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By Root 312 0

blew him clear across the road, but he was safe. The explosion blew dust and timber across the holler, like a tornado. And right away, the news went out over the radio. I heard about it even though I was in a different state. I said a prayer for those men because I’ve seen how mine disasters are, and I knew the picture was bad. Whenever there’s a disaster, the word gets out by telephone and radio, and by people yelling up their hollers. Within a few minutes, all the families of the miners were heading toward this narrow dirt road to the mine—women would just leave their cooking and their babies and start walking toward the mine to wait for the news. Nobody could go into the mine until the government inspectors got there, because there were all kinds of fumes. But even then, people knew it wasn’t going to be too good.

They waited all evening, while the holler was crowded with official cars and trucks. People built bonfires, and the Red Cross gave out baloney sandwiches and coffee. The families huddled together while the press and other outsiders stood and waited. Some women cried and others just stared. The governor of Kentucky said something cold about how mining is a rough business and you’ve got to expect things like this sometimes. … That was before they even found any bodies.

It started to snow around nine o’clock, and it got real miserable down in that holler. Then the rescue crews found some bodies and bundled ’em in pitiful canvas bags and brought them out by stretchers.

Well, it snowed all night, and all thirty-eight men were dead. In two feet of snow, they brought the bodies to the Hyden School and let the next of kin identify each man. This was right after Christmas—decorations were still up—and they were holding funerals. I saw pictures on television—houses all lit up, each with the casket in the front room and people praying. I’ve been to mountain funerals, and I could just hear the wailing. I saw one woman throw herself on the casket. She was about twenty-three years old and had a couple of babies. I remember my Mommy and all the years she worried about my Daddy. And I just sat in front of that television and bawled like a baby.

We followed that story for days. The mine officials held a hearing and said the men were killed because somebody was probably using an illegal explosive that sets off sparks and probably touched off some dust. They still haven’t settled it legally—the issue is still in the courts—but that’s what was in the papers.

For me the thing that mattered was that thirty-eight men left 101 children behind. The insurance companies and the government people were trying to get those poor widows to sign all kinds of legal papers. And those women couldn’t afford lawyers, so they were signing for payments that would get the company and the government off the hook. Meanwhile they had to bury their husbands and keep on living.

This just tore me up because these women were no different than my Mommy would have been—or me, when I first married Doo. Those women weren’t prepared for all this stuff because all that knowledge was in the heads of the men lawyers. So I decided I was gonna do something to help change things. The first thing was to visit Hyden. We went to the graveyards and I met the widows and I visited the mine. It was the saddest little mine, a little hole like a cave, no posts. All I kept saying was, “No wonder.…”

I heard how Leslie County was one of the poorest counties in the whole United States, with a high birth rate and a high death rate. And the mines were the only way to make a living. Maybe the men did know what was going on in that mine, but if they or their wives had complained, they would have been out of a job and on welfare.

I decided I would help at a benefit show for the widows. But I didn’t want the money to go just to lawyers or to get spent right away. I wanted the money to help people to break that way of living that keeps them poor and uneducated, that forces men to work in dog-hole mines and women to have too many babies and not know how to deal with lawyers and