A publisher’s initial responsibility with a historical manuscript is to make the world of the book readable on its own terms. One of the several strengths of Men with Black Faces: Tears of the Human Worms is the restraint with which it teaches readers the mine. Before the first family fight or payday scene, Valentine J. Thomas tours us underground: where the coal is, how it is accessed, and what that does to men who go to fetch it. He starts with the land itself.
Coal beds in the southwestern Pennsylvania fields may be near the surface enough to tunnel through the hillside or so deep that only a vertical shaft will work. Out of this self-evident fact grows a threefold taxonomy of mines drift, slope, and shaft that determines what comes next. A drift is a level face at the bottom of a hill; a slope follows the grade downhill, sometimes at tormented angles; a shaft drives directly through rock, pulled by cages and bull-wheels. Each has its own dance of danger, gear, and time. Inside, the plan deploys with the logic of a surveyor. Main headings drive to the company’s property line, then “flats,” “butts,” and “rooms” are struck off them, the butts frequently three hundred feet apart.
Air has to be herded to each man: doors, stoppings, and canvas work steer the currents through the working faces, and crosscuts are cut every 75 to 100 feet to keep the ventilation alive at the headings. It is not abstract engineering; it’s staying alive, described in blunt, workmanlike language. Above and below, the hoisting systems are detailed with the specificity of one who rode them every day. In a shaft, double cages counterbalance: while one climbs to unload an empty car from the tower into the chute, the other descends to the sump for the next load. Signals, not intuition, control stops at landings for men and materials.
It’s a portrait not of force but of coordination, down to the clearances along the track and the timbering that supports a roof between solid and disaster. The law comes into the mine on the wind. Thomas documents the need for at least three hundred cubic feet of fresh air per minute to be delivered to “each and every man” an unprecedented amount until you think of the dust and gases released by chopping and blasting, and the heat that accumulates as headings extend miles from daylight. The story takes readers through the process by which earlier steam-powered fans yielded to suction systems and electrical power, reversing directions and increasing dependability as the industry evolved. Mechanization comes not as technological procession but as a series of small blessings for weary bodies.
During the eighties and nineties, everything was done manually picks, undercutting, shot holes, powder, loading all under lamplight with a horse or mule to transport pit cars. Then the compressed-air cutters, dinkey engines, and, in non-gas mines, electrified haulage and coal-cutting equipment. The labor is still hazardous; it just happens quicker. Thomas is cautious to demonstrate how animals ultimately couldn’t keep up with distances that covered “several miles underground,” and why motors replaced them.
Even “retreat mining,” a term unknown to most readers, is treated with plainspoken simplicity: once the margin is reached, supports are pulled and the weighty strata collapses to fill the spaces, the ribs being salvaged as the mine recedes. These passages are important because they are reminders that the mine is a mobile thing moving forward, ventilating, draining, receding and that lives need to accommodate its beat. This is the usefulness of the book as a cultural document: it describes the system without sugar-coating, then places families against the system with compassion. Readers complete the technical chapters with a functional understanding of how coal is won and why the men who won it tallied the day’s air, light, and luck like wages. It’s rare to see the mechanics and the human stakes braided so tightly and without theatrics. That’s what makes these pages indispensable.
