Short Story
My hands slipped as I adjusted my grip on the handle of the pickaxe. The slipping, was from a combination of the accumulated blood and sweat on the palms of my hands. I reached back into my pocket and pulled my gloves out. They were tattered and worn, splotches of black decorating their plain brown color, along with numerous rips and holes in the fabric. I took them off to let my hands breathe for at least a few swings. The gloves get so hot, and my fingers often chafe within them after a full days work.
It was all for gold, every single day. We would swing and swing some more, endlessly crushing black rocks until a gleam of yellow smiled at us. We never smiled back. The air was thick and scarce, the light was dim, and morale was low. In a place as dark as this, what can you expect? These mines are among the deepest in the world, so they say. I simply don’t care, I go as deep as they make me, and crush the rocks for them. Some days I do “my work” well. Others I cannot bear to descend into that darkness again. Each day I must.
My brothers around me cough and wheeze. This is simply not our place. And yet, there are 240,000 of us here. 240,000. I heard two white men discussing the number a few days back. Recruited from our tribes, we had little choice in how to make our living in this new Africa. The poor have taken up their picks, and descended into the mines, I was among them. Some men seemed to enjoy the work, others did not hide their tortured expression. No matter the attitude, all us miners shared one trait; the gold we found, was far from ours. We are laborers of the white man, as they suck at the ground beneath our land, we shovel it into their mouths. There are many of them working along side us, but we are different. My brothers are unskilled, amateur, and weak. I find myself cutting at the same rocks for days, while the trained miners are pulling heaps of gold from this earth. I wonder if their hands sweat and bleed as much as mine do.
It feels as though I am searching for evil within these rocks. Once it is found, we cart the evil off to the surface, where it can be spread among the rich. I find myself wishing this land to be dry of gold, empty and unfulfilling. I want to fail the men who ask this labor of me. I wish to personally hand them the mounds of coal we wade through each day. To drop a dark dusty stone in their clean white hands. Hands, that are not sweating and are never bleeding.
Of those who persevered, and those who truly hated the mines, I was of the latter. The early morning descent made my stomach flip within me. The dimly lit torches were my sun and stars. The tired breathing of my comrades was my only music. There were no hums or labor songs beneath the surface, only the grunts and moans of those with hands like mine. We attempt to fight our sorrow through our companions, but it is difficult to find any conversation in the darkness. Swinging and swinging, not a smile and never a laugh. Weeks and months pass and I wonder what my small pay will bring me. These thoughts always poke at my spirit, and halt my mining. When I find myself thinking of money, it is hard for me not to sit down.
I work in this horrible crypt, only to make enough money to eat and drink each night away. If I were to stop spending, I would have to survive without food long enough for my money to accumulate. Even then, what would I use it for? I am chained to these mines. My search for the white man’s metal may be my sole purpose in this world, I certainly cannot find any other. I am trapped here, doomed to earn and spend, earn and spend. There is no hope for me to travel. Some men have attempted to find fortune by pocketing the shards of gold they harvest. I have seen countless fingers lost for that crime. I am here, and I will not leave, what else is there to say?
Over these years, I have been attached to a young man that shares my fate. Kwame mines the days away alongside me. Again, we rarely have much to discuss other than the rocks. At times, my heart is overcome with thoughts like these, and I must pour them out into any pair of nearby ears. Kwame is often those ears. Some days he answers, but most days he continues working. I never intend to depress him, or make him aware of the painful life he carries out. He is younger than me, and I wish I could breathe more life into his youthful body. It has been hard for me to watch his brow lower, his hair disobey him, and worst of all, his hands harden. Kwame was once an African young man, with a grin on his face, and sunlight on his skin. But now, he is only another axe, chopping away.
