Yesterday I began writing my perhaps-a-book in earnest. The boys have been funny and observant about my new obsession. Boys: "So tell us what your book will be about." Me: "Oh, I don't know if it will be a book." Boys: "It's always a book when you start ordering tons of other people's books."

They seem to believe that it's perfectly reasonable for me to undertake a research project. Boys: "So you're writing a history of coal and steel?" Me (horrified): "No! No! I don't know how to find out anything about anything! Ack!" Boys: "So you're writing a family history?" Me: "No! Ack! My mother would hate that!"

As you can see, my plans aren't all that clear. Nonetheless, something seems to be happening. Call it, for the moment, "Coal: A Meditation."

One thing I have been thinking about is what I've been calling "the romance of the laborer," a vision of the worker that has lured many people into an ambiguous and contradictory relationship with their own roots and daily actions. Andrew Carnegie, famous strikebreaker and founder of U.S. Steel, was prone to "noble statements about the workingman to the very end of his life, seemingly untroubled by those who criticized his business and labor practices." Henry Clay Frick, on the other hand, offered "no paeans to his former brethren among the ranks and no convoluted justifications as to just how and why the rights of the workers might somehow be maintained without interfering with a steady flow of profit."

Both of these quotations are from Les Standiford's Meet You in Hell, a brief history of the fraught partnership between Carnegie and Frick, which culminated in the infamous Homestead Strike of 1892. I don't always agree with Standiford's quick guesses about the psychological motivations of these men, but they have pressed me to make my own inferences and links. And as I was reading about Carnegie and thinking about our shared "romance of the laborer" tendencies, my thoughts turned suddenly to this poem, which in a way sums up what I mean about the allures and dangers of that romance. My guess is that Carnegie, a dedicated reader of the classics, was well aware of the work of the most popular American poet of his day.

The Village Blacksmith

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Under a spreading chestnut-tree

The village smithy stands;

The smith, a mighty man is he,

With large and sinewy hands;

And the muscles of his brawny arms

Are strong as iron bands.

His hair is crisp, and black, and long,

His face is like the tan;

His brow is wet with honest sweat,

He earns whate'er he can,

And looks the whole world in the face,

For he owes not any man.

Week in, week out, from morn till night,

You can hear his bellows blow;

You can hear him swing his heavy sledge,

With measured beat and slow,

Like a sexton ringing the village bell,

When the evening sun is low.

And children coming home from school

Look in at the open door;

They love to see the flaming forge,

And hear the bellows roar,

And catch the burning sparks that fly

Like chaff from a threshing-floor.

He goes on Sunday to the church,

And sits among his boys;

He hears the parson pray and preach,

He hears his daughter's voice,

Singing in the village choir,

And it makes his heart rejoice.

It sounds to him like her mother's voice,

Singing in Paradise!

He needs must think of her once more,

How in the grave she lies;

And with his hard, rough hand he wipes

A tear out of his eyes.

Toiling,---rejoicing,---sorrowing,

Onward through life he goes;

Each morning sees some task begin,

Each evening sees it close;

Something attempted, something done,

Has earned a night's repose.

Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend,

For the lesson thou hast taught!

Thus at the flaming forge of life

Our fortunes must be wrought;

Thus on its sounding anvil shaped

Each burning deed and thought.

• From the Library of Congress's online image catalog:
• 
  

GENERAL VIEW OF DURALOY COMPANY

OFFICE BUILDING LOOKING NORTHEAST

AT THE WEST FACADE




From 1885 until 1936, National Foundry & Pipe

Works Ltd. and its successor, United States Cast

Iron and Foundry Company manufactured cast

iron water and gas pipes and fittings.

The Duraloy Company took over the Scottdale

plant in 1937 after its West Virginia factory

burned. By 1945, it was one of the largest

producers of equipment for the manufacture

of magnesium, and a supplier for the

Manhattan Project.




(Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs

Division, Washington, D.C. [HAER PA,

65-SCOTT,1-]).

• 
  

By the time I was born, my grandfather was no longer mining but had taken a job pouring steel at Duraloy in Scottdale, where he lived. I remember that he used to come home with burn holes in his work clothes. One day he also came home with presents for my sister and me: two giant steel pennies that he'd poured for us. I have no idea where the penny mold came from--I suppose someone must have made it--but he told us that the men all had fun pouring pennies on their lunch hour. My big penny has been sitting on my desk for 40 years now.

You'll notice that I haven't said anything yet about the Manhattan Project. That would be because I can't find anything corroborating this involvement anywhere else online. It does give me the horrors, of course. My granddad himself could not have been involved: in the 1940s he was still mining. In fact, though he'd been drafted into the army and even had his suitcase packed, the government changed its mind and sent him back into the pit.

Still, to think that there was a vibrating link between Scottdale and Hiroshima is appalling. On the other hand, why should this surpise me? The story of coal and steel is all about evil.

