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This would be my last year a working at a place I was almost comfortable enough to call home though it wasn't that. I lived down the road a piece by the creek with my grandparents, and that wouldn't be home for much longer, either. I'd reached a milestone no other member of my lineage had: high school and about to graduate with honors.
Rivulets of sweat etched trails down my spine and funneled themselves into the crack of my butt, soaking my underwear as I eyed the pit builders' skills, assembling new ones under the relentless sun. My fingertips were sore and bore the scars of hurriedly grasping hot embers, too hot to handle or bag, in a hurry to fill another sack of charcoal. At a nickel, a bag — every minute counted; no one had time to nurse burnt fingers or toes. Putting a hot coal in a bag got you fired.
Old man White ran ten acres of charcoal pits in a stark, god-forsaken land of black dust and towering mounds that loomed like an eerie art form or a diseased Cherokee Indian village amidst the desolation. The air was redolent, smelled of wood smoke, and permeated every inch of your nasal passages and throat by day's end. Your snot was charcoal dust black every day, now that school was out. I worked five days at the pits, the sixth in Grannie's garden patch, hoeing, weeding, and watching out for Timber Rattlesnakes. There were little store-bought goods we ate; nearly everything came out that fertile two acres of garden produce and the surrounding ninety-eight acres of corn fields for cattle and pig feed. The seventh day was for the Lord, sometimes.
Building pits was an engineering art form; when done, they looked somewhat like a teepee. Stackers started with mill ends from a nearby sawmill, usually four-by-four-ish hardwood blocks, leaning 'em one against the other at a slight angle, leaving a small tunnel to light the stack as they worked outward and upward tier-by-tier to as high as they could reach. This was followed by mixing the lifeless, blackened dirt from past burns with fresh pine needles and layering the dirt over the outside of the pit to keep air from getting to it. Too much air — lost your profit; too little, and it wouldn't burn. The science, like I noted, was an art form.
Plumes of smoke wafted from the ten-foot-high mounds of slow, smoldering dirt with strategically embedded coffee cans around their bases for them to breathe. The stackers got paid by the pit to stand them up and, once charred out and the now-slumped pit giving up its last ghostly billow of smoke, tear them apart to cool. The burns were fewer since they used tools — but the hottest embers were more intense — more searing than blazes in Hades as the mounds were opened and you stepped on them, so they wore boots. It was a White man's job because it was the cleanest of jobs, most pay, required drivin' loggin' trucks, and the highest building skill level.
For the rest, mostly barefooted Blacks and a few barefooted Whites, me among them as a summer job, our days were marked by picking up and sacking lump coal into twenty-five-pound bags labeled 'Bama's Finest Lump Charcoal.' We filled the bags, ensuring just enough room for the sewer. No one weighed the bags; you just ensured they were full, with just enough space for the sewing needle to weave its scarlet dance. Too much and the seamstress gave you an evil eye; not enough, and the chit-taker dinged you the bag 'cause she had to add more to it. It didn't take long to learn to get it right.
Sultry Rebecca, the chit-taker, made frequent rounds and tallied everyone's stacks. Each summer I sacked coal, my eyes met those of sweet-smiling Bacca, longer each year as I struggled to pierce the flour-sack dress outlines, like Superman's X-ray eyes, to glimpse her nipples. I was hard for her on days she wore overalls, my swivel head focused on those loose side flaps, hoping to glimpse a curved breast during her tally. Going through life changes does that to a boy.
She was a young girl — almost a woman — perhaps a couple of years older than me, working the pits with a spirit unyielding to the relentless heat. Her hands bore the scars of countless sacks sewn shut, a testament to her resilience and tenacity. She moved amidst the pits with a quiet grace, her eyes and smile holding a spark that ignited my soul. She was a good-looking girl whom everyone called Bacca on account she was as dark as an aged reddish-brown 'tabacca' leaf. She was the darkest Black I'd ever seen; part Cherokee, some said. Others had it she was part Creek Indian descended from a runaway woman slave captured by 'em generations ago. I never had a reason to ask her 'bout it.
Tallied, I toted my filled sacks to the sewer station — a big, ancient industrial sewing machine that zipped red thread across the opening of each bag. As old as the dirt beneath her crooked toes, Elizabeth sat in a weathered, near-dead, wicker-backed chair at the sewer station for hours, deftly running her fingers dangerously close to the needle. She didn't talk much, well, mostly never. She was old man White's wife.
Though we worked in the open fields beneath a sun that would as likely burn ya brains out as likely to cook your hide, it was like working in a factory of sorts. Order prevailed, just as it had in old man White's family business for decades. Conversation wasn't needed much nor much asked for. There ain't much to discuss about bagging coal. Still, it was a symphony of efficiency — the pits going up, bags being shaken open, tractors running intermittently, and the bark of someone latching onto a hot lump of coal. In this desolate dance, I found my rhythm. And everyone fell under the spell of solitude amidst the hypnotic sounds of doves cooing in the pines or crows cawing out to one another as we labored, sweated, and bore up under the heat.
Thirst was ever on our minds, and Bacca's smile sashaying past me was on my mind along with it. The youngest, Black boys that couldn't bag coal, served as water carriers who toted buckets with dippers from the hand pump station to the pit workers. Whites dipped water from one bucket, Blacks from another. Still, it came from the same well, but was just like the separate drinkin' fountains in town labeled 'Whites only' or dinner seats separated by race, too. Same kitchen food, just not a sittin' down to eat beside one another.
Tractor drivers pulled wagons of slabbed lumber and sawmilled block ends, snaked between the pits to vacant patches, and dropped the wagons off. They were stacking, tearing down, and bagging invariably renewed itself like a phoenix rising from the ashes. It was as ubiquitous as the county's grading of red chert roads. You endured the heat and mind-numbing labor until the day's quota was met. That meant your day ended. Early was a reprieve from the heat, though it cut yer money.
