The Well and the Mine [Paperback]

Gin Phillips (Author), Fannie Flagg (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 21, 2008

In 1931 Carbon Hill, a small Alabama coal-mining town, nine-year-old Tess Moore watches a woman shove the cover off the family well and toss in a baby without a word. For the Moore family, focused on helping anyone in need during the Great Depression, the apparent murder forces them to face the darker side of their community and question the motivations of family and friends. Backbreaking work keeps most of the townspeople busy from dawn to dusk, and racial tensions abound. For parents, it's a time when a better life for the children means sacrificing health, time, and every penny that can be saved. For a miner, returning home after work is a possibility, not a certainty. However, next to daily thoughts of death, exhausting work, and race are the lingering pleasures of sweet tea, feather beds, and lightning bugs yet to be caught.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Exclusive:Gin Phillips on The Well and the Mine

The Well and the Mine is the story of one Depression-era family in an Alabama coal-mining town, and the single night that forever changes their view of the world around them. While the Moore family and their story are a product of my imagination, the world they live in was very real. It was a time and place shaped by the hard realities of poverty and racism, and there are still echoes of that world in the one we know today.

Let's start with 1931. Both banks in the coal-mining town of Carbon Hill had closed. The mining industry was close to shutting down, and 75 percent of the town's employment was tied to the mines. Property values were down 60 percent. For all the talk of an economic downturn now in 2009, the stark facts of the Great Depression highlight the gap between then and now. This was the Jim Crow South, with all the strictures of separate-but-not-equal in place. There was no Social Security, no disability, no Medicare or Medicaid, no aid for families with dependent children, no protection for unions. No heath insurance. It was, in large part, life without a safety net. And life was dangerous. If a man was killed in the mines, his widow and children could hope that neighbors or a charity or a church could offer help, but it was only a hope, there was no certainty. On the other side of hope was starvation and homelessness. Mining was demanding, mostly unregulated work. Each morning that a husband or father--there were no women in the mines yet--walked out the door, it was with a family acceptance of the chance that he might not come home. There was a very real chance that he could be killed during an average day's work. But that sense of life on a precipice is part of why this story appealed to me. In the midst of all the brutal labor and struggle and uncertainty, moments of beauty and transcendence have all the more power.

The plot of the book is entirely my invention. There was no baby thrown in a well, no investigation into the local mothers. Or at least none that I know of. But the people and the places do echo some real-life counterparts. Virgie, the Moore's oldest daughter, has my grandmother's sense of propriety. The youngest daughter, Tess, has my great-aunt's sense of fun. Their mother, Leta, has the efficiency and solidity of my great-grandmother, who died when she was 99 and I was 14. My great-grandfather, a coal-miner, died before I was born, but the stories about his razor-sharp sense of right and wrong are what gave Albert his backbone. My great-aunt still lives in the home my great-grandfather built, and I spent plenty of time in the house as I was writing this novel, sitting on the front porch and looking out over the woods, listening to the sound of the creek as I typed.

I grew up hearing stories about Carbon Hill in the 1920s and '30s being told across the dinner table or while sitting around the living room with my grandmother and her siblings. When I sat down to write the story of the fictional Moores, I delved back into my family's memories. Those memories helped bring 1931 rural Alabama to life--they gave me the sights and smells and the feel of the past. Bits and pieces of family lore found their way into the story, but also the domestic details and cultural perspectives that are hard to find in library books. Answers to questions like: What kind of underwear would you wear in 1931? What kind of floor cleaner would you use? How did a teenage girl feel about marriage? I never read good answers to those questions in library books, but I hear plenty of answers, simple and complicated, when I asked the right people.

And yet in the past, there are whispers of the future. The mining industry was unique in Alabama because it had an integrated workforce. In the mines, black men and white men worked side by side in the mines: It was a harbinger of things to come. Albert Moore wrestles with ideas of good and evil--of black and white--and comes face to face with complexities that haunt generations after him. Time and time again, he and the rest of his family struggle to do the right thing--and struggle all the harder to accept the fact that "right" may not always be such a concrete thing. It's that struggle, that drive to do what is fair and that need to see beyond their own perspective, that defines this family. And that struggle has as much relevance in 2009 as it did in 1931.

