Rednecks

by Taylor Brown

miners were still swarming in from every point of the compass. Word had company stores raided of arms, men in overalls training in the clearings, and Black miners eating in Jim Crow restaurants right alongside their white comrades, rifles propped against their tables. Moo feared what the country might do to put such a movement back in the ground. Moo loved America, he did. This country had attempted a “Great Experiment” for the promotion of human happiness—a written recognition that all men were created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights, and the state existed to guarantee those liberties, not to impede them. In practice, those high ideals made it a nation of deep hypocrisy—a country ever on a knife’s edge, ever failing to live up to its own principles. A nation ever in conflict with itself.