The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  Anita said her father used to warn her not to depend on anybody else, not even a man, for anything. “You have to make it on your own”—that’s what the tunnel taught Wilford Jones. But Anita thought it taught him something else too. “My dad was always going on and on about how you should treat everybody the same, everybody’s equal no matter what the race, religion, any of that kind of stuff. And I think that was directly related to his experiences as a little child.” Anita said her father was clever, could do math in his head. He started college but couldn’t figure out a way to pay for it, so he came home to help support the family. The only work he could find was in the coal mines, and by the time Anita was a child, he was sick with black lung. She told me it didn’t hold him back. Once, while he healed from heart surgery, “The miners went on strike, and he wanted to go out and picket with staples in his chest,” she said. “That’s the kind of people we’re dealing with when you talk about my family.” Near the end, perhaps delirious from lack of oxygen, Wilford got the idea that he was the actual son of Mother Jones, the union organizer who radicalized after she lost her four sons and husband to yellow fever. Some people had a theory that she had given her children up instead, to shield them from the dangers of her work. It became part of Wilford’s truth that he was one of those sacrificed sons. Before he died at the age of fifty-six, he told his family to open his chest when he was gone, just as they’d done to his brothers, to perform an autopsy and prove he had black lung. He told them to seek compensation. “I think he dwelled on the past and thought about how things should have been and was sad over it,” said Anita. “I personally, I’m a little bit mad.”

  Anita channeled that rage into a career in social services—she became an economic service worker at the West Virginia Division of Rehabilitation Services, processing relief applications and determining eligibility for Social Security and SSI. When Anita drives past the Alloy plant today, she thinks, “That’s who killed my family. That’s where our lives went . . . . I watch it happen over and over again in West Virginia, where families of coal miners, families of Hawk’s Nest, will lose their primary breadwinner and they just struggle and struggle and struggle until they die.” After all the death, after all the wealth was shipped out of the tunnel, she said, nothing was ever given back to Gauley Bridge—no investment in education or infrastructure. “Instead of being developed, it died with those men.”

  We read Rukeyser’s poem “Absalom” together, facing each other in two chairs before a window overlooking the main intersection of Charleston’s modest downtown. Somewhere in the shadows of the room, I like to think, Muriel was there—her wavy hair pushed back from her wide forehead, a dimple marking her soft chin. Anita held a photocopy of the poem in her hands, while I held the recorder. She leaned forward, reading half silently and half out loud lines from her grandmother’s congressional testimony, jump-cut with fragments of spells from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. When Anita got to lines that interested her, she stopped and free-associated.

  One of these was a passage that Rukeyser appropriated from the ancient text, meant to ensure that the hearts of the deceased were given back to them before rebirth. Then the deceased get their mouths back, and their limbs stretch out with an electrical charge. They are reembodied, with the power to move between portals of worlds freely. “I will be in the sky . . .” the dead chant.

  I asked Anita where she found hope in this story—her story, any of them—because sometimes I simply could not. She said, “Have you ever really looked at Gauley Mountain, how beautiful it is? That’s where I find my hope, yes. You think to yourself, God’s here. He’s here. He’s not forgotten any one of those souls that died.” She handed me a Bible verse she’d written out: “Fear not, therefore, for there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; nothing hidden that shall not be known.”

  “That’s what I think of when I think of Hawk’s Nest,” Anita said. “I’m not afraid. ’Cause I know everything will come out eventually.”

  I take her to mean, “God knows what that company did.”

  A few weeks later, I walked three-abreast on the train tracks with Anita and Rita Jones Hanshaw, Anita’s sister, toward Gamoca Cemetery, where most of the Jones family is buried. The day threatened rain; the Gauley flowed deep and brown in flood, though we were still months from the June storms that would bury Belva in water. The sisters debated the way up to the graves. Anita tore through the thickening understory in one direction, while Rita and I started up a rugged logging path. Both women found it at once: the array of bathtub-size depressions in the earth, clusters of metal markers nestled among saplings, with blank spaces where the names once were. Tree roots heaved up and twisted the iron fences encircling the burial plots. We came to a slight clearing, shaded by giant hemlock and carpeted in Easter lilies—there in a row, Shirley, Cecil, Owen, and Charley lay buried. A family member with money had recently invested in flat stone markers, engraved with their names. Emma’s body rests with her second family in nearby London, West Virginia.

