Charles was born in 1939 and grew up in a company house in a nearby coal camp called Big Creek, located about where Rukeyser drew “Nincompoop’s Road” on her map. Like everyone I would meet, he wanted to know what I was doing in Gauley Bridge, so I told him I was looking into Hawk’s Nest and Rukeyser’s poem. He said he preached a funeral a few years ago for a woman whose daddy died of silicosis in the tunnel. He mentioned this fact in his sermon, and after the service, some of the woman’s relatives came up and thanked him. They hadn’t known.
I suddenly thought of the cycle’s poem titled “Mearl Blankenship,” about a “thin friendly man” who worked on the tunnel and served on the Gauley Bridge Committee. I asked Charles whether he had any relatives by that name. “That was my daddy,” he said. I told him about Nancy’s letter to Muriel, in which she wrote, “Stress, through the stor[y] of Blankenship . . . the necessity of a thorough investigation in order to indict the Co., its lawyers and doctors and undertaker, how the company cheated these menout [sic] of their lives.”
“Well, what about that?” said Charles with wonder. “He possibly did . . .” He told me that his dad, whose nickname was Windy, had died at the age of forty-one. “He took that heart attack right over there,” Charles said, gesturing toward some couches in the lobby. That night his father had told Sheriff Conley, the hotel owner, over and over: “I’m hurting so bad in my chest.” Through the night, Conley fed him an entire bottle of aspirin pills. By the time he was rushed to a medical clinic around 2 A.M., Mearl had just hours to live.
I read “Mearl Blankenship” to Charles. Most of it consists of a letter that “Mearl,” a steel nipper who laid track in the tunnel, wrote to a newspaper in the city about his condition. At that point, he was losing weight and feared the worst. When I got through reading the poem, Charles said: “That wouldn’t be my dad. He never worked like that over there.” I asked him who he thought the guy in the poem was, and he said he didn’t have a clue. “It’s very unusual because all the Blankenships I knew.” He asked me for a photocopy, and then we discussed the brand-new aorta he got for free from a hospital in Cleveland.
That evening, I attended Charles’s church with a friend. The sanctuary of Brownsville Holiness, perched on a pitched hillside along the Gauley River, is adorned with red wall-to-wall carpet and a single, simple wooden cross. Services kicked off with an hour’s worth of live karaoke for the Lord, as congregants took turns singing at the altar, backed by members of a band who arrived late and casually set up around them. Then they all prayed in tongues. After, Charles shouted, “To know Christ is like coming out of a dark tunnel into the light! There is power in the blood of the Lamb! In the city where the Lamb is the light, you won’t need no electric there!” On multiple occasions, he stopped the service cold and asked both my Jewish companion and myself to approach the altar and give witness. I smiled with a Presbyterian’s customary politeness and declined. “Maybe next time,” said my good-natured friend.
Brother Nathan, with his thin, tawny hair and slow, easy voice, rose to read a scene from scripture. Simon and the other disciples were gathering up their fishing nets after nary a nibble all night, just as Jesus told them to throw the nets back out again, for no apparent reason. “Nevertheless,” said Simon, “at thy word I will let down the net.” Brother Nathan told us, “The facts will scare you. We need to put aside the facts. It’s time to say, ‘Nevertheless.’ I don’t care what the enemy throws at me. The devil can come at me every which way, but nevertheless, I’m going on with God, I’m going on with God, and I’m going all the way . . . Nevertheless, nevertheless, nevertheless . . .”
Weeks later, I still wished I’d gone to the altar, that I’d known the right words about the tunnel to take there. Instead, I pieced together a Mearl Blankenship from census records—a white baby born “Orin M” in 1908 in the lumber company camp called Swiss. Ten years later, the family was farming; in 1930, “Murrell” was twenty-one and literate, living with his parents in the Falls district of Fayette among coal miners, dam construction laborers, painters, lumber ticks, and dairy farmers. By 1940, ten years after tunnel construction began, “Myal” was an unemployed cement mixer, married to Clara, with whom he had three children, including an infant, Charles. He worked only twenty weeks in 1939 and earned $800. He died of a heart attack on February 3, 1950, and was buried at Line Creek. Charles was ten years old.
