The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  The word “disaster” emerged from an era when people often aligned fortunes with positions of planetary bodies. It joins the reversing force, “dis-,” with the noun for “star.” As in, an “ill-fated” misfortune. If a disaster is an imploding star, then the rebirth of a star is its antonym. Recovery is a process of reconstitution—of worldly possessions, of wits. It is never complete. Not today, in the aftermath of June’s floods, and not in 1930. Eight decades on, West Virginia hasn’t recovered from Hawk’s Nest. How could it?—when so much of what was lost still hasn’t been named.

  Now the photographer unpacks camera and case, / surveying the deep country, follows discovery / viewing on groundglass an inverted image.

  I’ll admit I’ve got a thing about falling in love with dead women writers and chasing their ghosts around West Virginia. So when I found out Muriel Rukeyser, an American poet well known for both her activism and her documentary instincts, had visited and written a famous poem about Hawk’s Nest, I had to know more. Rukeyser was born on the eve of World War I to a well-to-do Jewish family whose heroes, she wrote, were “the Yankee baseball team, the Republican party, and the men who build New York City.” Her father co-owned a sand quarry but lost his wealth in the 1929 stock market crash. Until then, it had been a life of brownstones, boardwalks, and chauffeurs. As a girl, she had collected rare stamps with the heads of Bolsheviks and read like mad; slowly, over the course of her childhood, she awakened to what the comforts of her life may have signified in the world.

  At twenty-three, Rukeyser found out about the nightmare unfolding in Fayette County from the radical magazines she read, and for which she wrote. After New Masses broke the Hawk’s Nest story nationally in 1935, it became the cause célèbre of the New York left. The House labor subcommittee began a hearing on the incident the following January. For a couple of weeks, the country absorbed the event’s gruesome details in mainstream media, but the federal government never took up a full investigation, despite the subcommittee’s urging. So early in the spring of 1936, Rukeyser and her photographer friend, a petite blonde named Nancy Naumburg, loaded up a car with their equipment and drove from New York to Gauley Bridge to conduct an investigation of their own. I imagine Muriel, fresh from winning the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book, Theory of Flight, in a smart, fitted blazer and a sensible skirt, glad to take the wheel from Nancy, especially on those curvy roads through the mountains. Their trip would form the foundation of Rukeyser’s poem cycle “The Book of the Dead,” included in her groundbreaking 1938 collection of documentary poems of witness, U.S. 1.

  The women originally planned to publish their photographs and text side by side, but for unknown reasons their collaboration never materialized. The method was in vogue at the time, as writers and artists across the country—mostly white—dispatched themselves to document the social ills of the Great Depression in language and film. That same summer of 1936, Margaret Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell traveled from South Carolina to Arkansas, bearing witness to the Depression’s effects on rural communities for what would become You Have Seen Their Faces. James Agee and Walker Evans were also traveling, witnessing sharecropper poverty in Alabama for what would become the most famous of these texts, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The American road guide, as a genre, was also coming into its own. The federal government assigned teams of unemployed writers to turn their ethnographic gaze to the country’s landscape and social history, producing the American Guide Series, which aspired to become “the complete, standard, authoritative work on the United States as a whole and of every part of it.” The Federal Writers’ Project published its first in the Highway Route Guide series, U.S. One: Maine to Florida, the same year that Rukeyser released her own U.S. 1. “Local images have one kind of reality,” she wrote in the endnotes to “The Book of the Dead.” “U.S. 1 will, I hope, have that kind and another too. Poetry can extend the document.”

  Much of what I know about Rukeyser’s life during this period comes, strangely enough, from a 118-page redacted chronicle of her activities, composed by the FBI. In 1943, J. Edgar Hoover authorized his agency to spy on the poet as part of a probe to uncover Russian spies; her “Communistic tendencies” placed her under suspicion of being a “concealed Communist.” When the investigation began, she was noted as thirty, “dark,” “heavy,” with “gray” eyes. In 1933, the report reads, she and some friends drove from New York to Alabama to witness the Scottsboro trial. When local police found them talking to black reporters and holding flyers for a “negro student conference,” the police accused the group of “inciting the negroes to insurrections.” Then, in the summer of 1936, after her trip to Gauley Bridge, Rukeyser traveled to Spain to report on Barcelona’s antifascist People’s Olympiad. In the process, she observed the first days of the Spanish Civil War from a train, before evacuating by ship. Her suspicious activities in the 1950s included her appeal for world peace and her civil rights zeal. The FBI mentions “The Book of the Dead” only once, in passing, as a work that dealt with “the industrial disintegration of the peoples in a West Virginia village riddled with silicosis.”

