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.
