Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (16 page)

But when we all sit and point the finger at each other at what we're doing wrong, we don't get to move forward with baby steps. We're not going to spring forth fully formed. And for that reason, that's what I think is dangerous about these sort of anonymous running commentaries online and the connection that has with gossip in general. It's like a place where people are free, they are given this forum to spew, nobody has to have discipline to try to understand. And so for me, it's like, okay, how can I not perpetuate that myself? How can I try to understand how I would feel if I was a coal operator? Well, if I was a coal operator I would think, “This is what I'm supposed to do. And if I try to talk about doing something differently, everybody's going to get scared, and suddenly I'm going to be without a job and the rug's going to be pulled out from under me.” How do we create some kind of
discussion where we can shut the world out and all of its running commentary, and say, “All right, let's all get in a room and get real. Tell me what you're afraid of.”

And I'll bet you money that if you sat down in a room where people all felt safe to be frank, you'd find a lot of coal operators going, “Man, I don't like it either. We don't like doing this, but coal is up right now. We got to get it while we can because we don't know when the price of coal is going to go back down. We might not even have enough money to pay what we need to pay to keep going.” So I think that there is a fundamental shift that is not about what we talk about, it's
how
we talk about it. I think that's where we'll begin to find answers.

I think any injection of sanity in the discussion is helpful. At the end of the day, I really believe that what we're all here to do is to use the gifts we've been given to try to contribute something to the world.

There are days when I lie in bed and think, “Who are you to say anything? Who are you? Just because you've got some tiny public forum of your own?” All of those questions go through my head, too. At the end of the day, for me, everything good that has ever come to me in my life has happened because I have tried to listen to my gut and lived my life from the inside out. It was the thing that told me I needed to quit school and come to Nashville.

There have been these moments of grace in my life when I've suddenly, clearly known what I was supposed to do. And so I have to trust that. And this is what I'm being led to do. It terrifies me. But I trust that voice inside, I've learned to trust it. And I've learned that no matter what happens, the ultimate result of that will take me to a place I need to be, even if I have to go through some rough times in between. And I think part of the reason that's hard for me is that, musically, I've not been one of those social activists through music. But I think that I'm an articulate person and I'm a thinking person. And in recent years, I've been asked to speak more and to teach and to write, and so I feel like I have this
other voice which is aside from my musical voice, and I feel like that's sort of what I'm being called to use here. It's not something that I feel a sense of knowing about my ability to articulate ideas, but stepping into that in kind of a public way is new for me, so it does feel uncomfortable sometimes.

The only thing I can say is I can't imagine how I would feel if instead of a mountain in my backyard there was a valley fill. I've seen the good ones. They're not exactly beautiful, even the ones that are done well. And if my family had lived on that piece of ground for two hundred years, I'd be damn emotional. I'm emotional about it now.

I think this is the test for all of us. Maybe the coal companies need to be a little more emotional and we need to be a little less emotional, and we need to meet somewhere in the middle. I think emotions are fine. I think it's the facts that are going to tell as well. The facts don't lie.

For me, when I get angry about it, or I get really sad about it, I have to take that and not try to make myself feel better by blaming somebody. I don't think I'm going to do any good that way. I have to find a way to get my story out, and I have to find a way to channel that energy in a way that's positive. So I don't think emotions are bad. To me, it's the difference between…I don't know if I'll be able to articulate it. To me, anger means that there is action to be taken. Like when I saw Gore's slide show, I didn't sleep for a couple of nights. There were a couple of points that kept coming back to me that I didn't think were sensational, mostly about the population explosion combined with the technological explosion. I went to despair for a while. I was just paralyzed. It was like a screen saver in the background that had been turned on and I couldn't turn it off.

But once I started to take action, I began to sleep at night again. I can't change it all, but I can do
something
. I can do what I can do. That's where peace comes from, and I think that's the place to use that energy. And then we have to learn to, as my husband is fond of saying,
¹⁰
sit in the ugly spot, we have to sit in
an uncomfortable place for a while and hold still and keep from clobbering each other to make ourselves feel better. Otherwise, we're just two sides of the same coin.

