Krishna
This is my first book by this author, and judging from the reviews, not her best book.
Emma Malloy reluctantly returns to Coal River, a mining town so named after the polluted river that runs through the town. She has been orphaned due to a circus fire and has a few meager possessions and an uncle and aunt who sent the ticket fare for her to travel to them. The year is 1912.
She is going back to Uncle Otis and his son Percy. She remembers how she and her brother Albert had stayed there for a short time when their parents lost their jobs in New York and were trying to find another job before taking their kids in. During the stay, Albert was bullied by the older boys including Percy and he agreed to go to the mansion of Hazard Flint and steal one of their items.
Hazard had a wife, Vivian whose newborn boy was kidnapped and held for ransom. Even after Hazard paid the ransom they did not return the baby who was lost forever. This broke Vivian’s heart and she committed suicide by hanging. Hazard was protective of the one remaining boy.
Emma, when she heard of the task given to Albert, goes in and rescues him; he is shaking and claims that he saw Emma’s ghost in the mirror. In terror he had wet himself. Emma takes him out and when the others laughed at him, punched Percy in the nose. Angered, he takes her locket and throws it on the frozen river. Albert goes to get it, and the ice breaks and he is swept away before anyone can even react. They find his body later and Emma is traumatized – enough to feel faint whenever she remembers past deeds deeply.
Now she suffocates in the house with the unwanted attention of Percy, strict discipline of Uncle Otis, the reproving glance of Aunt ida and her own memories of Albert in the house.
She goes out to the shop with aunt Ida, which Percy is managing, and finds out several things. If the miners shop anywhere else, they lose their jobs. Uncle Otis is the superintendent in the mines and can make decisions at will. If the miners do not have money, they will not get bread, even if the kids are starving. (She helps a poor miner family lady steal a loaf of bread when no one’s looking). The breaker boys work in the mines, though underage and have never had an education and are layabouts. She longs to help them. Some of them have lost limbs in mining accidents with no consequences to anyone else.
She keeps rebelling. Uncle Otis is upset that her camera was accidentally dropped by Emma and slaps her. Aunt Ida slaps Percy when he suggests that Otis had tried to propose to another woman when he was young and rejected.
For a girl who has nowhere to go, Emma is openly rebellious. She likes Clayton Nash, who everyone calls is a troublemaker and rejects ‘suitable’ suitors like Frank Bannister. When Frank wants a dance with her, she avoids him by dragging her poor cousin Percy and forcing him to Waltz with her.
The book is a bit annoyingly formulaic with the Otis family being a huge bunch of hypocrites (she catches Otis trying to kiss and fondle a mineworker in the back alley) and Emma being so impractical that she antagonizes openly the owner of the mine, Hazard Flint and his son Evis.
She seems to openly rebel against her new family and pays very little price for it. It appears that the story also starts going in circles. She meets every injustice she finds with incredulity and open contempt for the exploiters. Noble sentiment, no doubt but definitely tiresomely repetitive in the story and this takes away from sustaining interest in the tale.
She sees many injustices meted out to the coal miners; how their jobs are dangerous, how cave ins kill some men and their family is evicted from the houses, how even nonpayment in the stores results in eviction.
The way she learns these is artificial to say the least; the miners who hate her tell her things; Nash, the handsome miner, blows hot and cold; even the policeman who should know better tells her why he is evicting people. Not that it is unbelievable but it takes away from the picture you have formed in your minds of the exploitative powers to be and the poor miners and their families struggling to even live with dignity. She could have learnt all this through a more believable route, is my argument.
The fundamental story is interesting. When she realizes that the wife of a coal miner who died in an accident not only loses the husband and his earning but may be turned out of the house for not being able to pay rent. She then steals from the pantry of Otis and then distributes food items in the middle of the night to the miners’ families – putting them on the porch and not making herself visible. She starts with the miner’s house where the death occurred but goes to other random houses too.
Next she goes to visit the place where Albert dies but sees Hazard Flint kill a man with a gun and throw the body in the river. She was spotted. She runs but is caught but saved by Frank Bannister.
She keeps going to the miners’ area and makes a huge fuss about the inhuman conditions in the mines, much to the anger of Otis. Percy says that his father is right; Emma thinks she is too good for them; she does not hesitate to take all she can – abode, food, dress but is ungrateful. As a reader, you see some rationale in that viewpoint. Yes, Emma is fighting for the poor; is fearless and does not care about her own safety – but the way she goes about it – raging against everyone in her new family; getting herself into repeated trouble and generally being too transparent strikes one as a fairly simpleminded way to help people in need.
