cover image Coal Camp Justice

Coal Camp Justice

Ricardo L. Garcia, . . Univ. of New Mexico Press, $24.95 (328pp) ISBN 978-0-8263-3697-2

Raymond "Swannie" Swanson, a black New Mexico laborer, has had trouble beating the bottle and finding work since returning from WWI service more than 10 years ago. Miner Julian Heard and his wife, Dahlia, take him in and help him get a desk job with the company for which Julian mines. After being forced to short the miners on pay, Swannie is laid off, and having gotten religion, finds work enforcing Prohibition; he finds and destroys the mining company's still, but disappears after the building catches fire. When a body is later found, Julian, who is the focus of the book's final chapters, is accused, while sinister company forces seem very much in play throughout. Garcia fictionalized his WWII mining family boyhood in Coal Camp Days and gives a solid account of southwestern mining life and its denizens a generation before. But the dialogue, particularly Swannie's ("If'n he comes by, snorting like a bull and totin' his gun, I can't take no bull off him"), is a weak point, and Swannie's disappearance disturbs the narrative arc, leading to a muddled, anticlimactic ending. (Sept.)