| The Coal Miner’s Children |
By: Lois Kellerman, columnist, “Mother Knows Best”
On 1/11/06
Just after Will Johnson had left home for the evening shift, a storm broke over the valley. A bone-cracking thunderbolt chased by fierce lightning frightened Sarah Johnson so that she dropped the dish she was drying. “Girls, bolt the doors and windows,” she directed.
| "Rule number one: Don’t cry alone. Rule number two: Don’t forget to eat." |
She could hear young Johnny moaning in his fevered sleep. Running into the back room Sarah reached his bed just as rain, heavy as new coal, began smashing against the thin cottage roof and walls.
“Anna, Rachel, Daisy, Harriet…” She called each daughter by name. “Hurry!” The girls came spilling in to the back room and fell in a circle around her, their tears quickly soaking her cotton apron.
“Ma!” Johnny came awake now. “Ma!” Sarah pulled him down into her arms. Johnny closed his swollen eyes again. It was then that it came.
No one who wasn’t there that night could explain the exact eeriness of the explosion. As though the thick air around the storm had been cleared to let Hell’s funnel in. Everything shook. Everything. Then Sarah could hear someone shrieking--calling out a name: “Will, Will.” It was her voice. And a counterpoint: Five children wailing as one, “Pa!.”
In the summer of 1916 in a small town in Western Canada, 12 miners in No. 3 East Mine were killed in an explosion during an intense thunderstorm. We do not know if Will Johnson was among them because only the names of titled men were listed, but we do know that all that night along the slow packed row of cottages the names of husbands were lifted up on trembling lips and many a child’s heart was broken.
The Canadian Ministry of Mines documented numerous disasters during those early years: 1902, Coal Creek, 128 men; 1904, Morrisey, 14 men; 1910, Bellevue, Alberta, 30 men. 1914, Hillcrest, 189 men, but it is the twelve men in a mining town over 90 years ago, trapped in a mine during a lightning storm that resonates with the tragedy of the hour in a mining town in Pennsylvania.
Watching the news on television I wonder how I would talk to little Johnny, glazed and hot, and his four terrified sisters if I were their mother. I think Sarah got it basically right. She gathered her chickadees under her wings and created a safe space to begin a mourning process.
Rule number one: Don’t cry alone. Rule number two: Don’t forget to eat. They would all be drained by the terror inside and out. Extra oatmeal, dried fruit, lots and lots of water. The habits of mine women were to feed one another. Those habits still stand. And the third rule is to acknowledge reality while at the same time affirming hope. “This is awful. We didn’t deserve it, but it’s here in front of us now. Deal. Talk about it if you can. Tell them that there are lots of people coming to help, do what they can, comfort. Tell them that the living are built to cope even with dying and that, somehow, you’ll all get through.”
To Sarah and her children, weeping, I dedicate this month for reflection on how we can help to hold and rock all the children of the world.
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