What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia

by Elizabeth Catte

  Fifty years is not just an arbitrary dateline in Appalachia. We gather in these spaces of collective dreaming to sing and bear witness with the hope that we might call into being the end of what Rebecca Scott called “the dismal banality of the dominion of coal.” In Appalachia, coal isn’t just coal. It’s the blackest part of a constellation of knowledge that tells us it is easier in our world to bury a person alive than lift her up.

  “Mountaintop removal is an act of radical violence,” says the People’s Pastoral, our theology of liberation popular among some Catholics in the mountains, “that leaves monstrous scars across Earth’s body resembling moonscapes, dead zones on our planet which cannot be restored to their prior life-giving condition. Many people who see these wounds close up lament: ‘This is what the end of the world looks like to me.’”

  Ours is a region that makes graveyards for mountains, because companies have made our mountains into graveyards. “In his hands are the deep places of the Earth; the strength of the hills is His also,” one gravestone reads, quoting Psalms.

  There are, of course, individuals in the region who think the future of Appalachia is still coal black. But I prefer to think that it might be brighter, like the highlighter-colored shirts Larry Gibson wore, printed with his telephone number, daring us to care and reach out. Gibson died on the mountain he fought so hard to protect from mountaintop removal. In vain, rescuers transported him to a hospital where his daughter said, “You could smell the freshness of the air that was still on him. The dirt was embedded in his fingernails. It traced through every finger, every knuckle and every crease.” Or it might be the bright purple of ironweed that Judy Bond pointed out to visiting reporters after her love for another ruined mountain earned her the Goldman Prize for environmental activism. “They say they’re a symbol of Appalachian women,” she said, “They’re pretty. And their roots run deep. It’s hard to move them.”

  In the early years of my training as a historian, I came across a photograph taken in Haysi, Virginia, in the 1930s, captured by a New Deal photographer. My grandfather’s family is from Haysi and I became obsessed with this image and its mysterious origins because it profoundly challenged what I thought it meant to be Appalachian.

  The image shows the interior of a tidy café with perfectly laid out checkered tablecloths. The time of day is ambiguous, but it is likely daytime—there is a backlight in the window that trained eyes can see. In the corner of the café is what appears to be a futuristic machine—an automatic photobooth. A well-dressed couple, their faces glowing from the camera’s artificial light, sits inside. Leaning against the window is a young woman, waiting on her turn or waiting for her companions to be photographed. No one is paying attention to the photographer behind the government’s camera.

  My imagination ran wild when I looked at this image. Who brought a photobooth to Haysi, Virginia, a place populated by poor coal mining families? How long did it remain? Did anyone in my family use it? I ordered books on antique camera equipment from the library and imagined future plans to march into the National Archives in Washington, DC, my credentials as a historian in hand, and ask to see the image in person.

  When the rush of questions abated, I realized that this was the first time I had looked closely at an image of Appalachia that didn’t inspire shame or pain. I wasn’t looking at the usual images of people trapped in poverty, intended to evoke pity. I was looking at a photograph of men and women apparently content, more interested in making their own images than the image being made of them. Because I viewed this image without feeling shame and pain, I could imagine myself in the future, a person who belonged in a cultural institution demanding to see my history.

  Whatever happens next for Appalachia, there are people here who deserve similar moments of liberation from their pain and shame, to see their lives and history as something other than an incoherent parade of destruction and wretchedness. I hope that people in the region who keep fighting will, like the figures in my favorite photograph, turn away from anonymous cameras and capture their own images.

  SUGGESTED RESOURCES

  FICTION & POETRY

  Andrews, Tom. The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1994.

  Awiakta, Marilou. Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and Atom Meet. Memphis: St. Luke’s Press, 1978.

  Berry, Wendell. The Country of Marriage. Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 1973.

  Giardina, Denise. Storming Heaven. New York: Norton, 1987.

  Gipe, Robert. Trampoline: An Illustrated Novel. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015.

  Giovanni, Nikki. Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day. New York: Harper Perennial, 1980.

  Good, Crystal. Valley Girl. CreateSpace, 2012.

  Haun, Mildred. The Hawk’s Done Gone. Nashville: McNaughton & Gun, 1968.

  Holbrook, Chris. Upheaval. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

  House, Silas. Clay’s Quilt. New York: Algonquin Books, 2001.

  Howell, Rebecca Gayle. Render. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2013.

  Manning, Maurice. One Man’s Dark. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2017.

  McKinney, Irene. The Six O’Clock Mine Report. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

  Miller, Jim Wayne. The Brier Poems. New York: Gnomon Press, 1997.

  Norman, Gurney. Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories. New York: Gnomon Press, 1977.

  Offutt, Chris. Kentucky Straight. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

  Pancake, Ann. Strange as This Weather Has Been. Berkeley: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.

  Pancake, Breece D’J. The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. New York: Back Bay Books, 2002.

  pluck! The Affrilachian Journal of Arts and Culture.

