The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips
Authors: Gin Phillips
Tags: Fiction, Literary, General, Suspense, Fiction - General, Historical, Historical - General, Crime, Domestic Fiction, Alabama, Depressions, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Cities and Towns, Coal mines and mining
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it.” I plopped it on her plate before she had a chance to answer.
She looked like she’d argue, but then she just stared at me, eyes squinted a little, like she was trying to figure out her next move in checkers. “Alright, alright,” she said.
She bit in, and I started on mine. It was sweet and delicious, like always.
3 Cicada Shells
Jack AUNT CELIA CAME AROUND ABOUT ROOSEVELT EVENTUALLY, long before his train pulled into Carbon Hill. Tess was in high school, I had one more year of grammar school, and Virgie’d come home from Livingston for the weekend by the time Franklin and Eleanor’s train swung through town—it turned out that some old-time city commission wrote into their contract with the Frisco line that any train tour on the line had to include a stop at Carbon Hill. So Jasper got passed up and we got a look at Mrs. Roosevelt. Pop and Aunt Celia and the girls and I walked to the train station to see them, along with most of the town. Only Mrs. Roosevelt came out of the car.
People had their Sunday clothes on for that split-second wave from Mrs. Roosevelt, who I thought was homely, Tess thought was splendid, and Virgie thought was uppity. Aunt Celia yelled louder than anybody—she hadn’t called anyone a Bolshevik in years—and when some of the men tossed their hats, she got carried away and tossed her bonnet. She never did find it. But she apparently thought of it as her own sacrifice to the altar of the Roosevelts and told the story with plenty of theatrics for the next few decades.
You never saw such New Dealers as the whole town was then. Whatever seedlings we might have been before the Depression, we’d all grown into fine Democrats, warmed by TVA and fed by Works Progress. By the early ’30s, the mines had nearly halted altogether, and the town was 75 percent dependent on those mines, according to a pleased-with-ourselves letter the city commission sent to the federal government. Property values were down by 60 percent. Then the president’s safety net fluttered around us, with over $180,000 from the government matched by over $100,000 from local citizens. Roosevelt’s public works program spit and shined Carbon Hill into something unrecognizable, giving us curbs and sidewalks and more paved road—for the longest time we only had five paved blocks—a swimming pool, a gymnasium. We got a new high school—the one Virgie and Tess went to had twenty rooms for eight hundred kids. Before Roosevelt, we didn’t have hardly any indoor toilets in town, and those that were there would drain into ditches that ran right along the streets and the stench nearly knocked you over in the summertime. The new sewer system took care of those ditches.
You could smell the difference the New Deal made every time you walked through town.
Even before Roosevelt, though, the town was solid enough. Physically. Little pigs could have survived a wolf just fine under any roof—I can’t remember more than three wooden buildings left in downtown. Nothing but brick. There’d been fires that did some damage, but then a cyclone cut a swath through the middle of town in 1917. It destroyed the churches and the high school and a slew of other buildings. A few years later a bigger fire took out most of the town, from the Pearce Hotel to Sweat’s Restaurant. Then came the rows and rows and block after block of brick.
It had always been a town shaped by forces of nature. Wind and fire and earth that demanded a few lives every now and then in exchange for the coal we kept prying out. And one man in a wheelchair was as big a force as any of it.
Albert THE SUN HAD TURNED GRAPEFRUIT-COLORED WHEN Cecil Bannon—Ban we called him—and Oscar Jones stopped by. Leta’d finished putting the dishes up, and she’d just eased into her rocker and picked up her needle when we heard them holler from the road. By the time they came up the steps, it wasn’t hard to figure what they’d been doing. I could smell the home brew on
She looked like she’d argue, but then she just stared at me, eyes squinted a little, like she was trying to figure out her next move in checkers. “Alright, alright,” she said.
She bit in, and I started on mine. It was sweet and delicious, like always.
3 Cicada Shells
Jack AUNT CELIA CAME AROUND ABOUT ROOSEVELT EVENTUALLY, long before his train pulled into Carbon Hill. Tess was in high school, I had one more year of grammar school, and Virgie’d come home from Livingston for the weekend by the time Franklin and Eleanor’s train swung through town—it turned out that some old-time city commission wrote into their contract with the Frisco line that any train tour on the line had to include a stop at Carbon Hill. So Jasper got passed up and we got a look at Mrs. Roosevelt. Pop and Aunt Celia and the girls and I walked to the train station to see them, along with most of the town. Only Mrs. Roosevelt came out of the car.
People had their Sunday clothes on for that split-second wave from Mrs. Roosevelt, who I thought was homely, Tess thought was splendid, and Virgie thought was uppity. Aunt Celia yelled louder than anybody—she hadn’t called anyone a Bolshevik in years—and when some of the men tossed their hats, she got carried away and tossed her bonnet. She never did find it. But she apparently thought of it as her own sacrifice to the altar of the Roosevelts and told the story with plenty of theatrics for the next few decades.
You never saw such New Dealers as the whole town was then. Whatever seedlings we might have been before the Depression, we’d all grown into fine Democrats, warmed by TVA and fed by Works Progress. By the early ’30s, the mines had nearly halted altogether, and the town was 75 percent dependent on those mines, according to a pleased-with-ourselves letter the city commission sent to the federal government. Property values were down by 60 percent. Then the president’s safety net fluttered around us, with over $180,000 from the government matched by over $100,000 from local citizens. Roosevelt’s public works program spit and shined Carbon Hill into something unrecognizable, giving us curbs and sidewalks and more paved road—for the longest time we only had five paved blocks—a swimming pool, a gymnasium. We got a new high school—the one Virgie and Tess went to had twenty rooms for eight hundred kids. Before Roosevelt, we didn’t have hardly any indoor toilets in town, and those that were there would drain into ditches that ran right along the streets and the stench nearly knocked you over in the summertime. The new sewer system took care of those ditches.
You could smell the difference the New Deal made every time you walked through town.
Even before Roosevelt, though, the town was solid enough. Physically. Little pigs could have survived a wolf just fine under any roof—I can’t remember more than three wooden buildings left in downtown. Nothing but brick. There’d been fires that did some damage, but then a cyclone cut a swath through the middle of town in 1917. It destroyed the churches and the high school and a slew of other buildings. A few years later a bigger fire took out most of the town, from the Pearce Hotel to Sweat’s Restaurant. Then came the rows and rows and block after block of brick.
It had always been a town shaped by forces of nature. Wind and fire and earth that demanded a few lives every now and then in exchange for the coal we kept prying out. And one man in a wheelchair was as big a force as any of it.
Albert THE SUN HAD TURNED GRAPEFRUIT-COLORED WHEN Cecil Bannon—Ban we called him—and Oscar Jones stopped by. Leta’d finished putting the dishes up, and she’d just eased into her rocker and picked up her needle when we heard them holler from the road. By the time they came up the steps, it wasn’t hard to figure what they’d been doing. I could smell the home brew on
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