The death of James Earl Jones on Monday, September 9th led to an outpouring of online affection of the kind that marks the passing of a genuine legend. It’s sad, of course, that these collective displays of adulation come mostly on the occasion of a loss; I often find myself hoping that the artists whose work I cherish, particularly those who were never A-list marquee megastars, get to know during their lifetimes how many of us love and appreciate them. But James Earl Jones, surely, had the accolades and the body of work to be confident in his legacy. Twitter remembrances touched on his indelible voice acting in Star Wars and The Lion King, of course, as well as his early role in Doctor Strangelove and his immensely authoritative supporting performances in the 90’s Jack Ryan films. His distinguished stage career, too, was represented by a mesmerizing clip from his Tony Award-winning turn as Troy Maxson in Fences, which I watched in full every time it crossed my timeline, and which shows an actor in total command of his gifts: his voice, his physicality, his capacity to shift in an instant between immense warmth and volcanic anger. All told there was a range of output on display that amply justified the communal celebration, a multifarious career any individual facet of which would be enough for an actor to rest content with his work.
I was thrilled, too, to see some love for Jones’s work as ‘Few Clothes’ in Matewan (1987), one of his strongest performances which also happens to come in one of my favorite films of all time. It’s a film worth praising from a number of angles—visually, dramatically, rhetorically—but its most important performance might just come from Jones, in a role no other actor could have played quite the same way, a role without which the film doesn’t work. So I thought my own tribute to Jones might come in the form of a short discussion of Matewan: how it succeeds, how it arguably flirts with failure, and how Jones’s unique qualities bring him closer than any other actor could have come to resolving its internal tensions.
From its early location photography, in which bluesy harmonica and achingly beautiful coal miners’ folk songs play over shots of a ramshackle West Virginia mining town, Matewan presents itself as a piece of Americana. It was written and directed by John Sayles, an arguably under-discussed independent auteur whose output has a lot to say about American mythology, much of it intriguingly subversive, almost all of it unabashedly left-wing, and a director with an instinctive eye for different American spaces. Behind the camera also was Haskell Wexler, not only one of the great all-time cinematographers but also—with his DP work on both Matewan and Days of Heaven, his politically charged documentaries, his extraordinary narrative feature Medium Cool (1969), and his labor activism within IATSE—claimant to one of the great left-wing Hollywood careers, a body of work across which labor and liberation appear as persistent guiding stars. He makes the landscapes of Matewan look almost mythic, all overgrown railroad tracks and rough-edged company houses, the kinds of spaces where only old folk songs seem to make sense. I watched this movie for the first time in a high school history class, and I can remember being instantly transported by it, carried as deep into the past by its twangy opening narration as by the Ken Burns Civil War documentary we watched the same year. In some ways it’s a quintessential classroom film, painting in huge, powerful strokes across a canvas any American schoolchild will recognize.
What American schoolchildren of the twenty-first century are less likely to recognize is the 1920s labor culture the film evokes, which made a prodigious impression on me as a teenager. The film depicts a major episode in the West Virginia coal wars, and its setting is a world in which class war is viscerally literal; unionists and labor activists are forced to operate essentially outside the law, menaced openly by company gun-thugs and assassins. An organizer like Chris Cooper’s Joe Kenehan must deploy to the town of Matewan like a spy dispatched into enemy territory, totally unprotected from extrajudicial action, grilled by strikers (justifiably wary of infiltration) about the names and fates of labor heroes who clearly serve as the folkloric figures of this besieged counterculture. I remember being shocked on a first viewing by the character of Kenehan, a protagonist unlike any I had seen in a film to that point, an ex-Wobbly and communist who has previously been imprisoned for conscientious objection during the First World War. “All I saw was workers killing workers,” Kenehan says of his refusal to serve; the orthodox communist line on the war, of course, but one I had never heard before, let alone in a classroom setting where the approval of the teacher might just be implicit. This was, incredibly, the screen debut for Cooper, then a 36-year-old stage actor, whose Kenehan represents a distinctive kind of heroic masculinity: courageous and charismatic, the clear driver of the film’s action, but resolutely peaceful in his approach to the challenges of organizing in the face of overwhelming force.