  Rabble Lit–Working Class Literature.

  Rash, Ron. The World Made Straight. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006.

  Still, James. River of Earth. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014.

  Taylor, Glenn. A Hanging at Cinder Bottom: A Novel. Portland: Tin House Books, 2015.

  Walker, Frank X. Affrilachia: Poems by Frank X Walker. Lexington: Old Cove Press, 2000.

  White, Charles Dodd and Larry Smith, eds. Appalachia Now. Huron, OH: Dog Bottom Press, 2015.

  Wilkinson, Crystal. The Birds of Opulence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016.

  NON-FICTION

  Bageant, Joe. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York: Broadway Books, 2008.

  Blizzard, William C. and Wess Harris. When Miners March. Oakland: PM Press, 2010.

  DeRosier, Linda Scott. Creeker: A Woman’s Journey. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

  hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge, 2009.

  Perry, Huey. They’ll Cut Off Your Project: A Mingo County Chronicle. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2011.

  Mann, Jeff. Loving Mountains, Loving Men. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2005.

  McClanahan, Scott. Crapalachia: A Biography of Place. New York: Two Dollar Radio, 2013.

  O’Brien, John. At Home in the Heart of Appalachia. New York: Anchor, 2002.

  Offutt, Chris. My Father the Pornographer. New York: Washington Square Press, 2017.

  Sonnie, Amy and James Tracy. Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power. New York: Melville House, 2011.

  Tate, Linda. Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2009.

  Thrash, Maggie. Honor Girl: A Graphic Memoir. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015.

  Trotter, Otis. Keeping Heart: A Memoir of Family Struggle, Race, and Medicine. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015.

  Verghese, Abraham. My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS. New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

  Walls, Jeanette. The Glass Castle. New York: Scribner, 2006.

  West Virginia Writers’ Project. West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State. New York: Oxford Universi
ty Press, 1941.

  ACADEMIC HISTORY

  Barkley, Frederick A. Working Class Radicals: The Socialist Party in West Virginia, 1898-1920. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2012.

  Billings, Dwight B. and Kathleen M. Blee. The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  Billings, Dwight B., Gurney Norman and Katherine Ledford, eds. Backtalk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

  Carney, Virginia Moore. Eastern Band Cherokee Women: Cultural Persistence in their Letters and Speeches. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005.

  Cook, Samuel R. Monacans and Miners: Native American and Coal Mining Communities in Appalachia. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

  Dunaway, Wilma A. The First American Frontier: Transformation to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

  Eller, Ronald D. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.

  ________. Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

  Gaventa, John. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 1982.

  Harkins, Anthony. Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  Hubbs, Nadine. Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

  Hutton, Robert. Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013.

  Inscoe, John, ed. Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.

  Kelley, Robin D.G. Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

  Kiffmeyer, Tom. Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008.

  Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

  Lewis, Ronald L. Black Coal Miners in America: Race, Class, and Community Conflict, 1780-1980. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987.

  ________. Transforming the Appalachian Countryside: Railroads, Deforestation, and Social Change in West Virginia, 1880-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

  McDonald, Michael J. and John Muldowny. The TVA and the Dispossessed: The Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981.

  Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

  Pudup, Mary Beth, Dwight B. Billings, and Altina Waller, eds. Appalachia in the Making: The Mountain South in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

  Purcell, Aaron. White Collar Radicals: The TVA’s Knoxville Fifteen, the New Deal, and the McCarthy Era. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009.

  Rice, Connie Park and Marie Tedesco, eds. Women of the Mountain South: Identity, Work, and Activism. Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2015.

  Satterwhite, Emily. Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction Since 1878. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011.

  Scott, Rebecca. Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachia Coalfields. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

  Shapiro, Henry D. Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978.

  Shiflett, Crandall. Coal Towns. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

  Straw, Richard and H. Tyler Blethen. High Mountains Rising: Appalachia in Time and Place. Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

  Turner, William H., Edward J. Cabbel and Nell Irvin Painter, eds. Blacks in Appalachia. Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1985.

  Thomas, Jerry Bruce. An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2010.

  Waller, Altina L. Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

  Williams, John Alexander. Appalachia: A History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

  FILMS & VISUAL ART

  Before the Mountain Was Moved, dir. Robert K. Sharpe, 1970.

  Blood on the Mountain, dir. Mari-Lynn Evans and Jordan Freeman, 2016.

  Burke, Bill. Portraits, 1987.

  Chemical Valley, dir. Mimi Pickering and Anne Lewis Johnson, 1991.

  Dotter, Earl. The Quiet Sickness: A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America.

  Gowin, Emmet. Photographs, 1976.

  Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story, dir. Beth Stevens and Annie Sprinkle, 2014

  Harlan County, U.S.A., dir. Barbara Kopple, 1978.

  Kentucky Route Zero, videogame designed by Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy for Cardboard Computer.

