Collar by Meg Woodward

The water shivers as it splits open, winding from the west. The boat is cold, a cast iron carcass, sleeving through the deep-down weeds and choking fish and ash-sugar surface without a sound. The only sound is the slick of the horse’s tail, filched up by flies. Mist sits on the water like a layer of fat. The water smells of underground, of church stones.

He knows the smell of underground, though not of church stones. When he was small he prayed in a place of raw planks chinked with river mud, and when he was older, when Sunday was the only day he saw sunlight, he was too tired and angry for God. The underground is with him still. The smell and the slapped black smears, in the empty hull of the boat, on his soft collar – they will not let him go. Under his tongue and the hairs on his lip and gathered in the pits of his teeth, the never-going grit, his bitter second skin.

Something scrapes along the belly of the unladen boat. Waterweed, or silt, or a lump of coal lost overboard, long ago. When they dredge the canal they find all kinds of things. For a while, when he first came to Birmingham, this Birmingham – which is pronounced with a lilted um and not a ham, possibility instead of pig meat – he worked on a dredging boat. He levered the long wooden spoon into the soft unseen muck and sucked up great gobfuls of forgotten things. Silt and coal, but also metal furred orange: broken tools, bits of chain. Once a little sodden parcel, a shawl once perhaps, with the mushed pulp of newspaper inside, and poking through a small foot. The foot was black but the nails were perfect. They put it back and never spoke of it. He wonders how much belongs to this water, touching the bottom of boats unseen.

Soon they will moor. Before they start to load, the other two – the old man and the young boy – will come into the cabin, and they will drink thin tea silted with sugar. The sugar is damp and smells. The boy will stare at him and he will be silent. It is easier for all of them, that way. He reaches beneath the cot where he is crushed and feels for his only possession, rag-wrapped and still there, where he left it. Its hard edges mouth his fingers through the cloth and he wonders if it knows where he is taking it. That it is nearly home.

The boat hiccups against a soft wood siding. He sits up and squints through the porthole. There are legs in lippy leather boots, soles loose but for the ashy mud that gums them smiling shut. They have the paupers load and unload the coal, the cheapest and the hungriest of labour.

The old man ducks into the cabin. ‘We’m here, Blackie.’

It’s not his name but it is what they have christened him, like a dog.  He nods, and while the old man has his back turned, snorting phlegm and fiddling with the kettle, he reaches for his hidden package. The weight of it always surprises him, although he has carried it for years. It is a dead cold weight, like bricks sinking.

He has already paid for his passage. He steps off the boat. A boy is hawking the day’s paper, and the headline stops him in his tracks: WHITE SLAVES OF ENGLAND: THE CHAIN MAKERS OF CRADLEY HEATH DEMAND A LIVING WAGE. There is a photograph of them, women lined and hard-mouthed, and draped along their shoulders the links of the chain they have made.

His fingers tighten on his burden, and the cold metal bite of it through the wrappings stops him from tearing the grainy papers from the boy’s hands. Where he has come from the Thirteenth Amendment is forty-five years old but no one thought to tell that to Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company; to Pratt Mines on the edge of Birmingham,Alabama; to Slope No. 12, where for twelve long years he laboured in chains like his grandfather before him, where the biggest men raped the smallest to feel less alone in that impossible dark.

These people even in their cold hard lives do not know the meaning of the word, slave.

All day he searches. Between the low sheds and cottages, wet-walled, lurched and slumped on the restless ground. It is an unquiet earth, here: burrowed tunnels chase the snaking seams of coal below. The black rock is everywhere. In the gargantuan bellies of the blast furnaces, their far-up tops black-cloud-browed. In the pit shafts, down where the blind ponies pull. On the pit mounds, raised high as hillsides, and smutting the children who play on them. From where the horses plough on gasps of green dissected by rail line, to where the pit mouths pucker – coal is the pulse of this place, its life blood.

The day leaks into evening. At this time of year, the sun scarcely sleeps. The sky bleeds at its edges and the darkness is green, glowing. The air is tender, warm in the mouth; it tastes of smoke and honeysuckle. Sparrows skip on the slag heaps, which make mountain ranges over squat and chimneyed brick. His gut is a knot-ball and even though the light is stretching long for him, he worries it will not wait for him to find his destination. And though this journey has been months in its making, he is certain now it must be ended tonight. The iron has warmed in his hands and throbs between them like a heartbeat, leading him onwards. Today is the day he will be rid of it.

On High Street women walk with breasts pigeoned over aproned waists and their backs bent beneath the weight of metal rods, which they will heat and beat in their little backyard chainshops into something worth half a meal. He tries to stop them with his package, offering it up to them like a prayer, but most won’t speak with him. A girl with a face like wet sky, a grub-faced child dangling on the end of each spindle arm, ignores his question but begs a halfpenny for a loaf of bread. When he gives it to her, her eyes narrow and she wipes the coin fastidiously on her dirty apron before it vanishes. He watches her go on down the street; when one of the children stumbles she hawks him up like a puppet doll, snarling something furious and hopeless.

Finally one woman, her mouth a black cavern, looks at the crude maker’s stamp on his burden and jags her head in a direction.

‘That’s one of hers,’ she says to him. ‘Flaming Mariah’s. Anvil Yard.’

Anvil Yard. A place where tiny houses huddle, windows ragged and door frames drafting, and soft paper on the walls that squirms at night when the insects wake. Families of five, eight, ten, crush themselves in one room, their stinks and sounds ingrained in one another’s pores. Low fires grump in grates, smoky and heatless. Outside the yard is baked mud and ash, cratered with standing pools slimed and furred by flies; the people piss into pits that overflow and seep, and stain their crack-boot feet. And there, reeling at the back of one tiny terrace – her chainshop, pitch-roofed and chimneyed, and windows without panes in them.

He stands in the doorway and watches her. A tiny woman in her tiny shop, with a shrivelled twist of hot red hair. She is crabbed from her relentless work. She wakes the drowsing hearth with blast from the bellows, she lifts the first rod and heats its tip to an orange finger point. The chink, chink, chink of the hammer, and out of that sound sprouts the clawed hand, the sinewy arm with its spark-spittled scars. She twists and shuts the links like plaited hair. They puddle at her feet like the thick ropes of hair she does not have. He watches her, quiet as moonlight, but then the hammer pauses midswing; the shoulder dips and the hair jerks as the woman turns and

‘Ma’am,’ he will say, holding out his heavy burden. She will see this thing that hung around his neck, see the place where her maker’s mark rested like her own fingertip upon his pulse, pressed there for all the years of his chained servitude. And she will take the collar from him, and maybe she will be sorry, and maybe they will even talk a little about how their hard lives have treated them, their lives whole worlds away and yet, despite of and because of that, still touching.   

But before he can say a word, she turns with hammer raised. ‘Who the fuck am you? Get out of here,’ she says. And then, snarled low and animal, with all the weight of buried years and coloured hate between them, that he is certain she understands no more than he does, ‘you wog.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’ is what he says, and with his open collar cradled he walks away.

Meg Woodward

Banner Image: American steel slave collar – Google images.

Image- A woman chain maker in Cradley Heath, Birmingham early 20th century