One girl’s presentation she called “The Other Side of the Coin.” This is flippy-hair Bettina Cook with her posse of gal pals and her dad that owned the Foodland grocery chain, seven stores in the tristate area. Packed-lunch sandwiches with the cut-off crusts that flabbergasted me back in third grade, yep, same Bettina. Her family on her mom’s side were major shareholds of the Bluebonnet Mine. She passed out brochures on all the good the company has done for Lee County in the way of town park benches, etc. Her great-grandfather won an award from the governor for buying one of the biggest coal veins under Kentucky and figuring out how to pull it out of the ground on the Virginia side so they didn’t have to pay some certain tax. She had a slew of relatives that were senators and such in the State House, that she showed us pictures of on her computer. Yes, her own computer, brought from home. Also a Motorola phone. Queen Bettina, we all knew she operated at her own level. But Mr. Armstrong said okay, everybody gets a turn, just listen.
For the most part though we listened to the crushed-leg, dynamite-explosion type of stories. This was the oldsters’ chance to complain to their grandkids that usually have no time for old-people shit. If a miner didn’t get buried alive, the question was what part of him would give out first: lungs, back, or knees. I thought of Mr. Peg that was giving out all over, on disability ever since he got hurt. Another old-guy topic: how they didn’t want handouts. They grew up hardworking men and that’s what they believed in, working. Even if they were on disability now, goddammit to hell. They’re not that person. They hate that person. They also talked about Union. But I mean, this word. Like it was a handshake deal between them and God. We had the general idea of workers wanting their pay, safety, and such. But where did that go, and what was the or else?
Or else they’d all walk off the job and let the coal bosses suck their own dicks, Mr. Armstrong said. Not his words, but he got it across. He showed us films. Obviously we loved teachers showing films: nap time, makeout time if applicable. But this one, Jesus, you needed to see how it came out. Men calling a strike, the company calling in the army to force them back to work, the miners saying guess what, we’ve got guns too. Serious shit. Battle of Blair Mountain, that turned into the biggest war in America ever, other than the civil one. Twenty thousand guys from all over these mountains, fighting in regiments. They wore red bandannas on their necks to show they were all on the same side, working men. Mr. Armstrong said people calling us rednecks, that goes back to the red bandannas. Redneck is badass.
Anyway, it was all in the past, nobody in class had parents working in the mines now. We’d heard all our lives about the layoffs. The companies swapped out humans for machines in every job: deep-hole mines went to strip mines, then to blowing the heads off whole mountains, with machines to pick up the pieces. Bettina was like, Get real, you all, companies are in business to make money, that’s just a fact. The facts being, there’s hardly any coal jobs left around here. Bettina also said there’s no such thing as unemployed, just not trying. Her posse all stuck up for her side, and other kids said city people were the problem, for bad-mouthing coal.
I wasn’t from mining people that I knew of, so it wasn’t my fight. I drew a lot of pictures and kept quiet. I dreamed up the idea of a comic strip about an old time red-bandanna miner that’s a superhero, busting the company guys’ nuts. I could ask Ms. Annie for tips on how to make him look old-time, because she was amazing like that. She’d know exactly how to do it.
Mr. Armstrong as usual let the argument go rogue for a long while. But, he finally said. Didn’t we wonder why there’s nothing else doing around here, in the way of paying work?
Our general thinking was that God had made Lee County the butthole of the job universe.
“It wasn’t God,” he said. Just ticked off enough for his accent to give him away. I remember that day like a picture. Mr. Armstrong in his light-green shirt, breaking a sweat. We all were. It’s May, there’s no AC, and even the two cement bulldogs out front probably have their tongues hanging out. Every soul in the long brick box of Jonesville Middle wishing they could be someplace else. Except for Mr. Armstrong, determined to hold us there in our seats.
“Wouldn’t you think,” he asked us, “the miners wanted a different life for their kids? After all the stories you’ve heard? Don’t you think the mine companies knew that?”
What the companies did, he told us, was put the shuthole on any choice other than going into the mines. Not just here, also in Buchanan, Tazewell, all of eastern Kentucky, these counties got bought up whole: land, hospitals, courthouses, schools, company owned. Nobody needed to get all that educated for being a miner, so they let the schools go to rot. And they made sure no mills or factories got in the door. Coal only. To this day, you have to cross a lot of ground to find other work. Not an accident, Mr. Armstrong said, and for once we believed him, because down in the dark mess of our little skull closets some puzzle pieces were clicking together and our world made some terrible kind of sense. The dads at home drinking beer in their underwear, the moms at the grocery with their SNAP coupons. The army recruiters in shiny gold buttons come to harvest their jackpot of hopeless futures. Goddamn.