  The Last Mountain, dir. Bill Haney, 2011.

  May, Roger. Testify: A Visual Love Letter to Appalachia. Durham: Horse and Buggy Press, 2014.

  Night in the Woods, videogame designed by Alec Holowka, Scott Benson, and Bethany Hockenberry for Infinite Fall and Finji.

  Queer Appalachia Collective. Electric Dirt, 2017.

  Rothstein’s Last Assignment, dir. Richard Knox Robinson, 2011.

  Sludge, dir. Robert Sayler, 2005.

  Spear, David M. The Neugents: Close to Home, 2010.

  Stranger with a Camera, dir. Elizabeth Barret, 1999.

  Up the Ridge, dir. Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby, 1999.

  PEOPLE, PROGRAMS, AND ORGANIZATIONS (THANK YOU)

  100 Days in Appalachia, Appalachian Group to Save the Land and People, Appalachian Queer Film Festival, Appalachian Feminist Coalition, Appalachian Land Study I & II, Appalachian Volunteers, Appalshop, Black Appalachian Commission, Beehive Collective, Black Lung Association, Judy Bonds, Anne and Carl Braden, Jackie Bernard, Brookside Women’s Club, Calls from Home, Camp Happy Apalachee, Catholic Committee of Appalachia, Center for Coalfield Justice, Center for Rural Strategies, Coal Employment Project, Coal River Mountain Watch, Widow Combs, Communication Workers of America, Bruce Crawford, Hazel Dickens, Rick Diehl, Muriel Dressler, Wilma Dykeman, Zylphia and Myles Horton, Freyda Epstein, Friends of Blair Mountain, Friends for Environmental Justice, Jim Garland, Larry Gibson, Father Joe Hacala, Granny Hagar, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Sid Hatfield, Highlander Research and Education Center, Inside Appalachia, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, John Kobak, Aunt Molly Jackson, Mother Jones, Letcher County Governance Project, Helen Lewis, John L. Lewis, Hawk Littlejohn, Miners for Democracy, Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, Mud Creek Health Clinic, North Carolina Harm Reduction Coalition, Radical Action for Mountains’ and People’s Survival, Florence and Sam Reece, Ola Belle Reed, Redneck Revolt, Stay Together Appalachia Youth, Lee Smith, John and Katherine Tiller, Trillbillies, United Mine Workers of America, Don West, Ella Mae Wiggins, Young Appalachian Leaders and Learners.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank a number of friends and colleagues whose support has shaped this book as much as their words and deeds. I am grateful to Anne Trubek and Martha Bayne for seeing the potential for this book in a handful of online essays I wrote about Appalachia and the 2016 election. Their mentorship and guidance made the creation of this book feel like a family affair. Thank you to David Wilson, who drew the exceptional cover of this book, to Meredith Pangrace, Belt Publishing’s graphic designer, and to Michael Jauchen, our style editor. I am especially appreciative of Aaron Bady for reading and commenting on drafts, and for passing
along early critical suggestions that improved the text greatly. Thank you to Michelle Blankenship, who handled publicity for this book. To all those at Belt Publishing who helped bring this book into being, thank you.

  I am grateful for the friendship of John Edwin Mason and Roger May. Our conversations about Appalachia and photography inspired me to write and think more deeply about our region. To Crystal Good, thank you for the inspiration of your poetry and your entrepreneurial spirit. Thank you also to Lou Murrey for your commitment to the region, including my home turf, East Tennessee, and for the gift of your gorgeous photography. I am indebted to Chris Offutt, who generously offered fiction, poetry, and photography recommendations that have improved the back matter and who gave my work an important boost. Thank you to Tressie McMillan Cottom for reading and commenting on this book, and most of all, thank you for proving to me that you’re never too old to find new intellectual role models. A warm thank you to my Whitesburg friends Tayna Turner, Tom Sexton, and Tarence Ray for not only talking the talk with your fantastic podcast, but also walking the walk in your activism. To Glenn Taylor, who offered to give a copy of my book to Huey Perry, a personal hero—you made my day.

  There are a number of historians and scholars of Appalachia whose work has been invaluable to me. Dwight Billings, Kathleen Blee, Wilma Dunaway, Ronald Eller, John Gaventa, Anthony Harkins, Bob Hutton, John Inscoe, Tom Kiffmeyer, Ron Lewis, Alessandro Portelli, Rebecca Scott, Henry Shapiro, William Turner, John Alexander Williams, and others mentioned in the back matter, thank you for making the road by walking.

  I am especially thankful for my partner, Josh Howard. He did something far more important than offering scholarly suggestions and support during the writing of this book—he took me home. Josh didn’t hesitate when I proposed living and working in Appalachia again, and he made a tremendous professional sacrifice to bring us closer to the people and places that matter the most to us. On that note, I am also grateful to our families for giving us a warm welcome when we returned.