The Price of Coal

I can’t quit crying.  My eyes are filled with tears as I write. 

As I watched the tragedy in West Virginia unfold, a childhood memory surfaced in my mind.  I was 7 years old, and my family and I, with the rest of our small community, were gathered around the mouth of a coal mine.  There had been a rock fall and a cave-in, and several miners were trapped. 

We stood there for hours, in the cold and wet, watching, listening and hyper-alert for news of any kind, good or bad.  I was tired and thirsty, and began to whine.  My normally gentle mother slapped me, knelt down and shook me.  “This is more important than your needs”, she told me. 

While waiting for the drama to end, we prayed, sang songs, and held each other tight.  We tried to comfort each other.  I remember hugging a little girl younger than me, about 5 years of age.  Her Daddy was in that mine.  She was standing silently near her family, with them, yet alone, and something in her silent pain pulled me out of my preoccupation with my own small discomfort. 

She and I gradually wandered over to the edge of the lot, and sat down on a damp log. We were trying, as small children do, to distract ourselves from the overwhelming emotion running rampant from the adults. She was shivering from the cold, and her little threadbare coat was too small to provide much warmth. She inched closer and closer to me, and I put my arm around her.  Her body was trembling from the chilly air, and with fear.  I began to rock her back and forth, humming a song, a child comforting a child.

All at once, the air was torn open with wailing and screaming.  The first bodies had been brought out, and there was no life in them.  The keening cries rose in volume; they took on a life of their own.  Not even knowing whose broken body had been found, she and I opened our mouths, and the grief poured out.

One of those bodies was that of my brother-in-laws’ father.   At the age of 17, it now fell on his young shoulders to suddenly become the man of the house, and to try and hold his large family together in the face of our greatest fear made reality.

I had pushed this memory far, far back into the remotest recesses of my mind.  It broke out of its’ mental cage as I watched the families in West Virginia make the journey from joy to grief.  The keening rose in me, and I mourned out loud.

These keening cries of grief are torn straight from the soul of the Appalachian spirit.  It lays bare the anguish, it is pure emotion, and it shreds the hardest heart among the listeners. 

There are no myriad layers of polite veneer back here.  There are no social pretenses in the presence of death.  There is just the agony of loss laid bare.

Compounding this tragedy was the miscommunication between the rescuers and the surface.  To believe that your loved ones were safe, and then to be slapped across the face with the brutal truth, put these people on an emotional seesaw nearly beyond bearing.  So much for technology.

Reality show?  This was a reality show.  Do you sincerely believe that Fox or any other network has a clue?  Survivor?  What a farce.  This is survival.  This is reality. The reality of this life is that my people die because the Federal and State governments in charge of rules and regulations governing safety are more interested in making sure that the white-collar owners and lobbyists continue to make the most money at the least expense.

I was astonished and disgusted by the litany of violations in the Sago mine.  It is, however, much cheaper to pay small fines, ($200) for each violation than it is to make the necessary and expensive changes to insure that this and other mines in the mining industry are safe. That’s called ‘good’ business – keep costs down and profits high.

As my husband and I watched this agonizing chain of events, we saw something that gave us some small hope of future change.  After the truth had been broken to the families, one of the family members verbally cut loose on West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin III.  There were several police officers, including West Virginia State Troopers nearby, and they started to move in to protect the governor. 

In an act of supreme courage and compassion, Joe Manchin waved them back.  He knew that this man needed to vent his rage and grief on an official figure, and he just stood there and took it.  Joe is West Virginian and Appalachian.  He knew just how quickly the raging emotions could have gotten out of hand, and he stood in there in the face of this man’s awesome rage and just let him pour out all his anger and grief.  He put this man’s emotional needs ahead of his personal safety, and I thank him for this with all my heart. 

We are encouraged by the brave actions of Governor Joe Manchin.  He has exhibited the necessary traits of understanding, compassion and courage that are desperately needed to address the problems and to try and right some of the tremendous wrongs continually being done to the mining communities of Appalachia.

Although little can be done to change the past, the fact that the mineral rights to the coal in Appalachia were stolen by glib ‘company men’ who befriended the mountain people only long enough to get their ‘X’ on a binding contract needs to be brought back out into the public eye.  It was a massive, wholesale theft of invaluable rights, and should be expunged from our country’s ‘black gold’ history.

Exploitation of these socially impaired people for their mineral rights was only the beginning.  These companies then employed the local men to dig their own coal, and sold it for the companies’ profit.  The history of coal mining in this country is literally ‘littered’ with bodies of Appalachian people.  They call it ‘the true price of coal’, and it is a price America should never have paid, and the Appalachian people can no longer afford to pay.  The coal that fuels America’s industry has been drenched with generations of Appalachian blood.

What hypocrites we are!  Our leaders carp about conditions in China, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan, while ignoring the desperate straits of Appalachia.  We hear Bush, Cheney and Condi Rice talk about ‘human rights’ in undeveloped countries nearly every week. The Appalachian Regional Commission receives millions of dollars ($92 million for 2006) for improving the living and working conditions of Appalachian people, yet my people still have the lowest economic standard of living in the entire country!

It is this same administration that has gutted safety laws and environmental laws pertaining to ‘deep’ mining and mountaintop removal.  Have you ever seen what mountaintop removal does to the environment?  It fills in the breathtaking valleys, coves and ‘hollers’ that make Appalachia the most unique mountain range in America.  There are species of mussels, salamanders and wildlife that are found nowhere else in the world!

Why do we continue to cling to our way of life in the mountains? Why don’t we all just move away?  Appalachian people are bound to the mountains by much more than coal and blood.  When our Scottish forefathers made the long journey across the ocean and over the plains of the Eastern coast, they did not stop until they lifted their eyes up to the hills of the Appalachian mountain range.  When they saw the tops of the mountains shrouded in mist, their hearts told them they were home.

Have you have ever seen a computer graphic of how the continents of the world were once one large piece?  The Discover channel has shown this graphic in one of its’ fine shows.  If you watch it closely, you can see that as the continents began their shifts eons ago, the country that is now Scotland and Ireland was once physically attached to the end of what is now the Appalachian mountain range.  There is a band of red clay that runs through Appalachia to the end of our continent and continues across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland and Scotland.  Geographically, it is identical with the red clay here at home.

My people, in their racial intelligence, knew in their souls that they had come home, both physically and spiritually.  This ancient land called to their blood.  The King James Bible says it best in Psalm 121: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.  My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”

So much history, so much pain, so much agony, and all of it is unnecessary.  All of it is for profit, for the pursuit of the almighty dollar by people whose greed demeans the lives of good men and women who pay the ultimate ‘price of coal’.

My family and I have paid the price for your coal far too often.  It is my hope that Governor Joe Manchin III will take the lead in pushing for these critical, overdue changes in regulation.  I hope he will lead the charge in calling for overwhelming changes and strict enforcement on both State and Federal statutes.  It is a tall order, but Governor Manchin is a man of courage and conviction.  

In the meantime, I grieve.  My keening cries of today pave memory’s path to the two little girls sitting on a log and crying out to God:

“Daddy!  Not my Daddy!”