Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (14 page)

Cecil Roberts and his crew needs to set down with these coal companies and stop this criminal activity that the coal companies are doing.
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Right here in Eastern Kentucky, there's more coal being mined right where we're setting today, there's more coal going out of this immediate area than ever before, and not one lump of it is UMWA coal. If this coal was being mined union, maybe retired miners' checks would increase a little bit. But no.

The company plays on this type of information. When the 1,200 miners marched on Frankfort, I know why they did that. My son and son-in-law work in the mines, so I know. Everybody knows it. They were told that they either go down to Frankfort or they'd be fired. At least one company told them if they didn't sign that petition they wouldn't get their paycheck. That's the nonunion companies for you.

If you try to unionize now, the company will say, “You don't need them union bosses in here telling you what to do.” Them leaving made it look they'd just leave the miners high and dry. What am I supposed to say?

The union is only as good as its local union, as the men in the
mines. So if you're going to work unsafe even though you have the backing of the union, then what good's the union? But if you have the union, at least you have the right to work safe. But now, without a union, the way the administration is now, you just don't have any protection.

Even though I got hurt in the mines, I have to say that it was a safe mine. My accident was a freak accident. It all comes down to if a company wants to do the right thing or not. When I was just a young whippersnapper, first going in the mines, there was this old Italian miner who would say: “You clean him up, you timber him up, the coal, she comes.” Now what he meant by that was that if you mine safely, then you're going to mine good coal. But if you go in there and halfway do it and try to be greedy, it's going to screw everything up. That all depends on the company.

Coal mining in this area used to be a very respected profession. You wouldn't even know that coal was being mined around here a lot of times. Because of one little simple fact: all the companies had their own bathhouses, places for the men to get cleaned up. You very rarely ever seen a miner with a dirty face. But now you see them in the grocery stores, in the stations, with their dirty clothes on. To me, I don't know how to say it, but that's being disrespectful in a way.

The sad part about it is that the people right here in Eastern Kentucky who are mining the coal, they don't have time to see what's going on on the broader scale. It's not only hurting our culture here in the mountains, it's hurting a lot of people elsewhere, even in third world countries.

The coal companies own it all: the timber rights, the coal rights, all of it. All this logging that's being done, it's part of the coal mining industry. They go in and clear-cut and then they mine it.

We are unique in this little area because we've been able to fight a lot of this. If you'll notice, since we've been sitting here, you don't see any big coal trucks coming through by us, because we've kept them out. But if you go down the road about three
miles here, there will be trucks running every forty-five seconds; those big twenty-two-wheel trucks will be going through.

If all these mountains around me right now had been leveled, I'd be devastated. I'd probably—I hate to say I'd give up—but I'd probably just pack up and move. It just wouldn't be worth living here anymore, to me. It's sad enough to see it happening all around me. It just tears ye heart out, to see this type stuff going on.

Right here in this area, you've got your school board, your health care facilities, the newspapers, but there's no big industry but coal. Everything revolves around coal.

I honestly believe in my heart that if the environmentalists and the coal industry could set down together and get a dialogue going…we could change things. Coal ain't going to stop tomorrow. But there is a way we could communicate and clean things up and maybe even get coal to be a part of the equation. But the coal companies don't want to budge, they don't want to give anybody else a voice. They just don't want to lose a dollar.

Through the years, we have been beat down. Our politicians have not represented us. There was a big redistricting so that there are four representatives who represent Harlan County. It's divide and conquer. That's what's happening.

The companies' big showcases are Hazard and Pikeville. Yeah, they're doing well. But the surrounding rural areas are starving to death. Right here in this whole area of the tri-cities, there's not a red light. There's some stop signs, but no red light. If I wanted to go to Applebee's, I'd go to Hazard.

I just want my oak trees and walnut trees. I want to be able to take my grandchildren out in the woods and not have to worry about falling off a three-hundred-foot highwall. They're coming in on us. They're coming in from Letcher County, right over that ridge there. It's all on the other side of the mountain right now, but they're slowly encroaching. That's why I'm fighting so hard.

Benham, Kentucky, May 2, 2008

A Light in the Dark

The green rolling hills of West Virginia
Are the nearest thing to heaven that I know
Though the times are sad and drear
And I cannot linger here
They'll keep me and never let me go

     —Utah Phillips, “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia”

“There's a certain point in Eastern Kentucky, on I-64, when I'm driving home, where the mountains start to rise. Every time I hit it, still I feel it, it's way down deep, and something just lets go,” Kathy Mattea says. “As I get closer and closer to home the horizon gets closer and closer until I can only see right around the bend, and that feels real safe to me, being nestled in like that. Home, in the mountains.”

Mattea is a beloved, Grammy-winning singer who spent the last decade of the twentieth century as one of country music's most dependable and most respected hit-makers. Her songs are the kind that people know all the words to and sing along with when they come on the radio: “Eighteen Wheels (and a Dozen Roses),” “Where've You Been,” “Walk the Way the Wind Blows.” Mattea's personality has helped sell her records. People don't like just to hear her sing, they want to be her friend, too. In the new century, Mattea is emerging as one of the genre's most influential voices. She's also quickly becoming one of the more visible Appalachians involved in the fight against mountaintop removal.

