Workin'

              From: Stories ' Neath the Roan ( 1993)
WORKIN'
Cas Thomas
We had to work in the fields from the time we was big enough to hoe. I would
work my head off, until I got to the end of the row. Then I would want to quit. My dad
would say,” No, Sir!” He would put me in the row below all of them, and they would trash
me. He made me work from then on.
I was about three and a half years old when Mama died. I can’t remember seeing
my mom, but hit was back in 1916 when she died.
We moved from the head of Brown’s Creek to the clay mines, over here on the
other side of Micaville. Dad had been sick all winter. Granddaddy was able to work and
we moved into an old shack with no floor in hit. Hit was a place where they had to sheet
mica. They had no strips on the cracks when we moved in hit. When we started
unloading, the boss man from the mines come out there, and asked Daddy who give him
permission to move in there and my dad said, “ Nobody, but if you don’t want us to live in
this little old shack, we will just keep moving” He said If you can live in that thing, clean
hit out and live in hit.” We did, dirt floors and all After that, he told Granddaddy, “ If you
want to go out to the mines, I will give you a job
Granddaddy went out to the mines and went to work. Hit was a clay mine, not a mica
mine. He went to work and in a few days he came back and told Daddy, “ Can you sit out
there and run the hoisting machine that picks up the skips out of the mines? We will keep
hit oiled for you and you don’t have a thing to do, but sit out there. When we holler, you
pull the skip and let hit back in.” My daddy said, “ Yes.” Granddaddy said that the man
that runs hit said, if you would, that you could go down in the mines and work. So, Daddy
did that. So he come back in about a week, and told me, Ransom, and George, ( that was
my brothers), “ If you will go out there and pick up them mica scraps, or catch them mica
scraps out of the flume lines, I will buy them.” We went out with them. The men would
save them scraps and pile them up on the bank till we got to them. They would send after
us to come, you know, and then would pile them in there. They would choke up the flume
line and water would splatter to the top of the tunnel we was in. We would get them
things and throw them out on the bank. Ras was first, and then George second, and I was