Working

by Studs Terkel

  I can run circles around every girl I’ve got in the house today. I’m awful thankful for it, but I won’t hold up much longer. I’m a gittin’ down. Used to be I could stand and split wood all day long, but now I go out there and split a little while and it hurts the back of my legs to stoop over. But I done awful well I think.

  I just don’t know. I was just raised an old hillbilly and I’ll die one. Radio, it’s sittin’ up there, but I cain’t hear too good. Don’t have a television. I say there’s too much foolishness on for me to watch. I hear a little about Vietnam. And I study a lot about it. But I have enough worry on my mind without listenin’ to that to worry more about. What was to be would be. No, I don’t guess I have a grandson in Vietnam now. Terry’s boy, I actually don’t know if he’s out of Vietnam or not.

  They wasn’t much to think on when you didn’t have no education. I didn’t get half through the third reader, so I’ve got no education at all. Only five months of school. I just quit out until we got the fodder saved. Then it got so cold, I couldn’t go back. I’m just a flat old hillbilly. That’s the only way I know to talk and the only way I’ll ever try to talk.

  There was fifteen in the family and we were raised in a log house. There wasn’t a window in the house. If we seen how to do anything in the winter, we done it by firelight. There wasn’t even a kerosene lamp. We had to keep the door open regardless of how cold it was. If you needed to work at somethin’ we either done it by the light of the fire in the grate or opened the door. We always kept a good fire.

  That was the way I learnt to write. I’d get me a piece of clay dirt out of the cracks and write on the side of the log house. I couldn’t write a line when I was goin’ to school. Now that’s the truth.

  JOE AND SUSIE HAYNES

  Aunt Katherine’s nephew and his wife. On this morning, a piece of sun peers over the Cumberlands. “That’s young white oaks up there a growin’,” he says. “They’ll be there till the strip and auger11 people pushes ’em down and they get diggin’ for lumber.”

  His speech comes with difficulty, due to partial paralysis of his face and shortage of breath. Frequently during the conversation we take time out. He wears a hearing aid. She is hanging out the wash. A small dog runs about; a few chickens peck away.

  “Minin’s about all the work here, outside highway work or farmin’ a little. My father started workin’ in the mines when he was eleven years old. I guess he was fifty-seven when he quit, he had to. He had to walk across the big mountain and it’d be late into the night when he’d come back. So we never got to see daddy but on Sunday.”

  JOE: I graduated from high school in 1930, November. I went to work in the mines. We worked for fifteen cents a ton. If we made a dollar and a half a day, we made pretty good money. You got up between three thirty and four in the morning. You’d start work about six. We usually got out around maybe dark or seven or eight, nine o‘clock. I come back as late as ten o’clock at night. Sometimes I just laid down to sleep, not even sleep—then wash up.

  I just got short-winded and just couldn’t walk across the street. I’m better now than I used to be. The doctor advised me to quit work. My heart got bad to where I couldn’t get enough oxygen. March of ’68 I quit. They turned me down for black lung. I’m paid through Social Security. My old uncle, he retired forty-nine years old. He’s been dead a long time now. Guess he had too much sand.

  My hearin’ . . . It coulda been affected with so much noise. I was tampin’ up, shootin’ the coal down, just behind the machine. I worked that continuous miner. That made lotsa noise. This hearin’ aid cost me $395.

  I think the United Mine Workers has let us down a little bit. I think they sold us out is what I do. They teamed up with the operators, I think.

  SUSIE: I went to school with a young boy and he got mashed up in the mines. He was about eighteen years old when he got killed.

  JOE: Oh, I remember lots of accidents. I guess there was eight or nine men killed while I worked at one. These truck mines I worked in was all. They wasn’t union mines. The strip and the auger about got ’em all shut down right now. I have a nephew of mine run a mine. He worked about seventeen men. They all gone to unemployment now.