She meets Clayton in the carnival and has a ferris wheel ride, but is spotted by Ida and Otis. If there is an unrealistic part of the story, it is this. She seems to repeatedly get caught but does not seem to stop – goes on doing what she is doing, without even a plan for concealment. (Except in the rudimentary sense of smuggling food to the miners after everyone in her house has gone to sleep). And she does not seem to suffer any for it. Otis, Ida and Percy all are exasperated but do nothing of import to deter her. And you wonder why.
When she is caught going to a fair with Clayton, both Ida and Otis are nearly apoplectic but never throw her out (again). Then Bannister comes to take her to see Hazard Flint, who asks her to be his spy. She refuses point black, even under the veiled threat of harm to her and her uncle, and storms out.
But Nate asks her to play along, to buy him some time. He tries to organize a civil resistance among the miners by mass uncooperation and has to do it fearing Flint’s hoodlums and the police at any point in time.
More deaths, this time of children whom Emma knew personally. When the theft of the things at the store is discovered, they are threatened by masked men – all of them – Percy, and the tied up Otis and Ida, terrified. When they learn that it was Emma, and she exposes the masked leader as Frank Bannister, Otis and Ida are furious and after they leave, throw her out of the house. She gets her bus fare by blackmailing Otis and knows that she has to leave the house, if not the city.
She decides against leaving the miners to their fate and goes to the miner’s colony to see if she can beg Nash to take her in but finds a boy in trouble and about to drown in a sinkhole. Frank and two policemen come and unexpectedly Frank helps her rescue the boy and almost dies himself. Emma saves him. She tells him that she is about to leave town but he offers an empty house belonging to her mother. She cannot understand why Frank is nice to her.
She however rejects his offer. Her suitcase, with all her possessions, are gone. She tells Frank that she is leaving town but goes to Clayton to stay with him, and continues to keep his house.
She decides to take a picture of the conditions in the mine and send it to New York Times to focus attention on all the dangerous and illegal things in the mine, to break the grip of Flint. She dresses up as a boy and gets employment as a breaker with the help of Clayton.
Meanwhile, Clayton and Emma confirm their attraction to each other by falling in love.
She then steals a camera and takes pictures of the horrific conditions inside the mine when some daylight sneaks into the mine for a few minutes.
A boy falls into the crusher when she is right there and she witnesses the callous indifference of Flint who urges everyone to continue working. She manages to take the pictures.
But when she, Clayton and Nate go in disguise to take further pictures in the mines the next day all hell breaks loose. There is a fire in the mine (possibly caused by the very flares they had to light to take pictures) and when they scramble out, Flint (father and son) and Otis are there arguing. Suddenly Nate takes a gun out and shoots at Harold Flint, misses and hits Luke Flint instead, who dies.
Then Emma tries to stop him and is shot in the arm in turn and then he turns the gun on Frank but hits Clayton instead, His hand is then shot st by Frank and they are all captured and thrown in jail. Emma’s camera is confiscated by Frank as well.
She watches Nally being hanged with no trial. Then her and Clayton’s trial starts. Clayton is sick and weak but is forced to go to the courtroom.
The problem with this book is that for all her compassion and the will to do whatever to help, Emma is totally clueless or with no plan as to how to effectively achieve her goal. She knows how to shout and scream and kick up a fuss and wellwishers around her who like or love her – Clayton, Percy even Frank do all the work for her. She comes across as a clueless and barely controllable idiot, shouting ‘Why? Why?” for everything – even in court until she realizes that she will be held in contempt of court.
She comes across as clueless and pathetic, albeit with a heart of gold.
And she is saved by unexpected good fortune of people around her – those whom she did not even arrange to save her.
So, in the end, she is a good hearted, very stupid, incompetent girl whom everyone else helped become a heroine – that is one way to look at the story.
Perhaps I am being too hard on a story that brings out the exploitation of the poor in a town where the all powerful businessman controls and disregards law because he has everyone including the law enforcement machinery and the judicial machinery in his pocket but the narration just irritates the reader too much, in my opinion.
And then there is this weird twist : so improbable that it feels like it has been stuck there as a deux ex machina to finish up the story.
3/10
— Krishna