• 
  
• 
  

from Dan Rottenberg, The Kingdom of Coal:

Once placed in the mines, the mules never saw the light of day again, for fear the shock would drive them mad.

According to Rottenberg, "the Connellsville coking coal basin was about thirty miles long by an average of two and a half miles wide." The area was also known as the "Pittsburgh seam." Although the names on this small map may be difficult to read, you can see how many mines were crammed into a relatively small area. What you don't see are the coking ovens, where the soft bituminous coal was cooked into coke, a coal residue that was used to fuel the blast furnaces that made steel. In the 1870s and 80s, with the exponential rise of the railroads, the Connellsville coking basin was a trove. By 1883, the district had "more than ten thousand coke ovens." Imagine breathing that air.

Coal

Dawn Potter

Beneath houses and mountains, the coal seam lurks,

snaking under markets and factories, under churches, farms,

soda fountains, and garages, under railroad tracks and the hotel

where drunk old men sleep. The woman walks over the coal,

tracing an aimless map onto the earth—trailing, cigarette to lips,

through the ragged yards and alleys to the matinee minstrel show,

where she sits alone and watches the red-lipped white men mop

their black brows, cough and sing in the rising smoke from a hundred

women’s cigarettes, thick enough to choke the light; where she waits

for the piano player to seek out the chords of a darky strut,

for two black white men to stomp their feet, one two one two,

bow, and disappear into the empty wings, into the hill-bound town

where the chimneys hide behind the smoke and the riverbank

flares like a forest, where new leaves are painted in dust that sifts

onto the woman wandering home across the yards and alleys,

under the sooty trees, up the buckled, heaving streets to home;

where soon the man also walks, swinging a lunch bucket, not fast, not slow,

but quiet, stepping one step after another to where the woman sits,

smoking and silent in the kitchen where the kettle boils on the stove,

fogging the window where the child writes her name in careful script

on each little pane, index finger black with the coal that seeps into the house

that the woman has not dusted for weeks, for months, for years:

the glass-faced cabinets, the letters sloping onto tables, the newspapers

jaundiced with age, the scarred legs of couches draped in sheets,

the end table swathed in shabby linen where a once-gilt lamp perches,

throwing a saucer of light that never reaches the dark creeping

up the streets and alleys, the yards where black clotheslines streak the shirts

black and the trees shake black pollen onto the roofs. In the quiet house

the man takes off his boots and peels down his sweat-stiffened socks;

and the child gapes at the white hairless feet, soft and puffed, cramped toes

bending and stretching helplessly under the lamplight while the woman

smokes in silence, while the little kettle coughs and sings on the fire

and the minstrel show rises like steam in her memory, a slow vapor

that bends and frays. Ghostlike, the black-faced men mouth their songs;

crimson seats fold up over wraiths; invisible hands press the silent keys

of the piano. Smoke vanishes into ceiling, and ceiling melts to sky; the clouds

dissolve to pinpoints of light, and the light fades to nothing, not even black;

night descends on a town where the smelters burn and rusty bridges

hang over the creek like mothers staring into an empty crib.

For the child has flitted away into the darkness—a moth, velvet and brief,

wings brushing the soot-stained air, her shadow painting an eyeless window.

[from Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004)]

from The Kingdom of Coal by Dan Rottenberg

In Pennsylvania's Monongahela Valley, commercial coal mining began in 1759. Between 1768 and 1784 the family of William Penn acquired all of western Pennsylvania's bituminous coal fields from the chiefs of the Six Nations at a total cost of $10,000, or less than a cent an acre--a transaction that ranks alongside Peter Minuit's purchase of Manhattan Island from the Algonkin Indians for trinkets worth $24 in 1626 as one of the great bargains of history.

I woke up in the middle of the night. The wind was blowing hard, as it has been for days now; and my head was full of unwritten words. But I am beginning to see how I might approach this writing project, and one of those angles deals with the fluid yet enduring confusions of class. To wit: now that you've just read that quotation about William Penn's purchase of the coal fields, what do you say to the fact that my first serious boyfriend was 11th in direct descent from William Penn and used to keep a copy of the deed to Pennsylvania taped to his dorm room wall?

I feel that this project is too large for me, yet that's exactly how I felt about the Paradise Lost project. Is it any wonder that I'm waking up in the middle of night?

Yesterday I started reading the first of what may turn out to be a stack of books about the coal industry: Dan Rottenberg's In the Kingdom of Coal, whose study deals specifically with the Leisenring family, the dynasty behind the Westmoreland Coal Company, which operated mines in Virginia, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, as well as "remote places like Connellsville, Pennsylvania"--that remote place where my grandfather went down into the pit every day.

