The Invisible Line (39 page)

With each passing year, the mists were haunted by new and unfamiliar noises: a shriek, whistle, or whine, a percussive blast. The fog could lift quickly, but other clouds—red, brown, and black—remained. From high in the hills, one might see dust rising from dynamite and falling timber, or a steady column of smoke along the Big Sandy River. For more than twenty years, the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad had been extending its line eighteen miles from Lawrence County into Johnson. Paintsville was almost in sight.
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The train would be a rumbling envoy for the new century. Almost since the Civil War, businessmen in town and in faraway cities had dreamed of, dealt for, and plotted its course through Johnson County. The Chesapeake & Ohio was joined by the Louisville & Nashville and Norfolk & Western railroads in extending deeper and deeper into the mountains from north, south, east, and west. On a map, the lines were wrapping around the eastern Kentucky hills like a lariat slowly pulling tight.
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The train would connect Johnson County to the rest of the country—to the world, even—better than any Big Sandy steamboat. It would bring new markets and new jobs to the area, and it would kill old ones. It changed the way people thought about and fashioned their lives. They would keep time differently—railroads and the industries that typically followed insisted on standardized clocks. Homespun linen and wool would give way to storebought clothes. Within a generation a county historian would be describing local wedding customs as “comparable to those in ‘The Little Church Around the Corner' at East 29th Street, New York City.” The train would take people from the hills to big cities, and new people would come in.
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In addition to standardizing time, railroads ordered space in novel ways, introducing new encounters with outside authority. A train might roll through the Big Sandy Valley, but each railcar enclosed a different world, with rules set by faraway corporate officers and state regulators and enforced by conductors. These rules dictated how people could act: whether they could talk loudly or play cards, smoke or chew tobacco. They also dictated where people could sit—in first class or in the ladies' car, the smoker, or the colored car.
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For nearly thirty years after the war, blacks in central and western Kentucky demanded equal access to trains and streetcars, protesting and repeatedly suing over racial segregation. By the time the railroad was within sight of Paintsville, however, the state had resolved the issue in favor of absolute separation. In 1892 the legislature required all railroads, on pain of heavy fines, to provide separate coaches or compartments for black and white passengers, marked by “appropriate words in plain letters indicating the race for which [they are] set apart.” Four years later the United States Supreme Court held that such statutes were constitutional, and the Southern landscape was transformed with signs labeling everything white or colored.
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Johnson County did not experience the critique of white supremacy and display of black political energy that developed during the years of Reconstruction, nor was it gripped by the white majority's harsh backlash, its rage for separation and purity, that swept far beyond Kentucky. The county responded to Jim Crow by declaring everyone white. But each day the railroad brought a new occasion for train conductors, unfamiliar with the local accommodation, to disagree. Some state courts helped preserve local customs by allowing whites to sue railroads for being assigned to the wrong car; in essence, these suits forced conductors to give ambiguous passengers the benefit of the doubt. Kentucky courts, however, shielded railroads from defamation suits. “What race a person belongs to cannot always be determined infallibly from appearances,” the state supreme court held in 1906, “and mistakes must inevitably be made.” The importance of maintaining racial purity outweighed any individual right to be recognized as white.
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Despite the changing times, Jordan Spencer traveled every spring to a place beyond the C&O's grasp. He was as old as men got, but he could still handle a horse. Well into his eighties, he rode a fine stallion into the hills toward Virginia. No train conductors asked him where he was going or made a judgment about who he was. His children presumed he was returning to somewhere he had known as a young man. Given the impossibly rugged terrain, their father could have managed the journey and returned home only on horseback.
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In Virginia, Spencer rode from farm to farm, offering his stallion's services as a stud and collecting fees for the previous year's successes. Breeding horses required no modern technology, but new imperatives increasingly held sway. “At one time in Virginia horse-breeding, blood and record was everything,” reported Virginia's agriculture commissioner in the 1890s. “Now a more utilitarian time has come, and the horse that will produce the greatest profit ... whether for the turf, the road, the farm, or the team, will be sought for in the section to which the breed is suited.”
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Whatever the bloodlines of Spencer's stallion, it thrived in the mountains. Jordan made enough money to leave a good deal of it behind at stills and speakeasies known as “blind tigers” on the ride home. After a certain point on the road, the horse knew the way back to Rockhouse. It carried him along the creek bed and up the path to Spencer's cabin, where it stood calmly, waiting for someone to pull the old man down and put him to bed.
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All of Jordan and Malinda's children were dead or grown. Malinda, now in her seventies, had survived fifteen childbirths. Eight sons and daughters—mostly sons—were still alive. Their youngest girl, Lydia, had married in 1895. Their youngest boy, Jasper, was thirty-two and had been married twice, with two sons and a daughter. Jordan Jr. was the father of nine. For a time the old couple probably lived alone in their cabin, in silence they had never known as children or adults. Even though Old Jordan took pride in doing hard fieldwork until the end of his life, he and Malinda could survive with just a cow, some hogs, and what they grew in gardens by their home. They started selling off small pieces of land to neighbors. Jordan and Malinda lent them money to complete the purchases, just as their neighbors' parents and grandparents had helped the Spencers finance their own acquisitions half a century earlier.
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But Jordan and Malinda's cabin did not stay silent more than a few years. Shortly before 1900 their son Tobe moved back in after his wife died, with two teenage boys and two younger girls. The five of them gave Jordan and Malinda a workforce. The farm had new life, and the cabin was crowded again.
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When Old Jordan went visiting along Rockhouse Creek and elsewhere in the hills, people saw a dignified man. He sat tall on his horse, walked strongly, and still paid meticulous attention to his appearance. A handful had known him from the time the Spencers moved to the hollow. Most could not remember a time without him; none was his elder. He reminded them of their parents, long-dead brothers and sisters, lost days.
