personal essay

The Manway

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Part One: Beckley

Rose and I have booked a double at the Howard Johnson in Beckley.  We arrive and take it in: cracked plaster walls, a few interesting signs explaining that anyone staying at a different hotel isn’t allowed in this hotel, and also that they will not serve anyone who lives within 50 miles of Beckley.  The hotel is dingy and dilapidated, and an indifferent young man with a stained shirt comes out to see what we want.  His eyes go wide when he sees Rose and he avoids looking at her.  When we get to our room, it’s a single.  We go back to the desk and explain that we are supposed to have a double, and he looks for a few minutes and tells me they don’t have a double.  I’m worried Rose will think this was purposeful, but after canceling the reservation we find a Holiday Inn that looks fresh, smells like snickerdoodles, and has a helpful woman at the desk.  It also has a pool and a hot tub and costs only a dollar more.

The next day we wake up and go to the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine and Museum.  They have a children’s museum and a pioneer village plus company town buildings on site.  We pay for the tour and wander around the shop.  At their most critical, the displays are neutral toward the coal companies.  There are pictures of various coal barons and mine operators, but not a single mention of John L. Lewis.  No Mother Jones.  No mention of the Mine Wars or Frank Keeney or the miners’ army at Blair Mountain. The miners there are passive instruments, inert tools extracting coal from the ground on behalf of the operator.  There are a couple of union banners, but no union propaganda.  There is not even anti-union propaganda—the absence does the work of propaganda.  Roosevelt saved the miners with his New Deal and that’s the story. The Beckley museum celebrates the coal industry and the mine owner, while treating the miners’ dependence as a natural feature of the coal system.  It gives no thought to why that system changed, or how it came about in the first place.  

Our mine tour starts, and we clamber into a special mine cart hooked up to the mantrip that will carry us through the mine.  I notice the plaque on the wall listing victims of a recent mine explosion.  A surname stands out to me:  Workman.  Is he related to the late Nimrod Workman, balladeer of the mines?   I consider asking while the retired miner who is to be our guide describes the safety rules and then climbs into the mantrip to pull us into the mine.  Water drips from the low ceiling and out of the walls.  Great black veins of coal run through the rock walls parallel to the ground.  We stop at various points and he shows us how dark the mine is without the lights, how track was laid, and how the different coal seams were worked. He explains how the miners used the manway to traverse the mine and talks about scrip and the company store. He tells us he has the beginnings of silicosis and refers to the struggle for black lung recognition, but doesn’t say much about that struggle.  I wonder if there are things he’s not allowed to say as a condition of the job.  He refers positively to the miners gaining their union.  I wonder if he has a union now.

Surprised that the other tourists aren’t familiar with most of the things he discusses, I begin to feel like Tyler Ledford in The Menu. The old-timer asks if anyone knows where the term “redneck” comes from, and I can’t help myself.  With awe in my eyes, I intone, “The Battle of Blair Mountain.”  The miner must recognize that I’m here for a different reason than most of the other tourists.  He wobbles his hand and says, “Sort of,” and attributes it to the Mine Wars generally rather than that specific battle.

From then on, he plays off me when the others aren’t forthcoming with responses.  I have the urge to find him after the tour and show him what this history means to me.  I think about Chef Slowik talking to Tyler.  I want our guide to recognize me as different from these others—to tell me I’m worthy to stand here at the entrance of the cathedral and breathe the holy air and feel the blood dripping from the roof and see it run black through the walls.  The poem on the wall calls the mine a hell where breathing the air cost the speaker his life.

After we explore the museum and the pioneer village, Rose wants to go take pictures by a waterfall she saw on TikTok. The road to get there is almost washed out, but we make it.  The falls are not big, though Rose is dwarfed by the large rocks and white rapids crashing down.  She gets as close as she dares, and I sit on a bench thinking.  Rose walks around taking pictures, the roar of the falls leaving us each to our own devices.

Part Two: Matewan

We head to our next stop: Pikeville, Kentucky. The Holiday Inn provides us with the correct number of beds, though our room smells mildewy. We go to the pool—no hot tub this time—and play Marco Polo, and I see if I can still do a front flip in the water (I can). The next day we head back to West Virginia.  To the holy land.  To Matewan.