I am not optimistic and I'm not pessimistic. I don't know. I have no idea. All I know is I believe it's possible, but I think enough people have to come together with some kind of nonviolent approach in order to find a solution. I really do believe that. I think that if we just keep going, “You're wrong,” “No, you're wrong,” or “You're too emotional” or “You're not treating the people like people” or “You're trying to kill a whole industry,” we're not going to get anything done. I think that people need to go to court; people need to go say, “Here is the law, here is what's being done, here are the facts,” and let the system work. I also think that there is a larger discussion to be had, which is how do we all take responsibility for mapping the long-term road together ourselves. And we've got to come together in order to do that. Leaders from all parts of this have to be able to sit in a room together to do that. So I think that can be done. I don't know who can call that meeting. But I figure I'm going to take my tiny little ant-sized voice and throw it out there and see if it begins to take hold.

Nashville, Tennessee, February 11, 2008

The Endangered Hillbilly

My people, darker than God sometimes, I see you
in the shade of mountains, and if I burned a piece
of coal to see you better, I would burn
the darkness from it, but the darkness would
return behind the nearest object; it starts
on the other side of where the light runs out,
but let's agree that is the harder side,
where darkness makes another kind of light.

     —Maurice Manning, “Why Coal Companies Favor

     Mountaintop Removal”

There's a heaviness that hangs over the town of Whitesville, West Virginia. Like the fog from the nearby Big Coal River, it seeps through the streets, past the empty storefronts, on up the mountainside to the rows of houses that overlook the town.

It has become the invisible resident, a testament to the flight that has taken place over the years even as the profits of the mining industry have soared. Many of the buildings on the main street are vacant, pocked by broken windows boarded up with plywood. Only a few businesses barely hold on: an auto shop, a law office, a motel.

The sign for a local diner boasts hot fried baloney sandwiches, an Appalachian staple. Inside, a handful of people gather at the counter for their midday dinner. Even in the midst of the laughter that trickles out onto the street, one can hear the exhaustion.

People in Whitesville are tired. Although the town is located within Boone County, the leading coal-producing county in the state (and the county with the most mountaintop removal mines),
nearly 30 percent of residents live below the poverty line.
¹
Ever the faithless lover, coal has left much of Whitesville high and dry.

Judy Bonds, Whitesville, West Virginia. Photo by Silas House.

“This town is dying,” Judy Bonds mourns in the storefront office of Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW). “Growing up here in the sixties, this was a pretty booming town. My mother tells me that in the forties it was even more booming. The more coal we mine, the poorer we get.”

Such candor has made the fifty-seven-year-old grandmother a controversial figure around Whitesville and beyond. Coming from just up the road in Birch Holler, Bonds is used to taking her share of knocks. Her fierce hazel eyes and commanding voice are clues that she is descended from tough stock. It's something that has sustained her as the outreach coordinator for CRMW, a grassroots organization devoted to stopping mountaintop removal.

“I have the reputation of being a pretty angry person who speaks her mind,” Bonds says. “Sometimes the words don't come out right. If it's a spade, I call it a spade. That's who I am. I can't apologize for that. I lost my diplomacy a long time ago.”

Bonds was raised to speak her mind. The daughter of Oliver “Cob” Thompson and Sarah Easton Hannah—“pronounced ‘Hanner,'” Bonds is quick to point out—she is proud of her country upbringing in the Coal River Valley, where her family has lived for ten generations. “My first memories was of my father and grandfather plowing the field above my home,” she recalls. “I remember the smell of the rich, beautiful black earth. That's how it is in Appalachia—you are the mountain and the mountain is you.”

Bonds also remembers playing with her father's mining gear and finding one of his paychecks, made out for only fifteen dollars. That discovery, perhaps more than any other, put a nagging doubt in her mind about ethics in the coal industry. Her father's pay was barely enough to provide for her family, she says, let alone to compensate for the risks to his life and health.

“I remember walking up and down the railroad tracks at night with a pillowcase picking up lumps of coal so that we could stay
warm,” she shakes her head. “My memories of coal are not good memories.”