Mattea has had the chance to talk about the issue a lot lately, because she's appeared in the papers frequently these days with the release of her latest album,
Coal
, one of the best-reviewed records of the year, in country or any other genre.

Kathy Mattea, Huntington, West Virginia. Photo by James Minchin.

Coal
showcases Mattea at the height of her powers as a singer. In covering classic coal-mining songs like Jean Ritchie's “The Blue Diamond Mines” and “The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore,” Hazel Dickens's “Black Lung,” Billy Edd Wheeler's “Red-Winged Blackbird” and “The Coming of the Roads,” and many others, Mattea has achieved something new in her already remarkable career. She has not only produced what might just be her best album to date, she's also returned in music to the home she speaks of with such eloquence, the Appalachia that she left physically when she was nineteen years old, but that she never left spiritually.

“This record reached out and took me. It called to me to be made. That's a different experience. It's like ‘If not now, when?' and ‘If not you, then who?' Nobody said that to me and I didn't think that, but you go through your life and you try to be open, you try to think how can I be of service, how can my gifts best be used in the world?” Mattea says, seated at the dining table of her Nashville home, which is simple and modest by the standards of entertainers of her stature. “If you ask that question every day, you find yourself at the center of something.”

Mattea has found herself not only at the center of music at its highest power (“These songs provide a voice for a whole group of people, a place, a way of life. And that's a sacred use of music,” she says), but also at the center of a growing environmental movement.

After becoming involved with Al Gore's Climate Project, Mattea found herself learning—and talking—more about mountaintop removal. It wasn't something that most country artists were talking about at the time. In fact, Mattea, Naomi Judd,
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and Kenny Alphin (better known as Big Kenny of the duo Big and Rich) are the only country singers, Appalachian or not, to speak publicly on the topic despite constant lobbying from anti–mountaintop removal groups, who realize how powerful
a famous country singer's words would be to people across the nation.
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Mattea is no stranger to stepping up to the plate when she's needed. She was the first country singer—and one of the first mainstream artists, period—to speak out against the government for not offering better funding to AIDS research and health care. She shocked audiences in 1992 when she spoke on the subject on live television during the Country Music Association awards (CMAs), a show known more for its flashy dresses and cowboy hats than its political statements. At the show, to the chagrin of the producers, Mattea wore three red ribbons to commemorate three friends of hers who had recently succumbed to AIDS. At the podium, she explained what the ribbons meant.

“I had lost friends and that's why I wanted to say something,” she says. Although nobody else in the industry at the time was keen on talking about the disease publicly, she opened the door for others to do so. And she found that people were both receptive and supportive of what she had to say in her simple, nongrandstanding way. “For the next two weeks,” she says, “people kept pulling me aside and thanking me for speaking up.” She found support from many different corners, from the famously conservative DJ who privately told her she was his hero to the staffer on the popular
Ralph Emery Show
who told her his son was dying from the disease.

“I realized at that point was AIDS was touching everybody, but there was no safe way to talk about it. Before I spoke up, I felt alone; I felt afraid. I thought I might get blacklisted from the CMAs, but once I spoke up I could see right away that I had done the right thing.”

She still gets scared when she thinks about this new issue—mountaintop removal—that she feels compelled to speak out about, but she knows it's the right thing to do. “I'm very scared about this; I'm not very comfortable,” Mattea says. “I was not born an activist, but I try to live a life with some kind of integrity in it. So if you try to do that, if you feel called to do something,
you can't say no. I can't live with myself if I say no. I don't want to be eighty years old in my rocking chair and thinking, ‘Gosh, I really wish I would've done more.'”

Some people call themselves activists but actually
act
very little. Mattea is an activist in the truest sense of the word. She not only speaks her mind, but she also goes to action. After verbalizing her concerns about the government's reaction to AIDS patients in the early 1990s, she went to work on the issue. She immediately spearheaded efforts to create the album
Red Hot + Country
, a hit compilation record that gave its proceeds to benefit AIDS research and received two Grammy nominations. The success of the record led to a benefit concert held at the Grand Ole Opry. In two short years the issue had gone from being unmentioned to being discussed on the most hallowed stage in Nashville. Many people give Mattea credit for making this happen.
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In 1992
The Advocate
, the world's leading gay magazine, named Mattea as “Nashville's conscience on AIDS.”

These days Mattea is active in several charities, including the American Foundation for AIDS Research, the Music City Cares AIDS Walk, the National AIDS Candlelight March, the S.A.V.E. AIDS Vaccine program, the T.J. Martell Foundation, and the West Virginia Task Force on Children, Youth, and Families. Besides her long list of awards for music (two Grammys, four Country Music Association awards, and many more) she has been honored for her work for others. She is the recipient of the 2001 Minnie Pearl Humanitarian Award as well as the 1994 Harvard AIDS Institute Leadership Award.