I brought a copy of “Mearl Blankenship” back to the Conley on a cold spring day several weeks after my initial visit to Gauley Bridge—“a rough old day,” as Pastor Charles put it. I found him eating cheese puffs out of a coffee filter in the dim hotel lobby. He welcomed me back, took the poem, and this time read it to himself silently. He finally looked up, tearful, and said, “I’d say that was my dad. I had no idea. It stands to reason he worked there, because there was no other work back then.”
What Charles remembered of his father was his sleeping body glimpsed through the doorway of their coal camp house. Light filtered through some kind of sheer curtain. Once, Charles watched a black snake slither out of the ceiling and dangle in midair over Mearl as he slept. Charles repeated the story about Sheriff Conley and the bottle of aspirin. He repeated the story about the family who didn’t know that their kin worked at Hawk’s Nest. When I finally got up to leave, he held my hand tight, locked into my gaze, and told me that he loved me. I told him I loved him back.
George Robinson holds all their strength together: / To fight the companies to make somehow a future. // “At any rate, it is inadvisable to keep a community of dying / persons intact.”
While reporting this story, I learned that two of Nancy Naumburg’s photos from Gauley Bridge had resurfaced at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The first is a shot of a town where black tunnel workers lived, Vanetta, which Rukeyser had marked with a cluster of Xs on her map. Raw wood structures line a thin strip of land between the railroad and the Gauley River. The air holds fog—or is it smoke? A scatter of people sits waiting for a train in the distance, where the tracks vanish into perspective.
After my first night at the Conley, I woke early and started down the abandoned rail line toward Vanetta. The cool, misty air sang with the frenzy of mating frogs and feeding birds. A dripping rock wall rose up on my right; wild blue phlox, oyster mushrooms, and sandy beaches spread down to the river on my left. After crossing a trestle, I began to pass into the frame of Nancy’s photograph.
It was the same bend in the track that Leon Brewer, a statistician with the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, rounded in 1934. The apocalyptic dispatch he filed in confidence soon afterward counted 101 residents of Vanetta, occupying “41 tumble-down hovels, [with] 14 children, 44 adult females, and 43 adult males.” All but ten of the men were sick. “Support for the community comes from the earnings of 15 of the males, 14 of whom suffer from silicosis. Thirteen are engaged on a road construction project 18 miles away and are forced to walk to and from work, leaving them but 5 hours a day for labor. Moreover many . . . are frequently too weak to lift a sledge hammer.”
According to Brewer, these black families froze through the winter, starved and begged for both food and work. (One white local told me that he used to hunt for duck in the area where some of the sick, hungry workers camped on flat rocks next to the river; once, they asked him to bring them back a duck, and instead he returned with crow as a joke.) Brewer called for direct relief, “despite the protests of the white people,” and an immediate improvement in housing and sanitation. He declared that anyone who wanted to return home should be given passage and assistance with reconnecting to his or her home community. “At any rate,” he wrote, “it is inadvisable socially to keep a community of dying persons intact. Every means should be exerted to move these families, so that they may be in communities where they will be accepted, and where the wives and children will find adjustment easier.”
The other Naumburg image that resurfaced depicts the interior of a worker’s home in Vanetta: George Robinson’s kitch
en. Robinson, who came from Georgia, was the closest thing to a media spokesperson that the black tunnel worker ever had. In the frame of the photo, light falls onto a cookstove with kettles at the ready, the papered-over wall of Robinson’s board-and-batten home arrayed with essential cooking implements: a whisk, a muffin tin, a roasting pan. A white rag dries on a line in the light.
