A childhood autumn in the coal year of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“Coal Man’s coming today,” says Mama as she pulls the broom in swift, short strokes across the kitchen floor. I prance on bare tiptoes over the marbled turquoise linoleum tiles, its tidal pools swirling at my feet. I sway as I cross to the rag-rug islands in front of the stove, sink, and back door.
In 1855, the landscape painter George Inness began work on his commissioned painting The Lackawanna Valley. A century later, a girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, looks out over her coal-strewn homeland wishing for beauty and wondering where the artist had stood with his canvas. The interplay between the two stories is at the heart of Catherine Young’s memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored By Coal. Young invites readers into a world now vanished, but which lingers in shimmering portraits. A lyric work of environmental history, Black Diamonds gives voice to the birthplace of the industrial revolution in North America and the consequences for the people and the forgotten valley that once powered the nation.
It’s September, and it’s still green down our hollow, but Mama’s anxious to have the coalben filled. Who knows when a cold spell might come? Already in the gathering dark of evenings, the clouds sail in, dense purple-gray, meaning cold is coming. This morning, though, is sunny and warm. That’s hard on Mama. She longs to take a walk, but stays home, waiting for the Coal Man.
Midmorning, I hear the coal truck—a large, loud monster. It pounds down our steep street and comes to a slow metal-screeching halt in front of our house. All the coal trucks have screeching brakes—no matter whose you hire. This one is blue, coated in a film of oily black so thick that the name on the door is unreadable. From my front porch rail perch all I can do is watch. Mama has told me to stay away from strangers.
The Coal Man jumps down from his truck and comes around the back of his rig.
“You call for coal?” he shouts and flashes a gap-tooth grin. He drops a cigarette on the street and crushes it with his heel.
I nod, then turn and run for Mama. “Coal Man’s here!” I shout, banging the front screen door. “Mama!”
She takes off her apron and descends to the basement to open the coalben door, then climbs into the nearly empty coalben beneath the porch at the front of the house. She pushes the three-paned glass window outward, propping it open with a stick.
I return to the porch cautiously now, feeling exposed. I stay behind the rail and wrap my arms around the white-painted pillar to watch. The Coal Man pulls his truck out perpendicularly in the street and jockeys the truck into position. Backing the truck over boulevard grass and sidewalk, the Coal Man bumps his truck against the cinder-cement wall. The tilt is stunning. He leaps from the cab, and lets the door slam shut, pulled by the downward slant of the hill. From the rack at the truck’s bumper, the Coal Man pulls out boards and rocks to prop the wheels at the front and back of the truck to keep it in place. Back to the cab he goes, raises the truck bed, and races to the back end for the ramps. He slides oily black steel ramps across the yard, hooking one end to the back of the truck. The other end pushes into the coalben under the front porch. It’s tricky getting the truck in just the right place so that once the ramps are out, they go straight to the little window. On Grandma’s street, the coal truck has less of a tilt, but her coal man has to ramp over her hedge. Oh, her coal man grumbles if her hedge hasn’t been trimmed low enough.
Coal Man wastes no time. Up goes the little chute door at the top of the ramps and out comes the coal: a rattling, rushing torrent of black diamonds. The downpour is deafening, and all I can see is a blur of black.
Coal Man checks the flow of coal at the ramp’s top. Confident of the constant stream, he leaves the truck and goes around to the back of our house, to the basement door. I follow. His long strides take him quickly across the basement floor to the coalben where he watches the coal come in. Grabbing a shovel and hopping over the half-planked wall, he flings coal left and right to fill the corners of the room. As the bin fills, the space between the coal and the ceiling shrinks, and Coal Man’s head hits the porch joists. Out he comes, and he and Mama put in the next planks. The coal continues filling. Mama adds more planks until the plank wall is now as high as Mama’s collarbone—as high as it will be all year. Later, Mama will reach in and shovel the coal surface level so that it will be easier to work with. Coal Man wipes his face on his filthy sleeve and heads back outdoors.
As Mama hurries upstairs to find the money envelope, I follow her.
“Mama, where did he get the coal from?”
“What do you mean, where?”
“Where did he get it from for the truck?”
“From the breaker. You know. From the breaker—down in the Flats,” she says, and hurries to her bedroom closet. She reaches into the small, dark space and retrieves the worn electric company envelope marked COAL. From it she takes and counts the $63 it has taken all year to save up for this expense. She sighs, puts back the envelope, and carries the cash away downstairs.
I don’t like breaker buildings. Breakers are towers of blackness, surrounded by blackness—the mountains of culm dumps towering over them. Each breaker is a lopsided black building shaped like a stack of alphabet blocks, with one little last block off-center on top, many-windowed—or it would be many-windowed except most of the panes are broken. And the whole place clatters so loud. Dad took me down to the breakers in the Flats along the Lackawanna River, and we had to shout to one another—you can’t get close to one and still talk. Though I couldn’t see inside the building, I was frightened of it. The breaker building stood dark and tall, and there was something about it I knew was really bad—but I couldn’t name what it is. Dad told me there used to be breaker boys who sat inside breakers in the cold and dark along metal chutes, breathing coal dust and sorting coal. Sometimes they came away maimed. But that was a long time ago—when my dad’s dad was a boy. Now there are only machines inside. I still don’t understand how it all works.
“Mama, how do they get the coal into the truck?”
Mama waves her hand in the air as if brushing away a fly. “I don’t know, honey. I’ve never seen how. Ask your dad.” She dashes out the door.
With an oily black broom, Coal Man sweeps the last of the black diamonds from the truck bed through the chute. Sparse beads of coal rattle down the ramp and sound the end of the downpour. Coal Man pulls up the ramps, stacks them back on the truck, and hangs up his broom. He wipes his hands on a rag before pulling out a receipt book from the cab. Mama brings up the cash and hands it over. The truck heads out into the street and grinds uphill. Mama pulls the prop from the coalben window. The coal year has begun.
Catherine Young worked as a national park ranger, farmer, educator, and mother before putting her heart into her writing. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and holds degrees in Geography, Environmental Science, and Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Catherine is the author of Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal and the ecopoetry collection Geosmin. She lives with her family in the Driftless region of Wisconsin.
Header photo by New Africa, courtesy Shutterstock.
