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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