They Say in Harlan County They Say in Harlan County An Oral History ALESSANDRO PORTELLI 1 2011 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data They say in Harlan County : an oral history / Alessandro Portelli. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–973568–6 1. Harlan County (Ky.)—History. 2. Harlan County (Ky.)—Social conditions. 3. Harlan County (Ky.)—Economic conditions. 4. Harlan County (Ky.)—Social life and customs. 5. Harlan County (Ky.)—Biography. 6. United Mine Workers of America—History. 7. Labor unions—Organizing—Kentucky—Harlan County—History. 8. Working class— Kentucky—Harlan County. 9. Oral history—Kentucky—Harlan County. 10. Interviews—Kentucky—Harlan County. I. Portelli, Alessandro. F457.H3T447 2010 976.9'154—dc22 2010010364 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Frontispiece: Employees’ homes in the west end of Benham, Harlan County. The Kentucky Historical Society, KNU-1987PH2-1607 This book is dedicated to Annie Napier and her family, and to Hazel King This page intentionally left blank Contents HARLAN COUNTY, 1964–2009: A Love Story 3 1 THE BEAR AND THE SYCAMORE TREE 13 2 OF HARDSHIP AND LOVE 29 3 WARS AND PEACE 50 4 THESE SIGNS SHALL FOLLOW THEM 70 5 FLUSH TIMES AND ROUGH TIMES 93 6 A SPACE OF THEIR OWN 11 8 7 MINER’S LIFE 135 8 IDENTITIES 157 9 NO NEUTRALS THERE 183 10 GOD, GUNS, AND GUTS 209 11 HARLAN ON OUR MINDS 234 12 EXODUS 249 13 THE OTHER AMERICA 277 14 DEMOCRACY AND THE MINES 307 15 STAYING ALIVE 331 People I Owe 367 The Narrators 371 Notes 379 Index 425 This page intentionally left blank They Say in Harlan County Detail of State of Kentucky: Base Map, U.S. Geological Survey, 1958. HARLAN COUNTY, 1964–2009 A Love Story THE MAKING OF A PERSONAL MYTH: THE CLASS STRUGGLE It was 1988, my fi fth visit to Harlan County. I was on the winding road from Harlan to Evarts, driving a borrowed pickup truck, when I began to notice the roadkill. It was a dangerous road, with more than its share of adventurous drivers, and it was getting dark. I began to think of the many ways in which death was a presence in this land: the dead animals, the road accidents, and of course the coal mines. Guns. And black lung. Let me try to explain what I was doing there that night so far from home. I fi rst heard about Harlan County in, I guess, 1963, from an Almanac Singers recording of “Which Side Are You On?” written by Florence Reece during the dramatic miners’ strike of 1931–32. I heard Florence Reece and Pete Seeger sing it again at the great union rally, Solidarity Day, in 1982 in Washington: “They say in Harlan County / There are no neutrals there / You’ll either be a union man / Or a thug for J. H. Blair.” 1 In 1964, I bought the New Lost City Ramblers album Songs from the Depression, and I heard Aunt Molly Jackson’s “Join the CIO”: “The bosses ride their big fi ne white horse while we walk in the mud / Their fl ag’s the old red, white and blue and ours is dipped in blood.”2 I was being educated through music to the his- tory of the American working class. Next was an album of topical songs from the Newport Folk Festival, including Jim Garland singing about Harry Simms, the Communist organizer killed in Kentucky in 1932: “Let’s sink this rotten system / In the deepest pits of Hell.” 3 I hadn’t realized that such words had ever been uttered in the United States. But in 1970 in Brooklyn I taped Barbara Dane singing another Harlan County song, Sarah Ogan Gunning’s “I Hate the Capitalist System.”4 This was the sixties, and many of us dreamed of another world, a different society. I had a passion for America going back to teenage rock and roll, to what I knew of the civil 4 | THEY SAY IN HARLAN COUNTY rights movement, and to a year as an exchange student in Los Angeles (where I heard my fi rst hillbilly jokes). So I was also passionately worried about America—about Vietnam, Santo Domingo, the murders of the Kennedys, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. The image of the United States that prevailed in Italy was that of a society with no history of class confl ict, and so these voices from Harlan were a revelation. Harlan was bound to become a point of refer- ence in my imagination: partly mythologized, but full of meaning. Then I met David Walls, who was working at the University of Kentucky’s Appalachian Studies Center, and he took me on a whirlwind drive through towns such as Hazard, Harlan, Hindman, and Whitesburg. It was 1973, and the Brookside strike was on. I remember the coal camps, the strike signs along the road I would take fi fteen years later, the one-armed lady in a trailer who talked with David about the strike, and my frustration at being unable to understand what she said. The trip ended at the Highlander Center in New Market, Tennessee, a cradle of progressive unionism in the 1930s, civil rights education in the 1950s and ’60s, and the new Appalachian awareness and organizing. I met such inspiring fi gures as Myles Horton, Helen Lewis, and Guy and Candie Carawan, and I was in Myles’s offi ce when Rosa Parks called him on the phone. I had gone to Harlan on the track of the class struggle. I soon realized that my early inspirations—Sarah Ogan Gunning, Molly Jackson, Jim Garland, Florence Reece—were no longer part of the living memory of Harlan, from which they had been exiled since the thirties. Harlan was more complex and contradic- tory—which only increased my fascination and my desire to learn. Anyway, the struggle was still on at Brookside and in the Miners for Democracy movement. In Hazard we visited Frances “Granny” Hager in a small house along the rail- road tracks, and I recorded the fi rst of the two hundred tapes that went into the making of this book. She spoke of the “roving pickets” of 1962–63, and showed us how the history of the mountains was etched onto the geography of her body: Hager: And I’ve got scars all over my body, that I can show you, I’ve got in Harlan. And on my legs and on my arms, where the scabs would try to back us off the picket line, and that here place, I don’t guess you can see it too good, that white place, that they pricked the skin up—like that?—and one man held it and held my hand and had them cut that whole chunk out of my hand. And this right here, the doctors once they were afraid it’s cancer, but that is where that they held a cigar to my hand till it burned out most through here. Walls: In Harlan? Hager: Yeah, in the early thirties. And I’ve got scars all over my legs, you can’t see ’em too good, right there’s a sunken place, and there’s a scar. And I’ve got scars on my body, where they’d take knife points, you know, sharp knife points, and just barely stick it through the skin where it’d HARLAN COUNTY, 1964–2009 | 5 hurt, and twist it, that way it makes a small hole. Now that’s what we went through with our trying to organize, trying to get something out of—for the people. In 1977, I saw Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, U.S.A. in a commercial theater in Rome. When I watched the pickets sing “We Shall Not Be Moved” and Florence Reece sing “We Shall Overcome” at the Evarts Multi-Purpose Center, I sensed that using music to educate myself about American struggles was not entirely a fantasy. So I decided to go back. Through the help of John Stephenson, I obtained a fellowship at the Appalachian Studies Center, where I met my personal spiritual guide into the meaning of the mountains, Gurney Norman, as well as George Ella Lyon, Herb Reid, Alan DeYoung, Dwight Billings, Bill Turner, and many others who improved my education immensely; I also got to know the media and arts center Appalshop, which became my model of practical cultural politics. Back home, I started an Appalachian studies collective in the English Department of the University of Rome. We taught classes, wrote articles and a book of essays, and advised students’ dissertations; in three Appalachian festivals we brought over writers, artists, and scholars from the University of Kentucky, the Highlander Center, Appalshop, and Harlan.5 A faculty exchange program between the University of Kentucky and the University of Rome is still functioning (another participant, Berea College, had to drop out).