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No one seemed to think about Old Jordan's race—that had been something for the bygone generation to puzzle out. His children and their children were white, without question. Many of them were kin by marriage. When the 1900 census-taker looked at Jordan, he initially marked a
B
by his name. But then he had second thoughts—perhaps after gauging community opinion—and wrote a
W
over it, retracing the letter again and again until it was bolder than any other classification on the page. The old man had become emphatically white.
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Although Spencer was well composed in public, his grandchildren remembered someone different at home—a man who had spent decades working children hard in the fields, remained able to do heavy lifting, and, when he got drunk, stayed strong enough to administer beatings. Like their parents, the grandchildren living with Jordan worked instead of going to school. They never forgot the man, and as they grew older, they repeated stories about him that their children, in turn, never forgot. In one telling, Spencer was so full of rage, so uncontrollable one night that a grandson reached into a coal bucket, grabbed a rock, and beat Jordan until he collapsed to the cabin floor, bloodied and unconscious but still terrifying in a coal fire's glow. He would be a new man for the neighbors the next day.
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EVERY EVENING AN ARMY of Kentucky men sat in washtubs and tried to scrub themselves white. They scoured their cheeks and eyelids and ears and hands, under their fingernails. Their skin was dull black, head to toe. The black had worked through their sleeves and pants and long johns, burrowed into their arms and legs like the little red chigger bugs that infested the hills—perhaps the reason some called it “bug dust.”
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In the last minutes of light, the men washed themselves with lye soap until they tasted it and felt it burning their eyes. The tub water grew dull and dark and sulfurous as it cooled. Some of the black never came out. When coal dust got into a cut, it dyed the skin like a tattoo. Even after their nightly baths, the men could still smell coal, and they still spat black.
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The railroad had come to Paintsville for one reason: to tap eastern Kentucky's millions of tons of bituminous and cannel coal. People in Johnson County had been mining bits of it for as long as Jordan Spencer had lived there, but mainly for their own use, picking away at their hillsides when they had some spare time. Without an easy way to ship to the large factories, blast furnaces, and gasworks that needed it, there was no use in doing anything more. Rising industries in the North could rely on coal from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois; as late as 1900, western Kentucky's mines still produced more than the Appalachian counties. Once the railroad snaked up the Big Sandy Valley, however, the massive fields between Paintsville and Elkhorn Creek near the Virginia line would yield cheap, high-grade coal by the mountainful.
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It was common knowledge that eastern Kentucky was rich with coal. It jutted out of the ground in large rock formations, plainly visible to people passing by. For decades everyone from a local Johnson County teacher to financiers in Boston, Chicago, and Pittsburgh had been busy buying up hundreds of thousands of acres of mineral rights. They took rooms at the Alger House in Paintsville and carried suitcases full of cash. They rode through the hills with saddlebags heavy with gold pieces. Mining companies were financing the railroad construction. When the line first crossed into Johnson County in 1888, coal operations immediately opened along the way. Within months Johnson County coal was burning in New York City, Toronto, Chicago, the Dakotas, and elsewhere. As Jordan Spencer was selling off small parts of his farm, his deeds stopped referring exclusively to stone markers and tall trees in delineating property boundaries. In 1895, nine years before the railroad reached Paintsville, Spencer sold a parcel that began at “a rock and locust near a Coal Bank.”
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It was less clear how life would change once the mines along the Big Sandy Valley began producing tens of thousands of tons of coal every day. For a farmer like Jordan Spencer, coal companies paid good money for crops to feed the workforce and for timber to strengthen support walls inside the mines and to build housing outside. Although Clay County's saltworks and Johnson County's small-scale coal and timber operations must have given Spencer some understanding of industrial life, the old man could not have foreseen how different his children's and grandchildren's lives would be from his own.
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Jordan Spencer had spent his eighty-plus years surrounded by forest. His daughter Lydia sold her mineral rights and used the proceeds to buy a home for her family in town. Many more Spencers wound up in the mines. Men who had spent their childhoods in the hills took jobs chiseling and blasting their way through them. Many miners almost never saw the sun. In winter their days started before sunup and ended after dark. They entered the mine through a wide mouth gashed into a hillside. The main tunnel branched off about every eighty feet into smaller tunnels, known as “rooms.” Miners claimed their own rooms and returned to them every working day. They used their own time to buttress the walls and ceiling with timbers. At the end of a room was the rock face, and each day the room grew a little longer.
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In the dim, stinking light of lard lamps, the miners picked and drilled under masses of coal while lying on their sides. Packing and lighting gunpowder charges and diving for cover, they spent hours shoveling rock into carts. Slouching under beam and ceiling, feet soaked from the slush and puddle that slicked the mine floors, throats burning from powder smoke and dust, they pushed cart after cart to the main tunnel, where mules pulled them out of the hills.
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In the early years miners were paid by the weight of what they had carted out, usually two or three dollars a day, sometimes given as scrip redeemable only at the company store. In certain ways the mining life was not unlike farming in a mountain hollow. Plowing, clearing trees and brush, splitting wood and building fences, and harvesting could be grueling, repetitive, and lonely tasks. Miners who were paid by the ton could work at their own pace, with little supervision. The timbers that framed the tunnel walls and ceilings were notched like logs for cabins. Perhaps the most visceral reminder of life outside was the steep pitch of the mine floors. In the 1870s one miner described his daily routine as “very much like asking a man to stand on the roof of a house while working.” It was a sensation familiar to anyone who had ever picked corn in the Jordan Gap.
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