Mattea says that although she is speaking out against mountaintop removal, she believes everyone in this struggle deserves to be honored. In addition, she believes that no one will be served in the long run if one side is forced to sacrifice its needs for the sake of the other. “There has to be a shared strategy for the long term, honoring everyone involved…a creative vision where both sides brainstorm about solutions that are workable for as many folks as possible.” And that's part of the reason she's doing this: to call
attention to how jobs are being lost to the mining practice and how miners and their families are suffering at the toe of valley fills—not only to live with herself, but because she is loyal to the land she knows so well, despite having left in her early twenties.

“Even after you've gone away, it never leaves you, being Appalachian. It's like having a dual citizenship,” Mattea says. “I used to not understand living as an expatriate, but being an Appalachian and not living there is sort of like being an expatriate in our own country.”

She's also toured mountaintop removal sites. Always fair-minded, Mattea has agreed to tour such sites not only with environmentalist groups, but also with groups such as Friends of Coal, an offshoot of the West Virginia Coal Association. She says she has been greatly changed by seeing the devastation firsthand. But even more haunting than the unforgettable images of destroyed land are the stories of the people Mattea has met along the way. She refuses to be one of those celebrity activists who swoop in just to do a photo op. Instead, she has made a conscious effort to listen to the people who live with mountaintop removal every day.

“I have a lot of experience from my job meeting people after shows and hearing their stories, and I think that the biggest gift you can give somebody is just being totally present and listening with your whole self,” she says, her lip trembling. “That's what I really try to do, and it's amazing what happens, the connections that you feel with people and the things people tell you. When I went to listen to them and they all started to talk, I felt myself fill up. And I just felt myself…it was, like, so much.”

Mattea breaks down. Her home is silent, and the sounds of her grief are amplified by the quiet of the house and the ticking of the clock in the living room. Mattea's graceful hands wipe the corners of her eyes. In recalling the stories of the people, she is remembering their pain, too, and she feels it intensely, even now, a year after her trip. “It was just so much, what they were going through. How do you quantify story after story after story after story and you see people not giving up? It was amazing. I thought
about how hard it had been for some of them to get there, to come tell me their stories. And it was really powerful and, yeah, it's emotional. Those tiny, individual stories, when you put them together, are the stories of a people and a place that need to be told. Houses being washed off foundations, and the kids being afraid of the floods, and being told you can't drink the water but you've still got to bathe your kids in it. Coming home and finding your front yard torn up because of somebody's backhoe. I don't know what I would do in that situation. I don't know if I could be that strong.”

Mattea has also made the issue of mountaintop removal a central part of her oft-visited Web site (where she has even put up videos of anti–mountaintop removal testimony), and in March 2008 she lobbied Tennessee legislators in support of the Tennessee Scenic Vistas Protection Act, a bill that proposed banning mountaintop removal.
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She has also recorded a radio commercial in support of the bill, has written about the issue for
Blue Ridge Country
magazine, and, perhaps most important, continues to talk about the issue everywhere she goes, with every reporter who interviews her.

Speaking out is not without its negative side, though. “Some people say, ‘Oh, she just wants to sell records' or ‘Oh, she hasn't been in the limelight in a while and she's just using this' or ‘She moved away thirty years ago, well, who is she to talk about this?' I guess all those things are somebody's point of view, but it doesn't have anything to do with what's in my heart,” Mattea says. “I grew up in West Virginia running trot lines and spelunking with carbide lamps and walking in the woods. I climbed the mountains and I went to Girl Scout camp and did all the hikes. I've been all over the state, and I grew up really digging into what it was all about. And it's like, you can't bring me up that way and teach me all of that and then expect me to keep my mouth shut. I love that place. It's part of me.”

Mattea's family history with Appalachia—and with coal mining—is thick. Her mother, a second-generation American, was
the daughter of a Welsh coal miner. Mattea's paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Italy who came to America as a stonemason and found work building coke ovens all over West Virginia. “They sent him down to Smithers, and the mines were booming there, and so he saw that he could make more money by going into the mines,” she says.
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“They had come from Italy because of the poverty; they worked so hard, it was amazing.” Both of her parents grew up in coal camps.

Mattea's father was saved from the mines by an uncle, who helped him to go to college. “He found out the night before college was about to start. Uncle Wig told him he could work it off in the store,” she says. “His life changed in an instant.”

Mattea grew up in Cross Lanes, West Virginia, between Nitro and Charleston. She recalls a happy childhood steeped in family lore about the place and the mines. “One story I remember in particular is them always telling me how, in the wintertime, the miners never would see the light of day. They'd go in before daylight and come out after dusk. Around quitting time they'd watch for the miners to come home,” Mattea says. “They'd see this string of lights in the darkness, coming down the mountainside, and they'd know my grandfather was on his way home. I love that image.”