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A tight-knit miner's family struggles against poverty and racism in Phillips's evocative first novel, set in Depression-era Alabama. Throughout, she moves skillfully between the points of view of miner father Albert, hard-working mother Leta, young daughter Tess and teenage daughter Virgie, and small son Jack. They see men who are frequently incapacitated or killed by accidents in the local mines; neighbors live off what they can grow on their patch of land; and blacks like Albert's fellow miner and friend Jonah are segregated in another part of Carbon Hill—and often hauled off to jail arbitrarily. When Tess witnesses a woman throwing a baby into their well, no one believes her until the dead child is found, and few are shocked. Tess, hounded by nightmares, and Virgie, on the cusp of womanhood and resistant to the thought of an early marriage to the local boys who court her, begin making inquiries of their own, visiting wives who've recently had babies and learning way more than they imagined. With a wisp of suspense, Phillips fully enters the lives of her honorable characters and brings them vibrantly to the page. (Mar.)
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Product Details

• Paperback: 251 pages
• Publisher: Hawthorne Books; 1st edition (January 21, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0976631172
• ISBN-13: 978-0976631170
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (60 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #94,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wish my mother could read this, April 9, 2009

By 

California Doc (Clovis, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Well and the Mine (Mass Market Paperback)

As I read this book, I wished my mother was still alive to read it. It tells the story of a young girl and her family during the Depression. Like my mother, her father is a coal miner working for $8 a week. Reminders of the things that families did to survive during that time - eating a potato for lunch, putting cardboard in your shoes to make them last longer, working 350 hours in a month to pay your child's hospital bill - can help us gain perspective on the challenges we're facing now - and perhaps how we might use them to make our families stronger. My mother told me about those times. About how her older sister quit school rather than go without shoes. About how her father was murdered over a coal mine. About making a meal out of a piece of bread and a little sugar. I know she would have connected with this little girl.

45 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb Southern Novel from Debut Novelist, February 6, 2008

By 

A. Rodriguez (Spokane, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Well and the Mine (Paperback)

It's no wonder this book is getting huge buzz--it's a fantastic read that would appeal to anyone who loves Southern literature from the work of Fannie Flagg to Flannery O'Connor's; from Anne Rivers Siddon's books to William Faulkner novels. Really, this book appeals to anyone who loves a good story, rendered well. Phillips writing is somehow simultaneously fluid and hard-edged, and she knows her characters well enough to make their lives feel real to readers. This is one of the best books I've read in 2008. Highly recommended.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "How alike we were- man and dirt, black and buried underground, hardening more every day...", March 21, 2008

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Well and the Mine (Paperback)

Phillips slices into the bittersweet lives of the Moore family in 1931 Carbon Hill, Alabama, a mining town suffering the effects of the Depression. Their eyes focused hopefully on Roosevelt's New Deal, townspeople help one another survive the desperation gripping the country, although racial inequity still festers beneath the surface of daily life. When a lone woman drops a small bundle into the covered well on the Moore's back porch, nine-year-old Tess is invisible to the visitor, obscured in the evening shadows. Watching the woman, a stranger, Tess is frozen in shock, unable to speak. When she tells her parents, they attribute Tess's excitement to yet another fanciful idea, but are proven wrong the next day when the body of a baby is retrieved from the well. While much neighborly curiosity ensues, after a while it is only Tess and Virgie, 14, who are unable to forget the event. Life is far too difficult to tarry long over the infant in the well.

Because Albert Moore owns land, his family will not go hungry; but those coming to this family's door are never sent away empty-handed. There is a strong current of community that serves this town well, the mines swallowing able men before light, spewing them back in the dark, coal-stained, to spend a few precious hours with their families. In a home built on strong values, Leta and Albert treasure their children, the impudent and curious Tess, teen-aged Virgie, navigating her adolescence and Jack, a bit younger than Tess and all boy. This is a family nurtured on respect and hard work, the children basking in their parent's solicitude and moral direction. It is this moral sense that confounds young Tess as she grapples with an unidentified woman's motivation in tossing her child into the back porch well. Told from the various perspectives of family members, an image emerges of life in a mining community faced with the daunting challenges of the times.

Through Albert, the father, we learn of the racial prejudice that seethes beneath the surface in Carbon Hill, the rigid attitudes that circumscribe Albert's efforts to connect with Jonah, a black friend and co-worker. Much as he might hope, a real friendship isn't possible, the ramifications for Albert's children's futures too risky. The back-breaking work of the mines informs this family's daily rituals, the children lovingly tended as they sample the realities of the world they inhabit. While the question of the mother's identity is an underlying theme, so is the simplicity of these lives, the hope for better working conditions through the UMW and the solid values that make such an existence bearable. This is a vivid palette of the experiences that define former generations, stoic in their hardship, their Christian doctrines challenged by racial prejudice, poverty and one mother's desperate action. Luan Gaines/ 2008.