  Its twenty poems recount the events at Hawk’s Nest through slightly edited fragments of victims’ congressional testimony, lyric verse, and flashes from Rukeyser’s trip south. She lifted her title from a collection of spells assembled to assist the ancient Egyptian dead as they overcame the chaos of the netherworld—“that which does not exist”—so they could be reborn. One of these texts, which concerns the survival of the heart after death, was carved onto the back of an amulet called the Heart Scarab of Hatnefer, a gold-chained stone beetle pendant that the Metropolitan Museum of Art excavated from a tomb and put on display in New York in 1936, the same year Rukeyser began her version of “The Book of the Dead.”

  Curious to learn more about Rukeyser’s time in West Virginia, I called up a scholar named Tim Dayton, who had searched the poet’s papers for clues about the poem’s composition. He told me that Naumburg’s glass plate negatives of Gauley Bridge have since been lost, and that Rukeyser’s research notes are missing. The only evidence of their journey, I learned, consisted of a letter, a map, and Rukeyser’s treatment for a film called Gauley Bridge, published in the summer 1940 issue of Films, but never produced.

  In the letter dated April 6, 1937, Naumburg offered Rukeyser her “personal reactions to Gauley Bridge” and suggested a general outline for the piece. The document provides some clues about whom the women spoke to and what they saw—a few names, a vignette or two, and a description of the “miserable conditions” of those living with silicosis. “Show how the tunnel itself is a splendid thing to look at, but a terrible thing to contemplate,” Nancy wrote to her friend. Show “how the whole thing is a terrible indictment of capitalism.” She signed off, “Are you going to the modern museum showing tomorrow nite?”

  The map of “Gauley Bridge & Environs” is signed by Rukeyser and drawn in her hand. At the center is the confluence of the New and Gauley Rivers, where they form the Kanawha. Off to the side she sketched their little car, its headlights beaming forward. In cartoonish simplicity, she outlined the shapes that I recognize from my daily life: the trees, the bridge, Route 60. But some of her markings held greater mystery: a long, winding road jutting back into the mountains labeled, as best I could make out, “Nincompoop’s Road”; a house that was “Mrs. Jones’.” Rukeyser marked a big X on the town of Gauley Bridge, and an X over Alloy, rendered as a boxy factory belching smoke. She drew clusters of Xs next to two towns I’d never heard of on the Gauley River: Vanetta and Gamoca. This tracing of my home in her hand held the promise of a new way of knowing Hawk’s Nest.

  I gradually came to see that “The Book of the Dead” is itself a kind of map. (So much so that a literary critic, Catherine Gander, convincingly argues for the text to be read as a rhizomatic map in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.) Not only do the poems’ titles quite literally refer to people’s names and elements of the landscap
e—“The Road” or “The Face of the Dam: Vivian Jones”—the sequence also sketches out a crucial yet missing piece of the official Hawk’s Nest story, a narrative thread usually so common in the media’s treatment of disaster that it’s become a trope: the “pulling together of community.” Six poems in, we meet the Gauley Bridge Committee, an organized group of ten tunnel victims, their family members, and witnesses, whose caretaking and advocacy role had been totally absent from anything I’d read about the crisis up to that point.

  Rukeyser introduces them in “Praise of the Committee.” They sit around a stove under a single bare bulb, in the back of a shoe repair shop in Gauley Bridge, amid the din of machine belts. They are: Mrs. Leek (cook for the bus cafeteria); Mrs. Jones (three lost sons, husband sick); George Robinson (leader and voice); four other black workers (three drills, one camp-boy); Mearl Blankenship (the thin friendly man); Peyton (the engineer); Juanita (absent, the one outsider member).

