They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History (review)

They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History, the much-anticipated new book by prominent oral historian Alessandro Portelli, was well worth the twenty-year wait. This new book is more than a history of this fabled area of Kentucky; it is a labor of love. Portelli spent those twenty years collecting oral history interviews with Harlan County inhabitants. The result is an in-depth portrait of a community that experienced hard times and good times, times of peace and times of war, and times of loss and times of redemption. The indomitable spirit of Harlan County’s people pervades this fascinating glimpse into the complexities of their history and their lives.

There are really two books here. The first eight chapters of They Say in Harlan County focus on various aspects of daily activities, folklore and legend, spiritual life, hardship, family, and work. These chapters can be read in any order, as there is no chronology linking them. It is, however, the voices of the interviewees that hold the narrative together. Reading these pages gives a genuine feel for the rhythm of life in Appalachia, such as the belief that the contemporary world of industry and machines co-exists with the more elusive world of the “wilderness, the wild animals, the ghosts” (28). Mildred Shackelford discussed this odd dichotomy, stating that it was “sort of like growing up on two worlds, one world you’d go to school and there was this modern day stuff like television and telephones and people’s talking ’bout rocket ships, and we’d come home from school and here my grandfather’d been born in a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor . . . And it was just like living a hundred years in the past and then in the future, too” (28).

The second half of the book centers on what Harlan County is best known for: the ubiquitous and violent conflicts between management and labor in the coal fields. “Bloody Harlan,” as the place became known, was ground zero for what amounted to class warfare from the 1930s on. Beginning with Chapter 9, Portelli delineates an essentially chronological story of Harlan County from the Great Depression through the beginning of the twenty-first century. Much of that story revolves, not surprisingly, around the coal mines—the industry which dominates the region. Thanks to the accounts by eye-witnesses, the events of the 1930s that gave the region its derisive sobriquet, “Bloody Harlan,” come vividly to life through their words. One of the most enlightening parts of the story comes in the descriptions of the famous Battle of Evarts and the equally violent, but nearly forgotten, Battle of Crummies Creek. The events at Evarts in 1931 are well-known and often related in histories of the region, but, in what amounts to historical erasure, the Battle of Crummies Creek, which occurred ten years later is largely unknown outside of Harlan—but not to those who lived through it. Portelli notes that “while the local memory of Evarts is suppressed and fragmented, the local memory of Crummies was vivid and long-lasting” (229). He attributes this to history’s tendency to be periodized, with the result that the 1930s in Harlan “is often taken too literally,” many outsiders thinking that labor strife ended with the signing of the contracts in 1939. Portelli adds that Evarts “alerted the nation to the shocking discovery of class struggle in its own midst; by the time Crummies took place, attention had shifted” to World War II and it was written off not as class warfare but “‘hillbillies’ killing one another . . . All we have left is the stories” (229–30).

Not only Portelli was able to utilize the interviews he collected but he also benefited from the work done by other oral historians as early as the 1960s. These earlier interviewees included Florence Reece, who wrote the famous labor lyrics “Which Side Are You On?” from which Portelli drew the...