Mother Jones with the Miners’ Children
I got to know the life of the breaker boys. The coal was hoisted to a cupola where it was ground. It then came rattling down in chutes, beside which, ladder-wise, sat little breaker boys whose job it was to pick out the slate from the coal as the black rivers flowed by. Ladders and ladders of little boys sat in the gloom of the breakers, the dust from the coal swirling continuously up in their faces. To see the slate they must bend over their task. Their shoulders were round. Their chests narrow.
A breaker boss watched the boys. He had a long stick to strike the knuckles of any lad seen neglecting his work. The fingers of the little boys bled, bled on to the coal. Their nails were out to the quick.
A labor certificate was easy to get. All one had to do was to swear to a notary for twenty-five cents that the child was the required age.
The breakerboys were not Little Lord Fauntleroys. Small chaps smoked and chewed and swore. They did men’s work and they had men’s ways, men’s vices and men’s pleasures. They fought and spit tobacco and told stories out on the culm piles of a Sunday. They joined the breaker boys’ union and beat up scabs. They refused to let their little brothers and sisters go to school if the children of scabs went.
In many mines I met the trapper boys. Little chaps who open the door for the mule when it comes in for the coal and who close the door after the mule has gone out. Runners and helpers about the mine. Lads who will become miners; who will never know anything of this beautiful world, of the great wide sea, of the clean prairies, of the snow capped mountains of the vast West. Lads born in the coal, reared and buried in the coal. And his one hope, his one protection—the union.
I met a little trapper boy one day. He was so small that his dinner bucket dragged on the ground.
“How old are you, lad?” I asked him.
“Twelve,” he growled as he spat tobacco on the ground.
“Say son,” I said, “I’m Mother Jones. You know me, don’t you? I know you told the mine foreman you were twelve, but what did you tell the union?”