Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (6 page)

I was raised to speak up and say what I believed in. That was part of our education. My dad used to read every book he could get ahold of. He had the Bible and the
Pilgrim's Progress
and a few other big tomes. Just anything he could get. He'd just read, read, read. And he taught school, too. He taught there, round home, and started a subscription school when there wasn't any school; it goes back that far.
⁹
He was all in favor of education. Even before we went to school we were taught that everybody was the same in the sight of God, no matter what color they were or what country they came from. And we all believed that. And the older girls went to Berea, and Berea was a big advocate for not having racism or anything like that. Dad wanted us to go to school, and many kids didn't get to go to school, they were encouraged to just stay at the house and worked in the corn. School had seasons when they would let you off for fodder pulling or planting. Lots of people would say, “I didn't go to school, so you don't have to go to school.” Our family was different, and we were very lucky to have my parents, who told us to get an education. Hindman
¹⁰
used to send its best students to Wellesley, so I had two sisters who went there.

The first protest songs I ever remember hearing were by the Singing Miner, George Davis, who was always on the Hazard radio station.
¹¹
He was real popular, and everybody listened to him.

Then the first song I ever wrote that could be considered a protest song was just my own reaction to what was happening. I didn't think anyone else would ever listen to it. “Black Waters”
was the first one. George and I were going over Pine Mountain, and we saw some water that was polluted from the slag heaps. The water was all discolored, red or yellow, a lot of it was black. And when it flooded around people's houses it was all black from the strip-mining and such. So we were on that trip and we saw the water and I just started singing, “Black waters, black waters, run down through the land,” and I went home and over the next few weeks I wrote it.

And then there was “Blue Diamond Mines,” which George was real important on. We were driving on a big trip, and we went through a big pine forest. I was singing “In the pines/in the pines/ where the sun/never shines,”
¹²
and George said, “Why don't you do a song called ‘In the mines/in the mines,'” and I thought, oh, that's silly.
¹³
Then later on I felt, well, that is good, that's a very natural thing to sing.

I was very much aware that they were protest songs when I wrote them, and so I didn't want anyone to bother my mother, who was an old lady, like I am now. I didn't want anyone coming up to her and saying, “Your daughter's up in New York singing protest songs. What is she doing? She must be a Communist.” So I took a pseudonym: Than Hall. This was in tribute to my grandpa, but also to protect my family.
¹⁴

And those kinds of songs sounded better coming from a man than a woman, could be better accepted. Pete Seeger
¹⁵
never got over the notion that I only sang ballads. He'd come out and say, “Now Jean Ritchie is going to sing us a song in her high, clear voice, and she's going to make us all really feel wonderful. She sings these beautiful old songs she learned from her mother, these lyrical, high things,” but I wanted to sing “Black Waters,” so I'd go ahead and sing that and then the next time, he'd introduce me the very same way. Your reputation that you make in the beginning is very hard to change. I would get up there and say, “This is what's happening to our mountains, and we want it to stop.” That song made a big impression on everybody, and everybody always wanted to sing on the chorus.

I certainly do think mountaintop removal is morally wrong. Kentucky has one of the last great watersheds, these headwaters. It's being torn apart, it's being desolated. Every time we fill up a stream and kill a little river, you're causing terrible things for the future, as far as living in it. It's all going to be like Kenmont
¹⁶
someday, that whole part of the country. They've taken away all the houses out of Viper, on the right side of the road, by the river. When you drive up to Lower Viper, why, there's nothing there. The big trucks are coming out of Mace's Creek and turning down in there.

The children of today don't know the kind of experience growing up I did, I don't guess. They have television, whole walls of television, the schools go in more for sports than anything else, they have all these things to occupy them. So I don't believe they're as connected to the land as people once were, which might make it easier to happen.

Ever since I was a little girl and we would go with Mom and Dad to the Old Regular Baptist Church, no matter what happened, people would always say, “Ah, it's God's will. It's God's will and he's got a purpose for it, so we ought not question it.” I think while it's a wonderful old religion, and the songs are good, and the beliefs are good, I still think that religion has influenced people to be apathetic. I think that maybe times are changing, though. People are starting to see what's going on and what happens when certain things are done to the land. But that old feeling of “It was meant to be,” it's still there, I think.

