The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips Page B

just beginning to chirp. Only halfhearted sounds, like they were caught up with the sunset, too.
    “Yep.”
    “Good buddies with him,” Oscar piped in. He wasn’t a mean man, and his words didn’t have much bite. More like he felt he needed to get his two cents in.
    “You’ve known him for years, both of you,” I said. “He’s got a name. And ain’t nothin’ in the world wrong with Jonah.” It came out more tired than bad-tempered. But it floated up with the smoke and hung out there awhile, nobody arguing with it. I took my time wrapping my next cigarette, smoothing the paper on my thigh and pulling a pinch from the tobacco tin.
    “Niggers just don’t work as hard as we do,” Ban said finally, after I’d taken my first puff.
    Made it through half a cigarette after that comment, rockers creaking. Nice thing to sit and rock and smoke. You can tell a man by his rocking—slow and steady, antsy and skittish, lazy as a slug. Ban’s rocker creaked timidly, like he thought the porch might rear back and bite if he came down on it too hard.
    A word or giggle drifted over now and then from the children. Now those kids, they no more knew what it was like to look eye to eye with a Negro child than I knew how to dig a shaft to China. Leta neither, other than when their paths crossed during some trouble at the mines. Some coloreds did drink up their wages, and some of ’em were shiftless. Wouldn’t show up to work unless there wasn’t no money in the house. Don’t know as that had all that much to do with them being Negroes.
    But you work shoulder to shoulder with a man, push his cars with him, he pushes yours, that changes how you look at things. A few years back, five men were burned to cinders in a gas explosion, and when the bodies got brought out, they was all black as coal. There’d be a Negro woman and a white woman staring at the same body. When your wives stand next to each other trying to sort out if one of those charred logs is their husband, that means something.
    “Shouldn’t have let them in the union,” Oscar said.
    Now he and Ban were only tossing things out, not mad about anything, not really caring that I gave Jonah a ride to work. Just talking the same old words. Like kids and nursery rhymes. I kept rocking. They’d seen the same things I had, and Oscar was grasping at an old straw to bring up the union. Wasn’t even a union anymore. But even with all the hue and cry over coloreds and whites pulling chairs up to the same table, the union had mixed smooth enough. Weren’t no choice, for one thing, because the UMW stood firm on it. For another, any thinking man understood how all the gears locked and turned together in the big machine of it all.
    Bible says, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the last of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Real truth is what you do to the least of these, you do to yourself. Long as the Negroe’s wages were in the dirt, ours were bound to be. Long as the bosses rid them hard, couldn’t force them to do better by us. All go up together or all stay down together.
    The state finally killed off convict lease in ’28, not because it was wrong putting fellas to work in the mines instead of jail, but on account of the big operators not liking the advantage the convict mines had. Didn’t have to pay ’em and nine out of ten of ’em was colored, so they didn’t have to treat ’em human. Whipped ’em like animals. Worked ’em from six in the morning to ten at night, kept ’em in line with the whipping and the sweat boxes and no food. Kept us white men’s pay down, a’course, because why pay somebody when you got slaves, and that’s what they still was, just called ’em by a different title. You hold a slave up to a man expecting fairness and wages and you tell him he can take his leather grips to Kentucky so far as you’re concerned, because you don’t need to pay nobody for what you got a body to do for free. You come to the bosses