The Blind Brother: A Story of the Pennsylvania Coal Mines

In the coal-black depths of Pennsylvania, two brothers hold onto a dream that might as well be made of dust. Tom Taylor spends his days hauling coal and his nights dreaming of the surgery that could restore his younger brother Bennie's sight. Bennie, blind since birth, works as a door-boy in the mine, counting on his brother's promise to lead him out of darkness. But the year is 1886, and the mines are convulsing with strike fever. Workers are starving. Hope is rationed. And when Bennie disappears in the labyrinth tunnels below, Tom must descend into the earth itself, racing against time and the weight of a system that treats men as disposable as the coal they dig. This is a story about what we owe the people we love when the world owes us nothing. Homer Greene won fifteen hundred dollars for this story, the first prize from Youth's Companion in 1886. It remains a fierce, aching portrait of brotherhood tested by darkness both literal and figurative.