A Kentucky Town Shaped by Hard Lives, Hard Men

Police Chief Bill Tackett is driving his big cruiser across this spit of a town, a ride that takes all of five minutes.

He stops in front of three men sitting in the park. “If these old boys don’t know your people,” he says, “no one here does.”

In these parts, identity comes from lineage. I introduce myself as Floyd and Virgie Hall’s granddaughter.

“I knowed Floyd,” says Buddy Anderson, 74. “He worked the No. 4 mine.”

“What are you doin’, writin’ a book?” asks Virgil Chavis, who refuses to give his age. His mouth is edged in cracks stained by tobacco juice. “What do you want to know?”

What was it like to work in the coal mines?

The men exchange looks. City girl asking stupid questions.

Chavis spits a brown stream. “I could explain it until I was blue in the face, but there’s only one way to describe it,” he says. “You have to walk in there.”

Anderson snorts. “The company owned you from the cradle to the grave. You were born in their hospital, if you were lucky enough to get there. You were buried by their funeral home.”

When he thinks of the mines, “I can still feel the chills run up and down my back,” he says. “Anyone who tells you different is lying through their teeth.”

*

Looking back, a man in this Appalachian hollow could count on certain things. He would spend most of his days sucking black poison in a 3-foot-high mine shaft. Then he would crawl home, bent in half.

If he wasn’t electrocuted, blown up, maimed or crushed to death, there was black lung disease to fear.

It was mean work that produced mean lives in a city manufactured by Baltimore banker George C. Jenkins, whose Consolidation Coal Co. leveled a Letcher County forest in 1911 to build his namesake. Its goal was to chisel or blast every ounce of coal from mountains laden with it.

Because the industrial age needed more fuel. Because rich men wanted to get richer.

The poor, uneducated men who harvested the coal were a commodity, a means to an end.

In the end, like every other mining town in the isolated valleys of eastern Kentucky, Jenkins began to die after World War II. Gas and oil were fast becoming America’s new sources of fuel.

Now Kentucky wants to save this used-up town of 2,500, which once numbered 10,000. Gov. Paul Patton promises to spend millions building economic attractions, including an industrial park.

“Pie in the sky,” says Daniel Johnson, whose back was broken more than 50 years ago when a coal-cutting machine ran over him. For Johnson and many others here, it’s too late to repair damage done. The coal companies simply took, he says. “Not one thing did they put back in the community.”

But a lot of miners were put in caskets. Rescuing Jenkins means resurrecting it from their graves.

Mining Company Owned the Town

One belongs to my grandfather, a cantankerous, moody man who died 12 years ago from black lung disease and too many cigarettes.

He gave more than 10 years of his life to coal digging. Most were spent at Consol, as people around here called it. In the 1950s, Consol sold out to Bethlehem Steel, which closed in 1988. Forty percent of the local population went in search of greener pastures.

Consol owned everything. The houses. The school. The ice cream factory. The hospital. The funeral home. The men in its mines.

My father was born in a company-owned house. He attended the company-owned school. When the day shift ended at mine No. 4, he and his friends ran to meet men who emerged blinking, eyes road-mapped in red, bodies coated in black, swinging aluminum pails bearing their initials or employee number.

“The only way I could tell my daddy was by his lunch bucket,” my father remembers.

As a little girl in the 1960s, I listened in wonderment to my grandfather’s constant talk of getting money for his black lung disease.

His yearning was so deep it sounded like one of the sappy love songs that billowed from my mother’s car radio. “When I get my black lung money,” he’d start, “then I’ll . . .” (fill in the blank).

Get a new car. Get a new house. Be somebody.

The federal government finally gave him a settlement. It amounted to some $300 a month. It did not make him happy. It did not make him less mean.

It gave only passing notice to lungs sacrificed for the extraction of coal from a hole in the ground.

*

In Kentucky and parts of the Midwest, grandparents are called Papa and Mama (pronounced pa-PAW and ma-MAW). My Papa loved me; I never doubted that. But his hard life had made him hard.

Yet he listened with great seriousness to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing “Sixteen Tons.”

“That was my life,” he’d say.

He called shopping “tradin’.” He didn’t “buy” anything, he “traded” for it. Just as he did in Jenkins when he was paid in credits redeemable only at Consolidation stores. He kept his salary envelopes in a fireproof box. When I was in my 20s, he proudly opened it.

“For half month ending Feb. 28, 1946,” read one. Faded blue ink on worn brown paper.

“Rent: $13.10.

“Electric Lights: $2.25.

“Tax: $10.

“Burial Fund: $2.00.

“Group Insurance: $6.78.”