I'm still no further into the book than the introduction, but I already see that it will make its mark on me. Consider, for instance, Rottenberg's description of a hotel that "catered to the streams of coal brokers, entertainers, and tourists who constantly passed through Pottsville," a thriving eastern Pennsylvania burg, which was home to numbers of "anthracite coal barons":

The red-brick, nine-storey Necho Allen [was] named for the hunter who discovered anthracite coal on a nearby mountain in 1790. This hotel's subterranean Coal Mine Tap Room, decorated with anthracite walls and ceilings supported by mine timbers, attracted visitors from across the country who would never set foot in an actual coal mine. In the Necho's ballroom, big bands entertained standing room-only crowds. The Necho's elegant lobby-level dining room, with its ornate chandeliers and heavy white table linens, was dominated by an enormous three-piece oil-on-canvas painting of Sistine Chapel pretentions--but the subject of this monumental triptych was not God awakening Adam, but Necho Allen arousing succeeding generations of coal miners, coal towns, and coal machines to their heroic destiny.

Meanwhile, consider Walker Evans's July 1935 "Street Scene, Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania," one of the many portraits of the Connellsville area that the artist photographed for the Farm Security Administration. I spent a fair amount of time in Mt. Pleasant during the 1970s. It did not look very different from this.

Yesterday was eventful: my older son, after much pain and trial, finally got his driver's license, and we're all so proud and relieved. And my younger son returned home, cheerful and unwashed, after a thrilling and girlfriend-acquiring week at the North Haven island school. So here we are again, our customary quartet, although three of us are still asleep and one of us underwent aggravating dreams about the governor all night.

It is still very cold here--10 degrees at dawn--and yesterday afternoon's dripping icicles have all seized up in awkward paralysis, like crooked stage knives. This is my last free weekend before the onslaught of poetry season. Next Saturday I will be mustering my forces and heading down to Portland for the Maine Festival of the Book, where I'll be doing a book signing with, among other writers, our state's new poet laureate Wesley McNair. Then, in quick succession, I'll be hoicking down to Massachusetts to visit Charlotte Gordon's creative writing class at Endicott College, driving to the seaside to read with Dave Morrison at Rockland Public Library, and trying to think of something to say during a panel discussion at the Plunkett Poetry Festival. If you're anywhere near any of these places during any of those witching hours, come and hold my hand.

Meanwhile, I will drink more of this coffee.

Yesterday's post garnered a number of responses from you, not only the beautiful comments on the post itself but also a few emails and some remarks on the Facebook link. Whether or not you've had a teacher's or parent's relationship with children, all of you shared a patience and a wistfulness that, to me, was very moving. It is hard to be human.

Things aren't going very well, humanity-wise, here in Maine. Our horrible governor continues to make the worst possible decisions. This week, in collision with the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, he's ordered the state's Department of Labor to remove a mural depicting the history of Maine's working people. You've probably read about it: the national news has snapped up the story, as well it should. This version, in the Portland Press-Herald, sums up the painful stupidity of the situation.

By chance, I've been working on an essay about western Pennsylvania coal mining, thinking about the labor-worker relationship and how little I knew about it when I was the coal miner's grandchild. Not long ago, E. B. Leisenring, Jr., the man who ran the Westmoreland Coal Company, died. And when I read his obituary, I realized how much horror had been seething right under my nose . . . right then, while I was playing cards with my granddad, feeding his cows, running past the little coal tip he kept to stoke his kitchen stove. Quickly I bought a stack of books, so I'll soon be undergoing an intensive lesson in western Pennsylvania coal history. It will be strange to learn how that intersects with blithe childhood ignorance.

Here's a poem by my mother, the coal miner's daughter, that captures a different sort of childhood ignorance, and knowledge.

The Orpheus of Leisenring

Janice Miller Potter

. . . they heard the sluther of pit-boots.

--D. H. Lawrence

Often he winched his shoulders

quickly, to show he didn't know, as his calm

Sargasso eyes shifted away their troubles

with a remote expression of watery blue,

clear and unclouded but ruefully accepting

the reality that he possessed no clue to

how life had locked him in, a storm becalmed.

He'd thought and felt he knew nothing.

Was it the child, never scanting him

from her constellation of childish claims?

The lamp that rode his skull, the bright star

on the helmet he wore in the Leisenring Mine,

kept her wakeful at night, waiting for the dawn

and the sound of his Dodge. When he pulled in,

the untrellised, rambling seven-sisters rasped

that he'd come up in a cage from Leisenring.

Coal musk drenching his sunless skin,

sweat-sodden, he sluthered into the dark kitchen

where the child--up from nightmare--plundered

his dinner bucket for her wax-papered cake,

the coconut snowball he'd ferried down and back

for her to rob him of. In the half-light, whistling

"Mares Eat Oats," he knew he could assume

neither love nor delight the foil of time.

[from Psalms in Time (Finishing Line Press, 2008)]