Chief among these challenges is the racial composition of the mine’s labor force, which in the earliest scenes of the film is already generating outbreaks of interracial violence. The town’s native workers are striking for better pay, and so the company has duly replaced them, first with Italian immigrants and then—just as Kenehan arrives in town—with a trainload of Black laborers who are met by armed strikers as they approach the town. This is where we meet James Earl Jones as ‘Few Clothes’ Johnson, at a glance the oldest of the new arrivals, and among the first into the fray when the fighting starts. His character is an immediate focus for our sympathy; we understand quickly, from his obvious disquiet at being asked to disembark outside the town proper, that these men do not know they have been brought to Matewan to scab. As a low-level Stone Mountain representative talks the unwitting workers through the numerous ways in which they’ll now be consistently fucked—mandatory charges for basic work supplies, company scrip that’s mostly worthless as cash—Few Clothes asks a pointed question and is immediately pegged as a troublemaker; it’s a good thing to be in a film with very clear moral lines, and Jones’s voice and presence tell us immediately that this is a man for us to watch.
He plays a pivotal role in the film’s key early scene, in which he interrupts a clandestine union strategy meeting with a request to join the strikers. The native miners are aghast at his temerity; he stands before them, tense but resolute, as they needle him and question his intentions. One of them calls him the n-word, another calls him a scab, and only after the latter does his face transform into a mask of anger, his eyes hard and bright; “You watch your mouth, peckerwood,” he snaps, in that inimitable James Earl Jones voice, and suddenly the room is silent, there is nowhere to look but his face, and whatever he says next will have the force of law. “I been called n-----, and I can’t help that’s the way white folks is, but I ain’t never been called no scab.” By the end of the line there is a gavel-pounding rhythm to his words—called. no. SCAB—and he is almost yelling, almost frightening, bigger than life in the way Fences’ Troy Maxson is when railing at his son, that same outsized charisma put to a very different use. There is a momentary suggestion that the scene will end in violence, that the strikers might shed his blood, but he does not seem afraid; he conveys the required sense of absolute moral clarity, the feeling that he really will die rather than work another man’s job.
Few Clothes’s easy dismissal of overt race-hatred is in keeping with the message of the film, which Kenehan conveys in a showstopping speech deriding the miners’ misplaced prejudices. “You think this man is your enemy?” he says, pointing his cap at Few Clothes. “This is a worker. Any union keeps this man out ain’t a union, it’s a god damn club.” He continues as the miners look on, dumbstruck. “They got you fightin’ white against colored, native against foreign, holler against holler, when you know there ain’t but two sides to this world: them that work, and them that don’t. You work; they don’t. That’s all you got to know about the enemy.” The message, like most things about Matewan, is unambiguous: racial divisions are simply barriers to worker solidarity, as meaningless to the bosses as to any decent union. No war but class war. Under Kenehan’s guidance, the three factions of miners—the original miners and the two groups of would-be scabs, Italian and black—set aside their differences and strike together, testing the power of class solidarity to outlast what was then a truly staggering array of capital-aligned forces.
Those forces are represented, in the town of Matewan and in the film, by operatives of the Baldwin-Felts ‘detective agency,’ a private security company which, like the more famous Pinkertons, did considerable business as strikebreakers-for-hire during this period of interwar labor agitation. Matewan is, on the page at least, not a film much given to subtlety, and the Baldwin-Felts agents are utterly loathsome, loutish and sexually aggressive, unthinking bullies who seem to take pleasure in their work. We learn early that the Baldwin-Felts agency also has an operative inside the union, a spy and infiltrator, about whose motivations and worldview we hear virtually nothing; in the world of the film this is the lowest form of life, a man who lives like a brother alongside men he intends to murder and betray, and there is nothing much else we need to know. The decision to foreground Baldwin-Felts operatives in place of company men—to my recollection, no actual officer of the Stone Mountain Coal Company ever appears in the film—may well reflect historical reality, but it colors our perceptions also; these are some of capital’s truest parasites, men with no direct stake in these battles over production except the side they have freely chosen. There’s something refreshing about the film’s moral simplicity, which, along with its decades-later voiceover narration, gives it at times the quality of a labor parable, a story handed down the generations for what it has to teach.