  Yeah, I was born in an old log cabin here. I had a great-great-great-grandfather or somethin’ fought that Revolution. Grandfather Fields and his brothers was in the Civil War. One on each side of it. My grandfather owned 982 acres in here. He sold his minerals12 for twenty-seven and a half cents an acre.

  You’re in one of the richest areas in the world and some of the poorest people in the world. They’s about twenty-eight gas and oil wells. They have one here they claim at least a three-million-dollar-a-year gas well. One of the men that works for the gas company said they valued it at twenty-five million dollars, that one well. They offered a woman seventy-five dollars on the farm that the gas well’s just laid on, for destroyin’ half an acre of her place to set that well up.

  They can do that legally because they have the mineral rights—broad form deed. Eighteen eighty-nine, my grandfather sold this, everything known and all that might be found later—gas, oil, coal, clay, stone . . . My grandfather and grandmother signed it with two X’s. They accepted the farmin’ rights. Company can dig all your timber, all your soil off, uncover everything, just to get their coal. Go anywhere they want to, drill right in your garden if they want to.

  They took bulldozers and they tore the top off the ground. I couldn’t plow it or nothin’ where they left it. Come through right by that walnut tree. I’ve got corn this year, first year I raised it. About four years since they left. Nice corn over there. I had to move a lot of rock where they took the bulldozers.

  They threatened my wife with trespassin’ here because she called up the water pollution man, the gas and oil company did. (Laughs.) If the oil runs down this creek, ii’d kill the fish and everything in it. And I had a lot of chickens to die, too, from drinkin’ that oil.

  SUSIE: When they come through with them bulldozers and tear it up like that, the dirt from it runs down to our bottom land and it ruins the water. Our drinkin’ water gets muddy. So we don’t have much of a chance, don’t look like.

  Our boy in the Navy when he comes back, he says all he can see is the mountain tore up with bulldozers. Even the new roads they built, they’s debris on it and you can’t hardly get through it sometimes. I guess that’s what they send our boys off to fight for, to keep ‘em a free country and then they do to us like that. Nothin’ we can do about it. He said it was worse here than it was over in Vietnam. Four times he’s been in Vietnam. He said this was a worse toreup place than Vietnam. He said, “What’s the use of goin’ over there an’ fightin’ and then havin’ to come back over here an’ pay taxes on somethin’ that’s torn up like that?”

  JOE: If we don’t organize together, why these big companies is just gonna take anything they want. That’s the only chance on earth we got. It’s all gone over to the rich man. Even the President. And we don’t have a governor.

  SUSIE: Everybody talk about it all the time. Especially Aunt Katherine up here, that’s all me an’ her talk about—what they done to us. My mother and father sold all their land out, where my mother’s buried. Company said they sold the mineral to some other company and they was goin’ to auger it. They won’t have to dig the holes for the ones if they’re goin’ into my mother’s grave. ’Cause there won’t be enough left of ’em to dig a hole for. We’re not gonna let it happen to my mother’s grave because there’s seven of us children and I know that five of us will stay right there and see that they don’t do that.

  They said, men from the company, we’d get a road up to the cemetery that’s on top of the hill. I said, “Well, it won’t be any use goin’ up there, because there won’t be any dead up there. There’ll just be tombstones settin’ there. Because the coal is under the graves.” An old preacher down there, they augered under the grave where his wife is buried. And he’s nearly blind and he prayed an’ everything.
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  It’s something to think about, that a man to make a few dollars would go through and under a cemetery like that. Not even respecting the dead. You can’t talk to ‘em. They won’t talk to you about it. They walk off and leave you. They know they’re doin’ wrong.

  Our son just come back from Vietnam, he went to work for a strip mine. We told him we wouldn’t allow him to work for them and stay home. So he quit. He was tellin’ me yesterday, looks like he’s gonna have to go back to work. I said, “Well, do you want me to pack your clothes tonight or do you want to wait until morning to get ’em? ‘Cause,” I said, “when you start workin’ for the strip mines, you’re not comin’ back here. I’m not responsible for anything that happens to ya.” Don’t want none of ours in that, no way.