One day in the shaft, I must admit I was particularly miserable. As if all these years of thought had led up to this one day of realization. I will never leave these mines, I will never know the world, and it will never know me. Over the clanging of our picks, I asked Kwame what he sees in his future, and he could not answer me. I dropped my pickaxe and attempted to rest my brain, in an attempt to continue focusing on swinging. Kwame made a particularly hard swing and cracked a large coal rock in half. With a great exhale, he turned to me. He told me he cannot see his future, but he can see mine. When I looked up at him, he said I’ve always been able to talk nicer than any man he knew. I laughed for the first time in weeks. He told me I would be a writer one day, and I would tell the world how I feel.
Why should I write? How could I write? Words are beautiful, and there is nothing beautiful down here. This place is all I know, and my hatred for it is all I have to share. I am one among many crying faces. My story is the same as countless others. Actually, we have counted them. There are 240,000 of us. 240,000 Native Africans working in the Johannesburg Mines. What kind of story would you make out of that?
Just as this thought crossed my mind, Kwame shrieked beside me. From the black rock which he was cutting into, two small shards of gold tumbled forth onto the ground and rolled up to each of our boots. We both reached down, looked at one another, and placed them in our pockets. No one took notice, and we continued working.
Original Poem by Langston Hughes
Johannesburg Mines
by Langston Hughes
In the Johannesburg mines
There are 240,000
Native Africans working.
What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?
240,000 natives
Working in the
Johannesburg mines.
Critical Reflection
I chose this poem because I found it to be an incredibly unique piece among Langston Hughes’s body of work. His poems are often beautifully worded, metaphorical, and rarely this direct. Hughes finds a way to wrap terrible parts of human history in appealing language. He is completely aware of what he’s doing here, which is stating the subject of the poem and leaving it at that. His writing tackles many dark subjects such as slavery and oppression, but something about this particular piece of history was so bothering and powerful to him, that he refused to write a beautiful poem about it.
Upon researching these mines, I could not find much information about the native workers themselves. However, I did learn that the majority of them were recruited from nearby South African tribes. Many of them had never mined a day in their lives, and did not receive any training before being sent down into the Earth. They worked alongside European white miners who were well trained and working much more efficiently than them. The town of early Johannesburg was quite rough, and was mostly populated by miners, gangsters and prostitutes. The workers had very little personal life, they would mine and then come to the surface to eat and drink, where they were served by African women.
I found this to be an incredibly powerful theme to grab onto, as these people were tirelessly working their lives away, for very little profit. The narrator of my story comes to the realization that his life is not going up or down. He is on a plain of financial stability and horrible work. If he deviates from his current lifestyle at all, he would become completely poor. Endlessly working and lacking a personal life is something that would severely affect a human being, so I found that I did not have any difficulty putting myself in the shoes of these workers. I tried my best to grab onto the feeling of hating the place you’re in, and never being able to escape it.
I wanted to stay true to Langston Hughes’s idea of never romanticizing this event. I do not see this story as a beautifully written account of a worker’s hardship. I hope I have successfully emulated the mood of Hughes’s poem; helpless, honest and real. Even the narrator himself does not want to try and share this fact with the world in any elegant way. He is too hurt by the massive number of people working here to find any meaning or opportunities for artistic expression to be made. There is nothing romantic, or prominent, or powerful here other than the fact that these people were suffering. When I first thought of this idea, I knew I wanted to end the story by repeating Hughes’s words of “What kind of poem would you make out of that?” This question amazed me when I first read it, and made me think about how difficult his work must have been for him, to look at all these awful times in history and make them sound beautiful to us.
When writing this story, I felt as though I was carrying out what Langston Hughes wanted his readers to experience after reading his poem. Hughes is not telling us what’s so bad about the number of native workers within the Johannesburg Mines. We have to find out for ourselves through our own research on the subject. After all, that is what Hughes’s poetry attempted to accomplish, to make us aware of the wrongs in this world through his beautiful words. This time however, he just gave us the words, no beauty. As the author of this piece, I feel quite educated on this subject now, and my sympathies towards these people have drastically increased. I hoped to wave the facts in the readers face, while still keeping the language personal and honest, just as Hughes did in his poem.
THOMAS MAZZAFERRO 