It is about the size of Buena Vista or maybe Andersonville, just a main street running through three small blocks of two-story buildings and a railroad line cutting through behind town. The museum announces itself in red and black.  The murals of Mother Jones, Sid Hatfield, Frank Keeney, and Dan Chain, also known as “Few Clothes” Johnson, are arranged in a line along the side you come into town on. We park along the main drag a bit down from the museum and I pause after exiting the car to take it in: run-down brick buildings; the hotel with two rooms; the antique shop; the restaurant owned by the hotel, which also owns the ATV rental company; the bank. It’s quiet here, despite the ATVs parked all along main street.

We enter and walk up to the desk where a young man asks what brought us to Matewan. I tell him, “Well, for me it’s like a holy pilgrimage, but she’s just here because this is where I wanted to go.” He gives us the tour and explains the museum to us. I mostly ignore him—I’m familiar with the history he recalls.  I want to tell him that he should focus on informing Rose, but she’s wandered off.  

There is a timeline of the history of coal mining.  Inside is everything Beckley leaves out. It is a people’s museum, built from the ground up by working people. In a book I purchased at Beckley, Black Coal and Red Bandanas, Shaun Slifer explains: 

“As we usually understand them, museums tell stories from above:  ethnographic museums, for example, tell a story through trophies of cultural domination, colonialism, imperial triumph.  Art museums tend toward the commercially successful, what has been collected by, or otherwise belonged to, the wealthy elite, and what particular critics historically lauded and particular curators continue to uphold.”  pg. xvi

The West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, unlike the Beckley Museum, is a monument to miners. Here the miners are not tools.  Here they are human beings who walked back up the manway with black dust on their faces and in their lungs.  Here they went to war to lift martial law in Mingo County.  Here they organized under the United Mine Workers of America. Here they fought for their lives.  This museum tells the story of the coal industry’s attempts to bury the miners’ history.  I look around slowly, find the window with the outline of the shootout between the miners and the Baldwin-Felts agents and line it up with the bank.  I listen to Chris Cooper’s description of the shootout.  I look at the pictures of miners who sweated and sang and won and lost.  The description next to Dan Chain’s picture says he faded into obscurity after the Mine Wars.

This time, Chef Slowik asks me to cook.  

As I come back out from the display area, the man at the desk asks if I would like to have a look at the archives.  Thrilled, I tell him I would love to. He shows me in and then leaves me alone. Old mining picks, boxes of documents and handbills and photos. Some vinyl records of miners’ songs. I am afraid to touch anything, worried that light or oils from my skin can damage the relics here.  I touch a pick.  I open a box and look at the list of union expenses on top. I snap a few pictures of the album sleeves so I can look up the songs later. 

I came hoping to learn more about Dan Chain, also known as “Few Clothes” Johnson, so I buy three books about Black miners in Appalachia.

Rose and I get burgers at a pub a couple of towns over and go back to the hotel to swim in the pool. She tells me she doesn’t really like museums:  “It seems like I just walk around and look at stuff and it’s like, okay.”  I agree the experience generally goes like that.  

Part Three: The Green River

We head to our next hotel, and in the morning we drive out to the Mammoth Cave Adventures kayaking office. We miss it at first—Rose points it out, but I disagree, saying that the GPS wants us to keep driving. Later we come back after getting directions from the man at the zipline office. I tell Rose, “It’s because I’m a man, so I don’t listen to women.”  She agrees the experience generally goes like that.

Rose is nervous about piloting her own kayak, but I assure her she will be fine—it is her first time kayaking. I tell her I would like to float down to Paradise, but it is too far, and explain that it is a town that no longer exists. I tell her about John Prine’s song and how Peabody’s coal train hauled the town away.

She tells me about a kid who sat down across from her at breakfast and stared until she was driven back to the room, where I was still sleeping.  And there was the Qdoba worker who “looked at me like I had ten heads.”  She asks me if I had brought her to a sundown town and I tell her I hadn’t thought to look. 

