MY EXPERIENCE AS A LABOURER IN THE MUSCLE MARKET OF THE SOUTH
_Appleton's Magazine_ published my first serious attempt at fiction.
It was a short story entitled, "Two Social Pariahs."
The cry of peonage was in the air and I arranged with _Appleton's
Magazine_ for a series of articles on the subject. Dressed as a
labourer I went to the muscle market of New York and got hired. To do
this I had to assume a foreign accent and look as slovenly as
possible. With a picturesque contingent of Hungarians, Finns, Swedes
and Greeks, I was drafted for the iron mines of the Tennessee Coal and
Iron Company. The mines are near Bessemer, Ala. At every turn of the
road south we were herded and handled like cattle.
It was a big, black porter who led us into the car at Portsmouth, Va.
I was the leader of the contingent, and the porter addressed us for
the most part by signs, and when he spoke at all he called me
"Johnny." When inside, he arranged us in our seats, putting his hands
on some of our shoulders to press us down into them. I did not realize
that I was in a Southern state until I saw a big yellow card in this
car marked "Coloured." Then I knew instantly that we were in a Jim
Crow car. A coloured woman sat next to the window in my seat and by
her look and little toss of the head and a quick nervous movement she
seemed to say, "What are you doing here?"
When the train pulled out of the depot, I stepped up to the porter and
said:
"Haven't you a law in Virginia on the separation of the races."
The big black fellow grinned.
"Dere sho' is, boss--but you ain't no races. You is jest Dagoes, ain't
you?"
At Atlanta we changed cars and were again driven into the Jim Crow
car. This time I made a more intelligent attempt to solve my race
problem. The conductor, faultlessly dressed in broadcloth and covered
with gold lace, strode into our car with the air of an admiral of the
fleet. He went straight through the car, collecting the block ticket
for our gang from the boss, and as he returned I stepped into the
aisle in front of him, blocking his passage.
"Pardon me, sir," I said, "isn't there a law in Georgia on the
separation of the races?"
Without a word, he removed the glasses from his nose, stared at me for
a moment, then turned sharply, walked to the end of the car, removed
the card which read "Coloured" and reversed it. It then read "White."
Then he came back through the car slowly, staring at me as he passed
but without uttering a word.
Our particular destination was "Muckers Camp" at Readers. A group of
three buildings on the brow of a hill--the hill where the blacks live.
The first of these buildings is a kitchen and dining room, the second
is a big dormitory and the third is a wash-house. This was our new
home. The dormitory was originally intended for a series of small
rooms but the work was arrested before completion. The uprights
marking the divisions of the rooms were still standing--bare and
uncovered. The floor of the big dormitory was littered with
rubbish--miners' cast-off clothing, shoes, broken lamps, and in a
corner there was a junk-heap of broken bedsteads, slats, army blankets
and sodden mattresses. We were told to make ourselves "at home." There
was room enough and plenty of bedding. All we had to do was to fish
for what we needed and put it in order. Everything was red--red with
ore that men carried out of the mines on their bodies.
The junk heap in the corner played an important part in the movements
of my gang. The thought of having to sleep in the sodden stuff chilled
me to the bones, but I kept silent. Whatever the previous condition of
the men had been, they felt as I did as they pulled their bedding out
piece by piece. They had gone to spend the winter in the mines of
the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company; they knew the work, conditions
and pay; they had refused to be bribed on the way down, but as they
tugged at the junk, a change came over them! They swore in half a
dozen languages--they gritted their teeth and vowed that they wouldn't
be treated like pigs.
[Illustration: In a Mucker's Camp in Alabama]
[Illustration: Irvine and Three Other Muckers as They Left Greenwich
Street for the South]
We went to the wash-house and the outlook was less encouraging. There
was a long, narrow trough in the centre. It was half full of red ore.
The floor was wet and covered with ore, rags, old papers and other
rubbish. There were compartments intended for shower-baths, but there
again the work had been arrested and was incomplete. We washed, made
our beds, ate dinner and proceeded to the company store to be fitted
out.