  The room is packed with tunnel workers and their wives, waiting. The committee’s purpose is to feed and clothe the sick and lobby for legislation. George Robinson calls the meeting to order. They discuss the ongoing lawsuits, a bill under consideration, the relief situation. They talk about Fayette County Sheriff C. A. Conley, owner of the hotel in town, who heads up “the town ring.” Rumor has it that he’s intercepting parcels of money and clothing at the post office, sent by well-meaning New Yorkers to tunnel victims. At the end of the poem, their spectral voices rise up like the chorus from a classical tragedy, asking: Who runs through electric wires? Who speaks down every road?

  This scene played over and over in my head like the beginning of a film I wanted to believe existed about Hawk’s Nest. A film like the one Muriel meant to make, a story of dignity and resistance that was yet to be told.

  Touch West Virginia where // the Midland Trail leaves the Virginia furnace, / iron Clifton Forge, Covington iron, goes down / into the wealthy valley, resorts, the chalk hotel. // Pillars and fairway; spa; White Sulphur Springs.

  In the early Appalachian spring of this year—what proved to be the wet eve of June’s storms—I found myself barreling down Route 60 with “The Book of the Dead” in the passenger’s seat. The rivers swelled brown and bristled with snags of trees beneath color-drained mountains capped with a dusting of snow. I was following Rukeyser’s map, becoming a tourist in my own home. Along the road I saw metal buildings printed with soda pop logos and heard the shrieks of peepers in their vernal ponds. Easter loomed, and a church’s sign assured me: death is defeated. victory is won.

  First stop: the “wealthy valley” from the cycle’s opening poem, “White Sulphur Springs.” It began as a resort hotel, marketing the area’s geothermal springs and relative freedom from insect-borne disease to slaveholding autocrats across the South, who evacuated their families from the lowlands each summer. The hotel was known then as the Old White—a string of cottages encircling a bathhouse, where the South’s antebellum politics and fashions played out around a burble of sulfurous waters with allegedly curative properties. Later, the owners of the C&O Railway changed the name to the Greenbrier. Though the sickly smelling spring was capped in the 1980s, the hotel is still run as a resort with a casino by West Virginia’s current Democratic governor, the coal operator Jim Justice.

  Whenever I catch sight of the Greenbrier, there’s an initial moment of nausea. Like standing in the center of a vast array of radio telescopes or driving up a holler surrounded by a massive but out-of-sight surface mine. When Rukeyser drove through, the hotel’s stark white façade had just been redone, but the inside was still Edwardian and dim, draped in the depressing purples and greens of a deep bruise. Global merchant powerhouses like the du Ponts and the Astors would have been flying into the brand-new airport for the hotel’s famous Easter celebration, where princesses, movie stars, and politicians performed their circus of white gentility.

  I parked beside a utility van brimming with roses and entered the building’s interior galleries, which glowed like Jell-O–colored jewels. A dramatically lit hallway displayed busts of what appeared to be the same white man carved over and over in alabaster. I watched as workers prepared for daily tea service by putting out plates of sweets, around which tourists swarmed like wasps. A cheeky pianist played the theme song to Downton Abbey as I grabbed a cookie and made my way back outside. I wandered down Main Street to Route 60 American Grill and Bar, where a man from Jamaica was beating a man from Egypt at pool. The bartender answered the ringing phone: “Route 60, may I help you?” Some chunks of something slid into the fryer. I played “I Saw the Light” on the jukebox and drank by myself, before heading off to sleep in my car at the Amtrak station, a redbrick cottage perpetually decorated for Christmas. The entire town of White Sulphur Springs would in a few months be under floodwaters; three bodies would be pulled from the resort grounds, where the five golf courses had, in a handful of hours, become a lake.

  The next morning, I continued along the path Rukeyser laid out in her poem “The Road,” rolling westward through the Little Levels of the Greenbrier Valley, passing limestone quarries and white farmhouses drifting in pools of new, raw grass. In Rainelle, I stopped at Alfredo’s to eat an eggplant sandwich in a room full of steelworkers talking about ramps, the garlicky onion that heralds our spring. After, I skirted the mangled guardrails of Sewell Mountain, a 3,200-foot summit that today is clear-cut by loggers, where General Robert E. Lee once headquartered himself under a sugar maple in the fall of 1861. I passed Spy Rock, where Native Americans sent up signal fires, watched for their enemies. New beech leaves glistered like barely hardened films.

