https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n15/oliver-whang/diary
Oliver Whang

In​ 1917, the United States Coal and Coke Company established a mining camp named after the company president, Thomas Lynch, just north of the Cumberland Gap in eastern Kentucky, at the foot of Black Mountain, the highest peak in the state. By the start of the Second World War, more than ten thousand people were living in Lynch, and the mines, which employed four thousand, were among the most productive in the world. In a single nine-hour shift, workers could extract and prepare for shipping more than twelve thousand tons of coal.

In 1938, William Earl Turner moved to Lynch and was assigned a bed in one of the company boarding houses for single miners. Turner had been working in and around Central Appalachia since he left school, aged twelve, nine years earlier. Within a year of arriving in Lynch he had married a local woman, Naomi Rudolph, and moved into a small company house, No. 550. He was 22; Naomi was 16. Their first son was born in 1939.

Nearly every house in Lynch was the same, with a kitchen, living room and a steep, narrow staircase up to two bedrooms. Shift changes were announced by a horn every eight hours; employees were paid in scrip, a micro currency accepted at the company store; there was no mayor or sheriff and the company hired preachers, doctors and teachers. Services seem to have been decent. In 1925, Coal Age Magazine called Lynch the ‘Cadillac of Coal Towns’. But conditions in the mines were extremely dangerous. Coal seams could collapse on workers and the shafts themselves sometimes caved in. In the 1940s, there were 302 reported mining-related deaths in Harlan County, where Lynch is located, most of them attributed to ‘roof fall’ and asphyxiation. Making life in the town seem appealing was good business sense. The better things were outside the mines, the more likely people were to put up with conditions underground.

Earl moved to Lynch at the end of the Harlan County War, an eight-year on-again-off-again battle between coal companies and the United Mine Workers of America. He joined the union and his wife hung a portrait of its president, John L. Lewis, above her piano. But the Turners, like other Black families in town, were used by mine supervisors to destroy the solidarity between miners, in an attempt to break the union. The UMWA had been integrated since its founding in 1890 and in parts of Alabama was majority Black. But some branches, particularly in West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, had split into white and Black factions, with leadership positions going only to the former. Coal companies in Appalachia often asked managers to hire what Justus Collins, a West Virginian mine operator, called a ‘judicious mixture’ of races in order to counteract union bargaining. From the late 19th century they recruited sharecroppers from the South, offering them a new life in the mountains. In 1945, when his fifth son, William (or Bill), was born, Turner was one of four thousand Black people in Lynch. The town was by then one of the most racially diverse places in the country.

I moved to Prestonsburg, a mining town not far from Lynch, in the spring of 2020 to write an article about a twenty-year-long effort to reintroduce elk (which had been hunted to local extinction more than a century earlier). The mountains were beautiful, and people seemed eager to talk to me. By the time I returned to New York the pandemic had reached America, and I decided to go back and rent a place in Kentucky. But I often felt uncomfortable and self-conscious. When I went into stores with a mask on I received angry stares, even though there were signs stating that masks should be worn. This struck me as worth writing about, but I didn’t. I just stopped wearing my mask. It was election year and Central Appalachia was a Trump stronghold; 90 per cent of the population voted for him in 2016. When I first met my landlord, a registered Democrat, she said: ‘I’m a Trump girl and if you don’t like that then you can just get out.’ This struck me as worth writing about, too, but I didn’t. I just nodded and took the room.

In May, the Black Lives Matter protests began. Some were in towns in eastern Kentucky. A friend had mentioned a man called Bill Turner to me, and I saw he had written something for a website called the Daily Yonder about his ‘unbridled joy’ on seeing ‘crowds of predominantly young white people’ marching in Kentucky in the name of racial justice. ‘“Whiteness” in Appalachia,’ he wrote, ‘following the murder of George Floyd, does not mean the same thing to young whites in rural mountaintop towns like where I grew up.’ I had seen these crowds too, but had come to a different conclusion. It seemed to me that the protesters were virtue signalling.

Today around 95 per cent of eastern Kentucky is white and, if it weren’t for the news and the Mexican restaurants, it would be possible to forget that non-white people exist. In two months I had only met one Black person. His name was Papis and he worked at a local garage and played football on Saturday mornings with me and some workers from El Rodeo Grande, a restaurant up the road from my apartment. Our pitch was on what used to be the top of a mountain, levelled by strip mining. On warm mornings condensation would rise from the valley, drifting around us in a band of silver mist. Papis was by far the most talented among us, and the most mysterious. He had a foreign accent and drove a car with expensive rims, but I didn’t want to ask how he had ended up in Kentucky. I thought it would seem as if I was singling him out because he was Black. The other guys didn’t care. They called him ‘Marrón’, yelling it at his back as he outpaced them down the pitch. ‘Afuera, Marrón, afuera!’ They called me ‘Chino’.

