Interview


Jody DiPerna interviews Taylor Brown, author of Rednecks 



When author Taylor Brown first heard about the Battle of Blair Mountain, his first instinct was that he needed to know more. He wanted to know more about this fight for workers' lives in the mountains of West Virginia, where one million rounds of ammunition were spent, bombs were dropped on Americans on American soil, there was guerrilla warfare and machine gun fire. The natural storyteller in him wondered how he could tell the story of king coal assembling the collective might of law enforcement, hired private guns and civilians deputized into vigilance committees for their war on working men.  

In his novel Rednecks (St. Martin’s Press, 2024), Brown wrote the story from multiple points of view, going bit by bit, one decision leading into the next, with resistance, care and cruelty folding into one another like the mountains of West Virginia. He told me this book felt like a calling, mostly because this story has been muzzled.   

"It was so suppressed. Even 10 years after it happened, when the WPA (Works Progress Administration, part of the New Deal) was going around the state and interviewing folks . . . the West Virginia governor wrote FDR and said, 'we don't want the WPA writers mentioning the Hawks Tunnel disaster, the battle of Blair mountain and a steel worker strike,'" Brown recalled. 

Rednecks takes place in the southernmost edge of West Virginia, along the Tug Fork River, the border with Kentucky in Mingo and Logan Counties, the heart of coal country. After World War I, workers in the area began joining the United Mineworkers. Coal companies retaliated against unionizing. Even hints of organizing would find workers fired, blackballed and evicted from their homes in the company towns. Workers who took up the union cause were targets for violence at worst and, at best, they were blackballed from working in other mining operations. Corporate malfeasance in the Appalachian coalfields just means it's another day ending in “y.”

In the summer of 1921, as working families lived in tent colonies in the Logan County hills, the one law enforcement officer who took up for the miners instead of taking aim on them, beloved Matewan Sheriff Sid Hatfield, was assassinated by coal company men on the steps of the courthouse in neighboring McDowell County. The conflict exploded into the bloody Battle of Blair Mountain. 

Brown first heard of the resistance of the rednecks from his friend, Jason Frye, to whom the book is dedicated. The miners wore red bandanas around their necks, hence the term “redneck,” a sobriquet being reclaimed now by some as a badge of honor and symbol of resistance.

"Jason grew up on the mountain looking, not for arrowheads, but for shell casings, looking for trenches from the battle," Brown said. "He started feeding me this history, and I was just blown away, because I had not heard about it at all. Here's a battle—the largest labor uprising in US history—and it's not a story that everybody knows." 

I spoke with Brown in the summer (2024), weeks before the Democratic National Convention in mid-August, but we both thrilled when West Virginia activist and creator John Russell took the stage at the DNC, resplendent in a plaid short-sleeved shirt with pearl snaps, and told the crowd, "They called us rednecks back in the 1920s because striking workers from all different races wore red bandanas around their necks as they fought and died for respect and a living wage. Their fight yesterday is our fight right now. Right now."  

Brown himself grew up in a small town on the Georgia coast and now lives in Savannah, far from the coal fields of Appalachia. In order to do justice to those who struggled and fought and died, he researched intensively, steeped himself in first person accounts and archives, read numerous histories, and even rode his dirt bike to trespass on the land itself. All of it paid off in writing that is full of exquisite and righteous depth of feeling. 



            "A lot of the folks involved in battle didn't talk about it on purpose, because they didn't want to get in trouble. They could have been arrested and tried. Even later, after the statute of limitations,
they worried about blowback from the powers that be and the coal companies, even still."                          ~Taylor Brown



Of course, there has been plenty of writing about Blair Mountain. When Miners March by William C Blizzard, Thunder in the Mountains by Lon Savage, The Devil Is Here in These Hills by James Green, and The Road to Blair Mountain by Charles B. Keeney are essential nonfiction accounts. Diane Gilliam’s prize-winning poetry collection, Kettle Bottom, and John Sayle’s independent film Matewan are also devoted to telling about the Blair Mountain mining wars. However, this story has not come to life in fictionalized form since Denise Giardina's groundbreaking 1987 novel, Storming Heaven. Even with the efforts of these writers and the incredible people at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, some stories are lost to time.

"A lot of the folks involved in battle didn't talk about it on purpose, because they didn't want to get in trouble," Brown explained. "They could have been arrested and tried. Even later, after the statute of limitations, they worried about blowback from the powers that be and the coal companies, even still."

Brown brings the reader into the story in Matewan on May 19, 1920, when Sid Hatfield and local miners engaged in a shootout with the Baldwin Felts men who had come to town to evict and intimidate. Ten men died that day. Matewan mayor Cabell Testerman and two miners were killed, along with seven Baldwin Felts men, including Albert Felts himself. Elsewhere, Brown introduces us to Mother Jones, now 83 years old, who is worried about "her boys," as she always called the miners. She can see it coming—the armed conflict with coal company militias with endless resources for warfare and little regard for human life. 

