Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (11 page)

And that's someone who has spent her whole life right here in Maytown just trying to do right by the people in her community. And I think it let me know, too, if you stay in one place in the mountains that doesn't mean you have to give up anything intellectually. If anything, it's a great jumping off point for learning about the rest of the world. You don't have to give up a single thing.

I've always been aware I was a hillbilly. And the way I knew I was a hillbilly was I knew there were people that were more hillbilly than me. And the way I knew that was that when I was a little kid, I remember there was some kind of commercial or something on TV about little children in Appalachia that “don't have no shoes.” And I had shoes, so I was like,
Huh?
And all the kids that came to school had shoes. So, I thought, well, there must be someplace that's more hillbilly, that's more Appalachian than here. And whenever I would use “ain't” or some other “not proper English”—that being quote-unquote proper—my daddy would say, “You sound like you're from the head of Noggytuck.” So I put it together in my mind that Noggytuck was where the hillbillies were, the ones without the shoes, the ones on the TV. So I knew I was a hillbilly, but there was people that was more hillbilly.

It wasn't part of the dialogue, being Appalachian. I think my family was of that generation where they were raised on farm life and not having a whole lot. My parents were very much of that post–World War II generation, I think, that were wanting really hard to be part of the American middle class. They had the jazz records and the family car and the frame-built house and were on the PTA and active in the church. Well, my mom was active in the church; my daddy's an agnostic. He's a heathen! He's a heathen, he really is. Heath
ern
. But anyway, they were of that 1950s generation that were trying really hard to make it into the middle class.

It wasn't hardscrabble for either of them. My mom actually had a little easier time of it because my grandfather was a supervisor
for a gas company, and they had a pretty good-size house. They had a fairly comfortable life. My dad's family, they worked as farm people work. Milk the cows when you get up and go 'til daylight. A real strong work ethic.

But at the same time they valued pieces of the culture. My dad was a wood-carver, and the subject of his carvings were his memories from childhood—coal miners, women hoeing in the garden, preachers raising fire and brimstone—and so there was definitely a respect there. And because Daddy was a wood-carver he was in contact with people that did crafts.

He was an artisan, but he just said that he whittled. He sold them because my mommy made him. He just gave them away and finally she said, “No, these have value, you're selling them.” Because of course as with all hobbies he was putting in more money than he was generating. There was definitely a respect for the tradition.

Now my mother, she likes old-time music now, but she called bluegrass music “catterwalling.” Neither one of them liked bluegrass. They liked jazz and rock 'n' roll. I did some reading up on the history of Irish music, too, and their histories completely parallel. After World War II, every kind of ethnic music just about died out because of radio and television, this commercial music coming in. And a lot of World War II had to do with ethnic conflict, and people were just ready to put that away and assimilate and become a homogenous American identity. Appalachians wanted exactly the same things. Now there were some old folks that held out, the George Gibsons and the Lee Sextons and all them who knew that they had something worth hanging onto, but a lot of people were very much ready to walk away and forget because they'd been through hell.
⁴

Which makes a lot of sense to me when I start thinking about my family history. It just makes a lot of sense how it fits in. When people pretty much threw down their culture, there was some logic to that.

I don't think I was ever ashamed of being from here, but I
felt really confined. I remember thinking: I can't wait to get to college and be anonymous. Nobody knows my grandparents, nobody knows me. I would just be myself, and I wouldn't have all this burden of history around me. And I just thought that would be so cool to be anonymous. It really wasn't cool. It didn't get me anywhere. I also wanted to meet boys. That was real important, too. That was a good motivator for going to college.

I remember feeling like the high school I went to was just not adequate. I knew I hadn't gotten too hot of an education. And I knew there was a bigger world out there. What that meant I wasn't sure. Once I found it I realized: geez, man, I left it all back home, the stuff that really matters. It's wonderful to go to a theater and get to see foreign films, that's cool, but it ain't nothing compared to getting to live on your great-grandmother's homeplace.

I was made to feel less when I went to college, up at Morehead. And that's an Appalachian school! I mean, they were good to me. I had some wonderful professors who were really encouraging. That first year I went it was like the red ink just bled all over my papers. It was awful, that first year. But then I started catching on and learning how to read and write and critically think and I had professors more than once say, “You know, it doesn't seem like you're from Eastern Kentucky.” You know, when people say that they're trying to give you a compliment but what they're saying is, “Gee, I didn't expect you to do well in this class.” That happened repeatedly. And when I went to UK.
⁵

I majored in psychology at Morehead, that's what I graduated in, which qualified me to go out to Washington state and pick apples.

For a while there I traveled all over the Northwest and Canada. I worked in an apple orchard for three weeks. Busted my ass. And then I started working in a little restaurant, and from there somehow I found out about an opening in the women's shelter for the YWCA down in Seattle and I applied for that. For some strange reason I got that. I was an emergency housing counselor, which I actually was qualified to do. That was a really neat job,
a real adventure. I had a lot of hillbilly moments there. That was my big adventure in the big city. So I came home to work for KFTC, and I think I was about twenty-three when I did that.

The homesickness, it was awful. It was sick. One time when I was out on the coastal Washington peninsula I stayed with this family for some time, and they had a little girl who was about eight years old. And I was standing washing the dishes and I remember I was singing “Blue Ridge Mountain Refugees,” that Si Kahn song, just singing to myself. And this little girl comes over and hugs me around the waist and says, “It's okay, Bev, you'll get to go home again.”

When I was in Seattle, what it did was affirm that I was from someplace. I knew where I was
from
, I knew what I was
about
. What I found on the West Coast is a lot of folks who aren't from anyplace in particular and don't know what they're about, so they're trying to create a new identity for themselves. When I was out there it seemed like there was a whole lot of women who were changing their names to Jane Whiteoak, and I was always like, “Honey, what's wrong with being who you are? There's nothing wrong with that.” But I knew exactly who I was, and it took me living out in Seattle to understand what I had left at home.

