In television shows set in mining towns like Deadwood and Justified, rugged, independent, and often lawless men take center stage while women exist as little more than bit players. In her introspective coming-of-age story, author and poet Jessica E. Johnson writes mothers and their children back into the script, moving their experiences from the edges to the foreground.
Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home is a memoir about Johnson’s nomadic upbringing in a mining family during the 1970s and ’80s. The cover photo shows a solitary, pint-sized Johnson sitting on a mine car against a vast, bright landscape. The accouterments of an ordinary childhood are visible – a summer hat and a stuffed toy.
Yet, the juxtaposition of the child on the mine car is a remarkable sight. While the wheeled bin stands solidly in place, its potential to roll away evokes the constant motion of Johnson’s childhood. Her mother and father set a relentless pace, moving along with the boom-and-bust rhythms of mining life, creating makeshift homes in remote outposts like Granite, Oregon, and Leadville, Colorado – names that belie the bleakness of the terrain.
Johnson’s story shares similarities with many popular memoirs of American girlhood, including Jeannette Walls’ itinerant The Glass Castle (2005) and Lynda Barry’s graphic One! Hundred! Demons! (2002). Like those coming-of-age tales, in Mettlework, girlhood is never over. Instead, it is an “un-mineable” dimension that Johnson recounts, “I was wrong about the shape of time: I’d left nothing behind, I’d been walking in a circle I could only now perceive.” Motherhood acts as the catalyst for Johnson to dig into her memories of girlhood.
After her first child is born, Johnson receives scans of artifacts from her mother, including a Polaroid of herself as an infant that sets Mettlework in motion. Johnson overlays her girlhood memories onto myths of the American West circulated through pop culture in the television series The Lone Ranger and Bonanza, letters her mother wrote while in mining camps, and her reckoning with new parenthood.
During Johnson’s childhood, her mother glossed over any hardships or wrinkles in their everyday life as the happy consequence of a freedom-seeking, adventurous lifestyle. Her mother’s letters, however, alternate between optimism and despair to reveal a different story. Often the only woman in the camp, Johnson’s mother took on all homemaking tasks, catering to the needs of the men.
Mining made the conditions under which she labored and in which Johnson grew up difficult. One of the letters recounts an episode in which Johnson and her mother were trapped inside the four walls of a trailer in an extended snowstorm in Granite while they waited for the company to build them a cabin. Even though the heat was turned up as high as it would go, the water thawed for only an hour daily for cleaning and cooking. Confined to the trailer, her mother observes Johnson walking up and down her bed and reading books until dogs appear outside the window, her only entertainment.
Johnson is at her best when writing about the impossible standards imposed on mothers and how norms of white middle-class domesticity rely on hierarchies of class and race for superiority. It turns out that homemaking, whether in a mining town or post-recession Portland, Oregon, leans into the fiction of the perfect mother who dedicates everything to her child and, thus, to the nation.
From her mom, Johnson receives her great-grandmother’s copy of The Mothers’ Book: Suggestions Regarding the Mental and Moral Development of Children (1909), an early 20th-century mothering manual that traveled across two settler-colonial countries, from her great-grandmother in Canada to her grandmother in the United States. The Mother’s Book contains advice from numerous experts that resonates with her upbringing and contemporary regimes of mothering that expect women to be virtuous and self-sacrificing caregivers at all costs. Johnson links the training of women to be good homemakers to the violent legacies that sustain myths about the American West. Ultimately, Johnson rejects the “inherited pressure” to be the perfect mother and counters the isolation of her childhood by finding and nurturing community.
“Real-life mining leaves a hole where ore was, a disturbance. Byproduct compounds inert below the surface turn toxic in the air. The holes might or might not be filled in, but the process yields aftermath,” writes Johnson. Child-rearing, too, leaves an aftermath. Johnson’s unusual upbringing shows how the illusion of the good white mother is central to the violent extraction of land and bodies within capitalism and settler colonialism.