The list went on. Out of $175, Papa took home $89.78.

“You should write about this someday,” he said.

I wasn’t interested. I no longer liked my grandfather. He sucked all the air out of a room and all the life out of my grandmother. She never complained. I have never known what she really thought about anything.

She died last year at age 93. My father keened. I glared at the rented preacher, who’d never met Virgie May Asbury Hall, and pictured strangling him.

He implored us to get right with God while we stared at my grandmother in her coffin, a tiny woman in a fluffy purple dress with red-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, as if she needed to see where she was going.

The preacher said nothing about how her daddy died in the mines. About how, in the prime of her life, she’d cared for her dying mother instead of marrying young. She was a coal miner’s daughter and a coal miner’s wife. She lived in a coal camp until she was 45.

A hard life did not make her hard. It cowed her.

*

My grandfather was born in Coeburn, Va., just over Pine Mountain from Jenkins. My grandmother was born in Bondtown, Va., smack next door.

It’s a wonder they didn’t trip over each other in those tiny hamlets. Instead, they met in Jenkins. Each family came for the same reason. Papa’s family got there first.

His father, Garfield Hall, worked for Elk Horn Coal Corp., about 10 miles from Jenkins. On Feb. 6, 1926, something made him sit down and write to his four sons, although he knew nothing about grammar and couldn’t spell their names.

“To my precious Boy’s Floyad, Earnest, ollaf and T.S.,” he began. For three pages, my great-grandfather poured out his heart, telling his sons to make something of themselves.

“Always think of your body as something very sacred, as a beautiful temple fore the housing of something divine. Keep it pure and cleane.”

It’s impossible to find purity in a coal mine.

In Bondtown, my grandmother’s father, J. Smith Asbury, worked the Tom’s Creek mines. Every time someone died, a whistle blew. Then the whole town came running “to see whose daddy was dead,” my grandmother once recalled.

She spoke with only a tinge of sorrow, as if she were talking about someone else.

“One day they blew the whistle and it was my daddy who was dead.”

She was 7.

The Bondtown mines gave out, the Depression began and Mama’s mother, Mollie Asbury, put herself and her six children on the train that chugged over Pine Mountain into Jenkins, where there was workeven in those desperate times.

With no husband and no source of income, she had to let her two eldest sons enter the mines at age 12.

In Jenkins, coal dust billowed from uncovered railroad cars and draped the town in black. Women became weather prophets, waiting and judging when a strong downwind was coming so they could hang laundry. People bought cars in black or navy.

“I used to sweep that porch four and five times a day,” my grandmother remembered.

She was 33, an extremely old bride for those times, when she married Floyd Hall, a man who worked and drank with her brothers. Letcher County was dry, so they’d pile into a car and careen down the narrow road into nearby Pound, Va., to buy whiskey.

More men died on that dirt trail than in Consol’s mines, according to local lore.

There was no such thing as an 8-hour workday until the United Mine Workers organized Kentucky and West Virginia in the 1930s. John L. Lewis brought the UMW to Consolidation in 1933, with only scant trouble.

Not like neighboring Harlan County, where mine wars in the 1930s pitted Pinkerton guards against workers. The fighting and killing created a nickname still remembered--”Bloody Harlan.”

Union organizer Daniel Johnson remembers too. He worked the Elk Horn mines, in shafts adjoining Consol’s.

For 58 cents a ton, Johnson heaved coal rocks, some weighing 100 pounds, into rail cars. A good day’s pay was $7.

“We used to say that to do mine work, you had to have a strong back and a weak mind,” said Johnson, 81.

His father was a miner, though Johnson hardly saw the man.

“I would beg my mother to let me stay up and see my daddy,” Johnson recalls, his voice breaking.

“So many times in my life I’d be woken up in the middle of the night by my father groaning because he was in such pain and my mother was helping him bathe.

“I was such a young child, maybe 7 or 8, and I would lay in my bed and cry because my daddy was in such pain. That’s my earliest memory of what the mines did to the people.”

But the emotions of a child have no place in the mines.

“There was a story told about how the owners had once brought their families down to see the miners,” Johnson said. “The miners were so black and bent over that one of the women said, ‘What kind of animals are those, walking on their back feet?’ ”

*

Today Jenkins has one restaurant--a fast-food joint. But there is still a lunch counter at the corner drugstore.

There are no theaters, shopping centers or taverns in this crazy-quilt collection of old and new, where abandoned clapboard company houses sit next to perfectly preserved ones. A modern police station lies below Jenkins’ first hospital, which looks like a hilltop Southern mansion with its white porticoes and huge porch. Now it’s a senior citizens’ home.

