Voices from the Rust Belt

the museum might tell, and how far back and forward along Mingo County’s coal lineage it dared tread. Elijah Hooker, now a board member who was stationed at the museum’s front desk during two of Blankenship visits and who spoke with him at length, dismisses any notion of malicious intent. “The mere fact that a young man was working for a museum that is essentially the antithesis to everything in which Blankenship’s creed, or system of beliefs, has stood in opposition towards, most likely left him in a state of curiosity,” says Hooker via email, in explanation of what interest Blankenship may have had in talking with him. “[He] came to the museum out of genuine motives. After all, Matewan is his home; this museum does impart the history of [his community]. While it may take a particular stance, nevertheless, our attempt is to reconstruct the history of an area deemed to be a forgotten land of no significance to the greater development of America’s past; thus, I feel that there was genuine intrigue involved with Don’s visit to our museum, one in which no ulterior motives were attached—simply curiosity as to what was going on in the area he considers to be home.” Hooker, on his part, does not believe Blankenship is necessarily the monster he’s portrayed to be, one who had specific intentions of killing twenty-nine workers, but rather is someone who made some gross errors in judgment during his time as CEO. Perhaps he just saw the dollars and cents of business much more clearly than the people who were hidden in the mines, the ones who put that money in the Massey account.

Still, the tension between King Coal and those preserving its true history is palpable. “He went through the museum and spent over an hour there [during one visit], and it’s a very small place. He took pictures, read all the texts,” says Dr. Chuck Keeney, museum board member and history professor at Southern West Virginia Community and Technical College. “Then after, he and I spoke for a bit. He and I of course have a different heritage, his background being a union-buster, and I have union leaders in my heritage. So we’re on opposite sides.” This opposition is a point of conflict for the museum, daring to tell the history of unions in an area whose union members currently are largely retired miners.

“The conflict over coal has become over the years to be a conflict of memory. King Coal is not going to disappear. It’s still a powerful force, and a powerful social force,” Keeney says, and in this memory and storytelling lies the burden and joy of opening up an independent museum. “We were able to include quotes and facts that a state-sponsored museum wouldn’t be able to do. It’s quite enjoyable, to not have to be politically correct, to not have to pander to donors who have their own agendas or are concerned about image.”

Ultimately, the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum tells the story of a time when coal was everything, and of a future when it might not be. That’s certainly the case for Blankenship. Sid Hatfield probably never dreamed of the day when something like a mine explosion would put the company boss on trial, and maybe there is a future for citizens of West Virginia in which mine explosions themselves are an archaic story relegated to Plexiglas displays. In the meantime, we can study our past, celebrate it, and learn from it.

MARTHA BAYNE

Seed or Weed?

ON THE EVOLUTION OF CHICAGO’S BLOOMINGDALE TRAIL

DOWN THE STREET FROM MY apartment there’s a community garden on a vacant lot owned by my landlord—although, of course, it’s not actually “vacant” at all. It’s home to a dozen raised beds of flowers and vegetables. There are hoses and a rain barrel and two rotating compost bins and a mess of stakes and tomato cages under the porch of the house next door. In the spring, mushrooms push up through the dandelions and Queen Anne’s lace along the fence.

In the first warm weeks of May I sowed buttercrunch lettuce and mesclun and red romaine, along with beets and chard and kale and carrots in the plots I’d claimed as my own. I had the best intentions. I had carefully ordered an array of exotics from the heirloom seed catalog—Chantenay red cored carrots; bull’s blood and golden beets. I amended the soil with compost and an extravagant layer of topsoil. I even drew a map in a little spiral notebook. But, perhaps dizzy with the sudden onset of spring, when I got down in the dirt itself I quickly abandoned any attempt to impose structure on nature and began sprinkling seeds with abandon. I figured I’d thin them out once they’d germinated, after I saw what stuck.

One month later the lettuces were coming up thick in nice straight rows. But the bok choy and the chard looked sketchy, their sprouts emerging from the soil in curves and clumps, if at all. Only four of dozens of beet seeds had germinated, and cilantro had invaded the carrot patch. Samaras from the maple towering to the east rained down on the garden, blanketing it with little brown propellers, and every morning this summer I crouched over the beds, contemplating new clusters of inch-high shoots, wondering, Are you kale or crabgrass? Are you seed or are you weed?

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I live half a block north of this garden, on Humboldt Boulevard in Chicago, practically on top of the Bloomingdale Trail. That’s the colloquial name given to the elevated tracks stretching 2.7 miles west across the city from Ashland all the way to Ridgeway, along Bloomingdale Avenue, about midway between Armitage and North. Once it was a spur line for the Canadian Pacific Railway, but regular transit stopped on the line in 2001, and in the years that followed the tracks were reclaimed by fast-growing plants. Bull thistles and pokeweed grew thick along the railings while pineapple weed choked the tracks—as did broken glass,