Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal (17 page)

As a folk celebrity in her own right, she has certainly earned that chance. Her honest speeches, coupled with her compelling biography, have garnered mountaintop removal national attention in the pages of
People, Vanity Fair, O
, and
National Geographic
. In
2003, she was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Bonds is using the attention to educate people about coal. In Harlem, she tells a delegation to the United Nations that she is outraged: “Most Americans think their electricity comes from an electricity fairy. That's what they think. You ask them where it comes from: ‘Well, from the light switch.' Excuse me, but I know where it comes from because my blood, sweat, and tears pays for it. Every time you flip on that light switch you're blowing up my mountains and you're poisoning my babies. When you come to Appalachia, you're no longer in the United States of America—no, sir. You're in the United States of Appalachia, and King Coal rules with an iron fist!”

Bonds is determined to loosen the coal industry's grip in the mountains. To her, it's just as much about the culture that mountaintop removal is destroying as it is the mountains.

“They filmed parts of
Matewan
right up the road here,” she points out the storefront window. “James Earl Jones was interviewed, and I think he put it best. He said, ‘Mountain people are a different type of people, and their landscape makes them different types of people. They're not used to going anywhere the straight way. They have to be determined.'”

To that Bonds adds, “We have to keep working, keep fighting.”

That has become Bonds's mantra: keep fighting. It's something she whispers to herself in quiet moments, a guidepost she uses to shout down her doubts. Looking out at Whitesville, surveying its despair, she has no intention of turning back now: “I'll be there every step of the way.”

Judy Bonds talking…

My daddy was a coal miner; my granddaddy was, too. My daddy worked the evening shift and he'd come home all black, all around his eyes. I remember at that time, the house in Birch Holler—that's
where I's born—we had one of them old oval wash tubs. We'd pump the water out and we'd heat up the water. We had a fireplace grate, and Mommy would put the washtub right there and hang a bedspread up between the living room and the kitchen. We'd take a bath and then my daddy would bath in that water last because he turned the water black. I didn't get to see much of Daddy except for on the weekends because he worked so much. He was the hardest-working man I ever knowed in my life. Him and my granddaddy would plow the field up above the house there with a mule. My very first memory—my very first—is of that rich black earth where they'd plow in that field. I'll never forget that in my life. Those was the happiest days of my life, living up there in Birch Holler, away from everybody else. But lo and behold, one of them carpetbagging land companies owned that land, so when I was seven years old they made us move. We moved on down the same holler. I remember all the coal dust. That was the first time I ever seen running water.

I always loved horses when I was little. I found a pair of knee pads that they'd give the coal miners to wear down in them dog holes
⁴
and so I found them in Daddy's stuff and I thought, “Hmm, what great toys,” so I strapped them on and clomped around like I was a horse. It was a long time afterward that I realized what they were really for; they were for my daddy to wear so he could get on his knees and mine coal to provide electricity for everybody in America.

My mommy saved all the receipts in this big chest, and I used to get in it and look around. One time I found a paycheck stub for Daddy, from the Bethlehem Coal Company. That paycheck was for fifteen dollars. I just couldn't understand. Fifteen dollars for a man risking his life and his health. Fifteen dollars is what he gets for that?

If I had known then what I know now, I would've begged my daddy not to have been a coal miner. If he hadn't been a miner, he'd still be alive walking these hills with his health, if he'd just farmed or done anything else besides mining. Because he died of
black lung. He never complained about the company. He worked hard, and he always brought us kids some kind of special treat home with him, in them lunch buckets they had, the kind that kept water in the bottom to keep their lunch cool. My father taught me about hard work. But my mother taught me a lot about speaking out, about talking back, because she voiced her opinion. I remember how angry she was when the Buffalo Creek Disaster happened. She was so very angry. Not only at the coal industry, but also at the politicians. I think that was my first awakening to how our government, instead of protecting the people, protects the corporations.