Whether the story it tells is a little too simple is a question worth asking. Not, of course, that we need to see the lighter side of the Pinkertons; but the smoothness with which the film tables the question of race demands, perhaps, a moment’s interrogation. In his introduction to the union Few Clothes shrugs off the racial slur but erupts at the accusation of class treason, an order of priorities the film unambiguously affirms. In essence, he’ll forget the race stuff if they will, which they do fairly readily after Kenehan’s rebuke. In the world of Matewan racism is not a structuring principle of American capitalism, but an unthinking prejudice of the working class; there is little sense of whiteness as a devil’s bargain the white workers might have any material interest in preserving, nor of anti-Blackness as something that might in fact deter Few Clothes from working with these men. Watching this movie now, I thought often of Bill Duke’s marvelous The Killing Floor (1984), which is equally convinced of the need for interracial working-class solidarity, but allows for much more depth and gradation in its exploration of key challenges. On the matter of armed resistance, too, Matewan projects total confidence: only scrupulously peaceful action, Kenehan and the film insist, can ward off the lash and the government boot, and incitement to violence is explicitly the work of outside agents who seek the union’s ruin. We might wonder whether, in practice, the company necessarily needed an invitation to conduct a crackdown. Matewan was historically anomalous in possessing a chief of police, Sid Hatfield (played by David Strathairn), who refused to do the Stone Mountain’s bidding; without his unaccustomed obstinacy, armed agents of the company might have acted with state backing from the outset, ‘peaceful’ strike or no. This elegiac tale of a Christlike organizer who knew the way forward for labor, if only the workers would have listened, is in danger of obscuring a reality in which crucial strategic and organizational questions remain very much open.
Yet here the secret weapon is James Earl Jones. To that key scene at the union meeting he brings the full weight of his considerable authority. He is older, perhaps, than anyone else in the room—James Earl Jones was fifty-six at the time—and he seems like a man who really does know how white folks are, who knew what to expect at this meeting and made the decision, both solidaristic and self-interested, to come anyway. His stentorian burst of anger makes his decision to shrug off his fellow workers’ racism seem pragmatic rather than docile, a clear-eyed choice to take the steps that will improve his lot. On the question of violence, too, James’s performance is carefully modulated, and his burly physicality invaluable. This is a hard man, ready and able to fight, not converted to a life of dogmatic pacificism by one charismatic organizer but earnestly set on a particular strategic course. Without the precise mix of wisdom, anger, pride, and rational calculation we see in Few Clothes, the combination of age and vitality that we hear in his voice, Matewan would lose much of its nuance and humanity, becoming a starry-eyed fable in which human nature appears only as tragic folly.
James Earl Jones was by far the biggest name in Matewan’s cast when it was released, and he remains so today, despite the strong subsequent careers of Strathairn, Cooper, Mary McDonnell, and others. As John Sayles tells it, the role was written with Jones in mind, but on Matewan’s budget Sayles felt Jones was out of reach; an actor of his stature, Sayles thought, would never work for union scale. Much time was spent on a fruitless search for a ‘James Earl Jones type’ before a Hail Mary pass from Sayles secured the involvement of Jones himself, unfazed by the trivial pay, the mediocre shooting conditions, the cast otherwise made up of unknowns. There was, of course, no such thing as a ‘James Earl Jones type’; there was James Earl Jones himself, and there was everybody else, and it was Matewan’s great and saving fortune to secure the genuine article. Sayles’ pursuit of Jones suggests he may have understood the complexities elided by his screenplay, and sought an actor who could embody them, an actor with the tools and the presence to plug this film into a wider world. There was really no one else for the role, no one else for virtually any of Jones’s major roles; he leaves behind a body of work no other actor could have built, and Matewan conveys as strongly as anything the qualities that made him irreplaceable.