Each man was furnished with a number. By that number he was to be
known while in the company's employ. Each man showed his number and
drew what he needed--overalls, lamps, and heavy boots. There was
nothing niggardly in the credit. The deeper the debt the tighter the
grip on the debtor. The goods cost just one hundred per cent. more
than anywhere else. The company paid wages once a month. If a labourer
borrowed of his own within that time, he paid ten per cent. on the
loan.
As we came back from the store, the miners were just leaving the mines
and it was interesting to see them gaze into our faces and address us
in Russian, Hungarian, Swedish and various other languages. It was
one of the excitements of camp life--to inspect and classify the
newcomers.
One of the men had a wheezy accordion and he relieved the monotony of
the evening with some German airs. The big shed was unlighted, save as
each man was his own lamp-post. Each made his own bed by the light of
the lamp on his cap. As he undressed, the cap was the last article to
be set aside and the extinguishing of the smoky, flickering blaze the
last act of the night.
As the first streak of the gray dawn came in through the bare windows,
four of our gang dressed and deliberately marched out of the
camp--never to return.
The first number in the programme of a "mucker's" toilet is to adjust
his cap with his lamp in it, trimmed and burning. The second is to
light his pipe; then he dresses.
It was half-past five and still dark, when those nude, shaggy men with
heads ablaze with smoky, flickering lamps, began to move around. They
looked grotesque--unearthly--denizens of some underground pit. They
were good-humoured and full of boisterous laughter.
A breakfast of pork, beans, potatoes, bread and coffee--plenty of
each--and we went off with dinner pails over the hill to the valley,
where five tall, smoking chimneys marked the entrances to as many
mines.
Each mine has a complete outfit of men and machinery, and a certain
number of chambers or pockets in which, with blast and hammer and
hand, the red hills are made to disgorge their treasures of iron ore.
Three of us perched ourselves on the rear end of the "skip"--a big
iron-ore disgorger--and began the half-mile descent. It was a 45 per
cent. grade, and the skip, at the end of a powerful wire cable, went
down by jerks. One of my companions was Franz, the Hungarian, the
other was a German. The big square mouth of the mine became smaller
and smaller as we bumped into the bowels of the earth. In a few
minutes it looked like a small window-pane, and then disappeared
altogether and we were left in the darkness.
Each mine is like a little town. It has a main street and side
alleys--"pockets," they are called. There are "live" and "dead"
pockets--the dead are the worked out.
At the first of the live pockets the skip was stopped by some
invisible hand and we clambered over the side to a platform where a
foreman met and conducted us to the task of the day.
The mine was filled with red dust. We could see but a few feet ahead
of us. The lamps on men's brows looked like fire-flies dancing in the
red mist. There was a sound of rushing water and the _chug, chug_ of
the pumps. As we waded ankle-deep through a water alley, we heard the
warning yells of a foreman. A charge of dynamite was about to burst
and the men were flying out of danger. We were whisked into a cleft
for safety. Half a dozen old miners were squeezed in beside us. Our
scarcely soiled caps told the story of our newness and the old hands
watched us closely.
Boom! The hills shivered like the deck of a warship as she discharges
a broadside. Franz shivered too. His eyes bulged and he stared,
loose-jawed, at the men around us, who laughed at his fright.
The explosion was in our alley; it had torn up the car-tracks like
strips of macaroni; it was the salute of dynamite to our soft, flabby
muscles, to our white caps and new overalls; it was a stick of
concentrated power throwing down the gauntlet to men in the raw.
We had a foreman who superintended our compartment, "a driller," who
with a steam drill sat all day boring holes for dynamite, and we were
the "muckers"--miner's helpers--who carried away with muscular power
the effects of the explosion. Each alley had similar crews.
"Mule boy!" I roared with all my vocal power into what looked like an
ugly rent in the rocks. A moment later, I saw a glimmer of light, then
a mule shot up out of a hole and a black boy brought up the rear,
clinging to the tail of "Emma," the mule, our sure-footed locomotive.
We were handed a huge sledge-hammer each and the work began. My hammer
bounded off the rocks as if it were an air ball. It bounded for a
dozen heavy strokes.