The Green River is easy and the breeze cools our sun-warmed skin.  Sometimes the sun passes behind the clouds and sometimes it beats down. Dozens of sunning turtles dart into the water as we approach.  Dragonflies negotiate in the air and the fish stay out of sight. I bring out my favorite harmonica and play a little bit, but feel self-conscious and think it might be better to listen to the birds. When we make it back to the hotel that evening, my harp is gone.  

Instead of going straight home, Rose wants to go with me to my parents’ house to pick up my dogs.  Mom and Dad inform me that Sheldon found a turtle and very much enjoyed their pot-bellied pig, Cajun.  Rose tells me my parents are like the grandparents she doesn’t have, and so we stay until she is ready to leave.  Lennie makes sure she is in the car as soon as the door is open.  Sheldon turns toward my parents—he doesn’t want to leave the pig.  I snatch him up and put him in the car with Lennie.  

At my house, Rose plays games on my computer.  Once Rose has had her fill of the game, we load back into the car and I take her home.  We drive west into the sunset.  The blue-gray clouds loom like mountains in the sky ahead of us.  The setting sun highlights their edges in pink and gold.  We cruise past darkened corn and soybean fields and Rose takes pictures of the sky with her phone.  

Back home with the dogs, I put my books away:  the three from the Mine Wars Museum on my “to read” bookshelf downstairs.  I wonder when I will get around to reading them.  I’ve already finished the graphic novel I got in Beckley, so it goes upstairs.

What I Took

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Behind my desk in sixth grade math is a small, unobtrusive bookshelf.  Like most of the furniture in our school, it’s made of particle board, with generic wood grain veneer darker than the veneer on our desks.  It’s short and squat, with five rows of books.  Mrs. Bryant, the math teacher, or perhaps the school’s custodial staff, keeps the room well-dusted, and the shelf is clean, apart from the collection of cracked and faded paperbacks it houses.  It stands apart from the larger bookshelves with dictionaries, encyclopedias, and board games.  

I have a trick that usually gets me through lectures, but it doesn’t work so well for math.  Most of the time, I read my textbooks.  It looks like I’m paying attention that way, but I’m really just reading the short stories and case studies, the good stuff.  Now, I try poking around in the desk in Mrs. Bryant’s room, but the student who normally sits there doesn’t keep any books inside.  There’s an English textbook, and those usually have some good stuff, but there is no way to pull it out and read through it without getting caught.  There’s Mrs. Bryant’s bookshelf, but I don’t know if I can get into it without being noticed.

Mrs. Bryant dims the lights and flips the switch to turn on the projector, and I start to eyeball the shelf.  The black and yellow-white spines of books, interspersed with the occasional blue, green, or red, are like the neglected, crumbling keys of an old, out-of-tune upright piano kept in someone’s living room as a decoration.

I resist the bookshelf that day, but keep an eye on it for the next few days—it never changes.  The books remain in their uneven rows of concave spines; none of them are ever even tipped out from having been looked at.  Keeping one eye on Mrs. Bryant as she works through a math problem on a transparency, I reach out with my left hand, placing my index finger on the yellowed top of an Anne McCaffrey book, tilt it out of line, grasp it with the rest of my fingers, and swiftly pull it off the shelf, hiding it under the lip of the desk, halfway inside the desk’s cavity.

I can’t hold the book up to my face for fear of being caught, but I can smell it faintly, like the dry leaves on the forest floor in the summer.  Holding the book down in my lap, leaning it against the bottom lip of the desk’s opening, I read cautiously.  I have to pay attention to the class–turn the page in the math book when necessary, and be prepared to answer questions when called upon.  As Mrs. Bryant nears the end of her lesson, I dog ear the page I’m on, and slide the book back into its place on the shelf.  

As the year progresses, I grow more confident at my stealth reading.  I learn to situate my math book so I can angle my head in such a way that I appear, from across the room, to be studying it instead of reading a book.  I figure the signals Mrs. Bryant gives before she starts calling on students, so that I can be more engrossed in my reading during certain parts of class.  It doesn’t take long for me to finish the bookshelf’s selection of fantasy books, making it difficult for me to decide what to read.