Legally a landowner can do whatever he wants to with the land. But he ought to think about the result, about what his home is going to be like in a few years. He should think about what's going to happen to his neighbors, his river, his waters. He should think about others. He should think about the fact that there are no trees left to draw the water down. So legally it may be okay, but where it really matters, morally, I don't think so. The coal companies count on people thinking that their jobs are going to be cut out if they quit mining in a particular way. But my dad
always went and dug that coal out himself to heat our house, and that didn't hurt anybody, it didn't hurt the land. But this large-scale stuff…well, we have to change our way of thinking. We just have to.

There have been times when I've felt like I was fighting my own people. I always wondered how people around where we lived would accept “Black Waters.” When I was home, once in a while somebody would say something to me about it. Nobody ever threatened me or anything about it, but I think they thought I was a woman, so it didn't mean much. I don't know why I got by with it, but I did. And I never tried to say it was something else.

I still have land up in the holler. I guess we have about thirty-five acres. They've mined all the way up the holler. You can climb one mountain and see what it looks like on the ones hemming us in.

Do you remember being a young 'un and having a big sore on your leg, and it wouldn't get well, it kept draining? That's the way I feel when I see that land. I feel like it's a big, open sore on me somewhere. No matter what you put on it, no matter if you go to the doctor, it's still there. I don't know what it's going to take to heal it. I do what I can.

One time, I was up at home and I was complaining about the subsidence of our creek. The coal company had done something underground, and all the water went out of our creek, and they came up and looked at it. They waited until it rained and then they came up—they never would come when it was dry, that's how they do. From them I got the feedback that since I didn't live there year-round I shouldn't care what was going on.

I don't think I've ever really left Kentucky. So many thoughts are there, my family is there, my memories are there. The songs that I learned, people are still singing them there. I go quite often to visit, as many times as I can, and spend time there in my cabin. I feel that I'm still a resident of Kentucky. This is just the way I am, the way I talk, the way I act. I can't be anything else.

I talk the way we talk, and I wrote my book
¹⁷
that way, too, wrote it in our way of speaking. I had a helper, an editor at Oxford
Press, he oversaw all my stuff and gave me advice and he said, “Jean, you know some of these words you're using, nobody's going to know what they are.” And I said, “Well, you can tell by the sentence structure what they are. That's how we say it.” He said, “You ought to change it and put this word in instead,” and he'd suggest New England words. He was from there. And I said, “Well, I'm not from New England. This is the Kentucky word.” So he just said, “I'm going on vacation and in three weeks I'll have a decision about this,” and when he came back he had decided I was right. I don't know how I got the nerve to do that. That was my first book; I didn't know how nerve-rattling it could be. But I just wasn't going to do that, to change. And you know, when the book was reviewed, that was one of the main things they picked out to say that I did a good job of, capturing the language.

I guess I can claim Kentucky, because every once in a while they claim me. Just here recently they've named a road after me. Two miles of road.
¹⁸
I don't think they've done it yet, but the governor said he was going to.
¹⁹
They put the road fourteen foot higher on the hill. There was a big curve there where people were always having accidents. So they used that as an excuse to do the road over. They did improve it, but in doing it they denuded three or four mountainsides, all the way to the top. I don't know why they did that, but I think it's so they can mine it. I kept writing to Frankfort and asking them to not do it, telling them they were doing a terrible thing. Because they condemned everyone's houses, made them move, tore them down, desolated the land. I wrote letters and said they ought not do that, that they should fix the other road. I never got a real answer. When the governor came, he knew he had been getting letters from me, but he didn't know why; he hadn't read them. When they took the first shovelful of dirt he said he was going to name the road after me. When people told me this, I said, “Well, he sure wasn't reading my letters.” He must have thought the letters were telling him the road was a wonderful thing. But they weren't.

Now I realize that in a way I'm an activist, but I sure never
thought of myself as that way. Never thought of myself as someone who stood on lines and went to rallies and things like that. I'm a very shy person, but when I get on stage and am talking to my audience, that's different because I feel like it's one big person out there and we're just having a conversation. But I wouldn't get up and put on sequins and dance around with my microphone. I wouldn't go on like that. I just get up there and do what I do.