  In the afternoon I arrived at the Reconstruction-era courthouse in Fayetteville, less than a mile from my home, and climbed its entrance of pink sandstone. Most tunnel-related court documents were turned over to Rinehart & Dennis as part of the 1933 settlement deal. Even so, I found overlooked summonses, pleas, and depositions scattered throughout the county’s hundreds of case files. Soon, I held a blueprint of the tunnel in my hands, apparently entered as an exhibit in the first case to go to trial. It suggested the elegance of a graphic musical score, yet filled me with that stony disaster dread. At the time of the trial, some of the plaintiff’s witnesses were actively dying. Still, the jury deadlocked, and accusations of jury tampering arose when one juror was observed traveling to and from the courthouse in a company car. In time, the plaintiff’s lawyers were on record for having accepted a secret payment of $20,000 from Rinehart & Dennis to grease the wheels for a settlement. (In a turn of unexpected, though slight, justice, half the money was later distributed among their clients, by judge’s order.)

  As I sat in the clerk’s office trying to put the pieces together, Fayette County Circuit Judge John Hatcher walked in. We traded wisecracks back and forth for a while, and then I showed him what I was looking at. “Awful what happened,” Hatcher said. “They killed a lot of blacks.” Then he launched into a story from World War II in which the American GIs give out chocolate bars to the survivors of a concentration camp, but the richness of the sweets makes their starving bodies sick. I wasn’t sure what the point of his story was until he looked me square in the eyes and said: “Nazis.”

  I am a Married Man and have a family.  God / knows if they can do anything for me / it will be appreciated / if you can do anything for me / let me know soon

  I left Fayetteville and followed Route 60 over Gauley Mountain, crossing the tunnel’s path three times. I came into Gauley Bridge, the first community off the mountain and the first one you come to on Rukeyser’s map. It’s equal parts bucolic river town and postindustrial shell. I stopped at a thrift store, one of the only open businesses in the downtown core, and bought a copy of Conley and Stutler’s West Virginia Yesterday and Today for thirty-five cents. Adopted officially into the public school curriculum in 1958 but used widely in classrooms since its publication in 1931, it’s literally a textbook case of white people’s amnesia. The index does not list “Slavery.” The existence o
f “Negroes” is acknowledged six times, most often in relation to their “education.” It’s mute on the lost lives at Hawk’s Nest, offering instead a description of an engineering marvel and a scenic overlook.

  Back out on the street, I heard a sweet voice call out: “Diamond, are you working today?” I looked up and saw a frail man with pale blue eyes, rubbing his nose with a tissue. I told him I was Catherine but that I wished my name were Diamond, and he said, “You favor her. She just started working down at the nursing home.”

  He turned out to be Pastor Charles Blankenship, the preacher at Brownsville Holiness Church and the proprietor of the New River Lodge, formerly the Conley Hotel, where I planned to stay the night. What looked to me now like three shabby stories of grayish-yellow brick was a swanky stop for travelers when it was built in 1932, something I could imagine on the backstreets of Miami Beach. I believed Charles when he told me that Hank Williams had stayed at the Conley on many occasions. There’s strong evidence that Rukeyser had stayed here too; her son Bill remembers a black-and-white postcard of it among her keepsakes.

  In 2016 I found the lobby a friendly clutter of dusty MoonPies, hurricane lamps, and old panoramic photos that lit up for me the Gauley Bridge of 1936: its busy bus station and café, its theater and filling stations, the scenes of prior floods. A bulletin board displayed one of those optical illusions of Jesus with his eyes closed—stare at it long enough (i.e., believe) and his eyes are supposed to open. Most of the hotel’s residents today are long-term tenants, elderly or on housing assistance, but this lobby used to hum, Charles told me, recalling the thick steaks that fried on the grill at the restaurant. The Conley filled up most nights when Charles’s dad worked here as a porter, hauling luggage to the rooms of rich people passing through on their way to the East Coast. “I can picture them coming through the door,” Charles said. “He used to get calls all night.”