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| Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | F | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
From the coal camps of northeastern New Mexico comes a tale of families and friends struggling to rise above working and living conditions Theodore Roosevelt once described as worse than the serfdom of the Middle Ages. In this prequel to Coal Camp Days, the Chicorico miners battle to establish a labor union that promises to rectify dangerous and oppressive mining conditions.
The story opens in 1931 when Julian and Dahlia Heard, an African American coal mining family, take in Swannie, a town drunk. Swannie finds sobriety, peace, and opportunity with the Heards until his friend Judo Perkovich dies in a tragic mining accident.
Swannie stands up for Judo's widow and, as a result, is fired from the mine. He finds work in Raton as a "dry agent," waging battle against local moonshiners in Colfax County--and the local coal camps. Swannie disappears one day while demolishing a still near Chicorico. When a body is found in the nearby hills, Swannie's friend Julian Heard is nearly killed by a camp guard who will stop at nothing to secure a confession for the crime.
Author Notes
Ricardo Garcia
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Raymond "Swannie" Swanson, a black New Mexico laborer, has had trouble beating the bottle and finding work since returning from WWI service more than 10 years ago. Miner Julian Heard and his wife, Dahlia, take him in and help him get a desk job with the company for which Julian mines. After being forced to short the miners on pay, Swannie is laid off, and having gotten religion, finds work enforcing Prohibition; he finds and destroys the mining company's still, but disappears after the building catches fire. When a body is later found, Julian, who is the focus of the book's final chapters, is accused, while sinister company forces seem very much in play throughout. Garcia fictionalized his WWII mining family boyhood in Coal Camp Days and gives a solid account of southwestern mining life and its denizens a generation before. But the dialogue, particularly Swannie's ("If'n he comes by, snorting like a bull and totin' his gun, I can't take no bull off him"), is a weak point, and Swannie's disappearance disturbs the narrative arc, leading to a muddled, anticlimactic ending. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
