We tell ourselves the stories we need to hear, need to believe to get by. But I’m tired of getting by. We say Almost Heaven while so many live in downright hell.
They say, “Why don’t those people just move away and get jobs somewhere else?” They say, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Well, have you ever considered moving away from the only place you’ve ever known, the land that is woven into your DNA? Have you been able to reach the bootstrap attached to the boot on your neck? The boot that tells you if you want to make something of yourself you have to go somewhere else to do it? The boot that tells you coal is king and Jesus saves and just say no to drugs. The boot that has been in your life for so long you forget it’s there sometimes and have to look hard to find it because you’ve grown accustomed to thinking that this is all there is.
You see, Almost Heaven doesn’t complicate the narrative. It doesn’t reconcile colonialism and tourism in a mind. It doesn’t unfurl the banner of the long line of takers and collect the tears of the coal miner’s widow. It doesn’t listen to the kid who might want to leave or might not want to leave but goddamnit just wants to know there’ll be a home to come back to. It doesn’t speak for the countless voices buried at Hawks Nest or answer the question of freedom formed into a brick made by the hands of West Virginia slave after 1863.
West Virginia is my home, my heart, the place I returned to after too many years away. This is where I’ll die and where, until then, I’ll work with you and anyone who wants to see a different West Virginia, not an Almost Heaven West Virginia.
Williamson, Mingo County, West Virginia.
Mingo County
History, privilege, and reflection
As a white man, it has always been easy to move around in the world, to go where I please, to feel relatively safe, and to have my voice heard. As I’ve started to examine the privilege I have – the privilege I was simply born with and have done nothing to earn – I’ve been asking a lot of questions and trying to wrap my head around some things.
When I consider how Appalachia is, and has historically been, portrayed, I think of the structures and systems that have been intentionally put in place to “other” Appalachia. When I consider the story of West Virginia and the long history of colonization and rule by extractive industry, I think about the influence of power, money, and fear.
When I think about working to deconstruct the stereotypes of our region, specifically through visual scholarship, I am keenly aware of the challenges involved. I cannot fight against the willful stereotyping of Appalachia without acknowledging the harm that has been done to the region long before it was called Appalachia by white men.
Everywhere I look, I am aware of how history, white history, has been written or rewritten to proclaim the accomplishments of white men, express their benevolence, or justify their acts of murder, rape, theft, war, and expansion, to bring about a civilized society.
I recently did an erasure exercise of this sign in Mingo County to read “Nearby, white leader and white settlements in effect exterminated tribe.”
The Virtue of the Long View
On the north side of the King Coal Highway in Mingo County, West Virginia, I found this stretch road. I thought it odd that the road went from dirt and gravel to coal for about a hundred yards and back again to dirt and gravel. After several minutes of breathing in the air, listening to the birds rustle around me, I raised my camera. That's when it occurred to me. I was standing in a place I wasn't supposed to be in. I wasn't trespassing, mind you, but rather I was standing on a reclaimed surface mine site in an area that had been blasted away to get at the coal underneath all except for that on which I now stood. I was photographing what was never intended to be seen, to be reveled in. I often think about ways in which photography has led me to places and people that I might not have otherwise encountered and places I might've never seen even in my home county.
There are so many known things in the world. How are they known? Are they known simply because we read about them, were taught about them in school? How many things that we truly know were learned by experience? The type of knowing and experience that you simply can’t escape, don’t want to escape. To truly know and experience place. To be from a place and of a place, to hold that place dear despite all its imperfections and shortcomings. I think I try to make pictures here because I need to make sense of this (mountaintop removal), to find some sort of order. The scale of the devastation is too large to comprehend sometimes. By slowing down and looking for any form of beauty or mystery, perhaps that makes it a little more bearable.
I keep coming back to the King Coal Highway knowing that I both appreciate it and despise it. I appreciate the views it provides, but despise the toll it has taken on the communities below. I despise the greed it represents. I resent all that was taken and will never be returned. Over and over again, I come back to walk and drive and look and think.
In the introduction to Paul Kwilecki's testament to home, One Place, Tom Rankin describes a note in Kwilecki's office from Richard Nelson’s The Island Within: “There may be more to learn by climbing the same mountain a hundred times than by climbing a hundred different mountains.”
I reckon.
A Piece of Mingo County
I keep a piece of Mingo County on my desk. There have been many like it, but this one is mine.
Pieces of Mingo County, like this, have been taken away for more than 100 years. This piece is different, though. This piece reminds me of the cost paid by the men and women who mined this coal, who sacrificed in countless ways for their families and communities, and for the toll it’s taken on both the people and places of the Appalachian coalfields and elsewhere. I think about the hopes and dreams and fears and sorrow that hang like coal dust deep in the hollers of “Bloody Mingo.” I think about sacrifice and being sacrificed and I’m reminded of the difference between the two. I think about the natural resource and human extraction, blasted out, hauled away, never to return. And I think about what it is to return and how literally there are parts of Mingo County you can’t ever return to. I think about “Friends of Coal” and know that coal has never been a friend to Mingo County. I think about the wail of the train engines, the thunderous vibration of the tracks as coal cars roll out, taking another few hundred tons from the heart of the billion dollar coalfield, a heart that try as you may, you will never hollow out. Politicians have heralded it, outside interests have swallowed it, and we are all are complicit in our thirst for this nonrenewable resource. I think about my role in this, too. I think about home for me and it’s impossible to do so without thinking about coal.
This little piece of Mingo County keeps me thinking…