[To continue the
Labor
Day remembrances, for the rest of this week I’ll highlight and analyze
images and narratives of work in American literature and culture. Please share
texts, images and narratives, or histories and issues you’d highlight for a
crowd-sourced weekend post that’ll do work!]
On three
different types of cultural representations of mining communities.
There’s not much
point in trying to figure out which American experiences are the most difficult
or destructive, so I’ll simply start this way: the life and world of our mining communities
are fraught with hardships and dangers. In response to those harsh realities,
some of the most prominent cultural portrayals of mining communities have
focused on children who found a way out of those communities and into other
(and, implicitly or explicitly, better) situations: country superstar Loretta
Lynn (Sissy Spacek) in the film Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980); and NASA engineer Homer Hickam
Jr. (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the film October Sky (1999; based on Hickam’s 1998 memoir Rocket Boys). Both films portray the
protagonists’ miner fathers (played by Levon Helm in Daughter and Chris Cooper in October) with sensitivity and nuance,
but nonetheless make clear that their children have escaped to a better life.
While some of
the difficulties of the mining life as simply inherent to that job and world,
others, it’s important to note, have been amplified by the mistreatment and
exploitation practiced by many of the mining companies. Those histories came to
a head in one of America’s
most forgotten conflicts, the multiple West Virginia
Mine Wars of the early 20th century. John Sayles’ historical film Matewan (1987), about which I wrote
at length in yesterday’s post, provides an impressive introduction to the
mine wars, if one as I noted there overtly and thoroughly sympathetic to the
miners’ side and perspective. I share those sympathies, but of course whatever
we think about their cause the mining company operators and their hired
soldiers were all complex people in their own right, and so it’s worth
complementing Sayles’ film (as I also argued yesterday) with Diane
Gillam Fisher’s poetry collection Kettle
Bottom (2004), which constructs with wonderful nuance and humanity the
first-person perspectives of multiple sides and stories from the mine wars.
I wholeheartedly
recommend all of the aforementioned cultural texts, but they are all focused on
extreme, or at least unusual, aspects of the mining life and communities.
There’s also something to be said for a representation of more everyday
experiences and realities within a community and world, that is, and providing
such a representation is Steve
Earle and the Del McCourty Band’s wonderful song “The
Mountain.” Drawn from the 1999 album
of the same name, Earle’s song creates the first-person perspective of a
representative miner, one who has seen and experienced the century’s historical
and social conflicts and changes, as well as the effects of the mining life on
his own identity, but whose mountain home and community remain for him what
they have always been. That community is as present in America as it’s ever
been, and Earle’s song, coupled with all these texts, helps us consider that
presence as well as our past.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Responses to this week’s posts? Other work texts or
histories you’d highlight?
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