It was hard at first to speak out, being the daughter of a miner. But we have a mono-economy in West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, and Southwest Virginia. It makes me angry just to think about it. When I connect the dots, the complexities of it, I know that I have cousins and neighbors who still depend on the coal industry because they have created a mono-economy here. That's part of the government's conspiracy with the industry: you create a mono-economy, take away people's choices so that they have to blast and poison their own neighbors, and indeed their own children, in order to stay where they want to stay. It keeps them divided. Jay Gould said, “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
⁵
They're all using the same handbook of oppression. It's so hard, so complex, in a way. But when you connect all the dots, it's so simple. And so evil. It's about profit and power. It's about ruling over us peons. Because the coal industry and even the government think we're just peons. The coal industry thinks Appalachia is their own little playground where they can do what they want. And they have.

They kept us divided, they kept our fathers working very hard to make a living so they couldn't fight. The mothers were taking care of all the kids and the gardens and washing the clothes. So the mothers couldn't fight. So it kept us divided. Then came the baseball teams that the coal companies sponsored, just another way to keep the natives from getting restless. When I figured all
this out in my mind, it made me so angry. Right now I don't get a lot of sleep because it's in my head and it wants to come out, it's in my heart and it wants to come out. I'm pretty ticked off at how I've been duped all my life. My father kept his mouth shut because he knew he had children to raise. So he worked and he raised his garden. He was a true mountaineer. He loved this mountain life. He loved it. My family was mountaineers before they's coal miners.

We need to change things; we need to diversify our economy. We need to train these coal miners and give them choices to where they don't have to destroy their own homes in order to live here. What does it take to make a man destroy his own home, where he desires to live? What does that take? We need to give these workers another life, we need to give them hope. They have no hope, and they know that, but they won't admit it. Because if they admit it, they'd be admitting they're wrong.

It was through desperation that men became coal miners. If you go back and study history, these mountain men didn't want to be coal miners. They got duped and conned into losing their land to the industry and then they had no other choice. But to begin with they wanted to be subsistence farmers and hunters and mountaineers; they didn't want to be miners. That's the reason the coal industry had to bring in immigrants, because these mountain men didn't want to be miners. They wanted to be mountaineers.

Right up the road from where we're sitting, three miles from here, is Marfork Holler. Holler people walk. That's what you do, you know. You walk up the holler in the evenings, you get in the creek and flip over the rocks and look for crawdads. That's just what you do. The kids play in the creeks. You walk and talk. One evening me and my grandson, who was seven, were walking up the holler and he got over in the creek to play. And there were dead fish everywhere. I didn't notice them at first, but he did. He was standing there with fish in his hands, and I was screaming, “Get out of there! Throw them fish down! Get out of there!”

What do you do? It takes something like that for you to fully
understand that that coal company above you is putting stuff out that kills you and your family, that's going to poison you. I started to see more blackwater spills. So I started to put together that they're not just poisoning us there in the holler. Not just in Marfork. They're poisoning everybody. People in Whitesville, people along the Ohio River and the Kanawha River. They're putting out mercury that's causing mental retardation. It was then that I began to understand that they don't care about anybody, no matter if it's a child or an old person or anybody at all. I was already angry at that coal company, but that was the straw that broke the camel's back. There was no turning back from there.

The coal company had to restock the stream with fish, and they actually admitted that it was a leak from a chemical they used at the preparation plant. But they said, “It's not harmful to human beings!”

About three years later, my grandson and I were walking along. He had stayed out of the streams for a while, but it was hard to keep him out of the creek. It's hard to keep a mountain child out of the creek. But he got in there and I saw this white, gooey stuff in the bottom of the creek. So I got him out of there. And I found out later that it's polyacrylamide.
⁶
It's absorbed through the skin, a chemical they use at the preparation plant, it causes burns on the inside of your body, it causes cancer. They all use polyacrylamide at the preparation plants.

