Seek Not Your Fortune Way Down In The Mines
It's a long way to Harlan
It's a long way to Hazard
Just to get a little brew, brew, brew
Just to get a little brew.
And when I die
Won't you make my tombstone
Out of number nine coal, coal, coal
Out of number nine coal. --Merle Travis, 1947
It's a long way from the streets of Boston to the hills of Harlan County in east Kentucky. The people of Harlan County are hard, lean men and women who work all their lives; their hands are broken and rough, especially the hands of the women of Harlan. They miss teeth. Almost without exception, the people of Harlan County work in coal.
Coal mining is tough, dirty, two-fisted business--the most hazardous blue-collar job in the world. The heat that comes out of Boston's radiators and the light that comes from Boston's lamps is the direct product of the sweat of people in Harlan County, Kentucky, or somewhere else in the coalfields that stretch from south Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Alabama and west to Illinois. Once every three days, a man dies in the mines for someone else's heat and light, for someone else's steel.
In Harlan County, USA, Barbara Kopple has produced a brilliant documentary about the people of the coalfields. The USA in the title is significant--to citizens of the Northeast, these hill people are as alien as citizens of the moon. Yet Kopple, a native New Yorker, has captured them and the life they lead with touching accuracy. Perhaps her job was made easier by the fact that people who work hard and suffer long have a shy, easy grace in front of a camera. But it's a painfully easy grace--born and nourished in suffering. Kopple takes us inside their lives and, in moving sequences at the funerals of Joseph P. Yablonski, murdered reformer within the United Mine Workers, and Lawrence Jones, a miner assassinated in Harlan during a 13-month strike, inside their deaths. Kopple's camera moves with that smae painfully easy grace, darting around a landscape that always seems dark green, gray-blue, or black.
The film opens with miners hopping onto a conveyor belt and riding into Harlan's Brookside mine. In the background Merle Travis howls--"Come all you young fellers, so young and so fine, seek not your fortunes way down in the mines." Kopple cuts abruptly to Nimrod Workman, a retired miner. Workman sits on his porch and tells about going into the mines at ten, working 18 and 20 hours a day. Once a supervisor told him not to take his mule into a dangerous part of the mine. "But what about me?" Workman asked. "We can always a hire another man," he was told, "but we have to buy that mule." Workman looks away, disbelief lingering after half a century. Finally he says, "Cared more about that mule than he did about me. Cared more about a mule than a man."
In 1975, the miners at Brookside and Eastover went on strike over Eastover Mining's refusal to accept their vote to join the UNWA. Eastover Mining is a subsidiary of Duke Power, one of the largest utilities in the country, and fewer than ten per cent of its workers are union members. Harlan mines are among the most unsafe in the world--in 1970, one day before the first anniversary of the passage of the Federal Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, 38 miners died in an explosion at a nonunion mine at Hurricane Creek, only a half-hour away. The miners were to remain out on strike for 13 months.
Kopple began to make her film about the Miners for Democracy, the UMWA reform factiion that sprang up after the murder of Jock Yablonski in 1969. Instead, she found herself focusing on Harlan County and the test fight the union was waging there against Duke Power. She moved among the miners, lived with them, eventually got herself beaten up with them. But all the time her camera was rolling, and Kopple has captured incredible scenes on film. Here is Basil
Carr, the mine foreman and leader of the scabs, pistol in pocket, leaning over the hood of his pick-up and talking low: "Hoffa's a communist...Teamsters, they're all communists...AFL-CIO's all communist...what's gonna happen to the country when the unions get in?" Here is the leader of the striking miners, pleading with the men to continue picket duty six months into the strike despite court injunctions that could make them subject to jail sentences: "Hell, lawyers are made to get you out of trouble when you get in, not to get you out of trouble before you get in." And Norman Yar-brough, president of Eastover: "It is not true that inhalation of coal dust necessarily causes any impairment of pulmonary functions."
But through it all Kopple evokes the sense of a community divided. At one point state police move strikers back forcibly so scabs' cars can get to the mine. Oater, one of the men shouts in a state policeman's face, "Bailey! I know you! You're a damn disgrace to the Bailey family!" Somebody says of Basil Carr, "He had the nerve to run for sheriff." Later the sheriff will try to get strikers to jove a car out of the roadway so scabs can get through, and Lois Scott, a leader of the miners' wives, attacks him for aiding with the scabs. The community's feelings spring up froj having known each other all their lives; the atmosphere is caught in a song written in the '30s, "which Side Are You On?" The enemy is the outside, the unseen menace of Duke Power. As the leader of the strikers tells the company's president, a man who bears a striking resemblance to Hubert Humphrey (D-Monn.), "KWell I tell you one thing Mr. Horn--I'm gonna be right there on that goddam picket line looking at you.... just as long as it takes."
It is the women of Harlan Country who shine particularly. They are not pretty women; they've been through too much for that. But they have dignity and character, and they stand by their men. Sometimes, when the men sit, they stand up for them. Two are especially outstanding--Sudy Crusenberry and Lois Scott. Crusenberry is stringy, with a long horsey face; she looks like the breaking up of a hard winter. Scott is gregarious, aggressive, and big--a tough woman. At one point she laughs and reaches into her prodigious bosom and comes up with a Colt .32, and, still laughing, replaces it. You get the idea she'd use it. The power struggle between the two is glossed over, but Crusenberry becomes the leader of the women. When the men are hampered by injunction and fear, the Harlan women take over, walking picket duty, stopping scab cars--they are the backbone that holds up the flesh of the strike.
It finally takes a killing to end it. Lawrence Jones, a striking miner, is shot in the back of the head one night, and, ironically, the outside pressure brought to bear from the incident forces Duke to negotiate. The scene causes anger to rise cold in your throat--it's strangely impersonal, yet moving. A flashlight shines on some muck on the ground, and a miner's dirty hand stirs through it. "Know what that is?" the voice asks. "Them;s brains. Shit. That's the way with a dirty scab. Shoot you when you're not even looking. Shit." Kopple was asked to film Jones' funeral, and it's here in horrible detail, with Jones' mother carried away moaning "Oh Death!"
The film has its faults. Since it started out as a documentary about the Miners for Democracy, there is too much footage on the rather tortured recent history of the UNWA--it doesn't seem to fit. The scenes of the miners voting for the 1975 contract that took away the right to strike at the local level are confused, and those without a full knowledge of issues and personalities in the Mine Workers today will be left a little befuddled. But all in all that doesn't matter. Hart Perry's cinematography is excellent--it could hardly be better--and the music is tremendous, all old union songs. Harlan County, USA stands as a testimonial to a people and a struggle that the American dream somehow forgot; Kopple's film stands as a great documentary. It inruriates without becoming polemic, capturing a simple courage that brings admiration. This is a film bade by a leftist, and come from a leftist perspective, but it's not merely that. It's a stroy that catches you up because it's warm and richly human--the people of Harlan aren't so different from people anywhere, and their story is as sadly cathartic as Greek tragedy