It's a mid-December morning and I'm on a bus headed down South from Chinatown, New York.
The reckless driver speeds up on the icy roads. I am traveling across the States in a snowstorm...
because of a book. Written over the span of 20 years, back and
forth from the mining areas of Eastern Kentucky, the book by Italian scholar Alessandro Portelli,
is a monumental collection of oral history. It tells the struggle of a secluded world
built around the mining of coal, when immigrants would come to the area to work well-paid but
often ill-fated jobs. The book tells the story of Harlan County. And that's where I am going.
I'm headed to the Deep America of Portelli's book. I want to see what's left of that world
30 years since his first visit, now that the US is shifting to natural gas and coal mines
are shutting down, one after another. I do not expect to find a lively city. But
when I drive into Harlan, I find a ghost of a city, where people are stuck, like characters
in a black and white picture. Their stories and their voices have not changed
much from those recorded by Portelli in his field research and that today are leading
me in this journey.
I'm a hillbilly.
Well, what is a hillbilly?
I don't really know what a hillbilly is.
They call them a backwoods person.
But I ain't a backwoods person because I've been in 38 states.
Plus, at least in Italy.
Yeah, and Canada. And Canada, yes.
But, I've drove through 38 states.
I wouldn't classify myself as a hillbilly. But I am proud to be from the Appalachian Mountains.
They call it Appalachian Mountains but the old people called it the Appalachee Mountain.
I got married when I was 16-years-old and my husband was 17-years-old.
We had been married about six months when he went into the mines
and six months after that he died in an electrical accident. And we had a two-week-old son.
Lady lives down the street here on the end. Her husband was killed where the mine stand
here when it was running. Him and his brother-in-law and another guy, they went in on Christmas Eve.
Company wanted some holes drilled and some charges set off so they'd have some coal
ready for after Christmas. They went in there.
Anyways, sunk the hole up, put the dynamite and stuff in.
And when he backed up, got into the high voltage wire and it barbecued him, roasted him, killed him instantly.
Like that, that much power, two or three thousand volts,
something like that it went through him. Killed him, and he was killed in that mine.
That's 1956. Name of Robert Camel.
I find remnants of the mining history all over. Memories of the casualties and the hard
labor are alive in the stories told by the young and old alike.
They are nostalgic for the glory of collective struggle and hard work paid-off.
Speaking to the locals in dusty bars and saloons, I can see that their life was, and still is, mining.
Mines are their narrative, their collective legend and whoever played a part wears it with pride.
They are survivors of a world disappearing before their eyes.
This is the newspaper. That's my Granny. He worked first shift. He just got off shift
that day, first shift. They came in second shift when the mine exploded, so he escaped it.
I guess he got them out of job. That's my grandpa, my grandma, and my six uncles, right there.
You'd never let him leave home mad at each other. You always had peace because you don't
know if that's the last day you'll see him.
The water in the mines that you would have to drag through water, it would get up over
your knees and the horses would have to pull through it, the ponies would,
and then they would lay two-by-fours for tracks sometimes when they'd run out of track.
People here need work, like anywhere else. There is nothing for them to do. All the young
people are turning to drugs, alcohol.
If someone would, from out of state I would say, from our government,
would get get interested in this place, this part of Kentucky, I think we could
– these young people could – make it.
But if they don't, they are dying every day. Overdosing and, this, that, and the other.
Well, I went to Harlan County looking for the class struggle.
And the class struggle is still going on.
Maybe not in terms of the unions but for instance right now, in terms
of the environment.
You're taught that you can't fight a coal company and win.
Nobody's ever fought a coal company and won.
You're wasting your time. They're
very evil people, you know, they
do things to the families.
They do things to the young'uns.
Of all Kentucky counties, Harlan produced the most coal,
at the time in which most of what powered the United States came from Kentucky.
Today, the 33 active mines left in Harlan
employ less than a thousand.
Some of the old mines have even been converted into museums.
Laid off and left with nothing since the 90s, many live off welfare.
They don't see any other options.
In the few hangouts in town,
unemployed men are the usual customers.
Well Harlan County was founded on coal, I mean that's the reason Harlan County was built.
It is Harlan County's livelihood, it's its backbone. Basically it’s what Harlan County is,
it's built on coal. And if you ain't got the coal, there’s nothing else here.
We don't have the luxuries of the big cities, we don't have factories
and the reason why that is, because we’re so secluded in the mountains, we don't have the roadways in which
larger semi-trucks can come in and out. And,
I could go flip hamburgers at the local McDonald's
or I could go down there at the pizza joint, make a pizza, but that's not gonna pay my bills
Harlan used to be a booming place,
you could walk down the streets find anything you wanted.
