The stories told by Valentine J. Thomas are the one that shine with splendor, and stories that debase the spirit. These stories are preserved by his grandson, Albert J. Thomas, Men with Dirty Faces: The Human Worms is of the latter. It is not a story of kings and captains and conquerors, but a story of men and women who worked in the shadows, coal miners and immigrants and dreamers whose sweat and sacrifice made a nation of their own. Their spirit can be summed up in the title of the Journey from Dust to Destiny: it is a tale that starts with darkness and work but finishes with a legacy and light.
In the late nineteenth century, in America, in the coal-laden hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, the laboring classes survived and perished in oblivion in search of life. The mines were their food as well as their jail, enormous underground mazes of choking dust, poisonous air and endless danger. Men went down those black tunnels every day, not knowing whether they would ever come out. Their hands were the cutters of the energy that was the lifeblood of the stream of progress in America, though their names never came to be written in the pages of history. Men with Dirty Faces does not ignore such lost people, turning statistics into human stories and misery into heroism.
The book introduces the reader to such families as the Durants or the Tarnowskis: those are fictional, but they are very real. Syl Durant is a miner, owed a duty and love, who has to dream his son Jerry will not meet the same destiny as the generations of the past. However, tragedy befalls when young Jerry is forced to work as a child as a result of poverty, making him crippled and destroying the hope of the family. It is a heart-wrenching story that will make the readers realize how the burden of survival can destroy even the deepest aspirations. It is not merely a story of strife; it is a mirror of millions of real lives that were sacrificed to the workings of the machine and the realities of life.
Amazon: Men with Black Faces: The Tears of the Human Worms
Along the same lines as the story of the Durants is the story of Stanley Tarnowski, a Polish immigrant who arrives in America with nothing other than faith and will. His experience is similar to the millions of people who abandoned Europe due to the promise of liberty, only to discover new chains in poverty and exploitation. As Stanley falls ill after years of working in the cold, wet, lethal mines, his family has to endure his pain, but his pain only makes their love, faithfulness, and bravery brighter in the dark. These stories are connected to each other, a mosaic of humanity, a portrait of strength created by a sufferer.
These words were written by a miner and an immigrant who was Valentine J. Thomas, and he did not even guess that one day they would come to the world written in broken English. His writing is crude and coarse, yet incredibly natural. It bears the beat of the heart of a working man, sincere, heartfelt, and bare. His grandson Albert later found a handwritten manuscript of his grandfather which he discovered many decades later, and he realized that it had strength as a testament.
The Journey from Dust to Destiny also talks of change, how lives hidden in darkness had spawned generations that sought the light. It is about the way the pain made people stronger and about the fact that ordinary people were the silent heroes of the national history. Each page of the book is vibrating with emotion: faith struggling with despair, love struggling with poverty, and dignity struggling with oppression. It is a narration that is not a glorification of suffering, but it is a glorification of the strength one needs to survive and live.
This is one of the books that can be very helpful in the time when history tends to forget about its working people and exactly about those who made America great. Those miners who went down into the earth day after day were not mere laborers, but men of dreams, of fatherhood, of marriage, of faith. They suffered inconceivably, not to glory but just in the hope that their children might have better ground to stand on. They lived their life full of dust, but their dreams, they were their destiny.