The march to union: Taylor Brown tackles the Battle of Blair Mountain in "Rednecks"
Brown closes in on literary greatness with a compelling historical novel
“Rednecks” by Taylor Brown is a precisely written novel about the intersection of historical narrative and personal experience. The book tells the story of the West Virginia Mine Wars and the lives of characters lived 100 years ago.
Stepping off in Matewan with Chief Sid Hatfield, the story immediately picks up the perspective of several major characters living in the region along the Tug River. Supporting Chief Hatfield in resisting the brutality of the Baldwin-Felts detectives are an immigrant Lebanese doctor and an African-American grandmother evicted from her company-owned home. Her grandson, Frank, comes to embody the strength and heart of the region’s people.
What stands out the most in this novel is the writing. When reading a good deal of fiction one comes to recognize outstanding work. “Rednecks” is deeply thought out and brilliantly executed. Scenes are crisp and important. Not a second of the reader’s attention is wasted. Images and senses pop off the page, much like the gunfire that strafes the text.
Narrative structure is also a breakthrough in Brown’s telling. Exploring multiple perspectives to move the story works well here, and it’s a good use of omniscient narrator. Also a clear model for showing and not telling.
But Brown does tell a great deal, conveying significant historical action and detail within the character experience. The book is never a survey of events. It’s a gripping story.
There are several narrative techniques Brown uses to achieve this. The plot moves back and forth like a toggle switch between multiple character perspectives. Brown choses to go deep into the mindset of several main characters, but deftly stays on the surface with others. This makes the text a much broader experience for the reader and allows him to move through the history without becoming stale or mired in detail.
Brown introduces Mother Jones early in the story, as the fallout from Matewan hurls the region toward a broader conflict. Brown inserts Mother effortlessly into the story while never allowing her to dominate. He conveys her tragic backstory, which becomes her ultimate motivation, and places her character in the appropriate spot as an aging activist, more heartbroken than not, but still burning with righteous fury. She may fail to infuse restraint into the Redneck army’s leaders, but Mother never stops fighting to change the federal government’s posture toward labor and the right to organize a union.
Mother Jones becomes a major character in the book’s plot, and she serves as a conduit between the workers and the decision makers in Washington, D.C. It’s here that another of Brown’s narrative techniques shines. As federal government or U.S. Army characters are introduced, he keeps the focus on Mother, or Doc Moo, or Big Frank, while referring to the bit players as “the general”, or “the secretary” (of War), or “the reporter”. Combined with his quick-hitting chapters, this brings more tension to the narrative, which makes it one of the most exciting books I’ve read.
The toggle-switch narration is best exemplified in a section of the plot where Brown raises the stakes. As the Redneck army confronts Blair Mountain, and its defenders hold trench lines with civilian volunteers and state troopers, company forces bring in a local pilot flying a bi-plane for recon. Sheriff Chafin, one of the primary villains in the story, threatens the man if he refuses to go back up armed with home-made bombs. Brown layers this escalation in, not only in juxtaposition to the forces arrayed against each other on the ground, but in terms of post-WW1 advances in military technology. He does this as well in showing the different quality of arms deployed in the battle: with the company forces having the latest machine guns straight from the French front, and the Rednecks topping out with a 19th century gatling gun and aged scoped-rifles.
Chafin threatens the man, whom Brown calls merely “the pilot”, and his family. We never enter the pilot’s head or know what family he’s concerned with. We only know what decision he made because Brown moves us back to the Redneck base camp where Doc Moo tends the wounded. His school-aged son, Musa, secretly followed him to the camp in an earlier chapter. Now Doc Moo uses the boy to run errands. After giving Musa a small camp task, Doc Moo turns back to the schoolhouse he’s turned into a field hospital and hears the bi-plane return. The chapter ends with splinters flying and shrapnel in the air and Doc Moo looking wildly for his son.
The narrative moves back to Big Frank and his squad leader Crockett, positioned somewhere up the slope of Blair Mountain. The battle-hardened men, many a WW1 veteran among them, are taken back by the sonic quality of the most recent thud. A howitzer? Certainly too loud for dynamite. Then Crockett, who served as a Marine in France and wields the Redneck gatling gun, realizes company forces are dropping bombs on American citizens.
With the president having given the Redneck army a noon deadline to withdraw, it’s an escalation with nightmarish potential.
That nightmare is vividly portrayed immediately back in camp as Doc Moo searches for his son amidst the bomb’s wreckage. Brown conveys the carnage, and the terror, in another fast-paced chapter that moves with cinematic ease. We never see the pilot drop the bomb. But in hearing it from afar, and understanding the consequences via dialogue and multiple POV, the meaning is unmistakably clear.
It would take the Great Depression and the true threat of widespread social disorder to enable FDR to push through the National Industrial Recovery Act 12 years later. Title I, Section 7(a) of the NIRA guaranteed the right of workers to form unions. While it didn’t stop corporate thugs from violently attempting to suppress labor (see the Longshoreman’s Strike in SF in 1934 and the Flint UAW Strike in 1937), it did provide workers a path to union membership and a framework for handling disruptions.
Brown’s achievement here is one of the most striking in recent American memory. Reading “Rednecks” is as close as one can get to being there.