I wanted to capture some of the sacrifice, even nobility, of the very hard life of a coal miner in mid-century America. I wrote this with my father to tell the story of his four-decade working life.

From Amazon: "Coal made modern America. It built the factories and ships that won a terrible war and fueled the greatest peacetime economic expansion in history. The American Century came at a cost: the lives and health of the men who wrested coal from the ground. This is the story of how a long career in the most dangerous of jobs helped one soldier rebuild his shattered life, day by day, ton by ton—an inside look at how a miner learns to judge the mountain overhead, his fellow miners, and himself."

The Devil and Aunt Suse

Updated: Mar 13, 2023

I grew up in southern West Virginia, not far from the region of the Hatfield & McCoy feud. "Devil Anse" Hatfield (center, others unknown) was sweet on my grandmother's sister Suse and would visit her late in the evening when no McCoys would spot him. He gave her a pearl-handled revolver for protection.

The Naming

Updated: Aug 10, 2023

Few moments in life are more consequential than giving a child a name, whether it's whispered in a delivery room or awarded with the pomp and anointment of a church christening. A name is the most public of the bundle of signifiers making a child unique.

Sometimes naming is easy—a kid will be a Junior or a III (inevitably "Tripp"), or will be named after a late grandparent or favorite uncle or aunt.

Just a few generations back it wasn't so easy in my extended family, because children came early and just kept coming. My paternal grandfather Eli had a huge family with many brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and he and his first wife Rosa had six kids before she died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Similarly, my father's mother Elvira had numerous brothers and sisters and she and her husband Lee had six kids before her husband died of malaria.

Once those two widowers came together, they proceeded to have five more children, four of whom made it to adulthood.

In this very large branch of our family tree were plenty of sturdy common names—James, William, Mary—and names not heard much outside Appalachia, like Hiram, Sadie, and Vescar. I remember as a child liking the musicality of a lot of family names, such as Chloe, Erastus, and Rosina.

My grandparents were religious in the same way that everyone in that remote region of West Virginia was religious then—they were god-fearing Baptists who were too busy surviving to go to church much. But they did read the Bible, and a lot of the more obscure of our family names came from there, including Vashti, Enoch, and Dorcas. (Jesus raised Dorcas from the dead, as described in the book of Acts, and Vashti was the wife of a Persian king, per the book of Esther. Enoch was Noah's great-grandfather.) I have no idea why any of these names appealed to my forebears, but they did.

Spelling was at a premium back then. One of my father's sisters also had a biblical name, spelled Orpah in the Bible but misspelled on her birth certificate as Orpha. (I suspect Oprah Winfrey's parents made a similar mistake.)

My mother came from a large family as well, and no one ever thought to ask her mother (her father wasn't in the picture) why she was given the name Recie (pronounced ree-see). I've never met or even heard of anyone else with that name. Maybe her mother meant something else but I can't figure out what it could have been.

My paternal grandfather was Eli Center Miller but everyone called him "Center." As with my mother, I've never heard of anyone else called Center. I was very close with him and when my son was born his mother and I, perhaps unadvisedly, gave him Center as a middle name. It wasn't until my own father died and I was going through old papers that I found out that my grandfather's middle name on his birth certificate was actually spelled "Sentre." Again, either his parents couldn't spell Center, or they gave him the name Sentre for reasons now lost to time. I haven't found anyone else with that name.

My father was named "Thurmond" on his birth certificate but from as young as he could remember he spelled it Thurman. He knew from his parents that he was named Thurmond after a notorious small town not far from where they lived, where the Dun Glen Hotel hosted a fourteen-year-long poker party with free-flowing liquor all through Prohibition. Why my father's parents would choose such a name for him is also lost to history; I suspect that, after all those children, they didn't give it that much thought.

I was born eleven and seven years after my older brother and sister respectively, and after an unknown number of my mother's miscarriages. My parents wanted more children, but I was the third and final. They gave me a biblical first name (David is "beloved" in Hebrew) and the middle name Thurman, after my father.

Unlike my parents' and grandparents' unusual names, "David Miller" is one of the most common—there are tens of thousands of us out there. As a kid I was teased about my odd middle name, but as I've gotten older I've been glad to have it in my bundle of signifiers.

"Who, me?"

Updated: Aug 29, 2023

Even though my father, a coal miner, had little extra money when I was a kid, I received a small allowance and I promptly spent it on comic books. I was crazy for them and they were only twelve cents or at most a quarter each, and like many boys I collected and traded them. I still have a few of the oldest comics, and I still like graphic novels.