Jones and Hatfield became the "two burning lights" of the book, and they are just a few of the many real life people who populate Rednecks; but two fictionalized characters are the soul of this story: Miss Beulah, a septuagenarian Black woman who lives with her miner grandson, Frank, and Dr. Domit Muhanna, known to the locals as Doc Moo. 

"The relationship between him (Doc Moo) and Miss Beula — the way I envisioned it, it was the heart of the book," Brown said. "I had more freedom with those characters. You know where Sid Hatfield is going and Bill Blizzard and Sheriff Chafin, but here I had a bit more freedom."

Using these characters, Brown creates the truth of the tent camps where families lived during this time. The camps were more fully integrated than life in the town. By design, coal companies recruited workers from different places, Black and white, Italian and Hungarian and Polish, in the hopes that prejudices and language barriers would put a damper on organizing. Company towns were often segregated or organized into ethnic ghettos, but in the tent encampment, there were fewer restrictions, alliances were made across racial and ethnic lines, and people managed to overcome language barriers.

"The photos that you see, they're really living all together. It's surprising to us today to see the photos of 100 years ago, of Black and white kids and kids of all kinds of different backgrounds playing together, and people of different skin colors holding babies of other skin colors. It was something empowering about that, because this is such an antithesis of how we think about Appalachia — as largely white Protestant," Brown said. 

"Not enough stories like this one have been told, right? I think they've been deliberately suppressed." 

To be sure, Brown is telling the story of a war—an armed conflict on American soil that killed anywhere from 50 to 100 miners—but also of a larger war against working people. Mining was incredibly dangerous, and the scant pay was made in company scrip that could only be used at company stores where miners were gouged for necessities. They had little ability to up and leave, given that, even if they could have managed to save money, their scrip was worthless elsewhere. If they were injured in the mine, they were out of a job. If they died, their families would fall off the precarious financial edge.

It is hard even now, even 100 years later, to think of any recourse that they had besides fighting like hell. 

To get the reader into the actual fighting, Brown uses Frank Hugham, or Big Frank, the grandson of Miss Beulah. He is a fictional character, but the author pulled on real life people to create him. Big Frank was part Brown's imagination and part Frank Ingham, an officer with the UMWA and a man who was known as a powerful coal hewer. Hewers were also called pickmen as they loosened coal in confined spaces with short-handled picks and shovels. Frank Ingham was beaten by law enforcement so badly that they left him for dead. He survived. So, too, with Brown's Big Frank who, after such an assault, was nursed back to health by Beulah and Doc Moo. 

Big Frank is also part Dan Chain, a man often known as "Few Clothes Johnson," who was an organizer during the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek strike of 1912. The Mine Wars Museum notes that the UMWA was the first major industrial union to include Black workers in their membership and to employ African-Americans as organizers. Chain was likely one of the "Dirty Eleven," a group of commandos who used armed resistance against the coal companies; in Brown's hands, Frank is part of the commando group called "The Bad Seven." 

Brown tells all of these stories, connecting characters and chapters with prose that rolls smooth as a golfball on Greenbrier green. A doctor, an immigrant no less, stands up to the powerful to treat those in need. An elder Black woman remains fearless in the face of men sent to intimidate her. There are the stories of malevolent hired thugs, imperious law enforcement, and the pusillanimous men who aligned themselves with king coal. Holding it all together is the story of workers banding together and the courage of working folks in the direst conditions. 

The precision of Brown's storytelling, his honoring of the history, shines through the human connection he creates to tell an enduring story. He felt the timelessness of the story and also felt contemporary resonances. 

"I thought about outside agitators a lot, right? The way that Blair Mountain was largely smeared, that it was 'outside agitators, Bolsheviks and communists,' and that kind of thing. But in the wake of the battle—military intelligence reports, come to find out that wasn't the case at all. They could find almost no card carrying communists or communist operators that weren't from the area, or anything like that. It didn't matter, because they could just smear it," Brown says of the powerful using every tool at their disposal, including outright fabrications, to preserve and protect their own wealth and power. It's a story as old as these Appalachian coalfields themselves. 


Hub Bane's Red Bandana from the Battle of Blair Mountain, on loan at the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum.
Jody DiPerna is an award-winning journalist and writer who chronicles life at the intersection of the Rust Belt and Appalachia. She is one of the founders of the Pittsburgh Institute for Nonprofit Journalism and a longtime book lover. She spent an entire year following around a barn-storming women’s football team, has survived more nights on the sidelines of high school football fields than she would care to admit, and conducted one of her finest interviews in a laundromat. She is at work on Writing Down the Mountains, part-reporting, part-memoir, part meditation on books and story-telling in Appalachia. She believes that the right piece of writing, at the right moment, can save a life. 


_____________________________________________

Home     Archives     Fiction     Poetry     Creative  Nonfiction     Interview     
Featured Artist   Reviews     Multimedia    Masthead  

_____________________________________________