"Turn that rock over and look for the grain!" the foreman shouted in
my ear. Then he took the hammer, turned the huge boulder over on its
side, struck it twice or thrice and it flew into splinters.
We acquired the knack of things quickly, and instinctively struck the
working pace. It was the limit of human strength and endurance. My
jacket came off first, then my overalls, then my shirt, leaving
trousers and undershirt only. The others followed suit. The sweat
oozed out of every pore of my body. We smashed, filled and ran out the
full cars. We worked silently, doggedly and at top speed. Several
hundred men were doing likewise in other pockets; they were less
bloody, perhaps, but the work was the same and they did it without
knowing that it was brutally hard. There was a halt of fifteen minutes
for dinner. Then we went at it again. Our best fell short of the
demand. For every car of ore blasted, the foreman got fifty cents and
for running out each car, we got twenty cents--a little over six cents
each.
"---- ---- your souls to h--l," the foreman shouted. "Why don't you
get a move on you ---- hey?"
We moved a little faster.
"You muckers ain't goin' t' get ten cars out t'day if ye don't mend
yer licks!"
We "mended our licks."
He looked like a wild beast. Short of stature, but his arms were
hardened and under the red skin the muscles were hard as whip-cords
and taut as a drum. His eyebrows were heavy and bushy and over his
strong chest grew shaggy masses of black hair. Our car slipped the
track once and when he heard the smash he came thundering along,
ripping out a string of oaths as he came. Putting his powerful body to
the lever, he lifted the car almost alone. As he did so, his lamp came
in contact with my hand. Unable to let go, I screamed to him to move.
As he did so, he saw the seared flesh.
"Too bad! Too bad!" he said, as he dropped the truck. I gazed into his
eyes.
"Look here!" I said, "if you will look as human as that again, you may
burn the other hand!"
The human moles who empty these pockets of ore are inured. Life down
there is normal to them. After a few years' work, the skin becomes
calloused and tough. The hands become claws or talons--broken and
disfigured. The muckers laughed at us. They saw we were concerned
about trifles. Bloody sweat and hot oil held the red dust around us
like a tight-fitting garment. Our scanty clothing was glued to our
bodies. Our shoes were filled with water, but that was a luxury--it
was cool.
What a hades of noise and dust! The continual noise and clatter of the
pumps, the rattle of the drillers, the hissing of steam and the
ear-splitting roar of the dynamite explosions are matters that one
gets accustomed to in time. The frenzied desire to get cars filled and
run out leaves little time for novel sensations--for that, brute force
_alone_ is needed.
At the end of the first day we had filled and run out ten cars. Our
pay for that was sixty-six cents apiece. During the same time, Philo,
the mule boy, made seventy-five cents and Emma--she had earned what
would enable her to return to-morrow to repeat the work of to-day.
About five o'clock in the afternoon we were sandwiched into the big
iron skip with a score of others--black and white. Eight hours had
taken our newness away. We were as others in colour and condition. We
looked into their faces and felt their hot breath. Then a signal was
given and the panting, squirming mass was jerked to the surface.
As we passed over the hill to the camp I was in an ecstasy. The sense
of relief under the open sky was intense. Others seemed to have
it--for they joked and laughed boisterously over trifles as we went
"home."
Seven of us together went to the big wash-house. It was rather
crowded. I marvelled that nobody was using the shower-baths. I soaped
myself, stood beneath the big iron water-pipe and waited, but there
was no response. There was a loud laugh, then a miner asked:
"Air ye posin' for yer photo, mister?"
"No. What's the matter with the water?"
"Fits, Buttie--it's got fits!"
There was plenty of food, of a kind. The supper, at the close of the
day was a brief function, but brutal as it was brief. It was something
of a shock, the first night we were in camp, but at the close of my
first day's work I found myself on a level with the grossest. The
finer instincts were blunted or gone and I was in the clutch of a
hunger like that of the jungle, where might and cunning rule. At a
signal from the cook, we rushed in, crushed by main force into a seat,
seized whatever was nearest and began. Scarcely a word was
spoken--heads down, hands and jaws at top speed. The disgusting
spectacle lasted but a few minutes, then up and out to smoke and talk.