Shortly after I came to New York, it was about 1947, there came May Day, that used to be a big rally day in New York City. We were trying to organize the place I worked, the Henry Street Settlement, down on the Lower East Side. It was a place that was trying to help people, not a place that manufactured. But we didn't make a lot of money. Everybody said you shouldn't be doing this, but we said, “We want the workers at Henry Street to have better salaries and better places to live,” which was true. It was a fairly large outfit. We were having a rally, and we were carrying this big banner and walking down the street, and Pete Seeger gave me this megaphone and said, “Here, sing a song.” I said [
whispers
] “I can't do that, they won't listen to me, I can't do that.” They had a truck with a stage, and he was wanting me to go up there and make a speech, sing a song. I said, “I'll march, and I'll carry a sign, but I can't do that, sing a song like that here.” He pushed me out and made me—I was so nervous, so worried, that I just started singing, and the audience just talked. It was true, they didn't listen to me. It was just my personality, my belief in how good I was. In those days I really thought I was nothing, and still do, in some ways. I couldn't force myself to do it, it was something that my persona couldn't do.

But nowadays. Well, I'm again
²⁰
not saying anything. I think we have to make people more aware of what's happening. The reason more people are not doing anything, I imagine, is because they think they can't win. They think, “Well, that's the way the world's changing.” And that's the way the coal companies want them to think. They say, “Ah, we're bringing you stores and commerce and such; what do you want with this old country way?” And people
believe that. And it's easier for them to not say anything. I think people just think it's a monumental thing, that they won't make any difference. They think they're small and this is large, and they think they're not going to get anywhere, that they'll just be beating their heads against a stone wall.

Sometimes, I think of when I was a little girl there, in that place. The mountains circling around us like we were down in a little bowl. My happiest memories are of the times I was walking out in those mountains, on those trails. I had a special rock that jutted out, just big enough for a seat. I'd take me an apple and set there, and I'd talk out loud to the trees and the flowers.

The memories, they just push right down on me sometimes. Everybody who was there isn't there anymore. Nowadays I think mainly about how it looks now, and how it used to look. The rest of it is all going to be destroyed now—unless we can stop it.

Port Washington, New York, March 14, 2008

Mother Jones's Great-Granddaughter

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

     —H. L. Mencken

I'm Mother Jones's daughter and she
taught me to stand tall
For the rights of working people
and justice for us all.

     —Sue Massek, “Cosby”

Denise Giardina is a radical. Perched on the worn couch in her cozy home in Charleston, West Virginia, Giardina doesn't shy away from this term, a death knell in modern politics. She certainly doesn't fit the stereotype. Her wardrobe doesn't consist of military fatigues. There are no pictures of Che Guevara on her walls, no “Lyndon LaRouche for President” fliers lying on her coffee table. That's just not her style. Instead, Giardina looks to Henry Thoreau, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Mother Jones as her guideposts for revolutionary change.

Mother Jones is of particular importance to Giardina. Nearly one hundred years ago, Mary Jones was called before the United States Senate after organizing thousands of miners in a series of bloody strikes against the coal operators, most famously in Paint Creek, West Virginia. Senator Nathan Goff, a West Virginia Republican and a longtime supporter of the coal industry, scorned her in front of his colleagues as “the grandmother of all agitators.” Mother Jones smiled. “I hope to live long enough to be the
great
-grandmother of all agitators,” she replied with defiance.

Denise Giardina. Photo by Page Hamrick.

Giardina is one of these spiritual grandchildren. Now in her fifties, she has been building on Jones's legacy of agitation against the coal industry since the 1970s. In the 1990s, she became one of the first public figures in Appalachia to publicly oppose mountaintop removal mining; this was an unpopular and risky stand for a writer with “favorite daughter” status who continues to live in the region. Since then, Giardina has been on the forefront of the issue throughout Appalachia, inspiring other artists to fight back. So groundbreaking were her early protests that she is often referred to as “the godmother of the anti–mountaintop removal movement.”

The forcefulness of her advocacy sometimes catches her admirers by surprise. A self-admitted introvert, Giardina is a writer more in the tradition of Harper Lee than Truman Capote. Shy and reserved, she doesn't court publicity, doesn't enjoy being in front of large crowds, doesn't relish making small talk at receptions. Instead, her passions come alive in more intimate settings.

