Rednecks

by Taylor Brown

“Fact is, we ain’t but brutes to them, Doctor. There’s the crux of it. No more’n beasts of burden for King Coal. My husband was working a drift mine in Pike County back in niney-nine and the foreman had him put iron helmets on the driving mules cause he was afraid of a collapse. Husband asked why the miners didn’t get helmets, too. Foreman said, ‘Kill a man and we can hire another. But you got to buy the mule.’” She shook her head. “If that’s how the foreman thinks, imagine the gun thugs. They was on a mission to turn us out today and not a thing in this world was like to stop them.

“But the Baldwins ain’t the only enemy we face, you know that. It’s the men that hire them. The coal operators. King Coal. They like to call me an agitator. Hell, wasn’t Washington? Weren’t the pilgrims on the Mayflower? They like to ask me if I have a permit to speak. Sure, I got one. Patrick Henry gave it to me one hundred and forty-four years ago. Him and Jefferson, Adams, and Washington. And I damn well intend to use it.

War, building like methane in the chamber of a mine. Any day could come the spark.

During the Great War, miners had been exempt from the draft. America needed all the coal she could get to fire the boilers of troop carriers and battleships, the forges of steel mills and gun factories. Still, tens of thousands of mining men volunteered, same as her grandboy had. West Virginia had more volunteers per person than any state in the union. Shooting at Baldwins was one thing—the miners weren’t about to shoot at American troops.

Careful, when you beat a dog, you don’t awake the wolf.

They are men long accustomed to the flickering darkness of the mines, men who’ve learned the bravest of their kind can be shot dead in the street and no one will care. The greatest newspaper in the land will make light of his death. Will say he deserved it. And the public will hardly hear, deaf to their cause.

They are a hundred men at first, then two hundred. Five hundred. One thousand. An army of men rising from the earth, clad in blue-bib overalls. They hail from Italy and Poland, the Deep South and Appalachia. One in five is Black. They wear red bandannas knotted around their necks, as if their throats have already been cut. People will call them primitives and hillbillies, anarchists and insurrectionists. They will call them Rednecks.

Silence a moment, the men unsure how to receive such news. Presidents never heard their cries. Presidents heard the cries of senators and governors and congressmen, barons and magnates. Men who wore high hats and black tails, who had country houses and maids and tailors. It seemed too good to be true. They looked at one another. It had to be.

These hills have long memories. Some folks won’t forget which side we helped.” Buddeea’s dark eyes flashed up at his. “Let them remember. We are rock, Moo, till the stars fall and the seas dry up. They will break against us.”

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.

“You ask me, Crock, there’s different Americas. America if you got means or don’t, if you work in a tie or neckerchief, up in the office or down on the killing floor. White or colored, man or woman. Native or not. I reckon there’s Americas they’d drop a bomb on, and ones they wouldn’t even think it.”

State and law, money and influence. Empires of men who took their certainties from boardrooms and telephone lines, campaign donors and typewritten reports. Men who rarely saw the inside of a factory or mill or mine. Who’d never worked their hands bloody or lungs black, yet could wield incredible power over those who did. Someone had to bring that world to them, make them know it existed. Someone had to raise Hell on them.

The only problem with rising up was getting cut back to ground—especially when the man with the reaping blade thought you weren’t but a bunch of weeds.

The big man squeezed his shoulder again, then unknotted the bandanna around his neck. “I want you to have this here neckerchief of mine. You earned it. You can tell folks back home you were a real Redneck.”

“Daddy, he used to say, ‘Son, in this world, a ugly man’s got to be double tough compared to a handsome one. But you, my boy, you best be bulletproof.’”