There is one electric current that flows through the first few pages of Men with Black Faces: Tears of the Human Worms. You sense immediately that you are stepping into a lived world coal dust suspended in the air, heat blazing off the tipple, voices from half a dozen tongues wafting up from the patch. The book is constructed from firsthand notes by Valentine J. Thomas, a bituminous coal miner who immigrated from the ancient Austro-Hungarian Empire, then lovingly fashioned for readers by his grandson, Albert J. Thomas, who maintains the original cadence and grime of the storytelling. The outcome reads like history in progress. The preface announces the editorial intention clearly: leave “grandpa’s spoken word, his voice,” unadorned.
It’s not decorative. It’s the driving force that infuses the story with moral traction. These are not reconstructed tableaux or reconstructed dialogues. They’re the textures and tempos of a miner who wrote in “broken English” with “a comma after every three or four words,” doing as well as he could to describe the conditions that constructed twentieth-century America and the dignity of those who lived them. Thence on, the story drops us squarely into southwestern Pennsylvania’s coal towns in the mid-1880s, an age when seams could be twenty feet below the sod or seven hundred beneath rock and the difference could decide whether a community went to work in a drift, slope, or shaft. These first pages are a tutorial in geology and human geography, describing the three types of entries and how each defined the work, danger, and pacing of a day for a miner.
But this is not a guidebook. It is a people’s book. What’s important, most of all, are the families’ men who returned black from head to toe, wives who managed without running water or electricity, and children who grew up gauging seasons by the company whistle.
The grandson-editor, himself a son of a miner born in a patch, allows that experience to breathe, recalling the plain facts of life in the coal camps with precision: the stove that never really warmed the house, the winter walk out to the outhouse, and a neighborhood of nicknames and long-standing friendships. It’s historical testimony with a publisher’s favorite qualities particularity, humility, and acquired feeling. The drama of the book finds its deepest anchor in a story trajectory that’s representative of the time: parents who fantasize about keeping their children away from the pits, then see need set those fantasies aside. In one of the most poignant stretches of the book, the mine foreman makes a “trapper” offer to young Jerry Durant, and his dad Syl good-natured, weary, resolute has to balance education with bread on the table. The choice, as with so many in the patch, is one of compromise with exigency. The narration never sentimentalizes it, which is exactly why it sticks.
Publishers and editors are always speaking of “voice,” but voice becomes substance here. The language is unsweetened; the imagery is precise. Readers discover how ventilation doors deflect air, why stoppings are covered, how crosscuts sustain a man at his heading. The specifics pile up until the mine becomes readable, then inevitable. Along the way, the story expands outward from the headings to the streets to reveal a workforce gathered at Castle Garden from almost every part of Europe, a mosaic of names and tongues learning a new nation the toughest way.
What results is social history as well as family chronicle. The book illustrates how 1880s’ coke perfected triggered American steel and drew whole villages into the orbit of the furnaces, and it does so not in statistics but in household budgets, school programs, and mothers boarding out to make ends meet. This is the kind of history publisher’s dream of discovering: a story that weighs heavily with scholarship yet never strikes a didactic note, since it is rooted in houses, faces, and the tenuous understandings families strike in order to keep going. For readers discovering the title online, you’ll see the promise made succinctly in the retail listings: real stories, real families, a coal patch rendered from the inside. That’s exactly what the pages deliver. In shaping Valentine Thomas’s notes, Albert J. Thomas has honored a generation often talked about and seldom heard. This book lets them speak in their own vernacular and on their own terms and that makes all the difference.
