Living on the Edge

(Written in 1988)

Stopping by the coal camp in Verda, Kentucky this past winter I found my friends Clifford and Darlene Tolliver on their living room floor—soot-blackened and quaking with exhaustion.  I had walked in on a triple emergency that nearly cost them everything they had.

It all started when the hose from their spring froze.  After digging it up they dragged it into the house to thaw by the coal stove.  Somehow the stove wasn’t working right, though.  From past experience Clifford knew that if a lump of creosote had formed at the back of the stove he could blast it out by stoking an extremely hot fire for a few minutes.  He cut up an old foam rubber mattress that someone had thrown down the hill behind their house, stuffed several large pieces into the stove and slammed the door shut.  It was a mistake.  The obstruction remained and in seconds the room was a horror of deadly, black smoke.  Gasping and choking, they managed to bring the fire under control before it burned the house down.

As it turned out, a luckless chicken had fallen down the stovepipe outside and gotten roasted in the crook.  Cleaning it out was a nasty business, but that was nothing compared with the problem that remained.  Everything—walls, ceiling, furniture and clothes—was black with soot.  In the meantime the hose had thawed, trailing mud and water across the living room floor.  When the house wiring began to overheat, blowing one fuse after another and ominously dimming all the lights, it was nearly the last straw.

When I arrived Clifford was contemplating a potentially suicidal venture into the rat’s nest of electrical wiring at the ancient fuse box, and was loading the shotgun for Darlene to blast down the power line coming into the house in case of a shock he couldn’t yank away from.  Darlene had tears in her eyes but still managed a rueful laugh when she saw me at the door.  “You caught us lookin’ a little rough this time,” she said, gesturing helplessly about the room.

Her humiliation wasn’t lost on me.  Even though the Tollivers are the poorest American family I know, they are independent and fiercely proud.  Darlene, only thirty-seven but already a grandmother, is ordinarily a fastidious housekeeper.  Clifford, despite having been partially disabled years ago in a mining accident, works with fanatical intensity at every odd job he can find.  His pickup truck is a crazy quilt of unmatched parts, equipped with a CB radio and a home-welded boom for hoisting car engines.  He has turned their rented shack into a livable home, adding an indoor toilet, a bathtub and (after the aforementioned incident) new electrical wiring.  Their daughter and two sons are respectable and hard-working—no small blessing in view of the excuses they could offer for being otherwise.

Clifford and Darlene have made themselves guardians of another couple older and less fortunate than themselves.  John Blevins is a retired coal miner suffering from black lung who lived, when I first met him, in an abandoned gas station along Route 38.  Now he lives with his second wife Gertrude in the basement of a burned-out house nearby.  John is a fragile husk of a man who carves scraps of lumber into crude mandolins and fiddles, which he peddles for a pittance by the roadside.

Gertrude, a companion acquired for John’s old age, is a wraith-like alcoholic presence moored by a mere wisp of sanity to his own diminishing world.  She spends most of her time wandering the highway in a private hell known only to herself.  Rumor has it that Gertrude once lived in Michigan with a family of her own.  Folks speak obliquely of an accident in which her child was killed, and how she never quite recovered from the loss.  It’s easy to believe, for there is a pain and confusion behind her eyes that even the brightest smile never obscures.

On my last visit to the Tollivers Clifford told me about the happenings of the night before.   He had been over at John’s place checking up on things when Gertrude stumbled in, her face bruised and swollen, her head bald and white as an onion.  She had been out walking the roadside when some local ruffians had jumped her, shaving her head just for kicks.  Old John’s rage shook him like a fever, and he demanded that Clifford get his gun and help him find the bastards.  In spite of Clifford’s own outrage he spent the next few hours persuading John to cool down, lest he get himself killed. Gertrude merely sat dazed, her already tattered self-esteem reduced to ashes.

The hills and hollers of Appalachia are sown with people like the Tollivers and the Blevinses—people who have been so poor and so powerless for so long that whatever dignity they retain is guarded with ferocity.  Folks mess with the hill people at their own risk, and a long and bloody history discourages outsiders (and insiders as well) from interfering without good cause.  On the other hand, some of the warmest and most loyal friends you ever could find live among these hills, and Appalachian hospitality is as legendary as its violence.