  Rita, the spitting image of her grandmother, spoke of her thirst for justice; of Shirley, who was working in the tunnel to save money for college; the thrill she felt a few years ago when she first heard the sound of her grandfather’s voice, caught in an old newsreel someone posted on YouTube. Around that time, she and her sister Tammy began digging in the archives for the death certificates of tunnel workers, as a kind of self-fashioned therapy. “We just feel that us doing the research, and finding out what happened, it helps us heal. I know it was before we were born, but we still have feelings about this. It’s our grandparents, people we didn’t get to know. And through this we feel like we’re growing to know them.”

  For those given to voyages : these roads / discover gullies, invade, Where does it go now? / Now turn upstream twenty-five yards. Now road again. / Ask the man on the road. Saying, That cornfield?

  The white cemeteries wouldn’t accept the growing number of black dead, and the slave graveyard at Summersville was already full. So Union Carbide paid an undertaker named H. C. White $55 for each tunnel worker he buried in a field on his mother’s farm in neighboring Nicholas County. In 1935 a photo of cornstalks and mass graves on the White Farm made its way into the mainstream press and eventually caught the concern of a congressman from New York, who called for an inquiry into the accusations of corporate criminality at Hawk’s Nest. Members of the Gauley Bridge Committee and others gave nine days’ worth of official testimony, but Congress never took up the labor subcommittee’s recommendation to investigate. (The West Virginia legislature passed a weak silicosis statute in 1935, essentially set up to protect employers from similar future disasters.) Nevertheless, a trove of eyewitness and victims’ accounts, which would have otherwise gone missing, had been put down on record. And without that, it’s hard to imagine Rukeyser’s “Book of the Dead”—or much of any memory at all.

  The White family sold their farm in 1954, and the record remained more or less as it was until 1972. That year, the state surveyed for a new four-lane road and found human remains in its path, sixty-three possible graves. A state contractor sifted through the soil for bones and placed them in three-foot boxes, reburying them adjacent to the highway, along the towering pink sandstone cliffs that edge Summersville Lake. H. C. White’s son, the local undertaker of record, signed off on the whole thing. And there they remained, forgotten again, until 2012.

  Thirty miles from Gamoca, at a highway exit called Whippoorwill, I met up with Charlotte Yeager, who played a role in the recent rediscovery of the Hawk’s Nest burials. I parked next to a guardrail strewn with the Weed-Eaten heads of wild daisies. Charlotte, the publisher of the Nicholas Chronicle, emerged from a gray minivan with a pin on her chest in the shape of a ramp. It was April, and Richwood (another town hit hard by the June floods) had just hosted its big feed.

  Charlotte heard the rumors about the bodies of black workers buried in the hills when she moved from Charleston to Summersville twenty years ago. “Ev
erybody knew it, you know. It was just kept hush-hush because they were embarrassed.” She tried a few times to locate them but with no luck. Then one day, she read a story in the Charleston paper about two guys—likewise haunted by the missing men—who had led a reporter to this site, claiming it held some of the workers’ graves. One of them, Richard Hartman, later told me that the first time he went to Whippoorwill, he had to pick his way over rusting appliances and piles of roadkill that the highway department had been tossing over the side of the road for years. The sun’s glint on a metal grave marker between the trees and trash was all that gave it away.

