MY FATHER WORE BANK CLOTHES, BUT HE WAS NOT A BANKER & COAL WAS NOT A ‘KING’
I was not supposed to hear.
But I did hear.
I listened. Frozen. Chilled to the bone. I heard my father as he lay on the basement floor when he came home from work and almost died.
From the time he was 12 years old, my father worked the mines with his father.
20+ years.
$7 – $15 for an 8- to 12-hour shift.
Robbed of wages.
Paid in scrip — good only at ‘The Company Store’.
Backbreaking, brutal labor in the name of ‘King Coal’, lining the pockets of coal kings (barons) as coal dust lined his lungs.
To my tiny brain, coal was not King; it was Killer.
Granddaddy told stories of a headless miner who walked the tracks at night — the only words I ever heard him speak.
My father is one of those people politicians and bankers and talk-show hosts berate, ridicule, and call ‘lazy’, admonishing them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
I too am one of those people.
My father had no bootstraps. He had steel-toed ‘bank boots’ that laced up to his calf with his pants tucked neatly inside. He carried a ‘dinner bucket’ and wore ‘bank clothes’ and a ‘bank’ belt, but he was not a banker.
“You would be in the mines 30 minutes and the long johns would be wet with sweat, and then you would have to work 8-hour shifts” … my father’s words.
He worked in treacherous coal banks.
He was a perfectionist. My mother was a perfectionist. We had little – only what my mother and father created – but our home sparkled. To me, it was elegant and beautiful, and I loved making it look “brand spankin’ new”.
When company houses no longer served as housing for the miners, my father tore down those houses and used the wood to build our house. While he built, we lived in a one-room, tar-paper shack down the road. My father, my mother, my two sisters, my brother, and I lived in a single room. I must have been 4 years old.
The house my father built was on a dirt roa
d in Fayetteville, the heart of West Virginia and the heart of The New River Gorge. I grew up on that dirt road and in that house. Sometimes ‘they’ covered the road with ‘red dog’. It tore the skin from my bare feet as I ran up and down the road carrying water from my uncle’s red pump. My backyard was a chicken coop, a pig pen, a barn, and a garden. We raised our animals and grew our food.
But before that, I was born in one of those company houses my father tore down — a Company House in a West Virginia Coal Camp. There was no room at the hospital. The doctor sent my father to The Company Store for a zinc tub, but I arrived before he did.
It was not yet time for me to be born.
I came early. I have always been early. I have always been ahead of my time. That was just the first time.
And I have always been ‘DIFFERENT’.
The way my mother introduced me is etched into my soul and spirit like the coal etched into my father’s hands: “She is so different I would say they gave me the wrong baby if she hadn’t been born at home.”
My mother’s hands too were etched black with coal from carrying coal in the coal bucket, building & tending the fire in our Warm Morning heater, cooking on a cook-stove heated with coal, canning in a zinc tub on an outdoor fire, washing my father’s bank clothes with a wringer washer, hanging them to freeze dry on the ice-cold clothesline.
My mother and father did not have the luxury of schooling. They cared for their younger brothers and sisters. Fed them. Gave them a home. Kept them alive.
In a world of deprivation, poverty, and lack, my mother and father created beauty and abundance from nothing at all.
They were brilliant, gifted, genius — MAGIC — and they were gorgeous.
I always told people they were angels.
From the time I was born, I sensed and knew things I had no way of knowing, but I did not know we were poor.
After 20+ years, my father quit the coal mines to take a job as water-plant operator for the new water plant up the dirt road from our house. Before that, we had no running water. We bathed in a zinc tub in water we carried in buckets from the neighbor’s pond and heated on the cook stove. We carried drinking water from my uncle’s well. We had an outdoor toilet. We grew our own food.
My father bought an old backhoe to take care of water main breaks. He adjusted the chemicals and kept our water safe. The water company paid him $485/month. At the same time, my father cared for a junkyard, stripped the cars, salvaged the metal, loaded it on a huge truck, and hauled it down a treacherous mountain to sell as scrap just so we could live. He also repaired cars — three back-breaking jobs.
I have six brothers and sisters. For many years before I remember, my mother’s family lived with us. For many years after I remember, my father’s brothers and sisters lived with us. My mother had 10 brothers and sisters. My father had 9. My mother’s brothers were older. They fought in the war. My mother and father played a huge role in caring for their families. After my mother’s sister died at 26, her three babies lived with us.
I imagine my father held secret and sacred his genius, visionary, entrepreneurial heart and spirit. He was an innovator. He was a creator. He could create anything. He was an entrepreneur.
From a single, broken-down backhoe, he created the most sought-after excavating business in our town, county, and state.
I wanted to please my father – make my mother and father love me.
My father always said, “My girls are going to have an education,” and I was determined to make that happen – at least for myself.
I did make it happen.
Still, I withdrew from life, hid out, and stood back, becoming invisible. For most of my life, it felt like I was from a different planet. I berated and judged and attacked myself, thinking I was not good enough or smart enough or pretty enough. I felt fat and ugly even though I was 5’6 1/2″, weighed 103 lbs., and was size 0.
I was different. I ‘sassed’. I asked too many questions. I was ‘too big for my britches’. I was ‘too much’. I was ‘not enough’.
Someday I will finish the story, but for now …
DIFFERENT IS MAGIC.
