade.
In that time I got the facts of the life there and I became so depressed by what I saw that I had to fight daily to keep off a sense of hate that pressed in upon me every time I went into that atmosphere.
Here were eight hundred men, seven hundred of them coloured. They had committed crimes against persons and property. The state of Alabama hired them out to the corporation at so much a head and the corporation proceeded, with state aid, to make their investment pay.
The men were underfed and overworked and in addition were exploited in the most shameful manner by officials from the top to the bottom.
For the slightest infraction of the rules they were flogged like galley slaves. Women were flogged as well as men. What the lash and the labour left undone tuberculosis finished. Unsanitary conditions, rotten sheds, sent many of them into eternity, where they were better off.
They were classified according to their ability to dig coal, not according to the crimes committed.