In the mix of those sounds, everyone heard Bacca's husky voice, tinged with a Black southern drawl, carry across the fields when she hollered out, "Quota's met. Line up for ya pays!"
It was like cattle lined up at the feeding trough; we all knew our places, waiting to get paid. It was a fair process: Whites got paid first, no matter the position, pit crew or bagger, then the Blacks. It was what it was — though old man White was honest about the money. He didn't dock a man, boy, or girl, White or Colored, an unfair share for their chits. You got paid as long as you did the work, filled your bags, and kept respectful.
Perhaps it was due to his religion, whatever flavor that was; I didn't give it much thought back then. I guessed now, looking back, his was probably Southern Baptist or ... Southern Something, at the very least. He preached like all the religions with Southern in their name — against the Devil, sin, and drinking — but Preacher White tolerated 'shine for medicinal purposes, I figured. I based that on seeing him and my grandpappy lifting bottles out of the trunk of Grandaddy's car and carrying them behind the church.
Standing in the pay line gave me time to watch Bacca as she called out the names and tallies fer Mr. White. It seemed he had a lot of confidence in Bacca's abilities, more than he did for most Whites. He counted out the cash for the chit-work from an old cigar box he carried. I scanned every inch of Rebecca, especially the most woman parts, as she praised the workers. It was like salve on their burns as she told them they were 'getting faster at bagging.' Most got a smile on their faces at her smile. She was slim and graceful, with perfect, pearly-white teeth in contrast to the soot-covered long dress she wore. Even blackened with soot, the dress flowed nicely over her grown bosom.
Over the last three years, I'd watched her fill out as I'd stood in line during the summers. She was a rare one. She could read, write, and cipher as well as any, or better perhaps than most Whites I knew, though she never seemed to have gone to school.
"Boy," old man White said, as he handed me four dollars and seventy-five cents, "remember what ya grandpappy told me. One day, you gonna make something of yourself ... but if'n your eyes keep wandering o'er Bacca like that ... ya gonna be living in a shack feeding kids and chickens for the rest of life. Sacking coal, maybe. Find you a good White girl after you're out of here; meanwhile, keep your dick clean. Know what I mean?"
I grinned at his advice, nodded like I would, and latched onto the four wrinkled bills as he counted out the change. I thought about what he had just said and about an event that happened a week ago. The thought of that life-changing event racks a young man's mind and fires up his libido.
However, it was a good day at the pits. A few blistered finger burns, no burnt feet, and more green cabbage for the mason jar I had beneath my bed at my grandparents' home. By summer's end, I'd have enough for books, new jeans, and some brand-new Hush Puppies that didn't pinch my toes when I moved out in the fall.
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Day's End — A Walkin' Home
Fingers weren't the only pains I suffered, though; my charcoal-blackened overalls chaffed the crack of my butt — and my dick — as I strode down the freshly graded ubiquitous red chert road that the county graders reworked to smooth out the washouts and ruts. I was glad the graders had run today. The fine silt on the sides of the road felt softer on my bare feet after a fresh plow. Still, contact with flint-like sharp edges of chert would cause you to cuss once in a while, walking downhill in a hundred-degree heat.
The fresh plowed road led me downhill two-and-a-half miles to my grandparents' place. The shrill chatter of cicadas emerged from the piney woods, a soundtrack that accompanied my solitude on the lonesome backroad.
Hunger gnawed at me — a relentless companion that fueled my determination. I had shared one of my biscuits and bacon sammiches with a colored boy earlier, the lines between us blurred by the shared hardship of coal bagging. By noon, the coal dust had coated us both so thoroughly that it was hard to tell us apart. Except I had two sammiches, and the colored boy beside me only had his look of hunger, one even worse than mine.
Rounding the garden patch, I hollered out through the screen door, "Grannie, I'm back."
I got her usual syrupy southern 'Bama reply. "Don't bring that charcoal mess in my house, Jesse Moses! Shower. I hung clean clothes out fer ya. 'member to check fer widow spiders. Supper's almost ready."
I could smell the aroma of pinto beans and ham hocks as I trotted past the kitchen window. I knew there would be cornbread, fried okra from the smell of it, and fresh-cooked green beans for me and fresh-made biscuits — of course, for Grandpa when he got home. His preference was always biscuits and definitely didn't include disdained store-bought 'loaf of bread,' for Big Daddy, as most of my kin called him, ran a road grader for the county, plowing many of those red chert roads — probably did the one I walked home on today.
I found a fresh pair of overalls hanging on a nail by the outdoor shower.
It was another Southern engineering contraption by my Uncle Joey. He could tear down and build back up anything with a motor using just a screwdriver and a pair of pliers iffing he had 'em. The shower was three-sided; sheets of re-used and rusty tin roofing stood on the end and nailed to rough-sawed four-by-fours. The backside was open to the woods, facing the outhouse on the edge of the treeline. It was angled so nobody could see in it a coming from the house. It served its purpose well in the summer as did washtubs in the kitchen to bathe in during the cool winter weather. You just had to make sure everybody knew you were naked so they didn't make an entrance through one of those three doors into the kitchen.
With a tug of a rope, a spring-loaded lever sent a cascading shower of sun-heated gentle raindrops over your body as you stood on a wooden open-slat platform to stay out of the mud as the water ran out into the field--pure 'Bama genius.
Big Daddy didn't have indoor facilities, 'cepting running water at the kitchen sink. The hand pump was also still there, just in case the 'letric went down at least you had water at the sink and could cook out at the fire pit by the smokehouse.
