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IN THE SHADOW OF KING COAL  
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Sarah Jones
October 8, 2024
Dissent
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_ While the coal industry is in terminal decline, it still shapes the
culture of central Appalachia. _

Still from King Coal, Courtesy of Requisite Media

 

Writer and director Elaine McMillion Sheldon begins her latest
documentary, _King Coal_, with a funeral rite. A multigenerational,
multiracial procession of people in black clothing walks slowly up a
country road. All is quiet except for the sound of insects and a
steady drum. Who are these mourners? Sheldon lets the mystery linger.
But we learn eventually that the solemn rite is for a king—King
Coal—or perhaps for the past he represents.

In central Appalachia, where the film takes place, the king’s long
reign is coming to an end. The mines aren’t as active as they used
to be—and never will be again—but coal’s influence is still
palpable. To Sheldon, the daughter of a fourth-generation coal miner,
the region is beautiful and restless; a transformation is afoot at the
bottom of the mountains. “Papaw always said that every new beginning
starts with an end,” she says in voiceover during the funeral.

_King Coal_ depicts a region caught between life and death, past and
present. While the coal industry is in terminal decline, its presence
is still felt by all who dwell in its shadow. The fossil fuel industry
has poisoned the earth and its people, yet it still shapes not just
the economy but local people’s identities. Across central
Appalachia, counties host coal festivals, beauty pageants crown coal
queens, and one town rings in the New Year by dropping a large piece
of coal instead of a disco ball. “That’s what we live on top of,
that’s the ground. That’s what this town is made of,” a father
tells his child.

Underground, the miners “have to control all the elements,”
Sheldon says. “Earth, air, fire, water.” If they don’t, they
could die. The mine, as Sheldon depicts it, looks like a place where
people are not meant to be, where they might unearth something
terrible. The miners have become sensitive to death. “Those of us
who don’t work underground don’t have these magic powers,” she
explains. Magic powers, for a fairy tale kingdom.

The film follows two young girls now growing up in coal country. In
school, they learn about the coal industry’s bygone might. Sheldon
shows them dancing in a coal yard. They walk through forests of deep
green and rich brown, wander the black underground, and capture bright
fireflies in their hands. They are setting out on their own
adventures, their destinations undetermined.

Before the capitalists arrived to extract the mountains’ timber and
coal and organized the people into company towns, “this place was
wild,” Sheldon says. Traces of that pre-industrial ferocity remain.
The mountains and the rivers have endured, though they are not the
same as they were. The people, too, have changed. “For some, the
king has provided. For others, he’s stolen. For some, he’s given
pride. For others, he’s brought shame,” Sheldon says. She shows us
a high school football game in southern West Virginia where the teams
honor miners. They aren’t worshiping the king but asserting
themselves. They believe the miners’ hard work commands respect.

That conviction has sometimes brought miners into conflict with the
king. Midway through the documentary, I recalled the Paint
Creek–Cabin Creek Strike of 1912, a flashpoint in the West Virginia
mine wars—a subject that the girls in the film study in school.
Miners demanded wage increases and recognition of their union. In
response to escalating tensions, the governor declared martial law. As
historian Steven Stoll describes in _Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of
Appalachia_, operators of the Paint Creek mine evicted striking
workers and their families from their homes. Though the miners
appealed, a judge upheld the evictions. “A labor organizer explained
that the judge likened the relationship between miner and employer to
that of master and servant,” Stoll writes. They became refugees,
setting up a tent city nearby. At the Battle of Blair Mountain nine
years later, the culminating event of the mine wars, a force assembled
by the sheriff in Logan County and backed by coal operators killed at
least sixteen miners who’d marched toward Mingo County to protest
dangerous work conditions, violence against union members, and martial
law. Though the mine wars are long over, they leave a tangible legacy
that is visible in _King Coal_ and felt throughout the region.
Sometimes the only way to resist a tyrant is to put lives on the line.

On its own, coal is just a rock, but human beings made it an
instrument of despotic control. Like many tyrants, King Coal has power
over life and death. He has turned the tops of the mountains into
moonscapes; parts of Appalachia can almost seem haunted. Coal mining,
however, has neither killed the land nor destroyed the people who live
on it. In its wake, the land grows wild once again. As of 2023, Katie
Myers reports in _Grist_, Appalachia contains roughly 633,000 acres
of unreclaimed and partially reclaimed mine land. The land has
suffered, but while it is “ill,” Myers writes, “it is certainly
not dead.” Flora and fauna like the rare green salamander have begun
to return.

The people, too, are resilient, though years under the thumb of King
Coal have worn them down along with the mountains. Over time, Sheldon
says, machines replaced men. Jobs grew scarce. Her own family moved
around the coalfields seven times in twelve years, she explains,
because that is “what the king demanded.” A man’s voiceover says
that people in Appalachia know that “if anyone’s going to help
them, they’ll have to do it themselves.” The capitalists measured
the value of Appalachia by the ton. What if we measured its value by
the strength of its people instead?

The story of central Appalachia is one of dispossession, starting with
the seizure of Indigenous lands and continuing through the devastation
of mining communities today. But no single narrative can explain a
place. Appalachia is no less complex than anywhere else in the United
States. There is exploitation and abuse, but there is also survival,
endurance, and solidarity. In 2018, nearly a century after the Battle
of Blair Mountain, West Virginia’s teachers took up the red bandana
and marched to demand better conditions for themselves and their
schools. Last year, students at West Virginia University protested
budget cuts that threatened the institution’s core academic mission,
citing the teachers’ strikes and the struggles at Blair Mountain.
The people of Appalachia deserve better from the world. They do not
wait passively; like the Paint Creek miners, they are demanding more
for themselves and the generations still to come.

Geography once defined this place, Sheldon says. Geology then
succeeded geography. But “the king could never hold all our
dreams,” she adds. “What dreams would the Coal River dream? Who
are we without a king?” These questions remain unanswered, but just
asking them is an act of hope. A people can survive a cruel king. They
might reclaim the commons for themselves and build a democracy where
there are no kings at all.

At the end of the film, the funeral returns; embers from a pyre
scatter into the night as the people in the procession sing of a king
and of those whom he never truly ruled. Then, in the daylight, a young
girl dances. A new day commences. As the screen goes dark, Sheldon
declares: “If you’re hearing this, seeing this, know: This place
knows how to dream.”

_SARAH JONES is a senior writer for New York Magazine and the
author of Disposable: America’s Contempt for the Underclass,
forthcoming from Avid Reader Press. She grew up in southern
Appalachia._

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* Movie review
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* coal
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* Appalachia
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* mining
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* unions
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* U.S. labor history
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* class struggle
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