Biggers - Reckoning at Eagle Creek: the Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland

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Table of Contents

ALSO BY JEFFBIGGERS

In the Sierra Madre

The United States of Appalachia:
How Southern Mountaineers Brought Independence,

Culture, and Enlightenment to America

To
Cora Bell and Bob Followell, Frankie and Henry Stilley,
and all those who lived on Eagle Creek;

Richard and Jerretta Followell,
keepers of our family trees;

Gary DeNeal,
poet errant of the Shawnee Hills; and

in memory of Shera Biggers Thompson,
who reminded me of the importance of family heritage.

They who are strong have claimed an earthly peace
Gathering their strength in this treasured hour
When the winds hush, the muted waters cease
And fog with misty wings has raised a tower
Of silence as a harbor for the stars;
When hills have cleft the sky with brooding peaks
Thrust in the purple bowl, raised solemn bars
Against all utterance, he who then speaks
Shall in this mighty breathlessness be heard.
They shall be heard, the weary and the spent
The broken at the wheel, the fledgling bird
Each grievous thought, each yearning here unspent
Shall have its reckoning when the hills confide.
They shall find strength where peace and time abide.

JAMES STILL,Reckoning

Strip mining Eagle Creek. (Photos by Jerretta Followell.)

Prologue

IN COAL BLOOD

Something like a shadow has fallen between the present and past, an abyss as wide as war that cannot be bridged by any tangible connection, so that memory is undermined and the image of our beginnings betrayed, dissolved, rendered not mythical but illusory. We have connived in the murder of our own origins.

EDWARDABBEY,Shadows from the Big Woods

I stood with my mother and Uncle Richard at the rim of a lunar expanse of ruts and rocks and broken earth. We had to protect our eyes. A dark wind swept along the ridge. Howling little eddies of fury. Huge trucks stormed in all directions. Blocks of sandstone abounded like nameless tombstones on a battleground of slate and clay. Colorless somehow. It looked like an earthquake had devastated the area.

How green was our valley of Eagle Creek, when my mom and I last walked these hills together. Corn and sorghum tassels had jutted out from the slopes like ancient signposts next to the barn that slumped with stories of accidental and nearly fatal hangings. Our porch was weighed down with tables of chicken legs and gizzards, catfish, okra, garden vegetables, beans, corn bread, and heapings of rhubarb pie.

The rolling forests seemed eternal in those days, protected by sentries of hickory, oak, maple, gum, beech, dogwood, and wild grapevines that thickened up the ramparts of Eagle Creek with the intrigue of danger. Pine was a latecomer, an entry of reforestation. I was told yellow pine was a sign of death. The pioneers who had first entered these Illinois hills would plant two pines in front of their houses, which eventually served as the wood for their coffins. Coffin pines, we called them.

Our family homestead, known since 1849 as the Oval Hill Farm, sat on a knoll in the eastern shadows of the Eagle Mountains, which withdrew to the upheavals of 400-million-year-old faulted ridges that were older than many American ranges. To the northeast, across the nearby Wildcat Hills that infested my grandmothers stories of panthers and wolves, hid the ruins of the Great Salt Spring that fed the largest prehistoric civilization north of Mexico City and drove legal slavery into the land of Lincoln and Obama. On the southeastern horizon, the promontory outlook of the Garden of the Gods Wilderness area, one of a handful of such protected areas in the American heartland, retreated into the traces of the Shawnee National Forest boundaries that looped around the panhandle of our hollow with the intransigence of a national border.

On a clear day, as a child, I once pretended to be an eagle and took flight down the hill, rose above the forests, and soared beyond the Ohio River and Kentucky, which lay only twenty miles away.

I cant believe this, my mom whispered.

Beyond description now, Uncle Richard said. Just wasted.

Richard was a tall, peaceful man in his seventies, still all legs, blind in one eye, whose soft Kentucky accent spun words with an ancient borderland dialect that my first ancestor had planted in these hills in 1805 and distinguished family from outsiders. My mom may have been his older sister, but she moved faster, had sat confidently in the passengers seat at the age of sixteen, while her father drove across two county lines and left her at the redbrick wonder of Southern Illinois University with just enough time to get back to his place at the coal mines. She measured her soft-spoken words in an accent that left no traces of her past.

We could see the route of destruction. The first explosions had taken place in the summer of 1998. The coal company had set off the ammonium nitrate-fuel oil blasts in the surrounding Eagle Creek Valley, gnawing away at the edges of our family hill. One thousand six hundred pounds of explosives sat in each hole like a land mine, set to ripple across the valley with enough thunder to bring down the walls of Jericho.

In this last phase, Loevas place along the lower creek went first. She was still a teenager the first year she taught my mom and Uncle Richard at Central, a one-room schoolhouse on the muddy trail between the hills. From the porch of the Oval Hill Farm, where cousin Juanita would rest and put on her boots and lipstick before cutting through the forest, you could have seen the valley crumple into ashes, as if the New Madrid earthquake that had laid waste to the region in 1811 was returning for a second reckoning.

For years, our familys homestead leaned down the crest like an overburdened hickory. Not anymore. My moms cousin Leon, the last occupant of the old homeplace, had told and retold the story until he could tell it no more, no longer cared to talk about it, no longer wanted to have the memory conjured up by outsiders like a living nightmare. He didnt even want us around, poking into his despair, his affairs, a muck of betrayal that only he could fathom. He had just remodeled the log cabin for the eighth generation of our extended family set to reside therehad even put on a new porch.

And it shook with every blast. Permits were renewed and modified to move the explosives closer, until harassment became a legally authorized tactic. Dishes shot off the cupboards. Frames unhinged. Every three days the machines moved in closer, carving a rusty horseshoe two hundred feet deep.

We were on the wrong side of the official Shawnee National Forest and first designated Illinois wilderness area border for one reason; our land possessed resource attributes. Our family hollow and hillsides were endowed with five rich seams of coal. Dekoven, Davis, Springfield, Herrin, Survantquaint names that meant nothing to me, but that could change the register of any coal barons voice with glee.

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