I got Turner’s number from my friend and called him in Houston, where he now lives. He left Lynch in 1965 for university, eventually becoming a sociology professor. He told me about his childhood, about his mother cooking breakfast, shouting his father’s name to wake him, the sound bouncing off the chamberpot at the top of the stairs. Earl would come home dusty, smoking a cigarette and bantering with the other miners; Naomi would cook squash and collard greens. In the summer, Bill and his nine siblings and their friends went out every evening, barefoot, exploring the mountains, while the men gathered at the Lynch Pool Room to drink beer. During winter the house was warmed by a coal-fired stove and the children slept together in one room, lined up head to toe.

The Black population of Lynch was concentrated between Main Street and Sixth Street. In many respects the Turners’ life was like that of their white contemporaries. Black and white miners were paid the same; they lived in identical houses; a company-sponsored policeman would call on anyone who missed a shift. There was a white doctor, John Vicini, an Italian immigrant, and a Black doctor, Johnny Jones, who had been born in Alabama. There was a school for white children on one side of Lynch and one for Black children on the other. Everyone answered to the same bosses, faced the same dangers at work and shopped at the same company store.

This is not the version of Central Appalachia people are familiar with. The region is now best known for being one of the poorest places in America, with high rates of cancer, black lung disease (pneumoconiosis) and opioid abuse. Life expectancy is years lower than in most other parts of the US; the disability rate is around 20 per cent and the poverty rate around 30 per cent. Few of these issues are new, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that the plight of the region was brought to national attention, thanks to Harry Caudill, a lawyer from the town of Whitesburg, Kentucky.

Caudill was born in 1922. By then, mining companies had established themselves as the primary economic movers in eastern Kentucky by acquiring land rights from unwitting settlers, splitting ownership of the surface of the mountains from the minerals beneath. As the regional economy became more dependent on coal, companies began to use a cheaper technique, strip mining, which involved clearing the topsoil off ridges, blasting out hard strata and collecting coal from the exposed seams. It was efficient but dangerous. Sulphur from surface mines contaminated creeks; silica dust coated towns; forested mountains were covered in slag.

When the coal companies started to move out after the Second World War – there were fewer new seams to exploit and demand was dropping – the local population was left stranded. The 1960 census found that 19 per cent of adults in eastern Kentucky couldn’t read or write, and over 60 per cent of the population was living below the poverty line. Harlan County’s population fell by 30 per cent between 1940 and 1960. Caudill wrote in Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area (1963) that eastern Kentucky was not just suffering an economic depression, but a ‘depression of the spirit which has fallen on so many of the people, making them, for the moment at least, listless, hopeless, and without ambition’. The book was picked up by the press. Caudill showed reporters from the New York Times and CBS News around. In 1963 John F. Kennedy created the Appalachian Regional Commission; in 1964, Lyndon Johnson launched his War on Poverty from a porch in southeastern Kentucky. Over the next 25 years more than $15 billion was spent in Appalachia.

It did little to alter the region’s fate. While Johnson’s revamped welfare system pulled many people out of poverty, hardship persisted. Harlan County lost another 20 per cent of its population between 1960 and 1980. In 1976, Caudill published The Watches of the Night, which documented the largely unsuccessful attempts to address systemic poverty, corporate mismanagement and environmental exploitation in Appalachia in the wake of his first book. He began corresponding with the physicist and eugenicist William Shockley, telling him that he used to believe some of the area’s problems could be addressed through government intervention, but now felt ‘the poverty that is associated with our region is accompanied by passivity and dependence and I see no present hope for allaying it. I have come full circle in my thinking and have reluctantly concluded that the poverty that called into being the Appalachian Regional Commission is largely genetic in origin and is largely irreducible.’ In the autumn of 1990, Caudill returned to Whitesburg. He was 68 years old and suffering from Parkinson’s disease and a wartime foot injury. On 29 November he stood under a hemlock tree in his backyard and shot himself in the head.

In July 2020, not long after I spoke to Bill Turner, I drove through Lynch for the first time. Pastel houses lined the main road and mountain ridges rose on both sides, their slopes covered in kudzu. There were no traffic lights. Many buildings had been abandoned and boarded up. A rusted chute sloped down from the top of a concrete silo and disappeared into shrubs on the other side of the road. There were no working mines left in the town, and its population was around six hundred.

Over the past thirty years, many of the economic and social ills Caudill brought to light – child poverty, environmental degradation, high rates of cancer and disability, economic dependency, population decline – have persisted in Appalachia, and others have joined them: addiction, high obesity rates, tooth decay in babies weaned on Mountain Dew. Hillbilly Elegy, the bestselling memoir by J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, is another iteration of Caudill’s fatalistic story. According to Vance, whose grandparents moved from Jackson, Kentucky to Ohio in the 1950s, the town they left is

undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world; it is also full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them. It is unquestionably beautiful, but its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatters the countryside. Its people are hard-working, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.

