Author: William Woolfitt

William Woolfitt

Low rooms, poor light, cold water, figures on their knees or backs, lay down

boys, gonna be trouble in Cumberland Gap. Close my eyes, try to count

the conscripted fathers, husbands, sons, leased to Tennessee Coal and Iron,

convict miners crowded aboard eastbound trains. Taken off at Coal Creek,

four white and one hundred thirty Black men stockaded in box houses, fed

cowpeas, cold cornbread, hog (round) meat, crammed in rough plank beds.

Now and then a miner is released from his chains by well-directed buckshot.

Try to hear, clap along when Blind James saws the fiddle bow, carry songs

with me all the miles (ninety) from Coal to Coahulla Creek, near my home,

near Dry Valley, where the Cherokee families were jailed and fell sick with

cholera in muddy stockades. Here, cliffs and rocks where panthers rumor on.

Here, the Cherokee Nation, Polly Mocking Crow’s garden, creasy greens

and onions, woods the Ridge and his sons hunted. Here, stolen land. Here,

a medicine show, Gid Tanner & His Skillet Lickers play Boll Weevil Blues,

Hand Me Down My Walking Cane—with Bert Layne mugging, clowning

in blackface—while my dazzled antecedent guffaws and taps his foot,

and my forefather yeehaws, and Aunt Dinah takes a spell, swings a chair,

breaks her man’s little jug. Here, the table-land rises, rocky, cliff-lined,

irregular, notched by valleys, coves, finger spurs. Here, stolen men.

At Brushy Mountain, a prison shaped like a cross, inmates mining coal

until 1966. In 1862, General Morgan torches the hay, the meal, the meat.

In 1908, Felder writes that the whipping reports show an unusually large

number of whippings at Lookout Mountain Mines. Volunteer guards

drill faithfully, take up Winchester, revolver, billy—a force of gentlemen,

slate-eyed and sallow-faced like me. 1863: a secesh lady clad in bonny blue

sings rebel songs. Testimony in 1876: below Sand Mountain, three hundred

men from the state pen work the rooms of coal, supplying light, warmth,

and motive-power to the people of the State. Here, I or someone like me

gets a bright bulb, a swirl of heat, more volts; many suffer to give me ease. 

William Woolfitt

I drive four hundred miles to my grandparents’

Angus cattle farm near Nestorville, West Virginia.

And walk up the knob, zenith and center of meadows

they mowed, cow paths, rust-roofed sheds, silo,

shrinking pond. Once, I knew how to find may apple,

trillium, and jewelweed. A crow says caw caw caw.

Maybe my lost ones are reaching for me. I stand

on the knob, I think this is what it’s like to be alive

to wonder and dread. I try to bring them back.

For me, for my sons. I think of the burning planet

where we will live. Once, on the knob, Pa pointed

his hand and named the near counties, the rounded

lines of gray-green hills: maybe he said Limestone,

Laurel Mountain, Polecat, Pifer, the long folded

edge of the Alleghenies. Those hills pocked with

mine pits, ringing with the whistles of helper trains

that no longer run. Once, he sang I won’t need this

house no longer. That was before Applied Energy

built wind farms on Laurel: turbines, blinkers

flashing red warnings nightly. Before cow burps

were linked to greenhouse gas, glacial melt.

Before the coyotes came—eating anything

they can chew, the DNR says. Once, Pa baled hay,

strung barbed wire, dug out the crowns of multiflora

rose and burned the top vines, clipped bull calves.

What else did he say? I reach for him, grab a handful

of empty air. One night, my older boy and I visit

Grandma, who lives alone on the farm. I try to hold

this memory of her, ember I’ll warm in my hands.

She sits near a TV tray, plastic cup. She and the boy

kick a cloth ball, play keep-away. The boy draws

two big turquoise circles. These are dream ponds,

the boy says. They help you go to sleep. That night,

we dream in the pool of a moon-washed house.

There’s Angus cow in me, flat-spired snail,

night shark, jaguarundi, giant kelp, ground dove.

Our home is oil-spilled sea, the damaged air.