Something's Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal by Silas House and Jason Howard Read Free Book Online

that time period the most vivid sort of environmental damage was from gob piles. 5 I remember thinking as a kid how bad they stunk and how awful they looked, and I couldn't understand why they were allowed to put them there. I don't remember anybody talking much about the environment when I was little, except to say the creek was dirty or something like that.
    My mother learned how to drive just so she could take us to church, since my dad had no interest in it. I always took church seriously, and I took the Bible seriously when it said that we should take care of the earth. My mom had a lot to do with teaching me about the environment and how that had a connection to our spiritual life. We weren't allowed to litter and things like that. She always made it clear that was wrong. I guess I extrapolated from that that if it was wrong to throw your pop bottle out then it wasalso wrong to dump coal just wherever you wanted. I just assumed that was wrong. I thought of it as a “do unto others” thing.
    I grew up in the Methodist church. I always got a sense from my mother, and from my Sunday school teachers, that, again, you're supposed to take ethics seriously. You're supposed to take care of each other and the earth and care about what happens to others. Jesus stood up, and he expected you to do the same thing. That was always the model for me; even though it wasn't real political in that little Methodist church, I always felt like it should be. And just watching the evening news, just seeing people like Martin Luther King. During that time period, that kind of stuff soaked in. Nowadays it's Jerry Falwell and the Religious Right who get all the exposure but back then there was a Religious Left that got exposure, too. I think I soaked up that.
    My mom had the most impact on me during that time. Her name was Leona. She was from Grapevine, in Pike County, Kentucky. My mom just was always outspoken about a lot of things. The first act of speaking out or being defiant that I remember most had nothing to do with coal mining, but it did have to do with her. She had the first integrated Brownie troop in the state of West Virginia. She wasn't trying to make a big statement, she was just starting a Brownie troop and she thought everyone should be able to be in it—black kids, too—so she just invited everybody. I actually talked about this at her funeral; she died two years ago. We had our picture taken and she sent it to the state headquarters, here in Charleston, and they apparently went through the roof when they saw that picture. I was only seven at the time, so I only remember it vaguely. They told her she couldn't have black children in the troop and she was like, “Well, why not?” and there was a big rigmarole about it. She didn't back down. So finally they told her she could keep the troop if she would destroy all the pictures because they said if the Charleston Gazette got ahold of them it would be all over the state and then everybody might want to integrate a troop. And they didn't want that, of course. She said okay, but she didn't destroy the picture, so I showed it at her funeral.
    She was just real feisty. She didn't like being pushed around. She was that first generation of young women who had all kinds of experiences. She was a nurse, she joined the U.S. Army and went to the Philippines during the war. She had all these experiences rather than just being in Pike County all her life. She got out and saw the world, and she never shut up after that. She stayed independent.
    When I was a child there wasn't much going on in my county to do with protesting coal or anything like that. But I think I internalized a lot of stuff when I was a kid. I remember not only the creek and the pollution, but lots of injustice. I went to junior high at Gary, which was a U.S. Steel town. 6 They had a big sign, a big archway, over the road that said “Man Hours Lost to Accidents” and it had some kind of slogan about being safe, but they