But a very different kind of comic was even more popular and successful in its way than Marvel or DC. The 1960s and 70s of my childhood were a golden age for "Jack Chick" comics, tiny booklets of twenty pages or so, not much larger than a dollar bill, with garish two-color covers. They didn't look anything like my superhero comics—they were blunter, static, splashed with blood-red and ominous cross-hatching. (Underground comix artists were heavily influenced by them.) Each little Chick tract had some kind of super-conservative evangelical message, often homophobic, anti-Freemason, anti-Jew, and anti-Catholic, anti-alcohol, anti-premarital sex—sometimes all of the above—with the kind of gory imagery you might expect in an EC comic.

For Chick, rock music was a portal to ever-lasting torment and Halloween a satanic ritual; the Devil was everywhere and was fighting hard for your soul. Chick's comics showed teenagers overdosing on marijuana and going on a killing spree, or being lured into some free-thought cult, or young person standing at the Pearly Gates confronting all the terrible sins they'd committed, such as daydreaming in church.

The little tracts were free and you'd find them everywhere—phone booths, diners, random store shelves, and certainly in any church youth group in the Bible Belt. Because of their religious prejudice and apocalyptic world view, bookstores wouldn't carry compilations of them and at one point they were banned in Canada as hate speech. But the tracts were unstoppable: By the 1990s half a billion of them had circulated, and New Yorker writer Daniel Raeburn called Chick "the most widely read theologian in human history."

The tracts were ostensibly offering a path to hope and salvation; instead they were actually tiny horror comics, often complete with a red devil with horns and a pitchfork. The point of the tracts was to lead the reader to the only choice that matters: repent and completely submit to a savior, or face eternal damnation in a fiery pit of Hell. They aimed to make the reader so afraid they dare not risk it.

As a kid I had no idea who distributed them but they were everywhere, just lying there for the taking, and I slipped any new ones I found into my pocket until I had amassed a huge collection. I didn't tell anyone.

For me, at least, because I was free to read anything I could lay my hands on, the tracts offered a third option than Heaven or Hell: Laughter. I was guilty of many of the soul-endangering sins Chick drew but somehow knew from the very first one that they made fundamentalist religion so gloriously ridiculous that I could safely (if quietly) make fun of it, even though it was the dominant worldview there in the Bible Belt. Sometimes the best tool for questioning authority is the ability to recognize how ludicrous it is.

Chick died in 2016, so has his own Eternal Answer now, but his company continues to put out those tiny hate-filled comics. I haven't read any in years and can't imagine today's media-savvy kids taking them seriously, but there are plenty of other ways to scare them with religion. I hope young people are finding a way to laugh back.

Photo of striking mine workers in 1920s West Virginia

"Your great-uncle shot my third cousin!"

Updated: Aug 5, 2023

Just over a hundred years ago, in late August 1921, the largest armed insurrection since the Civil War erupted not far from where I grew up. Ten thousand coal miners who were attempting to unionize the coal fields took up arms in Logan County, West Virginia, and were met by three thousand armed men working for the coal operators. (John Sayles' excellent movie Matewan, filmed near there, tells the story of the events that led up to the conflict.) The fight lasted five days and came to be known as the Battle of Blair Mountain.

At the time, coal towns were operated as fiefdoms of the operators, who controlled every aspect of life there. They quickly and ruthlessly smothered any talk of unions. Miners were kept on a short leash economically, paid in private money called "scrip" that was only good in stores owned by the particular company that owned the mine.

Roads were bad or nonexistent and few miners owned cars anyway. A miner could be fired and evicted from their company-owned house for any reason, or no reason, their possessions thrown on the side of the dirt road as an example to anyone else who might breathe the word union. From their point of view, miners had little to lose in trying to organize.

More than a million shots were fired during the Battle of Blair Mountain, with a hundred men killed and many more wounded and arrested. The battle only ended when President Harding sent in the National Guard to quell the rebellion. Airplanes swooped low to drop bombs on the miners. The miners ceased firing, unwilling to shoot at the US Army.

The battle was a huge victory for the coal operators. In the next few years, the United Mine Workers Union lost 80% of its members, and wouldn't begin to recover until the union-friendly Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. The union shifted its focus from direct confrontation with mine owners toward political strategies instead, beginning a long period of ascension for the union, which peaked in the 1950s and 60s.

Since then, and accelerated by both sharp production declines in the coal industry and the fervently anti-union Regan Administration, unions in general and the UMWA, in particular, have lost almost all the political clout they gathered mid-century. Not coincidentally, as coal is no longer a sure-bet industry in the state, many young people are looking elsewhere for work—West Virginia is the only state in the union to lose population over the last quarter-century.

