Hard Times Come Again No More-With The Horrors Of Mister James Crow In Mind

By Zack James

Josh Breslin never forgot the night his father, Prescott, not a talkative man about anything from his service in the Marines in World War II to his younger days in misbegotten coal country Kentucky, told him about some of the things that he had experienced and noticed when he was young back in the hills and hollows of the Appalachian range. Josh was perhaps eleven or twelve on that night we are speaking of. Prescott may have been “in his cups,” had had a few drinks too many after learning that at the end of the year in 1955 the MacAdams Textile Mill which had provided work for many in Olde Saco up in Maine for over fifty years would close its doors forever and head to cheap labor North Carolina not all that far from where he had grown up. That closing meant that a man with few salable skills in a tight labor market like Prescott would be reduced to any awful work he could get to feed four hungry growing boys, Josh the youngest, if he stayed in the area. The thought of going back to the South had crossed Prescott’s mind for a minute but then he dismissed it out of hand. He could not go back, he would not. Hence Josh was that night privy to some of the specifics of what his old man could not go back to.

Prescott had been born in Prestonsburg, really in a hamlet, Olden, outside of that town, the former then barely a town, more like one of those five stores and a post office that you still see in extremely rural areas in this country. Outside of town things were even more primitive with scattered tarpaper shacks, some owned by Peabody Coal Company, others the result of families in some back generation being too lazy to head west to better land and letting things run down even more, if that was possible. All one had to do was picture a photograph by say Dorothea Lange or somebody like that with the classic shack, broken down crooked porch, maybe windows maybe not, tarpaper coming off in spots, some old pappy setting on that porch smoking his corncob pipe, a million kids running around half naked, overgrown weeds, and X number of old rusted out cars totally useless to clutter up the landscape. That would sum up the look of the Breslin estate.       

Needless to say that Peabody Coal Company owned everything in sight that was not nailed down, except a few ancient shacks like the Breslin one which had been there since before the coal mines came in. Owned the company store and exploited every resource it could, including the Breslin labor as far back as the mines existed. Included Prescott’s labor who at fourteen worked his way into the mines like his kindred and brethren before him without a peep from his father or anybody else. World War II came along to get him out from under the miner’s life. He had joined the Marines after the damn Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Said to his father that between dying of the black lung and getting hell from the Nips he would take his chances with the latter. So Prescott except in very private moments of despair like the mill closing never looked back, never wanted to look back.   

Oh sure he told Josh not all of it was unrelieved anguish and despair. He had had as a guy they locally called the “Sheik” for his dark Valentino-like good looks his fair share of the young girls come Saturday night barn dance time with the fiddles and guitars playing and the corn liquor going down smooth. Had taken “advantage” of more than one young girl (that was not the way he expressed it to young but growing Josh but that is what Josh remembered later) and a couple of older woman too (again not the way expressed at the time). Went fishing and hunting on those precious minutes off from the mines. Enjoyed running up and down the hills and hollows too. But there was no future there except black lung and if not black lung the some irate husband or some misbegotten other thing.      

After speaking about those younger days “for a piece” (one of the few expressions he retained from down home as he tried to become a Yankee as much as he could although with at times little success with that soft southern drawl of his) his father suddenly changed tact, began to speak about the “nigras” who lived over on the other side of Prestonsburg, over in “Nigra-town” (that was the term used then and which Prescott used when he spoke of black people-so this is not politically correct by todays’ standard but that was the reality in white Prestonsburg, and not just there, or just back then).   

Prescott spoke about how his mother, the real locus of family life repeatedly warned him and his siblings away from going to that side of town, told then the “nigras” would corrupt or steal white children for some evil purpose. Would practice some awful blood ritual to hear Mother Breslin tell the tale (always Mother not Ma or Mom) and besides that they stank up every place they went and that was the reason that they were kept on that side of town, down in the hollows where no respectable whites would go. Told her charges that when they went into Prestonsburg not to let themselves mix with “those people.”

What Prescott noticed most of all though was that “those people” when they did come to town walked on the road since the sidewalks were “reserved” for whites, they could only drink from “their” water fountain at the small town square, purchase goods only on “their” side of Mister Peabody’s store and could not hang around like white people could. He noticed all this but did not even think to question that social order, it seemed immutable. That things but be otherwise he really did not understand until he had lived up North for a while where such restrictions were not evident which made him very uncomfortable (he would never for example until his dying breathe be able to call a black person anything but “nigra” despite Josh’s efforts).          

That night thought he did tell Josh about the one Saturday night that he and Rick Jackson when they were about sixteen went over to, snuck over really, to “Nigra-town” to see what those people did for entertainment since he had heard in town that they raised holy hell on those nights. Fighting, drinking old mash, changing women around and dancing very seductively. The dance was held in the Baptist Church (black version) after they had cleared the pews and chairs back to allow for dancing. The band, an odd mix of fiddle players, drummers, guitarists and a lead female vocalist, set up on what on Sundays was the altar area. He and Rick stepped to the back so as not to be seen and waited for the dance to start expecting who knows what. What actually happened was that the young bucks and young women dances to tunes like Sitting On Top Of The World and the latest Robert Johnson tune Dust My Broom very much like he and his kindred did down at Brown’s red barn on Saturday nights except the band was a little jazzier than Frank Jackman and the Bow Men who creeped along. Prescott mentioned to Rick that he did not know what the big deal was, didn’t know why those people were thought to be wilder, drunker, more sex- crazy than they were come Saturday night.       

Still Prescott Breslin, a good if much put upon man, never called a black man or woman anything but nigra.