Mind Picker: Work Like Any Other

Even with Wilson there, it was just work – work like any other, like milking and cleaning stalls, building pens and running dogs, rolling carts down narrow aisles, organizing cards, memorizing numbers. It was picking at coal veins on your side and breathing rushes of coal dust, awaiting explosions, lifting and loading. It was tamping and shoveling and pitching. And work is measured in time as much as it is measured in pay. I am uncertain how many hours of running equal a man's hand, his wrist, and forearm and elbow. How many books must be stacked in exchange for one finger? How much milk driven into a pail? How many holes dug, how many dogs pulled from the ground and then buried back even deeper? How many wives and sons? I am still unsure of my debts.

The first paragraph of Work Like Any Other contains these lines: The electrical transformers that would one day kill George Haskin sat high on a pole about ten yards off the northeast corner of the farm where Roscoe T Martin lived with his family...Roscoe built the transformers himself. He built the lines. He did not have permission. Because all of this is revealed immediately, I won't consider it a spoiler, and everything that follows is about what you might imagine would result from such misadventure. This is historical fiction – set in 1920s Alabama, the book not only deals with the central idea that a person had, for the first time, the freedom to choose his own vocation (coal mining, farming, the exciting new field of electricity; even a gentlewoman could go to university and become a teacher), but it also shines a light on the first reformatory prisons, the residual effects of institutional racism, and independent women demanding their own freedom. As I was reading this book, which has a dreamy and hallucinatory tone, I thought I was loving it, but it's funny that on reflection the plot doesn't seem to hold up. And I don't how much that matters in the end.

Here in this barn with my hands bloodied by meat scraps and dusted by bonemeal, my nose stuffed up with the stink of it – here I can see why he took so much comfort in those veins of coal. They were tangible, as were the coal cars and the mules and the men. They could be touched and moved, nothing like the slippery currents running through the wires I so admire. His coal was like the corn in the fields or the cows in the barn or the dogs in their pens – solid things we can feel with our hands and see with our eyes, smell and hear and taste. There's relief in that sort of integrity.

Author Virginia Reeves starts with a sly trick: by beginning with a scene of Roscoe manhandling his young son and storming out on his frightened wife Marie, the reader assumes he's a certain kind of nasty man. But in alternating sections – first person from Roscoe's perspective and third person to include everyone else – we learn that he's a thoughtful and educated man, feeling constrained by his wife's insistence that they return to her family farm after the death of her father; despite Roscoe being a trained electrician with a love for his work. Eventually it's revealed how weighted with irony this situation is – Roscoe's father was a coal mine foreman who thought farming was beneath him and his son, and Marie's (gentleman farmer) father fought for mining labour rights; both men thought electricity was a passing fad and Roscoe a dilettante for being fascinated by it. Only by illegally setting the farm up with electricity could Roscoe find his own way there, and as his improvements made the farm profitable for the first time ever, it led to the family happiness that was obviously his goal all along. But then a young man from Alabama Power was electrocuted while investigating a pirated line and Roscoe (and the Black farm manager, Wilson, who followed his orders) were sent off to prison.

The prison scenes were fascinating: with illiterate sadists acting as guards, the lofty goals of reformation through job training was, in practise, little more than the prisoners being used for slave labour (the situation was even worse for Wilson, who was “leased” to the coal mines like all the other Black prisoners). Roscoe was assigned to the dairy (so, more irony: he is condemned to farming while Wilson, who excelled at farm management, is sent down the mines), and because he could read, Roscoe also worked in the prison library once a week; eventually catching the notice of the bloodhounds trainer who needed someone to read books on dog training and summarise the information for him (because Taylor was “too busy” for reading himself). Roscoe has a tough time in prison and he's always having imaginary conversations and hallucinating comforting visits from his wife and the cellmate who went AWOL while out on furlough. As a reading experience, I really enjoyed the blend of grit and lyricism this allowed for. This is Roscoe, semiconscious, in the prison infirmary:

Now, Marie is standing. Her hand is leaving the bone of my arm. The muscles and veins close the gap, stitching themselves back together. I reach for her, trying to sit up, but she's so far away already, down there by the sad iron foot of my bed, and I am stopped by the desperate torment in my stomach. The pain guts me, scoops a voice I don't know I have from the depths of my lungs, shoots it dark and gruesome into the air, where it strikes Marie full in her nearly familiar face.

So, sentence-by-sentence, I liked the writing, I liked the structure, and I was fascinated by the historical detail. As I said earlier, in the moment, I was loving this read. But when it was over I began stewing on what a cartoonishly bad person Marie ended up being (and I never understood how she had all that money even after the Crash of '29: was she sitting on her moneybags while punishing Roscoe for being an incompetent farmer?) And while I understand that the idea of being able to choose your own profession (against a parent's wishes and better judgement) was revolutionary at the time, I'm not certain if it needed to be repeated so many times: yes, Roscoe is an electrician, not a miner or a farmer or a dog-handler, but a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do; a revelation he could have come to sooner. And here's my biggest complaint: in the end, this felt like a man's story being told by a woman; it has a feminine feel and I don't know if Reeves really got inside the male psyche – is this really how he would have reacted to prison life? To betrayal and breaking and losing those things that had made him a man? I don't know if I buy the whole thing, but I don't feel like downgrading this one because it didn't survive closer scrutiny. I'll give it four stars, but I don't think it should win the 2016 Man Booker Prize.

We are born with some things in our veins, coal for my father and farming for Marie’s and a deep electrical current for me. My father’s draw started from need, I suppose, and Marie’s father’s from land, and mine from glowing Birmingham streetlamps. I had stared at those bulbs the first time I saw them, the streets lit by a force greater than any I’d known – bigger than me, bigger than my father, bigger than his tunnels even.