For most West Virginians, the narrative for the state's lurch from being the bluest state to now being the reddest is easily grasped: Democrats did this to us. They promised to kill the coal industry and they did. The belief that government is the problem, not a potential solution, is widely held in the coal fields.

Of course, culture wars have played an outsize part in the state's transformation. Many West Virginians see themselves as victims--victims of Democrats trying to ram through a transition away from coal, and victims of illegal immigrants, though few immigrants make their way to the state. West Virginians are more religious than most of the rest of the country, and churchgoers get a steady drumbeat of sermons against liberals, who push New Testament values of tolerance and equity instead of Old Testament values of sin and loyalty to a flawed but God-sent leader.

Many in the state also resent their hard-earned tax dollars going to welfare cheats in other states, even though West Virginia gets far more federal tax money, in the form of disability checks and other benefits, than it pays into the system. (Almost one in five West Virginians is disabled, the highest rate of any state.)

Culture wars have always been good for coal operators, who could claim to be protecting miners from godless socialism, but in an age of social media and information silos like right-wing cable channels, even Republicans have been surprised at how easy and inexpensive it was to turn the state the brightest red.

I worked close to Blair Mountain for a year back in the 1980s and had friends all over the area. The battle wasn't much talked about as we were growing up and was never mentioned in school.

One friend and I knew we had some sort of connection through family lore, both of us coming from huge families with long memories. We kept working our way back in our genealogy until we found it. Finally, she said, "Your great-uncle shot my third-cousin!"

In her telling, one of my great-uncles was on the union side during the Blair Mountain battle, and her cousin was one of the men hired by the coal companies. I doubt that her cousin was particularly anti-union. Probably he and many others were just given $5 and a rifle and did what they were told. A man would do a lot for $5 in that place and time.

I didn't know if her story was true and there was no way to verify it--I barely recall that great-uncle and her cousin was long-dead. But there's no reason it wouldn't be true. Some West Virginians can talk about things that happened long ago as if they happened yesterday, and they were personally involved.

I wonder if those memories will ever be long enough to remember what the miners were fighting for at Blair Mountain.

Photo of miners and their families at Blair Mountain courtesy Cultural Landscape Foundation.

I had the privilege of working with Maryat Lee through the 1980s and got to experience her unique methods firsthand. -- David

Capturing the heart of Appalachian culture through “rough" theater

Updated: Mar 23, 2023

"Maryat dug theater out of these mountains."

- Billie Jean Young, MacArthur Fellow, actress, poet, author and teacher. You can hear a brief interview with the Maryat Lee I knew in this video:

Playwright Maryat Lee, a Kentucky native, trained under theologian Paul Tillich and anthropologist Margaret Mead before making a name for herself with street theater in 1950s Harlem, using non-actors and the most primitive of stages to mirror the real lives and concerns of the community. Her first play Dope!, championed by Jackie Robinson, focused on the heroin epidemic ravaging the city. Other plays addressed then-taboo themes of gay urban life and domestic abuse, all presented on crowded city streets by performers on a simple stage only a few feet from the audience. In 1975, ground down by city life and finally heeding the advice of her good friend Flannery O'Connor, Lee moved to rural West Virginia and began using the same "rough theater" methods that worked in the inner city, crafting plays from local legends and oral histories. Drawing on Lee's archives and much other previously unpublished material, this volume collects four plays from that era, with extensive notes by the author and Dr. William French on the plays and Maryat's process.

Maryat Lee: The Appalachian Plays can now be ordered directly online or through any bookstore.

Maryat Lee: The Appalachian Plays

“In a time where Appalachian Studies scholars are reckoning with (and revisioning) our region’s history of movement building, multiculturalism, political strife, and hard times of all kinds, this new collection of Maryat Lee’s timely and pathbreaking work is long past due. Lee’s Appalachian Plays, edited with energy and care by David Thurman Miller, re-gifts to all of us the work of an artist whose vision we will need if we are ever going to make sense of these hollers, these hills, and these diverse and complex lives of the people herein.” --Dr. Matt Bryant Cheney, Assistant Professor of English & Director of the Center for Community Engagement, Carson-Newman University