Curiously, in my experience it has been the well-to-do and influential who have been most suspicious of my motives as a photographer and documentarian of the region.  The poorer folks are surprisingly hospitable and willing to talk to sympathetic outsiders.  They have little to lose by letting the rest of the world know their circumstances.  It is the prosperous ones who most resent the public airing of Appalachia’s problems.  They act like a family guarding some terrible secret.  The irony is that that unless this secret is aired in all its complexity, no remedy is likely to be found.

Responsibility for Appalachia’s stunning poverty ultimately must be laid at the door of the coal industry, for present circumstances are almost wholly the product of its exploitation and mismanagement.  Most of the large coal companies today are owned by multinational energy corporations, which harbor little sympathy for the region or its people.  Slumlords on a truly massive scale, these monoliths have profited immensely from creating the conditions endured by their longsuffering tenants.  They haul their black booty out of the mountains on railroad cars and give back nothing in return.  The people who mine the coal have always been as expendable as the environment, which is slashed, trashed and then cashed on the energy market.

How the region’s staggering mineral wealth came to be transferred from the people to powerful outsiders is itself a breathtaking saga of greed and brutality.  During the turbulent years following America’s industrialization, the Appalachians were systematically raped.  The dark art of the offer that cannot be refused evolved to perfection in the mineral-laden hills of Kentucky and West Virginia.  For mere pocket change thousands of people signed away their mineral rights to speculators who never told them that surface rights were subordinate to mineral rights.  Some who were cannier refused to sell out, but finally were run off their land or simply killed by hired thugs for their obstinacy.  Lawyers in cahoots with the coal companies tied up their estates until the rightful heirs were broken in spirit and ruined financially.  Illiterate farmers who owned desirable tracts of land were jailed for no reason and then offered “release forms” to sign that were actually deeds for their land.  Thus people unwittingly condemned their own homes and farms by the square mile, while the speculators and coal lords laughed at the ignorance of simple folk whose dreams were bound up in the beautiful hills.

Uncounted miles of mountains were mangled as timber was clear cut for coal tipples and strip mines.  Land was devoured in hundreds of communities until only the mines remained for people to work in.  Displaced from their farms and ancestral homes, the miners had no place left to live except in the substandard housing of unsanitary coal camps.  Grossly underpaid in company scrip rather than legal tender, they were forced to do all their trading at commissaries, which charged many times the value of goods sold.  Safety considerations in the mines were forfeited in favor of maximum production, until accidents and occupationally induced maladies buried thousands deep under the once-beautiful hills.

Companies grew fabulously rich, and hired their own police—the gun thugs so familiar to early labor organizers—to brutally quell all protest.  Early efforts to unionize resulted in disaster after disaster for the people.  In 1921 the infamous Battle of Blair Mountain ended with U.S. Army troops bringing aircraft, bombs and heavy artillery into the hills to subdue striking West Virginia coal miners.  It was a bleak and shameful era in the land of the free and the home of the brave.  Absolute control rested in the hands of the coal operators, and the law upheld their priorities—as it still upholds their entitlement to the land and resources stolen from the people.  This is the legacy of Appalachia, and all hope for future change must reckon with the present realities and limitations imposed by it.

The 1960s brought a flush of expectancy to the region as President Lyndon Johnson fired the early volleys in his celebrated War on Poverty from the rickety porches and rutted roads of coal country.  A few improvements were made, but there was no comprehensive agenda to address the root causes of Appalachia’s problems.  The deeply entrenched, coal-fired political machine that powered state and local affairs was scarcely dented by the superficial reforms instituted by well-intended outsiders.   Like a thick, luxuriant kudzu vine sucking out the vitals of a tree, the matrix of coal interests strangling Appalachia became the ultimate beneficiary of nearly every form of relief delivered to the region.

