Disclaimer: I’m reading this aloud but my voice sounds quite hoarse & like gravel.
Hello dear ones,
How are you? I hope whatever state you find yourself in today, that you may be nourished with hot tea or coffee, maybe a pastry or cookie, a little sweetness. We all need a little sweetness as winter churns on with grey skies & precipitation.
This week, I have been pondering the peculiarity of my hometown. It’s brought to mind a perfect poem, “A Primer” by Bob Hicok. I was first introduced to this poem by my dear friend & creative writing professor Monica Berlin, who was a huge believer in the magic, uniqueness, & significance of place in poetry & really, all art. I’ll read the poem at the end of this letter.
I come from a small town in Southern Illinois called Herrin. Some poetic minds have tried to spell it Heron, but it’s named after a family. Coal mining used to be a huge industry in the region. Hence nearby towns & villages named Carbondale & Energy. My grandpa Joe, an Italian immigrant, joined his father working in the coal mines after he graduated eighth grade. Eventually, he began working as an electrician at the Crab Orchard Wildlife Refuge & he would say, “Any day above the ground is a good day.” Boy did he mean it.
Growing up, there was a coal mine behind our house. I wouldn’t say it was in our backyard, but it was not far. I was too little to explore it & I’m sure our parents didn’t know or condone it, but my oldest sisters did. Instead, the younger sisters, myself included, played next door… on the coal pile. The coal pile was a giant pile of coal, likely deposited & stored in an otherwise empty lot owned by the coal company. For small girls, it was a vast mountain range made of shimmering, sand-like coal, surrounded by a bit of woods. It was so fine that we would run up & down & feel our legs struggling to maintain resistance. Afterward, we’d pour bits of it out of our shoes & it would collect at the sometimes frilly ankles of our white socks.
We first met one of the canine loves of our life, our dog Toby Trenton Worf, aka TTW or as we mostly called him “Puppy,” at the coal pile. He followed Michelle & I around the coal pile, happy & sweet, but he was limping. We noticed he had a wound on his paw the size of an opened-rose. Coal stuck to his raw skin. Black in red & pink. He followed us home, mom took him to the vet, & he became a member of the family. He was part lab & part chow chow with thick long black fur & a purple tongue! What a good guy.
It was only when I left Herrin to attend Knox College in Galesburg that I realized that not everyone grew up playing in a coal pile.
Southern Illinois is a special kind of place. Filled with stubbornness & beauty. People dump their garbage along a nearby road that hugs Crab Orchard Lake, where you oughtn’t eat fish you catch due to something in the water. Meanwhile, prehistoric Egrets & Herons fish along the shore, Black & Turkey Vultures station in trees, & Coots bob on the water. What a beautiful land this is. It seems easy for people to take for granted, easy for people to dump their garbage on.
It’s populated by people who have been taken advantage of for generations, used by the wealthy for the work they could do with their bodies & their bodies only bore the burden, black lung or worse. This, too, is a people of resistance, who fought back against coal companies. The Herrin Massacre occurred on June 21st & 22nd, 1922, during a National United Mineworkers Strike. Local union miners laid siege to the mine & a few were murdered. In turn, the union miners murdered the superintendent & strike-breaking scabs, who were brought down from Chicago. It was brutal, part of a series of acts of resistance by miners from 1890 to 1930 called the Coal Wars. This & other stories of local crime history were written about in the book Bloody Williamson by Paul M. Angle.
Yet, even with this strong union history, even having been exploited for generations, many people in the region vote against their own best interest. I don’t understand it, except that perhaps economically powerless people seem to grip the rungs on the ladder of systematic & social power they are afforded, bloody knuckles holding onto whiteness, xenophobia, & bigotry for dear life.
There is evidence of healing, though, like in the way the strip mines are being reclaimed by the natural world that was wrenched apart in their creation. For example, Burning Star Mine in Jackson County, includes thousands of acres of wetlands where the Illinois Department of Natural Resources (IDNR) has observed restoration in the population of Trumpeter Swans. What a thing it is to see their big white wings stretched out on a cold brown field nearby in the wintertime.
‘Spose I have a lot to say about the history of this place I come from. I have a series of semi-Southern gothic vignettes & tidbits I’d love to share with you. So, look forward to more of those in the future. I’m sure you all have your coal piles, dear readers. Those social & geographic footholds of place & memory. They are so special–in all their dust & wonder. Their complexity makes up the fabric of this country, which is bewildering & beloved to me.
Until next week,
Annie
A Primer By Bob Hicok I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go to be in Michigan. The right hand of America waving from maps or the left pressing into clay a mold to take home from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan forty-three years. The state bird is a chained factory gate. The state flower is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical though it is merely cold and deep as truth. A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,” can sincerely use the word “sincere.” In truth the Midwest is not mid or west. When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio. There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam, which we’re not getting along with on account of the Towers as I pass. Then Ohio goes corn corn corn billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan. It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing. The Upper Peninsula is a spare state in case Michigan goes flat. I live now in Virginia, which has no backup plan but is named the same as my mother, I live in my mother again, which is creepy but so is what the skin under my chin is doing, suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials are needed. The state joy is spring. “Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball” is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April, when February hasn’t ended. February is thirteen months long in Michigan. We are a people who by February want to kill the sky for being so gray and angry at us. “What did we do?” is the state motto. There’s a day in May when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics is everywhere, and daffodils are asked by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes with a daffodil, you know where he’s from. In this way I have given you a primer. Let us all be from somewhere. Let us tell each other everything we can.
Soundtrack:
“Keep Your Nose On The Grindstone” by Tyler Childers (Gosh this is a powerful song)
“Angel Band” by The Stanley Brothers (The swans’ snow-white wings made me think of it)
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