Most residents are retirees. The rest, according to Chief Tackett, are mostly on welfare. Jenkins is in one of the state’s poorest counties. In the most prosperous era in America’s history, more than 30% of its people live below the poverty line.

There’s no place to order a drink, but there are 16 churches and a mission established by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity, the order’s first in rural America.

The governor who promises to revitalize Jenkins made his fortune in the 1970s by owning coal mines. During his first term, Patton pushed through changes that made it harder to get black lung benefits.

Patton says that stricter environmental laws have nearly wiped out respiratory illnesses and that antiquated ways of determining benefits were bankrupting modern coal companies. Since the late 1960s, “we dramatically cleaned up the mines,” Patton said.

The Courier-Journal in Louisville reported in 1998 that nearly 40% of clean air tests taken in mines in the 1970s, when Patton was an owner, were doctored.

“There wasn’t any truth to it,” Patton said of the investigative series, based in part on interviews with former employees. “You can always get disgruntled people to lie.”

Patton was reelected last year to a second term, no thanks to Jenkins. He lost several eastern Kentucky coal counties, including Letcher.

*

Chief Tackett was born here. His father worked in the mines and lost every toe to a coal-cutting machine. After his feet healed, he limped straight back to the shaft.

The son swore he would never follow his daddy’s maimed footsteps.

In 1961, Tackett was drafted. He stayed away 20 years. “My mother said, ‘You can come home walkin’ or you can home in a box.’ So I decided to come home walkin’.”

Mountain people always come back, Tackett said. “It’s just in our blood.”

He drives to the top of Pine Mountain. Jenkins peeks from the valley floor, surrounded by forests winter-gray and dead.

In the first half of the 1900s, coal warmed homes, powered the industrial revolution and fueled trains that drove the country west. Most of today’s coal goes to foreign countries and to power electricity plants. Many jobs once done by humans are now done by machines.

“That’s where our future lies,” Tackett says, pointing to the town’s future industrial park site, 77 acres of dirt surrounded by sawed-off mountains, their tops lost to strip mining.

The city has already spent about $1 million in state money extending water and sewer lines to the site. Another $2 million in revitalization funds will be spent to create wilderness trails to lure tourists, and building a welcome center for travelers.

“Where do you want to go now?” the chief asks.

To the cemetery. I am determined to find my great-grandmother’s grave, but I have no idea where it is.

The graveyard looks like an abandoned lot. It is overgrown with weeds and littered with broken, listing headstones. Patches are impassable because of thorns and fallen trees.

On a lonely slope covered by dead leaves sits a plain granite rectangle.

“Mollie N. Asbury,” it says. “1882 to 1940.”

The woman who lost her husband to the mines and was forced to send her sons down at age 12 is alone here, forgotten in an unattended grave.

There is a small, worn photograph of her that I’ve somehow inherited. It is more than 70 years old, taken when my great-grandmother was in her 40s.

Her shoulders are stooped, her face set in sadness. The veins on her hand rise like tree roots.

She looks like an old woman. This is what mining life did to the women.

“We bring a jail crew out here once a year to clean up,” the chief says. “But that’s all we can afford to do.”

*

Tackett takes to me to Mudtown, a hilly section of company houses so named because its roads turned to waist-high muck in the rain.

The streets are paved now. This is where my grandparents lived after they married. This is where my grandmother and her family lived before she wed.

Trees used to create a canopy stretching the short length of Main Street. They were chopped down for reasons no one remembers. Now it is all asphalt and concrete, save the small park in the middle of town where the old men sit on a wooden swing.

After saying they remember my grandfather and indulging my queries about the mines, they ask where I live.

New York, I reply. I could have said Mars. Their reaction would’ve been the same--distrust and skepticism. It makes no difference that I am Floyd Hall’s granddaughter, or that I came to Jenkins as a child during summer vacation.

I don’t know what I expected to find here. Some sense of belonging, perhaps. Some sleeping place in my heart that would be awakened by knowing more about the grandparents who helped raise me, and this town that shaped their lives.

But in the hardened stares of these three men, I saw what I was to them: An outsider. Someone who could never understand choosing to stay in a town that took care of you while it killed you.

Because I had never lived it. Because my grandparents left in 1950, when my father was 11, and moved to Cincinnati, giving him, and me, the greatest gift they possessed. We were spared the hardness of Jenkins. We were given what they’d never had--the chance to become whatever we chose.

I shake each man’s hand. The police chief and I get back in his car.

“You get what you need?” he asks.

No, I say to myself. And I wonder whether Jenkins will either.