There is one book that interests me, but I’m not excited about actually reading it.  Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men sits on the shelf, white cracks running like lightning through its black spine.  I know the story.  My brother and I had watched the movie version with Dad a few times.  The one with Gary Sinise and John Malkovich.  After the first time he saw it, Ross had asked Dad, “Why’d he shoot that guy for?”

“Because that other guy with the glove, Curly, was gonna shoot him in the belly and let his guts hang out and let him suffer.  But George and Lenny was friends, and George didn’t want him to suffer like that.”  

“Oh.”  It’s hard to say if Ross was satisfied with Dad’s answer.  It seemed like a decent enough movie to me, but it was just a movie.  Dad says the book is better than the movie—and there aren’t a whole lot of books that hold his interest.  He identified with the characters in the book, the way they went around looking for work, living hand to mouth, trying to survive.  He had lived a life like that, day laboring, dreaming of getting a little place of his own.

I know it’s a story about the real world, and I prefer escapism.  I try to sit through math class instead of reading a book about the real world, as there can’t be much difference between the two.  It doesn’t take long for me to grow so bored of math class that I decide to read the book, even though I already know the story.  As I did with all the others, I sneak it off the shelf and open it in my lap.  I move through the story quickly, taking only a couple of math lessons to finish.  I let my guard down as I read, losing myself in the book’s worldly prose.  As I reach the end, I can feel the strain in my face and the tears welling up in my eyes as Lennie asks George, “Ain’t you gonna give me hell again?” but I can’t put it down—I have to see how the scene plays out.  “’Guys like us got no fambly. They make a little stake an’ then they blow it in. They ain’t got nobody in the worl’ that gives a hoot in hell about ‘em—‘”

Every couple of lines I have to look up to the ceiling, trying to slow my pace.  “’Go on,’ said Lennie, ‘How’s it gonna be?  We gonna get a little place.’” Eyes aimed back at the ceiling, I focus on breathing as Mrs. Bryant drones on about math.  I know what’s coming.  “’No, Lennie. I ain’t mad. I never been mad, an’ I ain’t now.’”  I blink, and a tear escapes from my eye.  Mrs. Bryant moves toward the middle of the room.  I quickly press my fingers into my eyes to wipe away the excess fluid.  “Slim twitched George’s elbow. ‘Come on, George. Me an’ you’ll go in an’ get a drink.’”  I close the book, and sneak it back to the empty slot on the bookshelf.  Breathing slowly through my mouth, I keep my eyes pointed up, trying not to blink and not to think.  I suddenly notice that the room has gone quiet, and I hear Mrs. Bryant ask, “Riley, what’s wrong?”

The class has stopped, Mrs. Bryant has focused on me, along with every face in the room.  I don’t know what’s wrong—I’ve seen the movie, it didn’t make me cry.  What’s wrong is the God damned injustice of it all, but I can’t put that into words.  I get enough flak for not doing my homework or not paying attention in class.  I can’t tell her that I’ve just finished reading a book that moved me to tears.  I put my head down, hoping she will move on, but she doesn’t.  I start heaving and sobbing uncontrollably, and in between breaths I gasp out a hurried “Nothing.”

I keep my head down, but I can feel everyone staring at me, watching.  I can’t tell her why I’m crying.  I’m not sure I can explain it to myself.

My surreptitious reading of Mrs. Bryant’s books got me through the sixth grade, and the experience encouraged me to take note of people’s bookshelves wherever I go.  A person’s books are a part of them.  Their bookshelves help to keep a lot of parts together.  The first thing I take note of when I enter someone’s office is their books.  I wonder, often, to what degree their books are ornamental.  Are they meant to convey identity?  Personal philosophy? Are they favorites or just the ones most often reached for?  I have never asked anyone, or indicated that I knew anything about their shelved books.  

When I was growing up, there was never enough room for all the books in our house.  Most bookshelves are simple affairs—a box of wood or plastic with horizontal shelves to hold the books.  Dad hung shelves on the wall for Mom using metal brackets, but she still had piles of books in the corner of their room, at the ends of the thin corridors between their queen-sized bed and the walls.  The weight of her books pushed the floor down away from the wall, leaving a small gap.  