"A play is always pretending, but Maryat tried to keep it as 'real' as possible by using local, untrained actors and a raw and vibrant prose she drew principally from their own lives. She wanted them to become themselves on stage, not actors reading lines. Her Appalachian actors had to struggle both with the role they were stepping into and the stereotyped role the larger culture had already assigned them. That struggle is the play. Maryat's work is not just exciting: it's real." --Joseph G. Anthony, author of A Wounded Snake and other novels and story collections

"Maryat has been underappreciated not just as an influence on Flannery O'Connor but in her own right as a visionary dramatist, proving that her unique methods worked, first in New York and then in rural Appalachia. She found the transcendent in the ordinary."--Rev. Dr. Georgia Newman-Powell, scholar and author of "A 'contrary kinship': The correspondence of Flannery O'Connor and Maryat Lee, early Years, 1957-1959"

“David T. Miller has put together Maryat Lee’s Appalachian plays in a book driven by commitment and connection—he worked for Lee after she left New York for Summers County, West Virginia, producing indigenous Theatre based on oral histories. Dr. William French’s excellent introduction provides the backstory and dramatic roots of Lee’s work and life. And Miller’s preface is a personal homage to the groundbreaking truth of Lee’s Appalachian work. If you don’t know the story of Maryat Lee, here’s the place to listen to it.”--Joan Vannorsdall, journalist and author of the novels Solitary Places and The Hearts of Soldiers

"Kentucky native Maryat had a unique gift for portraying authenticity while producing compelling theater, using non-actors relating stories from their own communities, first in Harlem and then in Appalachia. David T. Miller's collection of her plays and the stories around them remind us that we can find universal themes played out in our everyday lives when we, with open ears, take time to listen."--Steve Flairty, author of the series Kentucky's Everyday Heroes and Everyday Heroes for Kids

Believers

I attended a small Appalachian college for a year after finishing high school and was required to take a class in speech. I liked the class a lot, as it mostly involved giving or listening to short presentations and a lot of solo and group improvisation. The professor had been in a few small roles on Broadway, many years earlier, and had been good friends with the famous actor Lee J. Cobb. He would occasionally drop a comment about "how Lee might have done it."

I made friends with some very interesting people in the class. One guy had been in a cult, a local offshoot of the Hare Krishnas. This mystical Hindu sect had already established small groups on remote, inexpensive land in West Virginia, and eventually would erect a huge mansion in the north-central part of the state, with hundreds of members.

There were several types of Krishnas. One group shaved their heads and sold flowers in public places. Others dealt drugs or begged on street corners or stole credit cards to raise money. A third group dressed and acted like typical, if very friendly, young people, with casual dress and impeccable manners. The job of the latter group was to recruit new members, and my friend had fallen in with them.

He described how he met this very nice group of students at a nearby college and they invited him to go hiking with them along the beautiful Appalachian Trail that ran close to the campus.

He was having such a great time that when they decided to stay another night, he did the same.

They invited him back to their cabin for breakfast, then a hike, and since it was late in the day when they got back, they offered him a room for the night. They started the evening with dinner and wine and singing familiar songs, and he joined in. A cute girl got him up to dance.

He liked them all so much, and felt such love from them, he didn't want to disappoint them by leaving. A day turned into two, then a week. He stayed in the cult for two years, until his parents had him kidnapped and deprogrammed.

It was quite a tale.

There were (and are) numerous cults in West Virginia, drawn to the cheap land. Some are only marginally cults as such, just back-to-the-landers with a charismatic leader who’d found a place to live in the middle of nowhere, beyond the reach of most law enforcement.

Some truly religious cults sprang up from a combination of devout biblical fundamentalism and the gullibility that too often comes from cultural and geographic isolation. Much as land holding companies saw West Virginia as a vast pool of minerals, with unsophisticated and pliable locals, cults saw in its rugged beauty and cheap real estate the possibility of new Edens.

And then there was Charles Manson, who lived for a while in Charleston. His mother served time in prison near Morgantown, in the north central part of the state. Several of his followers served decades in prison in the women's facility in the southern part of the state. In 1983 Manson wrote a letter to the West Virginia Penitentiary in Moundsville, asking to be transferred to West Virginia from a California prison. His request was denied.

One of the largest Hare Krishna branches in the world sought, beginning in 1968, to turn the entire state into its own small country of believers. Having the Beatles, especially George Harrison, become involved with Krishna Consciousness caused millions of young people to experiment with it.

Its first American outpost, New Vrindaban--"the Taj Mahal of Appalachia"-- is also near Moundsville and seems to be thriving, despite charges of murder, abuse, and kidnapping brought against its charismatic leaders over the years. (See the podcast The Hare Krishna Murders for an account of the crimes and trials.)