I conjure the scene in the shack. I see George sitting, reciting what he told Congress and the juries, almost rote by now. His breathing is labored. I see his wife, Mary—is she distracted by thoughts of dinner, whether she should offer these women something to eat? Has a white lady ever been in her kitchen? Maybe they reminded her of the social workers who came from Gauley Bridge. Maybe Nancy is setting up her camera, her head ducking under the black cloth, as she peers through the ground glass, trying to get the focus right. Why, Mary wonders, had she chosen that wall? What did she read there? Did Mary want it to be read? Muriel sits, jotting down what George tells her in a notebook, wanting to capture it all, but also attempting to maintain eye contact—aware at every moment of the discomfort her privilege brings into the room. Was theirs a welcome visit, I wonder, or did the presence of these two white women disrupt the family’s hard-won and precarious sense of sanctuary?
Muriel and Nancy made this visit in the spring that followed Robinson’s congressional testimony; by June he was in the hospital, and by July 1 he was dead of “heart trouble” at fifty-one. On July 12, they buried him at Vanetta. I never found George Robinson on any census, nor do I know if he had children, or where I might begin to search for any surviving relatives. The only picture of him I ever came across was an Acme press photo from the D.C. hearing in which he is misidentified in the caption as “Arthur” (for that matter, his last name was misspelled in the congressional record). He sits at a table with papers spread around him, wearing a plaid woolen coat and button-up shirt. His arm is raised midgesture and his mouth paused midspeech as he describes to the labor subcommittee chair the conditions under which he worked and contracted silicosis.
Robinson testified that he ran a sinker drill straight down into the rock, that it was operated dry, and that he wasn’t given any protective gear. He witnessed two men crushed by falling rock. “The boss was always telling us to ‘hurry, hurry, hurry.’” He described the dusty trees in the labor camps where black workers lived around the tunnel mouth, the shack rousters paid by the company to physically coerce the sick men to work. Sheriff Conley came around and ran off those who couldn’t continue, he said, men so weak they had to “stand up at the sides of trees to hold themselves up.” He remembered one who died under a rock. Robinson knew of 118 who perished, had personally helped bury 35, and estimated a total death toll of 500. He said the company burned down the camps when the project was completed, so the workers would scatter. They even “put some of the men in jail because they wouldn’t vacate the houses.”
Bernard Jones—a white man who lost his father, uncle, and three brothers to silicosis—gave new context to this exodus story in a 1984 oral history with occupational health specialist Dr. Martin Cherniack. The white merchants at Gauley Bridge had liked the idea of the tunnel workers at first, said Jones, because they thought money was to be made from them. But eventually, they got “irritated” and accused them of “thieving,” stockpiling stolen goods under a nearby railroad bridge. The merchants and professionals wrote an open letter denouncing the media for printing “propaganda” about their town, decrying the “undesirables, mainly Negroes” who had taken up residence there. Still, some of the black workers who lacked either the health or the means to go elsewhere attempted to stay at Vanetta. “Who it was I do not know,” said Bernard, “but somebody in Gauley Bridge went across the river in Vanetta, and they put a big cross up there on the hillside and wrapped it with rags and soaked it with gasoline and set it on fire. Well, these black people, when they seen that cross burning, that scared them. And the next morning one group right after another came down that railroad track headed for the bus station, going back home to the South.”
And now here I was, the latest white witness-invader, tromping in the opposite direction, back into Vanetta, where not a single structure was left. I saw a path that led from the tracks up the hillside and into the woods. Rukeyser’s poem “George Robinson: Blues” tells me to look to the hills for the graveyard, and so I followed its lines into what was becoming a warm, cloudless spring day. I found it: a cemetery covering the whole mountain. I saw a corroded gravestone from 1865 and the fresh grave of an infant buried the day before, but I never found George Robinson’s.
He shall not be diminished, never; / I shall give a mouth to my son.
In press photos and newsreels from 1936, Emma Jones appeared white, beautiful, and hungry. Sometimes she wore a little fur around her neck. She—who had lost three sons and was soon to lose both her brother and her husband—had become the white face of the tunnel’s suffering in the American mind, the media’s “Migrant Mother” of this particular disaster.