Bonds doesn't recall ever hearing her father grumble. “It was my mommy who complained, who railed and ranted against the company and the industry and how they treated the miners and the people. My mother was the one who talked about Matewan and Mother Jones and John L. Lewis.”
²

Her mother was also responsible for making sure her father finally received his black lung benefits. “My daddy got old and he was used up by the coal industry and he had black lung and needed to retire, but he still had children and grandchildren that he had to raise,” says Bonds.

The coal company didn't take such things into account. They denied him compensation, giving him an ultimatum: go back to work or quit.

He went back in the mines.

Meanwhile, Bonds recalls, her mother hatched a brilliant scheme. “My mother thought, ‘Well, I'll get life insurance on Cob.' So the agent come to the house and came back after a physical, and he looked at my mother and said, ‘Ms. Thompson, we can't insure your husband. He very sick, he's ill.' And she said, ‘Well, what's wrong with him?' And he said, ‘Why, he's got black lung. He might live six months.'

“My mother said, ‘Can you prove that?' He said, ‘Yessir, Ms. Thompson, right here's the paper that proves he's got black lung.'”

Despite her requests, the agent refused to turn over the piece of paper. Not batting an eye, says Bonds, her mother pulled out a pistol that she had tucked away in the big pockets of her housecoat.

“She pointed it at the insurance man and she said, ‘Sir, you're not leaving here with that piece of paper.' And so that's how my father finally proved that he had black lung.”

Bonds decries that “a proud, rebellious people have kind of lost their spines,” something she blames on the coal industry. “I'm
awful proud to be a hillbilly!” she shouts and lets out a big grin. “I choose to call myself an Appalachian-American because people need to realize that Appalachians are a distinct ethnic group.”

Her identity is something that Bonds always mentions in her speeches. At an anti–mountaintop removal rally at a church in Harlem in May 2007, she is filled with righteous indignation: “I never knew that America thought that I was an ignorant hillbilly until I went to Ohio when I was six years old and I found out that I was an ignorant hillbilly! It amazed me.”

Bonds's feeling of inferiority has been buried deep inside her all these years. It bubbles to the surface whenever she thinks about mountaintop removal and the fact that it's destroying her culture. In fact, she is so adamant about preserving mountain culture that CRMW recently created a t-shirt emblazoned with the rallying cry “Save the Endangered Hillbilly.” They can't keep enough in stock.

“Some people say if you're from a coal mining family and you speak out against coal you're betraying your heritage. Well, I pretty much say that these modern-day miners are the ones betraying their ancestors by destroying this land and who we are,” Bonds says with her trademark bluntness. “God made mountains and mountaineers. Greed made coal mining. I'm sorry, but that's the truth.”

Here she pauses and looks out the picture window at her hometown. A car sputters by every now and then. Somebody passes by on the sidewalk; she throws up her hand in acknowledgment. Leaning back on the worn couch, her posture softens.

“I've lost a lot of friends over speaking out,” Bonds says. “Nobody in my family, nobody real close. I consider them people who were never my friend to begin with. My daughter bought me a stun gun for Christmas because I've been threatened a couple of times. You can't look down when somebody looks at you. You've got to look them right in the eye and keep going.”

It's an old company strategy: divide and conquer. And Whitesville has been torn in two.

This, Bonds says, is a fact often acknowledged in conversations around the supper table and in line at the local Dairy Queen. There, a weathered man walks in wearing a t-shirt with what appears to be a man's face morphing into that of pig. A devilish mustache curls its way out from underneath the snout. What gives away the identity of the swine is the bold, black text above the picture, an ode to the state's largest coal producer: Massey Energy Sucks. The pig is Massey CEO Don Blankenship.

A patron looks up from his chicken strip basket. “Nice shirt.”

“Thanks, brother,” the man says, ambling over to extend his calloused hand. “He sure is a bad 'n.”

Another customer rolls her eyes and giggles, nudging her friend across the table. She turns and shakes her head in disgust.

Bonds herself cackles at mention of the man in the t-shirt. “I'm so glad he was out today. Ain't he great?”