This story is based on a particular image of an Appalachian: a hard-working, white frontiersman. Yet this account, as Elizabeth Catte argues in What You Are Getting Wrong about Appalachia, depends on tracing Central Appalachia’s inhabitants back to Scots-Irish pioneers whose values – self-reliance, pride, violence – were insulated from modern culture by the mountains that surrounded them. To people such as Vance and Caudill, the fact that the region’s inhabitants and official representatives have often failed to meet the demands of the modern world is evidence that particular American values have been preserved there, uncorrupted. It is a view that easily veers towards eugenics, as Caudill’s story shows, and in 2016, Vance and Charles Murray, the co-author of The Bell Curve, discussed ‘the decline of the white working class’ in Appalachia at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank. ‘There is definitely a sort of ethnic component to what’s going on in these areas,’ Vance said. ‘The Scots-Irish culture is both unique and regionally distinct, but it’s also spread pretty far and wide, and has a lot of effect on other parts of America.’

That summer I met one of Turner’s high school friends, Rutland Melton, who still lived in Lynch. Melton, a Black man with blue eyes and freckled skin, returned to the town after serving in the Vietnam War. He hadn’t planned to go back, but then he heard that miners were making $50 a day. In 1984 the Black Mountain mines were sold to Arch Coal and in 1998, in the face of falling profits, Arch shut down operations, only to reopen the following year with non-union labour. Melton retired. I met him in front of the Lynch Coloured Public School, a red brick building with shuttered windows. He told me that the school was a source of pride for the Black families in town, although it was more modest than the white high school building. Its teachers had been educated at the great Black colleges, including Fisk, Hampton, Wilberforce and Tuskegee; portraits of Black intellectuals and activists lined the halls.

Vance, like Caudill, has little to say about the Black people who grew up in places like Lynch. By framing the region as a single doomed entity, populated by a single ethnic group, he paints over the history of what Turner has called ‘the most historically marginalised of the subcategories and subgroups within the national African American population’. By the time Hillbilly Elegy appeared, Central Appalachia had become one of the whitest regions in America.

In 2021, Turner published his own book, The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns. He notes that outside their working lives, Black and white miners rarely interacted. In cinemas, Black customers sat on the first floor and whites on the ground floor. White folk swam at the Lynch Country Club; Black folk swam in Looney Creek. Integration, which came when Turner was at high school, seemed more of a loss than a gain. The school for Black children became the middle school, the portraits were taken down and Black history ceased being taught. Within five years, most of the Black teachers had left town. The rest of the population soon followed. ‘Up to that point, Black people did not have to concern themselves with what white people thought about them, about their intelligence or their potential,’ Turner wrote. ‘Integration changed that.’

It seemed to me that Turner’s excitement at the Black Lives Matter protests in Central Appalachia had a lot to do with a feeling that the Black history of the area was somehow being recognised. In the 1960s, with the white faces of struggling Appalachians in national magazines, policies for combating generational poverty stopped being so closely associated with the civil rights movement. Fifty years later, the national opioid crisis was labelled an epidemic after white people in Appalachia began dying from fentanyl overdoses; never mind that Black people in poor parts of Philadelphia, New York and Chicago had been dying of overdoses for decades. The migration of people from the coalfields to the Midwest over the past half-century is often framed as a ‘brain drain’; it was also a movement of Black families away from harsh, discriminatory working conditions.

Though Turner returns often to eastern Kentucky, he has spent most of his life elsewhere. There are now only a few hundred Black people in Harlan County. Earl died in 1987, and after Naomi died in 2001, there were no longer any members of the family in the town. When Turner and his siblings returned home for their mother’s funeral, their cars had licence plates from Louisiana, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, New Jersey and North Carolina. Before breakfast one day, Turner and some of his brothers went round the back of their house and shot 9mm rounds at cans balanced on sticks. ‘Three decades earlier, those shots would have sprayed dozens of homes where hundreds of people lived,’ Turner wrote. ‘In two generations, the tree line of Black Mountain had come within a stone’s throw of our backyard.’

At the end of 2020 I decided to leave Prestonsburg. There were plenty of reasons. I had only published a handful of articles and was spending more waking hours watching Netflix than anything else. I also felt I might be doing more harm than good. Over the decades, many reporters had come to the area looking for stories of Appalachian poverty. Locals were used to seeing themselves represented in the press by black and white photos of opioid-addicted single mothers or barefoot children playing with snakes in trailer parks. People were suspicious of me. I was suspicious of myself. One of the first pieces I published concerned a family that was struggling to access unemployment benefits; it was accompanied by black and white photos of them staring blankly into the camera. I left, but a few months later I went back. And then I left again, and then I went back. On my most recent trip, I ate at the café my former landlady owns with her son. I got a hug, but not a discount. Still an ardent Trump supporter, she occasionally texts me Bible quotes. One of them read: ‘Foreigners who live in your land will gain more and more power, while you gradually lose yours. They will have money to lend you, but you will have none to lend them. In the end they will be your rulers.’