When construction began, she and her husband, Charley, lived at Gamoca (jah-MO-kah), a little town with a company store and a swinging bridge over the river, just down the tracks from Vanetta. She had nine children at the time and would go on to have two more. Charley and her sons worked in the coal mines, when there was work (which there wasn’t). That is to say, they bootlegged. It was one of Charley’s customers, a foreman at the tunnel, who convinced them to look for jobs at Hawk’s Nest. Charley became a water boy. Cecil, the oldest son, was a driller. The youngest, Shirley, a nipper. And Owen, the middle son, had a mean streak and disliked blacks, so the company supervisors made him a foreman and gave him a ball bat.
The brothers got sick around the same time; their father held out a few years longer. Emma went out to Route 60 and begged for money to buy them chest X-rays. Before Shirley died—so skeletal Emma could lift and move him around the house like a lamp—he made his mother promise to have the family doctor perform an autopsy on his body. The doctor, in fact, preserved the lungs of all three brothers, hardened like cement, in jars as proof of their disease. The Jones Boys. That’s what the doctor’s son and his wife called the disembodied lungs after the old doctor died, I guess to make the whole thing feel less atrocious. The lungs sat in the couple’s basement for years like forgotten pickles—until they loaded them into the back of their pickup truck, drove them up to the dump at the top of Cotton Hill Mountain, and chucked them over the side. “They sure made a racket when they went down over the mountain,” the woman said later in an oral history, “but it sounded like just one jar broke.” I used to live on the back side of Cotton Hill and spent long summer afternoons searching for them, to no avail. I imagined the ghost lungs fluttering through the forest at night like little sets of wings, surrounded by halations of shimmering silica dust.
I learned that many of the Jones family’s descendants still lived in the area. People like Anita Jones Cecil, one of Charley and Emma’s grandchildren. I hesitated before contacting her, worried that I would disrupt her grieving process, or that she wouldn’t want to talk to me; worse yet, that she’d want me to stop talking. But when I found her on Facebook one day, it seemed like maybe she’d been waiting awhile to tell this story. “My family is chained to that place by ghosts,” she wrote in the message box. “Hawk’s Nest chained my grandmother and my father to Fayette County through generational poverty . . . I have three sisters and two brothers, and I am the only one that went to college. We didn’t have a chance.”
Anita agreed to meet up at the library in downtown Charleston, where we settled next to a window in a dim, empty meeting room. She struck me as graceful and strong, with long brown hair and brown eyes, deep dimples, and a gaze that felt like a steady hand. She said, “This is what my dad told me, and what I actually think: they actively sought people who were poor, who were desperate and uneducated, and shipped them up here. Expendable people. People that nobody would miss.”
Together, we looked at Rukeyser’s m
ap. I pointed out the house labeled “Mrs. Jones’.” Anita told me it was the small farm that Emma and Charley bought for $1,700 with their settlement money, near present-day Brownsville Holiness. They received roughly twice the compensation that a black family would have received, but there was still nothing left over to live on, and Charley had to go back to work in the coal mines to pay off their debts. For a short time, while she was pregnant with Wilford (Anita’s father), Emma worked at a WPA sewing factory in Gauley Bridge to support the family. Her oldest surviving son later said that she gave away bags of potatoes and flour to needy neighbors until the money ran out, and the family was right back where they started.
Charley died in 1941, leaving Emma a single mother with three children under eighteen. Then their house burned down. Emma turned to the Holy Spirit to get her through those times—she prayed and spoke in tongues. Eventually, she remarried and settled in a four-room coal camp house in Jodie, and life got a little easier. She had one of the nicest homes in town, with red tar shingles, a little fishpond, and a colony of elephant ears that she grew and shared with her neighbors. Anita may have never met her grandmother, but she grew up in that house, raised by her grandmother’s ghost.
The Best American Essays 2017 Page 20