  After that newspaper story, word got out, and a group of community members arose around a common desire to rededicate the cemetery. They included not only Charlotte, but local high school students, religious leaders, filmmakers, government officials, and descendants of white tunnel victims—like the Joneses. They cleared the area around the graves; the state came out and did a radar survey of the site. Rita Jones Hanshaw, a schoolteacher, and her sister Tammy began digging into vital records for names of workers. Plans for a memorial park were drawn up and then realized at a 2012 ceremony honoring the dead. A white barefoot preacher from Summersville joined with a black minister from Beckley to anoint the site with water from the New River; local youth lit a candle for each departed soul. It had taken eighty-two years, but hopes ran high that the workers’ families might be reunited with their loved ones across death.

  Charlotte led me through an elegant archway, past a stone engraved with the story of Hawk’s Nest, and up a short path to several neat rows of depressions, each marked with a wooden cross and an orange surveyor’s flag. After days of rain, the depressions held clear, still water that reminded me of baptismal fonts in a church sanctuary. Hemlock, beech, and red maple saplings grew among and inside them; moss and ferns cushioned lichen-draped boulders forming natural benches around the burials. Sunlight dappled the glossy leaves of rhododendrons. It would have been almost peaceful if not for the rushing traffic above our heads. But it was beautiful, in spite of itself.

  Later, as I sat in my car next to the creek that drained Whippoorwill into the lake, I thought with disgust: I swim here in the summer. Then I got a random call from a friend who had lost the hard drive that contained her life’s digital history, who sought my advice for its recovery. I told her that the thing about data is it’s not invisible; it’s there, in traces. Every byte has its physical form. Poetry, I remember thinking, fills in the gaps.

  Defense is sight; widen the lens and see / standing over the land myths of identity,  new signals, processes:

  The Gauley Bridge Historical Society is headquartered in some shambles in a narrow green building on Route 60, next to a bridge that burned twice in the Civil War. I had heard that the old museum held documents relating to Hawk’s Nest, so I’d made an appointment to visit. It was raining when I walked in, and Nancy Taylor sat at a desk among empty display cases and stacks of files. She looked at me like the public school teacher she is and said, “How can I help you?” in a tone that sounded like, “Impress me.” I told her I’d come to see the material she mentioned on the phone, and she started handing me bundles of papers.

  I took them to a table and began flipping through one of the stacks. I saw typewritten lists of names, mortality tables, narratives, and I felt the quickening of adrenaline through my blood. I started urgently taking photos for later study, but it soon became clear that the pages—which appeared to be multiple sections of a single text—were in jumbled disarray: faded legal-size photocopies of names, some barely legible, and hopelessly out of order. Under the tin roof in the rain, I spent hours of the afternoon reconstructing the document. Nancy seemed into it and said she didn’t have anything else to do. The chief of police even dropped by to add his two cents. What he said, I don’t remember. All I could think about was the sorting. Finally, I put the last of its 227 sheets into place, which turned out to be the title page: Accident and Mortality Data on Rinehart and Dennis Company Employees and Miscellaneous Data on Silicosis, Copy No. 2, March 10, 1936. Nancy and I cheered. She let me borrow the manuscript (I think she was grateful for the new order). I felt its preciousness in my hands, its presence in my car on the way to the copy shop.

  When I finally read it, I could see it was the company’s version of everything—their racially segregated tallies of employees who died in West Virginia from 1930 to 1935 (110 total); their count of “alleged” silicosis victims (14); their estimation of the number of men they admit actually died of the disease (basically none). Line by line, they rebutted the testimony of the Gauley Bridge Committee’s members, tearing into them with audaciously racist and belittling commentary, blaming the victims and “radical agitators” for all the trouble. Of their leader, George Robinson, they wrote that he was faking it all, in order to enjoy “notoriety, travel without cost to himself, and the pleasure of making an impression on white people for probably the first time.” One section included a list of the deceased for whom H. C. White had served as undertaker: sixty-one employees (fifty-six black, five white) and five camp followers, including three women. Thirty-six he buried at the White Farm; the remainder were placed in other local cemeteries or shipped out of state to towns like Syria, Virginia; Union, South Carolina; Knoxville, Tennessee . . . This list was flawed and, like the congressional hearing, not enough, but it was a beginning.

