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Anti-miscegenation Laws
In the 19th and 20th centuries, Company Stores were common fixtures in company towns, which were built and owned by mining companies to house the employees necessary to work mines in isolated and rural areas. The Company Store, owned and operated by the mine company, sold staple foods, clothing, and basic household goods. Company Stores could be—and often were—exploitative. The company would pay its workers in “scrip,” or a special form of cash that could only be redeemed in the Company Store, then charge inflated prices for the goods there. If workers couldn’t afford the necessary items, they would be offered credit, and the company could take money from their wages to pay off their bills. In this way, the Company Store served to send most of the workers’ pay right back to the company owners, drastically reducing the workers’ standards of living and increasing the owners’ wealth.
Company Store Quotes in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
The The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek quotes below are all either spoken by Company Store or refer to Company Store. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 11
Quotes
Pa believed the mattress advertisement that promised to soothe hurt bones and give better rest would help me heal faster. Pa had credit to spend at the Company store that he used for the purchase, saying he’d had a little extra that month.
But Pa didn’t have as much as two nickels to rub together […] The Company didn’t like for the Kentucky man to feel a dollar in his pocket, and they’d pay the miners mostly in Company scrip—credit that could be used only at the Company store—to make sure of just that. The Company […] [kept] the families good ’n’ indebted to them, insisting to any that might raise a brow, it serves to smarten the miners, give the coal man a vicissitude from improper business standards, and educates them on sound business practices, on acquiring sound credit.
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Pa and I had seen our share of hunger. We only had the berries, morels, squirrels, rabbits, and other life we’d pinched from the forest. Sometimes Pa’d trade the miners his kills for other foods we couldn’t get, like eggs, corn, and fruit. Rarely could we afford the expensive staples at the Company store. The Company scrip and my paycheck helped us to stay afloat a little, despite Pa using most of it to buy up the store medicines rather than a doctor’s stronger ones to fight his lung illness. Still, he stayed in debt purchasing newfangled medicines, the next sure-fix potion that the store would bring in. Like a small bandage, the store-bought medicine would hide his sickness for a little bit, so that he could go back down into the mine and make more money for newer cures the Company kept stocking and pushing on the miners.
Chapter 27
Quotes
“Hold your tongue! The men picked me, and I have to speak for my fellow miners to get better pay and safer work conditions! It’s thievery down in the shafts, the lung sickness waiting to snatch your last breath. The miserable long hours. And the Company bosses who’d murder anyone who wants better than that—they scalp our land, leave behind the dirt an’ ash, their broken coal trucks and ghost camps. They’ve left their filthy, fancy boot prints everywhere on everything, the poor ’tucky man’s back. Why, even the fish are dying from the poisons running into our streams.”
Get the entire The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek LitChart as a printable PDF.
Company Store Term Timeline in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
The timeline below shows where the term Company Store appears in The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 8
...she watches a delivery of caskets—always the first thing to be sold out—arrive at the Company Store . On the other side of the room, her supervisors gossip about the upcoming town...
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Outside, Junia nickers, and Cussy Mary looks up to see Jackson coming out of the Company Store . As he feeds Junia an apple, Harriett sashays to the window and ogles him....
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Chapter 11
...hurries through her chores. She lies down on the mattress that Pa bought at the Company Store hoping it would help her heal faster after her beating. He had to work extra...
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Chapter 32
...the community potluck, and to placate Pa. He bought expensive sorghum for it at the Company Store for her.
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