“We’ll show these fascists what a couple a hillbillies can do.” - Woody Guthrie
El·e·gy - a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead.
Hillbillies don’t need an elegy; not all of us are gone. I’ll tell you what could use a good elegy: the once beautiful mountains of West Virginia. So very many of them are gone, dead, murdered for the sake of the mighty green dollar. We still have some of those left, too. Enough worth fighting for. But sometimes that’s tough to see through the clouds of blasting dust coming from the barren strip mine above your holler.
A man like J.D. Vance wouldn’t know the first thing about problems like that.
Full disclosure here: I’ve never read the man’s book, and I’ve never seen the movie about it that poor ol’ Opie Taylor directed. I didn’t figure I needed to raise my blood pressure by sitting through a movie about some flatland Buckeye whose sole reason for existing seems to be to slander the mountain people I’ve spent my entire life around. But I’ve read plenty of what Vance has to say about mountain people like me.
My name is Junior Walk, and I am a hillbilly. My parents are hillbillies, and their parents are hillbillies. We hail from the rugged mountains, dense forests, and flowing creeks and rivers of West Virginia’s Coal River valley. Since I was 19 years old I’ve dedicated my life to doing everything within my power to protect the people and ecosystems I grew up around from the exploitation and destruction wrought by the coal industry.
Like Vance’s, my grandfather was a union man. Unlike Vance, I don’t think the various coal industry jobs held by members of my family ever dictated their identity. I’ve never been thankful to the coal industry for putting food on my table growing up; it never did, not one single scrap. The sweat and blood of my family, their sacrifice of their health and wellbeing, that’s what put food on my table growing up.
Those money crumbs falling off the tables of the coal mine operators are nothing to be grateful for.
My people have had to toil and suffer, all while coal mine bosses get to live someplace with clean air and water. They also get to send their children off to Ivy League schools like J.D. went to, while the people who’ve literally broken their backs and destroyed their lungs to dig that wealth out of these mountains are left with nothing to show for it outside of medical bills and the knowledge that their hard work probably made their boss a couple million. They often don’t get to send their kids to college – their kids are lucky if they don’t wind up sick due to the proximity of these coal mine operations to their schools and homes.
I’ve done everything I can to hold the coal industry accountable here, to make way for a better life for the people in my community. I didn’t get to leave and go to school to better myself; I went to jail for helping with tree sits and blockades to stop these coal companies – even just for a short while – from exploiting the land and the people here.
Vance wears the term hillbilly like a costume, but I can see through it. You want to know how? A hillbilly wouldn’t bend the knee and kiss the ring, not for a coal company, and certainly not for a wannabe dictator from New York City who’s been handed everything in his life on a silver platter. A real hillbilly knows what it’s like to watch somebody they love work themselves into an early grave. A real hillbilly knows it’s men like Trump who are responsible for putting our people into the socioeconomic condition they’re in today.
It’s unfortunate, but not unexpected, that the people of this country would take the words of Vance as gospel about the hillbilly mountain people. They don’t know anything real about us, about the way we live and survive in these mountains. They’ve been fed lies their whole lives about us. We’re all backwards, inebriated, racist, sexist, homophobic, and we don’t know what’s best for ourselves.
I’m not saying there aren’t bad people here, but there is as much diversity in political thought and opinion in these mountains as there is anywhere else in the country. You can’t look at us as a homogenous group; just ask people in one holler what they think of the people in the next holler over.
The disenfranchisement of the people here is no accident, just as it is no accident that West Virginia voter turnout has ranked in the bottom fifth of the nation in every presidential election since 1988. Would you vote if you felt so disconnected to, and forgotten by, the rest of the country? Wealthy interests have seen to it that the people of Appalachia are typecast in this way in order to maintain control and maintain the illusion that when we die from diseases caused by extractive industries, then nothing of value was lost.
The most common response I get out of local people in regards to my work is one of resigned apathy. I can’t imagine they think about national politics in a dissimilar way. When you and your family, friends, and neighbors have lived in conditions such as these your whole life, it’s difficult to hope for anything better.
Those lies the media and people like J.D tell about us have only served to further the interests of the owning and ruling class. They’ve made it easy for the average American to look at hillbilly people as collateral damage, expendable as long as it serves to keep their lives as comfortable as possible. My family is not collateral damage; the mountains I’ve spent my life in are not collateral damage.
Coal River Mountain Watch has been fighting back against these coal operators in our community since 1998. There are people in these mountains who are still willing to fight as hard as they can to make this a better place for the people who will live here after us. It is entirely possible to recognize the slim chances of success in an endeavor such as this while also knowing somewhere deep in your heart that you don’t have any other choice but to try. Every chance I get I’m out in the woods here monitoring the coal mines in my community, trying my best to hold these companies accountable.
Do you have something in your life that you hold so dear, so sacred in your heart, that you would fight for it as hard as you could no matter the chances of success or the personal cost?
I do. I’d say many people who live in these mountains do. I do not think J.D. Vance does.
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Junior Walk is a 34-year-old anti-coal mining activist from southern West Virginia. His work to stop mountaintop removal coal mining has included lobbying in Washington, D.C., gathering scientific data, providing standing in lawsuits, and being arrested for direct action. Currently he monitors coal mines to identify potential permit infractions. Coal River Mountain Watch. This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
