Margaret Walker (1915-1998) was an African-American poet and novelist born in Birmingham, Alabama. I think this poem is a good example of the earthy, evocative strength she brought to her writing.

Ishkooda: a mining community located in the Red Mountain area of Alabama, that is part of the Appalachian mountain chain.

Childhood

When I was a child I knew red miners
dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.
I saw them come down red hills to their camps
dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.
Night after night I met them on the roads,
or on the streets in town I caught their glance;
the swing of dinner buckets in their hands,
and grumbling undermining all their words.

I also lived in low cotton country
where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,
or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks
with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by;
where sentiment and hatred still held sway
and only bitter land was washed away.

Margaret Walker