Assonance

Assonance (ass’-o-nance): Repetition of similar vowel sounds, preceded and followed by different consonants, in the stressed syllables of adjacent words.

Anthracite coal, black, blue—along the veins, vine-like lines of my shining quarry.

It’s dark and damp below the earth. My dim lamp light barely shows the wall. I drill and plant my dynamite, wire it up, step back and blow it. The coal scatters all around and I shovel it into my coal trolley and start to push it to the mouth of the mine.

I hear music coming from deep in the mine. How can that be? It’s Tennessee Earnie Ford singing “16 Tons.” It was a sort of Union organizing song. Here’s a few lines:

“You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store.”

What was going on here? Coal mining had gone to hell years ago. There wasn’t much money in it any more. Was I hearing things? I was going to find out. All my colleagues were standing there, frozen in time, carved coal statues. They couldn’t talk. They couldn’t move.

I jumped into a trolley and started the ride down. It seemed like I was going 100 MPH. The walls of the mine shaft were a blur. I couldn’t slow down or stop. The veins of coal turned into smiles and I could hear Tennessee Earnie laughing like a big bass drum.

I got to the bottom and hit the wall hard. I bent my helmet and cut my hand. I was briefly knocked unconscious. When I woke up I was sitting against the wall with a battery-powered 45 RPM record player sitting in front of me. When I woke up, it started playing “16 Tons.” There was no Earnie there, only a portable record player. I turned off the record player and saw that the record was autographed by Earnie. I grabbed the record and stuck it in my jacket. I didn’t care where it came from. It would be worth a lot of money. At that moment, the record player disappeared. I felt my jacket and the record was still there.

A shaft of coal rose up from the floor. It said, “Take the record son. Sell it. Send your kid to college. Don’t make him come to work down here.”

I sold the record for $150,000 to the Tennessee Earnie Ford Museum. My son graduated from UPENN and became an accountant for a grocery store chain. He hates his job. On Saturdays, he dresses up like a miner and digs holes in his back yard.

Definitions courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).

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