“I can’t afford it,” Clate said honestly.
So, after much bickering, the company’s script clerk offered to give the miner script for his time.
“My buddy has to have cash money,” Clate argued. “He’s quitting. Going back to his folks over in Ohio.”
Clate found out that when he sold his time he got only about fifty cents for a dollar.
“What you think I’m accommodating you for?” the company’s script clerk wanted to know. “I’m not out for my health. Course if you don’t want to take it”—he shoved the money halfway across the counter to Clate—“you don’t have to. There are plenty of fellows who are glad to sell their time.”
There was nothing left for Clate to do. He and his family had to have the bare necessities, bed, table, chairs.
Soon he was in the category with the other miners, always behind, always overdrawn, always selling his time before payday. Soon he was getting an empty envelope with a lot of figures marked on the outside. Clate was company-owned! If he lived to be a hundred he’d never be paid out.
Though Clate Wellford and the other coal miners never heard the word redemptioner and indent, they were not unlike those pioneer victims of unscrupulous subordinates. Men in bondage like the sharecropper of the Deep South, the Okie of the West.
How different the children of the coal field looked to those along the creeks in the shady hollows of the Blue Ridge!
In the coal camps they were unkempt and bony, in dirty, ragged garments. They squabbled among themselves and shambled listlessly along the narrow path that led past the row of shacks toward the commissary. The path was black with coal dust and slate dumped along the way to fill the mud holes.