Today about 350 adherents worship regularly at the enormous temple, and tens of thousands of Hindu pilgrims and tourists visit it each year, bringing an ironic new meaning to the state motto Almost Heaven, which is drawn from John Denver’s ubiquitous hit Take Me Home, Country Roads.

For what it's worth, pay attention to the lyrics of the song. Neither the Blue Ridge mountains nor the Shenandoah River are in West Virginia.

But once an idea takes hold it doesn’t really matter whether it’s true or not. As time has gone by, I’ve gotten less and less surprised at how tightly people cling to their beliefs no matter the evidence against them.

Photo courtesy New Vrindaban

Bob and weave and hit pillows

Updated: Aug 29, 2023

The Appalachian coal fields attract national attention in cycles, usually in one of two ways. In the past West Virginia occasionally played an outsize role in politics such as the hard-fought 1960 presidential primary, when both John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey visited the state to secure its few but critical electoral college votes. That era seems to have passed.

The state is also a perennial favorite in surveys of the least healthy, poorest-educated, and least diverse, and many of these attributes stem from the deep history of poverty in the region, driven by economic booms and busts and low severance taxes paid to the state by faraway owners of extractive mineral rights, and the decline of the miners' union.

In addition to its poverty, West Virginia has one of the least diverse populations in the country, and that includes emigrants from other states. This wasn't always the case. From the earliest days of mining in southern West Virginia, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, mine owners were desperate for labor and recruited miners from Eastern Europe and even Central and South America, and Black workers were integrated into the workforce and the union earlier than in many other industries, though they were often given the harder jobs. But coal mining communities were isolated and, unless they were somehow involved with the coal industry outsiders were (and I believe still are) suspect.

In the mid-1960s, President Johnson's War on Poverty was well under way, casting the spotlight once more on Appalachian kids. My elderly grandfather Eli had no pension and qualified for only a small Social Security check but had always worked hard and it was difficult for him not to be able to contribute more to the household. With so many mouths to feed our family sometimes had no choice but to take advantage of the free commodities the government handed out. Eli took me with him to pick up our government cheese and powdered milk and corn meal and so on, and such staples made a real difference in the lives of many poor families.

Some families in our little coal camp also saved money by creating their own small, illegal mines in the hillsides, digging enough coal in these "punch mines" for their household use. Occasionally a railroad car would derail, spilling coal along the trackside. Mothers and fathers and older children would hurry like ants to a picnic to shovel as much as they could into wheelbarrows before the company righted the railcar and scooped up the remaining coal.

As part of the War on Poverty, many idealistic VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) workers came to the state, one of their goals being to organize locals to change the environmental laws governing mining corporations—laws written by and for the benefit of the companies. In that era, there was very little regulation to require them to address the damage their industry was causing, from flooded valleys to boulders falling into homes to the fouling of drinking water. The industry controlled the state capitol and staunchly resisted such reforms.

Power brokers at the local level also resented outsiders and saw VISTA volunteers as meddling hippies.

In addition to working for environmental reform, some of these young men and women volunteered to mentor schoolkids. When I was in sixth grade at Mark Twain Junior High, a young volunteer was supposed to help me with school work for an hour or two a week but I didn't really need her help, so we mostly just talked. She was a college graduate and had grown up in a mysterious place called New York City. I'd only heard the name and knew nothing about it. No one I knew had ever been there. I wanted her to tell me what it was like living in a city.

But our time was cut short: Fist fighting and bullying in general were common in the coal camps, and fathers would often discipline kids (usually their own but often others') with a belt. At one PTA meeting a VISTA volunteer tried to broach the subject. She said there were other ways to correct misbehavior and other ways for kids to express their anger. Such as? asked the PTA chair. A different volunteer raised her hand and suggested that kids be taught to hit pillows instead of each other. The laughter among the locals started quietly but built quickly, and lasted until the volunteers walked out of the meeting, humbled. They weren't invited back and that was the end of VISTA at our school.

Soon the governor decreed that he would personally have to approve every single VISTA volunteer coming into the state and the group's numbers dwindled quickly. But in just a few years a raft of new federal legislation created the Environmental Protection Act and established new health and safety standards for miners, and VISTA workers were a small but important part of the coalition that successfully pushed for them.

I've often wondered what other kids who had VISTA mentors, even for a short period, took away from the experience. I was sorry to lose mine, but my brief time with her helped me imagine a world outside our "hollers," a world of high-rise buildings, museums, city buses. A world where people talked back to power and fought to make their homes cleaner, safer, and more kind.

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