If we could get the mass media to really look at this, to report on what an injustice this is, then mountaintop removal would have been over five years ago. It's going to take blood before anyone will notice, before the mainstream media will pay attention. But we can't get the national media to care about an Appalachian-American issue.

We're the only ethnic group you can still get away with making fun of. It's all over the place.
Squidbillies
, “Appalachian ER,” “Hillbilly Moment.”
⁷
It's all over the place. I call myself that because I'm proud to be an Appalachian and proud to be an American. I'm proud to be a hillbilly. I love that word. That word doesn't
bother me at all. It's the words they put in front of “hillbilly” that demeans us. I want Americans to understand that we're a distinct culture that they should be proud of, too. Our place defines us. We're a distinct mountain culture, and our culture means something. This is a culture that has been handed down to us all the way from the Native Americans. This mountain culture is a very special culture that America needs to embrace and understand.

The mainstream media doesn't pay attention to us because of the stereotyping. In 1860, this army officer addressed the general assembly in Virginia and said, “To the west of here”—that being West Virginia—“lies a land with vaster amounts of coal than all of England, nay, in all of Europe. And the people there don't know the value of their land. So let's go steal their land and put them to work as cheap laborers.”
⁸
And our fate was sealed. Then the railroad companies and the land companies and all that knew of the timber and gas and oil and coal in Appalachia. They knew that if they dehumanized the people, that'd make it easier for them to steal their land, to steal their culture, and to put them to work as indentured slaves, which is basically what they did when they started paying our granddaddies in script.
⁹
They painted us as inbred, ignorant, violent people—“Stay away! Stay away!”—and that made it easier for them to do what they wanted to in Appalachia, because they had sold us as being mongrels—that was a word that was used to describe us. The mainstream media believed that.

Appalachia is a bad taste in mainstream Americans' mouths. Because it's vast, it's stark, it's real. We're not this plastic society that Americans thrive on now, this materialistic place. We don't put on a show, don't put on airs. We're unhomogenized. We're not Photoshopped. We're unretouched. We're
real
people. And I don't think mainstream America likes real and stark and raw. That's my opinion of it.

I believe it will take someone like JFK or RFK to shine a spotlight on us. I'm hoping—and I have faith—that there are true Americans out there that will realize that these hillbillies, these
mountaineers, that we are intelligent people, we're caring, we're friendly people. And they'll realize that maybe they ought to go beyond our dialect, beyond the way we eat and dress, and listen to us. When it comes to wars, who's the first people they want to fight their wars for them? It's us, it's us. It's always been that way, if you look at the history of Appalachia. We's born fighting.

I've lived here all my life—fifty-seven years—except for about six months when one of my husbands was in the service and he took me out to Kansas, of all places—Fort Riley, Kansas. And in that time, I've seen this town die. Bill Raney's association keeps talking about the prosperity of coal. Hell, I can't find it nowhere. I've looked everywhere for that prosperity. I can't find it. I can't find it nowhere. The more coal we mine, the poorer we get. Why? Can they explain that to me? I want my government and the coal industry to explain that to me. I just can't seem to get it. Maybe the coal dust is affecting my brain. I'm seeing, in this little town, buildings falling apart, boarded up. I've seen it all my life. The more coal we mine, the more mechanized they get, and the poorer we get. It's just about the same in every Appalachian town.

You take McDowell County, it was once one of the richest counties in the United States.
¹⁰
It's now one of the poorest. I just can't find that prosperity. The coal industry says, “Aw, it's your government, they're stealing that coal severance from ye.” I say, well, let's go to the legislature and tell them we want the taxes to go back to the coal communities it come from. But they say, “Oh, no, you'll never get that, all the counties deserve that coal severance tax.” But are all of them breathing the coal dust, drinking the sludge water we're drinking? They're all in on it together. In Appalachia, I think 98 percent of the politicians are corrupt. They owe their soul to coal.