  You and Joe have very little money. Life is rough and life is hard . . . Your son could pick up about fifty dollars a day . . .

  SUSIE: From forty-five to eighty a day.

  JOE: He’s an equipment operator.

  SUSIE: Yeah, he worked and he made good. But we didn’t want him in that. He was gonna get killed over there and we wouldn’t be responsible for no doctor bills and no funeral bills for him—if he was gonna do that kind of work. Then he said he had to make a livin’ some way. Well, he’s gonna have to go back to the army, look like. I said, “Go to the army and come back. Maybe you can get a job then.” He said he didn’t want to go to the army. And he went to work for one of his cousins, night watchin’. He makes $150 a week. But he told me yesterday that they were gonna close down over there and he was gonna have to go back and work for the strip mines. I said, “When you start work, I’ll pack your clothes. You’re not gonna stay here.”

  We sent him to school for him to take this heavy equipment. I worked and cooked over at the school, helped send him there. I said, “I’m not sendin’ you to school to come out here and go to work for these strip mines.” I’d rather see him in Vietnam than see him doin’ strip jobs.

  I just think if it’s not stopped by officials and governor and all, we’re just gonna have to take guns and stop it. When they come to your land . . . We got tax receipts here dated back to 1848 that the Haynes and Fields paid tax on this place. Do you think we should let some money grabber come here and destroy it? For nothin’? And have to move out?

  JOE: They sweated my grandfathers out of it. Millions of dollars . . .

  BOB SANDERS

  His home is Boonville, Indiana. It is an area of newly built one-family dwellings: pleasantly arbored, front lawns uniformly well-trimmed, two-car garages to the rear. It was somewhat difficult to distinguish this house from the others, though a good distance separated them.

  It is said young Lincoln studied law in this town, along the Indiana-Kentucky border. Today the natural landscape of this region is overwhelmed by slag heaps, huge banks of shale. It is strip mine country; one of the earliest.

  He’s been a strip miner for more than twenty. years; his father was one too. He earns about twenty thousand dollars a year. Casually he voices his one regret: he might have been a major league baseball player. He had a tryout with the New York Giants some twenty-five years ago; it looked promising. Marriage plus his jather’s illness cut short the promise. He lost the chance of proving himself a major-leaguer.

  At first he spoke with a great deal of reluctance; his comments short, cryptic. Gradually, he let go . . .

  I don’t dig coal. I take the dirt off coal. You have to know how to handle dirt, to get the best advantage of your machinery. You just can’t take a piece of equipment that’s developed to take eighty foot of dirt and go on and get ninety, ninety-five. That’s management, you follow me? All you get over the maximum, that’s gravy. You have to uncover it as cheap as possible.

  From the time you go to work, like eight o’clock in the morning, when you step up on that piece of equipment and get the seat, why there’s not a piece of equipment that’s not movin’ all day. We run around the clock. We’re on a continuous operation, three shifts a day, seven days a week. I work at least forty-eight hours every week.

  You don’t ever stop it. Eighty dollars a minute down time is what they figure. You have an oiler that you break him in to operate. When I’m eatin’ lunch, thirty minutes lunch time, that machine’s still runnin’. The only time the machine stops is when you change shifts. Most machines have even got a time clock on how long it takes you to swing, how long it takes you to grease, how long it takes you to load your bucket and go to the bank, how long it takes you to dump it, how long this and that. I drink coffee and smoke and never miss a lay. There is no break. They don’t pay you for that.

  I know what this piece of equipment’s raised to do. I always try to get that and to better it. Any company, if they’re worth 150 million dollars you don’t need to think for a minute they’re not gonna know what you’re doin’. They didn’t get there that way . . . and if I want to go any place . . . If I’m supposed to move five thousand cubic feet of dirt an hour, if that’s what the machine’s rated at, you know damn well they know it. Sure, you’re gonna get a certain amount of fatigue.