I didn't want to be another unemployed hillbilly, so I was out there in Seattle. I read in
Progressive
magazine about the Appalachian Land Ownership Study,
⁶
which showed what we already knew: that almost all of the coal reserves are owned by multinational energy corporations and that the surface land is undervalued and undertaxed and a lot of that belongs to the coal companies, too, and that that's the source of poverty and inequity in Appalachia. I said, “Well, that's interesting, something's shaking back home.”

So I started getting the KFTC newsletter, and somewhere or another the word came back to me they were looking for organizers.

I was an organizer, and my job was to try and get out the word. We were mainly working on two things as far as the legislature goes, which was the unmined minerals tax and the broad-form
deed amendment. The broad-form deed amendment was nearest to my heart because, of course, I wanted someplace to come back home to. This whole holler was auger mined in 1962 and 1963. So my family was broad-formed then, and we were eminently threatened from then on out of being broad-formed again. I knew this could happen anytime, so it's the fear I've always had that I would lose my home.

So one of my little jobs was to do some local organizing around Somerset and that area,
⁷
but as far as the legislative session goes, my job was to try and get the word out about the minerals tax and the broad-form deed amendment to other counties in the west. So I did a lot of traveling. I went and did lobbying as all KFTC staff and members do, went and worked the legislative session. It was a great experience, a really good experience.

As an organizer with KFTC, you cannot take a leadership role, you can't be doing interviews with the press. You have to be in the background. I was liberated from that whenever I left KFTC and went to UK, when I went to college. So I would be called upon. Like when we did the big rally at the Rotunda, I was one of the speakers, which was mind-blowing because I have a terrible fear of speaking in public. But somebody had to do it, so I did.

So yeah, I was active during the fight for the broad-form deed amendment as a volunteer. That was a lot of fun because we won big. It's not every day that happens. It was incredible. We were optimistic going into the election. It was really cool on that night we had the election for the broad-form deed amendment. The primary was over—I think it was during the general election they had that—so Bush Senior was elected and that was a bummer. Every other election was just awful, but we were so happy because we'd won the broad-form deed! And we all got together at Hindman and had this wonderful party where it was just this huge sense of relief. And I couldn't believe that we didn't just win, we kicked butt. We won big. And it was the biggest vote for a constitutional amendment since the one to give eighteen-year-olds the vote.

This is relevant to the mountaintop removal struggle here. The key to winning it was really good on-the-ground organizing that covered the whole state, but there was a moral force behind us that was pushing it on. And wherever you were in the state, people knew strip mining companies were running people off of their land and treating people unfairly and destroying the land. And they knew it because the
Courier-Journal
had Nellie Woolum
⁸
being carried off of her homeplace and Bill Sturgill's mine,
⁹
where the house was going over the edge of the cliff. Folks had been seeing this for twenty years. They knew that strip mining was an abusive practice. So when they got down to the voting booth, 86 percent of them understood that they could vote against the coal industry. It was like a referendum against the coal industry, and all that we had to do was make them understand that that means a “yes” vote. Now, that's what we had to do because referendums are very confusing, all this really complicated text and you're in the voting booth for thirty seconds and you've got to figure this thing out. So we had to make people understand that a “yes” vote means you're voting to stop the broad-form deed. That was some really good, fast, on-the-ground organizing, but it had twenty years behind it. And that's where we're going now.

I think any reasonable person can intuitively understand that when you've blown the top off of a mountain you have forever destroyed it. People downstate, I think, can understand that more clearly. People here, they understand that, but they also understand that people have to make a living and that there's a limited number of jobs available, the economy isn't very diverse, so it's like a necessary evil that they're willing to accept because they have to have a job. The folks downstate don't have to deal with that end of it.

And the coal industry is always running its own campaign. They're always saying “We've created jobs, we've brought wealth to Eastern Kentucky, we put the land back just as good as it used to be.” They have that same line. I've heard it all a thousand times. And it doesn't matter what the issue is when it's related to the coal
industry, that's always what they say: “We've brought in wealth, we've brought in jobs, there wouldn't be anything in Eastern Kentucky if we weren't there.” All of which are really offensive lies, but I think people can see through those lies and they do see through it.

Eastern Kentuckians like to say, “I can do what I want with my land.” In the fight against the broad-form deed we had that feeling on our side. It is a major obstacle in the fight against mountaintop removal because what happens is the coal industry has a scam going on all the time. They've got the commercials showing the duck ponds and how nice they've put it back and they don't tell you the rest of it's wasteland and it's just dusty tabletops. They just show you the duck pond.

There's a mind-numbing amount of propaganda that's being put out by the coal industry all the time so that when they come around with this lease and say, “Okay, we're going to give you a dollar a ton for all the coal that we take out of here, that will be a half a million dollars. And we're going to put it back. You're going to have forty acres of flatland that you can do anything you want with. It's going to be beautiful. We're going to plant pasture grass, we're going to plant trees if you want us to, whatever you want. We'll put it back just the way you want it, and you'll get a half a million dollars.”

So who doesn't want to believe this? When you're talking money, people hear what they want to hear, and this is a really seductive thing. Well, what they don't tell you is that they don't have to tell you a word of truth. They don't put it in writing. People here believe a person's word over a document.

And with the broad-form deed, the only people making money was the coal company. And now the landowner can, in theory, make some money out of it. What they don't tell you is that they don't have to tell you the truth about how much coal is on your property, they may not even want all the coal on your property. They may want your area for a load-out, which means you're going to get nothing. They may want your area for a haul road.
You're going to get plenty of destruction and you ain't going to get squat in the way of money.