As I neared the end of high school I started reading through her collection—she liked nonfiction, especially biographies.  If I thought one of her books was really cool, I’d try to hang on to it.  I still have her copies of Freud’s case studies, like The Wolfman and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

I still have Mom’s copy of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, too.  I had figured out at a young age that not going to church meant that I was not a very respectable person, and so I was very interested in ideas and things that made church people uneasy.  I was intrigued by Rushdie’s title, and asked Mom what it was about.  “I don’t know—I couldn’t understand it,” was her reply, “but it was a big deal when it came out.”  She recalled that the radio stations in Texas had boycotted Cat Stevens’ songs because he had made statements in support of the bounty on Rushdie’s head.  Khomeini’s fatwa was enough of a reason for me to read it.

That year—my senior year—I had an American Literature class with Mrs. Sladek.  She was a short, round, dark-haired woman with intense, bulgy eyes who kept her room orderly and quiet.  Some teachers seemed more interested in social status than teaching, and Mrs. Sladek struck me as one of them.  If you didn’t go to the right church, if your family wasn’t prominent enough, if you didn’t look fashionable, she wasn’t interested in you.  She was more dismissive of me than I was used to, even for someone who rarely did his homework.

Near the end of the year, we had a lot of quiet reading time in class. One day, I pulled out Mom’s copy of The Satanic Verses, found my place—marked by the glossy red and gray jacket—and started reading. My desk was near hers, and it wasn’t long before I heard her voice: “Riley, what are you reading?”

I was excited at her interest. I’d been struggling with the book—I didn’t know much about Islam or the cultures Rushdie was writing about—but I kept at it, rereading and trying to work through it slowly. Maybe Mrs. Sladek, an English teacher, could help me understand it.

I held up the book and said, “The Satanic Verses. Have you read it?”

She scowled. “No, and I don’t think I would.”

I put the book back on my desk and kept reading, but her response stayed with me. I’d thought everyone had heard of The Satanic Verses—Mom and Dad had told me about the protests, the bounty, the boycotts of Cat Stevens. I was surprised that she hadn’t heard of it—and more surprised that a teacher would shut down a book like that without a second thought.  I suppose not everyone thinks of books in the same way.

When someone dies and the family swoops in to divvy up their stuff, I try to get their books.  When Mom’s dad died everyone fought over what to do with his things.  I took his books.  He had a lot of books about faith.  He was a Catholic, and he struggled to reconcile his religion with his politics.  The church told him that in order to be a good Christian he had to vote for the party that wanted to outlaw abortion, but he felt that it was unconscionable to vote for the Republicans.  He had a lot of books about what it means to have faith.

Uncle Elbert, on the other hand, was a Republican and lifetime member of the NRA.  He owned most of the land that butted up against Tuggle Road—all hayfields and cow pastures and hollers where the woods were left to grow because they weren’t worth turning into hayfields.  Dad bought the piece of field where we put our house from him, and, when Uncle Elbert was dying, everyone bought the fields their houses sat in from him.  They were worried that there would be a problem with his will—he had family who would be able to claim his property before any Tuggles, though I’ve never met them.  They let me take his books when he died, but everything he owned was supposed to be sold off and divvied up to this other family.

Elbert’s bookshelf, which I keep in a safe spot at the top of my stairs, is made of a knotty old cherry tree that wasn’t quite worth sawing up into boards to sell.  I never dust it, and I don’t think he did either.  There may still be dust from his house on it.  It isn’t like most bookshelves—he had made it by hand in his shop.  It’s got two boards which serve for legs that are rounded at the top and come up about waist high, one of them is so full of knots that it has started to split and separate from itself.  Between the legs run three shelves which are each made of two boards put together at a right angle.  The books rest on their sides, not quite parallel to the floor.  It’s made to hold paperbacks about the size of your hand.  Uncle Elbert had filled it with dime store westerns by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour.  

The top shelf holds a row of my own paperbacks that just happened to fit. The rest of the collection is fragile, held together more by memory than glue. I think about those books sometimes—about the legacy Uncle Elbert left me without meaning to. Maybe I’ll explore them one day. But I don’t think it’ll be as simple as pulling one down to read—it might crumble in my hands.