Beside me sat a strong, powerfully built German boy, who joked about
the age of the pork for supper.
"What you guff about?" the burly steward asked.
"Schmell, py gee--its tick mit bad schmell!"
"Vell, you shut your ---- maut or I smash your ---- head, see?"
The boy laughed, then the steward removed his plate and refused to
give any more. Nobody took any notice. We were too busy and too
brutally selfish to interfere. The steward was the camp bully and the
men were afraid of him. They must not even laugh at his provisions. We
had pork for breakfast, we took pork chops to the mines for dinner,
and the staple article--the standby--of every supper was pork. Pigs in
Alabama are like turnips in Scotland--there are no property rights in
them. They breed and litter in the tall dog-fennel; they root around
the shanties and cover the landscape.
"Who owns these pigs?" I asked old Ransom Pope, a Negro.
"One an' anoder!" he said.
The gullies and the weeds were full of them and the steward found them
easy and cheap feeding.
"You come yere for breakfast to-morrow an' I smash your dam head!" the
steward said to the boy, as we left the dining room. There was no
reply. Each man went his way. They were tired--too tired to think.
Though a stranger to even the taste of liquor, I had an intense
craving for it and it seemed as if I had used it all my life. An hour
after supper, I lay down on my sodden pile and went to sleep.
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.
From the stockade I went to a lumber camp where some officials had
been found guilty of peonage.
[Illustration: Irvine Punching Logs in the Gulf of Mexico, 1907]
I got a job as a teamster and took my place in the camp among the
labourers as if I had spent my life at it.
In this way I got at the facts of how and why men had been decoyed
from New York and imprisoned in the forests.
I was so much at home in my work and so disguised that no one ever for
a moment suspected me. I obtained photographs of the bosses, the
bloodhounds and the camp box cars in which the lumber Jacks lived.
Several times around a bonfire of pine knots I entertained the men of
the camp with stories of travel, history and romance.
If I had been discovered, if the purpose of my presence had been known
I would have been shot like a dog; for life is as cheap in a Southern
lumber field as in any part of the world.
From the lumber camp I went to one of the big turpentine camps where
conditions are as primitive and as inhuman as in the stockades.
My next and last job in the South was punching logs in Pensacola
harbour for a dollar and six "bits" a day. There I got material for
several stories of peons who had escaped from the woods.
While in Pensacola I made a visit, one Sunday morning, to the city
jail and asked permission to address the prisoners. The jailer, of
course, wanted to know what an unkempt labourer had to say to his
charges.
In order to convince him I had to deliver an exegesis before the desk!
The cells were iron cages with stone floors.
A young Englishman, who had just landed after a long sea voyage the
night before, was the first man to whom I talked. He claimed to have
been drugged and robbed in a saloon. The fact of his incarceration was
a small thing to him; what made him swear was the condition of his
cage. The excrements of probably half a dozen of his predecessors in
the cell lay around him, nauseating and suffocating him. Fire shot
from his eyes as he pointed to it. He was bitter, sarcastic, sneering,
and with evident and abundant cause.
Whatever I had to say to the men and women in that dungeon that
morning was driven from my mind and my lips.
The young man pushed all the resentment of his soul over into mine! I
spent that Sunday in working out a plan by which I could help
Pensacola to clean up this social ulcer.
There was a Tourist Club there and I offered to lecture for them. It
was arranged for the following Sunday afternoon. I called on the mayor
and he promised to preside. I interviewed several aldermen and they
promised to attend. I lectured for forty minutes on my experiences as
a labourer in the camps of the South, and for ten minutes at the close
described what I had seen in the city jail.
It was a somewhat heroic method of treatment, and I did not remain
long enough to see the effect, but I at least deprived them of the
plea of ignorance.
I found in Florida two Government officials who had done splendid work
in behalf of labour. I mean the labourers who were decoyed by false
promises and brutally abused on their arrival in the camps. They were
both modest men--men unlikely to enter politics for personal
advancement. I cut my articles out of the magazine and sent them to
President Roosevelt, calling his attention to the conditions and
commending these men to his notice. The result was that they were both
promoted to positions where their usefulness was increased and the
cause of labour considerably helped.