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.