Her living room invites a level of ease. Hers is a writer's house, unapologetically lived in and worked in. Books and other objects of importance dominate; a copy of Ian McEwan's
Atonement
lies on her end table. Giardina is a West Virginian to the core; a DVD of the recently released movie
We Are Marshall
sits on a bookcase. Her beloved animals—one dog and three cats—creep around corners and hide under tables at will. Phyllis, her loyal mutt, rests her black-and-white speckled head on Giardina's lap. “Phyllis is just full of love,” Giardina explains, scratching behind the dog's ear. “That's how she got adopted. I went to the pound and all the puppies were playing, but she came and just looked up at me, like, ‘Play with me.'”

Such compassion is surely behind her objections against the coal industry; compassion for her people, compassion for her native land. Giardina's is a Christ-centered identity: “to bind up the
broken hearts and set at liberty them that are bruised,” in the words of Isaiah. But her theology of mercy has its limits. Out of this river of sympathy runs a steady stream of righteous indignation more akin to Christ's cleansing the temple. It's certainly something she'd like to see happen in West Virginia.

“I will be as blunt as I can be,” she once wrote in the
Charleston Gazette
. “Mountaintop removal is evil, and those who support it are supporting evil…I puzzle over the modern-day difference between a terrorist and someone who supports mountaintop removal. One destroys with a bomb, the other with a fountain pen, dynamite, and a dragline. God help us.”
¹

Such language illustrates that Giardina isn't your average protester. Her rallying cries come from a very deep place, a cavern of faith that she has found refuge in since childhood.

Reared in the Methodist Church with its Wesleyan creed of service, Giardina eventually gravitated toward the Episcopal denomination. During college, she began discovering the works of theologians such as Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who became involved in the German Resistance movement and a conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler. The plot was eventually discovered, and Bonhoeffer was hanged for his participation. Giardina found Bonhoeffer's witness so inspiring that she based her fourth novel,
Saints and Villains
, on his life story.

“The church radicalized me,” Giardina says. She was so taken with her faith that she eventually received a Master's in Divinity degree from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria. More recently, she has become an ordained deacon or, as she prefers to call it, “a sort of servant minister.”

“The phrase in the prayer book is ‘Interpret the world to the church and the church to the world,'” she says. “It's a totally different way to advocate, with a spiritual point of view.”

But Giardina's advocacy has always focused on the spiritual. A large portion of her faith and activism rests on the concept of environmental stewardship, or the responsibility of Christians to support the “protection of the environment and…the sanctity
of creation.”
²
It is also the inspiration behind her choice to agitate through her art, in the many articles, op-ed pieces, and novels she has written over the years.

One of those novels,
Storming Heaven
, published in 1987, chronicles the fight for unionization in West Virginia during the early 1900s, in particular the real-life Battle of Blair Mountain, an uprising of 10,000 West Virginia miners. The striking miners, after years of enduring low wages, poor working conditions, sickness, and even starvation, take up arms against the mine owners and the corrupt state government. The federal government eventually intervenes, sending in troops and airplanes with bombs, and finally quelling the rebellion.

“The U.S. government dont give a damn what goes on down here,” one of Giardina's characters laments. “They dont even know we're here.” Another, in agreeing to fight against federal forces, responds, “So what? Hit's a lousy bunch of Republicans is all it is. Hit's a rich man's government and hit's a coal operators' government. We dont have to take nothing offn it. Aint yall never heard of the Declaration of Independence? Hit's our god-given right.”

The God-given right to unionize is something that appears repeatedly in Giardina's work. Like many in the mountains, the union is something she holds dear, which is why she laments the absence of its once-stabilizing influence in today's mining industry.

“The union has disappeared from Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia,” says Giardina. “Cecil Roberts is a big part of that problem. Unions on the whole have lost power, but he's been really ineffective.”
³

On the subject of the union, Giardina continues: “They've really sold out to the companies on mountaintop removal. That was the worst thing they ever did, when they let surface miners be part of the union, because they didn't used to be. That was a disaster. And the unions have been in the pockets of the strip mines ever since.”