“Massey has been able to steal the spine out of people,” she says. “It's a lot like battered wives, that Stockholm syndrome, where you identify with your abuser. That man beats you up, knocks you down, then he says, ‘Oh honey, I didn't mean to do that, I love ye so much, let me help you up.' And then he kisses you. It's the same thing. ‘Here's ye some coal sludge, here's ye some coal dust. Oh, I love you, here's ye a paycheck. Let's build a sludge pond above the school down the road here and send your children there.'”

Located about ten miles downstream from Whitesville, Marsh Fork Elementary School stands in the shadow of one of West Virginia's largest impoundments, which is operated by Massey Energy. Standing 385 feet tall, the Shumate sludge impoundment holds 2.8 billion gallons of coal slurry. Another impoundment, built just a few miles upstream from Whitesville in Marfork Holler, contains 8 billion gallons of slurry.

The ponds have surrounded Whitesville, making some residents concerned for their safety. Despite repeated assurances from Massey Energy, many, including Bonds, still have their doubts.
The disasters at Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, in 1972 and Martin County, Kentucky, in 2003 are still too fresh in their memories.

“We had better remember,” she says, going on to blame the union's absence for the domination of the coal companies over area residents.

She recently witnessed the partnership between union and company when she traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend a congressional hearing on the oversight of the Surface Mining and Reclamation Act. What she saw stopped her dead in her tracks. “I was standing there with my ‘Stop Mountaintop Removal' shirt and I looked over and there sat Cecil Roberts rubbing shoulders with Bill Raney and Bill Caylor.
³
Coming from a union family, I about puked. It makes me sick to know how corrupt the leadership in the union has become.”

Bonds also refuses to cut the local churches any slack. A practicing Christian, she credits her faith with informing her views on the environment and fighting mountaintop removal. “Mountaintop removal is a destruction of God's earth,” she says. “More churches don't fight back because they have coal miners in their congregations. And there's a history there. Most of the pastors in the old churches were owned by the companies. Churches don't want to divide their congregations.”

Many mountain churches also are subsidized by the coal companies, she notes. “It's very complicated; it's not black and white. They just teach God, gays, and guns and don't talk about the environment. It's changing, but a lot haven't joined the fight.”

Maybe more would enlist if they had been on the walk that Bonds took one day some years ago with her seven-year-old grandson. Like any other child, he wandered over into the creek to play. His hands full of stiffened shad, he hollered up at his grandmother, “What's wrong with these fish?”

They were dead.

Bonds panicked and began screaming for him to get out of the creek. The look of confusion on his little face cut her to the quick.

“Anybody who sees their grandbaby—or any child—in a stream full of dead fish under a corporate outlaw, there's no way it can't affect you,” she says.

Bonds says that the coal company did more than just ignore her concerns. They laughed at her. “I called a lawyer right up the road here,” she remembers. “He said, ‘Well, Ms. Bonds, what do you want?' I said I wanted the trains covered, I wanted them to quit running them at night, I wanted the black water stopped, I wanted the blasting to quit.

“He said, ‘This is coal country.' He went on and on. Forgive my language, but I said, ‘I don't think you're the lawyer I'm looking for. I think you're a pussy.' So I didn't work with him.”

Instead, Bonds joined up with CRMW in 1999 after seeing a flier for a rally. Formed the previous year by activists Randy Sprouse, Janice Neese, and Freda Williams, the organization has become a leading voice in the fight against mountaintop removal.

The cause keeps Bonds so busy that she barely sleeps. “It's overtaken my life,” she confesses. “I write letters to the editor in my sleep. I spend a lot of time on the road. It's hard for an Appalachian to travel that much. I've had people tell me that I'm doing it for my children and grandchildren, but it's hard to give up that fishing, that family time.”

It's also been hard to get the ear of the national media, which Bonds blames on prevailing stereotypes about the region. She has pitched an idea for a national media campaign involving celebrities, but so far to no avail: “People have tried to contact Jennifer Garner and Brad Paisley to speak out, but it's hard to get your foot in the door with them. It bothers me that people like that don't help their own state, their own region. I'd like to hear an explanation from them on that.” Knowing Bonds, she'll confront them about it if she gets the chance.