  “There’s some dangers to it, yeah. There’s danger if you go out on the highway. If you get 125 deep. If you don’t get this hole tamped right and this kicks out, instead of goin’ vertical it goes horizontal—well hell, I’ve seen it go seventy-five foot high and the house covered up . . . people. It still isn’t as dangerous as underground. But around the tipples, even in strip mining, the dust is tremendous. These people have to wear inhalators to stay on the job. I do. They can be subjected to black lung.”

  We go as deep as ninety-five feet. From the operator’s standpoint it’s more profitable. From the consumer’s standpoint, they stand to benefit by the profit the company gets. The cheaper they produce the coal, the cheaper the electricity gets.

  The company I work for produces five, six thousand ton of coal a day. A million ton a year. Our coal runs from four to seven foot thick. Four-foot coal runs six thousand tons to the acre. We’ll mine an acre a day. You have bastard veins, where the coal runs fifteen foot thick. They’re gettin’ ready to put in three and a half million ton a year mines.

  People’s misinformed about this environmental thing. About your soil being dug up and not put back. Ninety percent of this ground, even twenty-five years ago, was rundown. Ninety percent of the ground I’ve seen tore up, you’d starve to death tryin’ to raise a roastin’ ear on it. But in the next ten years you’re gonna see good farm land that’ll be bought up by the coal companies. You’re gonna see some good topsoil move because the companies are gonna pay prices. They’re gonna get this coal.

  There’s ground that doesn’t look too good now, but that’s all gonna be changed. The companies are makin’ the money to go and do this. They’re gonna level it. I can take you to a place right now where they’re throwin’ banks up eighty feet high. They have tractors up there running twenty-four hours a day and it’s leveler than my yard. That ground is in much better shape than it was before it was turned over.

  Don’t misunderstand me. For years these things went on and the companies have been at fault. Hell, they’re just like you and me. They done got the gravy, and when they have to go puttin’ it back, it’s just a dead cost to them. But hell, they can afford to do it, so there’s no problem. They’re gonna do this. I’m no operator, I’m a workingman, but I don’t think it’s fair to the industry for this kind of talk to go on.

  There’s a lot of things I don’t like about my work. I’ve never really appreciated seeing ground tore up. Especially if that ground could be made into something. I think about it all the time. You tear somethin’ up that you know has taken years and years and years . . . and you dig into rock. You get to talkin’ about the glacier went through there and what caused this particular rock to come out of the bank like it does. You see things come out of that bank that haven’t been moved for years. When you see ‘em, you have to think about ’em.

  “Only about fifteen percent of strip miners are
veterans. See, in 1954 mining industry was dead. Hell, everybody quit burnin’ coal. Everybody went off to gas and oil. Coal mines were dead. Then in 1954 we had a few power plants that started bringin’ it back. Up till the last three years, your natural gas people consumed that tremendous rate. They don’t have natural gas hardly to last a century. All right, look at your oil. The cheapest thing in this world right now is coal. This is for heat, light, anything. So now coal minin’s boomin’. From the time we got our last contract three years ago, companies were gettin’ three dollars a ton for coal power plants. Now they’re gettin’ six, six and a half a ton. And they’re not even diggin’ their coal out.”

  You go on a piece of equipment and say it’s worth ten million, fifteen million dollars. You don’t expect people to go out there and take care of that for thirty or forty dollars a day. If you got that kind of money to spend for equipment . . . it just doesn’t add up. I make more money than anybody at the mine. Still and all, they don’t have the responsibility I have. The difference is maybe eight, ten dollars a day between what I do and the men down there. All he has to do is get his bucket and go to work and come home. But if I don’t uncover the coal, nobody’s gonna work.

  Aw no, I don’t feel tense. I’ve been around this stuff ever since I was a kid. I started working a coal mine when I was in high school back during the war. I started in the laboratory and then went to survey. These are company jobs. A miner is a UMW man. I don’t think there’s a union man that wants to see the ground torn up.