The subject of unionization was also a major theme in Giardina's
follow-up to
Storming Heaven. The Unquiet Earth
was released to widespread critical acclaim in 1992, winning Giardina an American Book Award for fiction.
The Unquiet Earth
picks up where
Storming Heaven
left off, documenting union-busting efforts and further abuses of power by the coal industry. One such transgression is a neglected slurry impoundment that is near a community. In a chilling climax, the dam bursts and washes away nearly 150 lives. Once again, Giardina uses fiction to remind readers of an actual event, in this case the Buffalo Creek Disaster, which killed 125 people and left thousands more homeless in Logan County, West Virginia, in February 1972. The final scene, describing a character's evacuation by helicopter, remains eerily relevant: “The mountains are falling away below us. They are ripped and torn like a rumpled gray quilt where the cotton batting shows through. The crown of Trace Mountain is gone, a flat rock moon pocked by green ponds of acid water.”

Like the devastation of mountaintop removal, that disaster might have been avoided had more people raised their voices in dissent. Giardina believes that Appalachians have been disenfranchised for so long that they no longer feel empowered to fight back.

“We're fatalists in the mountains,” she says. “It's all up to the good Lord. People pray and get saved and wait for the Lord to fix everything. I think that attitude grows out of powerlessness. If we were Vermont or New Hampshire, we'd have town meetings and local political control and own our own land. This wouldn't be happening. But we're not, we're a third world country.”

Such civilizations require visionary and moral political leadership to lift them above their social woes. Like many other states throughout Appalachia, West Virginia has historically been lacking in political leadership. Traditionally a Democratic state, most of its politicians at both the state and federal levels pledge some sort of allegiance to the coal industry.

Giardina challenged this conventional wisdom when she made the leap from art to politics in her run for governor in 2000.
Knowing she'd never make it past the starting gate as a Democrat, Giardina ran as a third-party candidate in order to get into the general election and force a dialogue on mountaintop removal and other issues at the debates.

Her intentions had the Democratic Party in an uproar. Fearing she'd siphon valuable votes from their candidate, two Democratic officials asked her to lunch. In exchange for dropping her gubernatorial bid, the party would guarantee her a seat in the state legislature for her district. Giardina left the meal shocked and disillusioned and even more committed to her candidacy.

As the Mountain Party candidate, she ran on a platform of strict populism, the likes of which had rarely been seen in West Virginia since Hubert Humphrey and John F. Kennedy campaigned in the state in 1960. Championing such issues as better access to health care, smaller schools, and greater regulation and taxation of the coal and timber industries, Giardina barnstormed the state to gain support.

As the powers that be would have it, she managed to appear in only two of the debates. “Twice on statewide television I got to get up and talk for two minutes on mountaintop removal. A year and a half of work to get to speak for two minutes,” she recalls wearily, running her small hand down her frowning face.

Her frustration in the gubernatorial race was all the more galling, Giardina says, because of what she decries as the lack of backbone among West Virginia politicians at the federal level. “[Senator Robert] Byrd is terrible on all coal issues,” she says. “He's such a Constitutionalist, he took a good, principled stand on the war, but he's never been good on coal. And [Senator] Jay Rockefeller has always been spineless on coal.”

She sighs in exasperation at the lack of presidential leadership on the issue. “I can't stand George W. Bush, but I'll have to say, he's not any worse than Clinton or Carter on mountaintop removal. Carter may have thought he was going to stop mountaintop removal, but clearly he didn't. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, none of them ain't worth a damn thing when it comes to coal.”

In the end, Giardina received 2 percent of the popular vote for governor and a decade's worth of disillusionment with the political process. She also became pessimistic about the prospects of mountaintop removal being banned any time soon.

Her job, she believes, is to keep sounding the battle cry. And like her spiritual great-grandmother Mother Jones before her, Giardina hopes that she also can give birth to a new generation of agitators.

Denise Giardina talking…

I grew up in the Black Wolf coal camp in McDowell County, the southernmost county in the state.
⁴
The damage to the land was already starting to be evident, although mountaintop removal hadn't started yet. But even as a small child, for example, it made me mad that I wasn't allowed to play in the creek, because the creek was full of mine acid and all that. I remember one time my brother and I were mad at another kid, so we made Kool-Aid for him out of the creek water. I was aware for as long as I could remember. Living like that didn't seem right, and it didn't seem like things like that happened in other places, from my reading about them. There was already some strip mining, and I didn't like that either, but actually during that time period the most vivid sort of environmental damage was from gob piles.
⁵
I remember thinking as a kid how bad they stunk and how awful they looked, and I couldn't understand why they were allowed to put them there. I don't remember anybody talking much about the environment when I was little, except to say the creek was dirty or something like that.