If you didn't watch you'd run over people cause the population was so big.
The coal mines started leaving, during the strike and now is getting worser.
Everybody’s having to leave home.
Well,
I have been working since I was 15,
altogether.
And I went into mines when I was 21,
somewhere around there.
It looked like a good future.
All my uncles that worked underground
was working through the '70s when all the striking and everything was good,
and they told me not to get too comfortable, and I did.
I don't know what I am gonna do.
If we don't get something here, in another 10 to 12 years it's gonna be a ghost town.
There won't be nobody here but retired people and people who draw checks. That’ll be all of it.
When I went in the coal mines I was 18-years-old,
it was right when I got out of high school.
And I worked in the coal mines for 5 years underground and 2 years surface mining.
I am a waiter here at the Huddle House.
Is the pay better than in the mines?
Oh, no… I make 2 dollars 13 cents an hour plus tips and since coal mines
aren't around anymore, the tips aren’t very good. There is not as much money in the town of Harlan.
What am I doing here?
I just got out of jail!
For what?
Possession of stolen property.
I’m not guilty.
I mean, jail is jail.
It’s not good, but
it’s alright.
They feed you three times a day
give you a place to sleep, roof over your head, TV, all that stuff.
When I was a teenager, Smith and Jones’ creek, that was the two of the roughest places around here.
Well, I started carrying a pistol when I was
about 12 years old,
and I've carried one ever since and I still carry one.
I'm the gun guy here at the pawn shop, for the past five years.
We take everything from,
DVDs, boat motors or whatever you wanna imagine. We have some motorcycles, and some other things.
The mining equipment, we would take a lot of that stuff.
We would sell a 400 dollar mining helmet maybe once a week, lights daily,
but the fact that mines are shutting down…
makes it difficult to sell that stuff because these were being sold to personal miners
for their own use.
They are not into mining anymore of course they are not buying it.
Have you been working in mines?
23 years
Where?
Where? All over Harlan, Perry County.
Just
Everywhere.
In the stasis of today,
it's hard to see any traces of the turbulent past that once made Harlan notorious.
The county is still mostly ‘dry’, and was one for years.
People used to make moonshine.
Now drugs are on the rise: at first pain killer prescribed by doctors
to treat the injured and sick miners,
now, an escape from the emptiness.
There’s a lot of people here that's addicted to prescription drugs.
Oxycone, Percocet, Xanax, Valium,
pretty much anything that makes them feel better
or they think that make them feel better.
We have a lot of problems with items that come in that are stolen,
and maybe not just from drugs users but that is a problem.
And I can say, again it's desperation,
it's trying to get some money to maintain a habit, you know.
And I think since all this, you know the mining, the depression of the mining and everything,
it's caused a rise in pills.
Pills are the new alcohol.
You're talking about the Forties.
I'm talking about the Forties and Fifties.
So in the fifties well,
we made moonshine, and sold it.
During the summer we'd pick huckleberries, blackberries; sell them. The huckleberries we'd
carry into Virginia, sell for a dollar a gallon.
The blackberries we only got a quarter a gallon. But we'd get enough
money from that
to buy clothes and some food for the winter.
Mostly what we bought for in the food line was cornmeal and
lard, beans, soup beans, what we called pinto beans. We call 'em soup beans yet today.
So
it was a rough life but a good life.
In the beginning I would only have to take
a few. I could do one and it would last me all day.
Towards the end of my drugs addiction I was taking
5 to 10 of the
Oxycodone 80s
before they switched
to the one that gelled them up,
I went from a 50 dollars day habit
to a 1,000 dollar day habit.
The jobs are gone. Coal mines,
they are shutting them down. All the coal mines are shutting down.
And that was our lifeline.
Coal mines were the lifeline around here
and they are shutting down to people
in poverty.
It's over.
I walk the same roads Alessandro Portelli walked three decades ago,
and words from the opening paragraph to his book come to my mind:
“It was 1988, my fifth visit to Harlan County.
I was on the winding road from Harlan to Evarts, driving a borrowed pickup truck,
when I began to notice the roadkill.
It was a dangerous road, with more than its share of adventurous drivers,
and it was getting dark.
I began to think of the many ways in which death
was a presence in this land:
the dead animals,
the road accidents,
and of course
the coal mines.
Guns. And black lung”.
Returning to New York, leaving behind Harlan
in an endless rain,
I try to put together the pieces of a remote world I only got a glimpse of.
I always wondered where all that energy came from,
the energy that lights up the luxuries of the big city.