Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

Twilight in West Virginia: Six O'Clock Mine Report

430 LISTEN HERE TWILIGHT IN WEST VIRGINIA: SIX O'CLOCK MINE REpORT from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989) Bergoo Mine No. 3 will work: Bergoo Mine No. 3 will work tomorrow. Conso!. No. 2 will not work: Conso!. No.2 will not work tomorrow. Green soaks into the dark trees. The hills go dumped and heavy over the foxfire veins at Clinchfield, One-Go, Greenbrier. At Hardtack and Amity the grit abrades the skin. The air is thick above the black leaves, the open mouth of the shaft. A man with a burning carbide lamp on his forehead swings a pick in a narrow corridor beneath the earth. His eyes flare white like a horse's, his teeth glint. From his sleeves of coal, fingers with black half-moons: he leans into the tipple, over the coke oven staining the air red, over the glow from the rows of fiery eyes at Swago. Above Slipjohn a six-ton lumbers down the grade, its windows curtained with soot. No one is driving. The roads get lost in the dotted hills, in the Blue Spruce maze, the red cough, the Allegheny marl, the sulphur ooze. IRENE MCKINNEY 431 The hill-cuts drain; the roads get lost and drop at the edge of the strip job. The fires in the mines do not stop burning. DEEP MINING from Six O'Clock Mine Report (1989) Think of this: that under the earth there are black rooms your very body can move through. Just as you always dreamed, you enter the open mouth and slide between the glistening walls, the arteries of coal in the larger body. I knock it loose with the heavy hammer. I load it up and send it out while you walk up there on the crust, in the daylight, and listen to the coal-cars bearing down with their burden. You're going to burn this fuel and when you come in from your chores, rub your hands in the soft red glow and stand in your steaming clothes with your back to it, while it soaks into frozen buttocks and thighs. You're going to do that for me while I slog in the icy water behind the straining cars. Until the swing-shift comes around. Now, I am the one in front of the fire. ...