  It was the beginning of more than memory. I’d found the company’s narrative, yes, but it held the names, each one the beginning of a spell against the narrative of disaster. And against shame. Each one, a link to descendants for whom this list likely mattered a whole lot more than it did even to me. Here was the evidence one could intone. Like Rukeyser’s poem, the list ran counter to the version of events where we all crawl off and die quietly. It held the potential to move that story, and it had been sitting here this whole time.

  How had it made its way into this halfway shut-down museum? Nancy casually mentioned the name of a mutual acquaintance of ours who might know more about its origins, so I called him up. “I got [those materials] in a way that I probably shouldn’t have,” he told me. “I’ll be real cryptic here. I was able to get into the rooms at the power station where they stored all the records, and I borrowed a lot of stuff one night, and I shared that with a number of folks . . . And then I put the originals back.” This was back in the 1980s. Apparently, he said, the company gathered every scrap of information they could find about the disaster and put it all in a room that “looked like a jail cell,” under the power house.

  and this our region, // desire, field, beginning.  Name and road, / communication to these many men, / as epilogue, seeds of unending love.

  I used to be able to walk so close to the dam that I could practically climb across it. At its edge sat a creepy beige trailer with a single light that could be seen from the gorge’s rim at night. On a wet day in April, I set out for it; I wanted to see the dam as it strained against the spring rains. The river ran wicked under the bridge where I parked and then started down a gravel road thronged with red warning signs: extreme danger—if you notice changing conditions, get out!

  I had pushed levers called questions and the story had opened. How unqualified, how unprepared I felt for what I had found. Until that day at the Gauley Bridge Historical Society, few words had adhered to the uncounted dead, so I could abstract them in the “supposed” or “alleged” past. Suddenly their scale had become specific, and therefore vast. I knew their families were out there, in my mind always somewhere south of here, living—either in full knowledge of their family’s inheritance, or in ignorance of it. Their trauma, I presumed, could be traced down through the generations. Yet none of this suffering was mine, was it? “Mine.” I feared I was reinforcing some kind of savior narrative I had about my own white self—a middle-class woman who just wanted to “do the right thing,” not embarrass anybody, most especially herself. I worried that, instead of resurrecting, I had desecrated the resting dead—
ghosts who had never elected me their spokesperson. The names of the Hawk’s Nest dead gave me powers I wasn’t sure I deserved.

  Birds of prey called from the Appalachian jungle, the purple bells of the paulownia trees rang out as I walked, listening for the dead. I turned to look behind me. I rattled my keys. What was I afraid of? The dam of history, bursting. I felt it cracking open, an inner chamber of the disaster that I hadn’t known existed. I was afraid—of the woods, of the story, of the names.

  I saw that a new barbed-wire gate had gone up to stop public access to the top of the dam, so I headed down a trail toward the river’s edge, where waves dashed boulders like the starry backs of breaching whales. These are roads to take, Rukeyser wrote. I believed her. I took the roads. I thought of my country. And it had taken me to this terrible June, still looking to name what I’d found in the tunnel, for some cathartic shudder of light. The document has expanded, but into a longer list of undervalued, erased lives, as the rivers in West Virginia run their banks, as #WeAreOrlando and #BlackLivesMatter shout over and over to #SayTheirNames. Soon I will wake to #AltonSterling and #PhilandoCastile. Soon I will wake to Donald Trump’s nomination for president. The same white supremacy that allowed, condoned, and covered up the mass killing at Hawk’s Nest still asserts its dominance. The road of history is flooded with all of this, and so am I. But this is the road I must go down. It’s the only one we have.

  I drew closer to the water’s rush and caught a view of the dam through the trees. I stopped and stared, and as I lifted my camera to record, I swear I heard the dam’s steel gates groan. Those red signs flashed in my mind: keep away!keep alive! I ran scurrying back up the path. Circular clusters of fallen paulownia blossoms lit the way like lavender spotlights. With relief, I reached my car, and then I heard and felt a thunderous thump in the gorge behind me—something geological in scale fell. I thought of the blast from a surface mine, and then of my own beating heart.