New technology came to coal country only to mechanize many traditional jobs out of existence.  More coal was mined in 1987 than in any year in history, with approximately half the number of miners employed in 1970.  In June of 1988 the Kentucky Prince and Whitaker Consolidated coal companies in Perry County, Kentucky laid off more than 200 workers.  As in countless other coal companies across the region, and as far into the future as anyone can see, these doors will be swinging only one way.

Today there are signs of decay everywhere.  The punishing boom-and-bust cycles of the energy industry have exacted a heavier toll here than in most places.  In a region where nearly everything stands or falls on the price of coal, the economy has been inflated and deflated so abruptly so many times it has lost elasticity.  Disunity among the OPEC nations, while holding gasoline prices down for most of the nation, has only depressed Appalachia’s economy still further.  Its infrastructure creaks and sags, and the list of towns is ever growing where few jobs exist and only the old and disenfranchised remain to carry on the ritual of living.  It has been said that America encloses within its own borders a struggling third-world country, and few who have been here would disagree.

But this is only part of the picture.  To sum up the essence of Appalachia by looking only at its travails would be a great mistake.  One must see them clearly, in order to assess the damage of the past and avoid further blunders.  But the great hope of the region lies in its people.  Resilient and resourceful, they are survivors of the worst America has had to offer.  How might they thrive, given a shot at the American dream most of the country wakens to each day?  As economic realities continue to erode the number of available mining jobs, more and more people are finding that question on their minds.  Economic diversification is the only way the region can be saved, and in local governments where new blood has managed to displace old coal, the search for new job-producing industries is going full tilt.

The quest has begun not a moment too soon.  Barely half the students I talked with at Harlan High School in 1987 held much hope of enjoying a prosperous future without leaving the region.  They have seen powerful evidence that too much in life depends on the vagaries of major forces far outside the control of people who live here.  These bright youngsters are Appalachia’s most precious resource, and if they can be persuaded to stay—to gamble their talents and ambitions on an uncertain future—there may be hope for a lasting recovery.  Perhaps a new administration in Washington can provide the spark that will kindle a vision of Appalachian prosperity for them.

Events have a way of devouring individuals, and I fear for the futures of some of my friends in the hills and hollers of Kentucky and West Virginia.  Their ancestors got by on believing the Lord helps those who help themselves—but like their ancestors, some eventually will find themselves up against mountains too big to move.  Clifford Tolliver is older than his wife and his health is poor.  Yet they are fortunate—their children are bright and responsible and provide a cushion against certain eventualities.  Many others are not so well protected.

Two years ago at dusk I was driving east out of Harlan on Route 38.  Past Verda and Evarts, twisting by ponderous coal tipples, dilapidated clapboard shacks and dark veins in the striated outcroppings of shale and granite, somewhere up the road near Closplint I came upon a house as poor as all the others and maybe even more so.  It caught my eye only because of the children playing outside.  They were laughing and enjoying themselves with such abandon that I stopped to watch.  Their father was tilling the garden, and we talked a bit.  Then their grandmother came out, and I took a few pictures.  As I photographed I was struck by two things.  The first was the beautiful innocence of those children and their incredible reservoir of joy at simply being alive.  The second was the smell of raw sewage wafting from the corner of the house where a short length of PVC pipe slanted toward the ground.

When the light finally drained from the sky and I climbed back into my car, the radio began playing Mozart.  My mind reeled at the vast distance between the primitive world of the family I had just met and the world of the university over the mountains whose radio station now filled my ears.  Would the children of this family ever discover the strange but wonderful realities that intersect their universe, so near and yet so far away?  And if they did, would their innocence and happiness be increased or diminished by the experience?

I thought about those children many times after that, and several months later while driving east out of Harlan decided to visit them again.  I missed the house on the first pass, so I turned around a few miles up the road and began looking more carefully.  Finally I found the spot where the house had been.  A small pile of charred furniture lay beside what was left of the chimney, and a man on a tractor was scraping the foundation into another pile.  I never did find those kids again.

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Return to “My Coal Country Photos

Copyright 1988 by Dennis Crews

 

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