WYCO, WV–Judy Riffe had been in a coal mine only one time, but she had been part of the industry for fifty-six years.
In 1966 she traveled down in a deep mine with her husband, Bernard Riffe. It was Bring Your Family to Work Day. Judy recorded the whole thing on a camcorder: the portal, the roof bolts, the coal carts. A few months later her son recorded over that tape. Now the memory is largely gone for her.
Not the same for Bernard. He began working in the mines of southern West Virginia at age 15 and didn’t retire until he was 56. He could spout stories like a shaman. Their home was filled with relics of his pride: a bust of a coal miner, a miniature coal cart that held flowers, a portrait of his father exiting a mine in 1912.
But Bernard’s pride came at a high price. He had black lung, or coal miner’s pneumoconiosis. Belabored and obstructed, each breath he took moved through him with a wheeze of tension. He had to use an oxygen tank at night. He could not be outside when it when it was too hot or too cold. Just moving from one room of the house to the next exhausted him.
Consequently, Judy took care of everything. She planted and harvested their garden. She mowed a weedeated a hillside so steep that she had to wear football cleats to stand up on it. She kept her home clean. She was active in her church. And she was the secretary of the Wyoming County chapter of the Black Lung Association.
She had helped her husband apply for and be granted black lung benefits. Now she helped other miners do the same.
When asked why she did so much for others, Riffe avoiding an emotional answer. “I try to stay active,” she said. “I like to be busy.”
But the busyness was a recent development. In 2006 Riffe’s kidneys failed, and she would be have to visit the doctor weekly for dialysis for two years. Though recovery was rare, Riffe was a success story. Miraculously, her kidneys started working again.
“The Lord delivered me of that,” Riffe said, and her second chance at life brought her renewed energy.
Her latest project had been raising money for a bus to drive a group of miners to Washington, D.C. to lobby Congress for black lung benefits. Riffe had hand-sewn a quilt to be raffled.
The quilt depicted male and female miners, some kneeling in prayer. The center square of the quilt showed Mother Jones, a late-19th century labor organizer widely praised by the United Mine Workers of America. With four days left before the drawing, she had raised nearly $1300.
“All the coal miners recognize Mother Jones,” Judy Riffe said, “that’s why they buy so many tickets.”
The raffle quilt was not Riffe’s first quilt about coal mining. Across the surface of her and Bernard’s oak, poster bed, Judy Riffe laid out a quilt that told her husband’s history. At the top of the quilt was an exact replica of Bernard’s coal mining certificate. Below that, the quilt moved through time like a comic, right and downward.
In the upper left was a coal miner with a carbide lamp and lunch pail. Further down was a miner with an electric lamp and bit box, innovations that replaced the formers. Eventually the quilt showed the equipment that put many miners out of work: the loader, the longwall machine, the continuous miner.
At the bottom right of the quilt was a mine inspector with a speech bubble over his head reading “I’m putting a close on this place.” Since 1983 Central Appalachia had seen 38,000 coal miners lose their jobs.
Riffe well knew the effects of mine closings. In February 2016 West Virginia’s unemployment rate was nearly 2% higher than the national average, and in August 2016 Riffe’s home in Wyoming County had been named the American county with the highest rate of drug overdoses.
Yet somewhat conflicting, she also knew the pain the coal industry had caused her community. At her bedside, looming like a strange omen, the oxygen tank sat silent and riddled, resting in the intermission before Bernard required it to see morning.
Riffe saw the changes in the coal industry not as political issues either left or right but as inevitable.
“Trump came to West Virginia,” Riffe said, “and he told all the miners that he would get their jobs back. Those jobs aren’t coming back.” Riffe foresaw a future in which coal mines required even fewer laborers—a future in which things were even more heavily mechanized.
“A lot of miners talk about ‘Obama’s War on Coal,’ but it’s just not true,” Riffe said. She saw examples of this in her work for the Black Lung Association.
According to Craig Robinson, a community organizer who was largely responsible for the miners’ health movement in southern West Virginia, since passage of the Affordable Care Act, the number of miners getting black lung benefits had jumped from 6% to 16%. Spouses of miners—even deceased miners—were eligible for those benefits as well now, whereas they were excluded from them before.
Riffe joked that maybe she should be applying to black lung benefits. “Might as well,” she said. “I’ve been with Bernard fifty-six years through strikes and booms. I washed his mining clothes, his bucket, all of that.”
Back in the garage of their inviting, former coal-camp home, Bernard Riffe reached for the hard hat he had worn the last fifteen years he spent as a miner. Hung on nails on the wall beside their pearl Jeep Durango were all of Bernard’s mining artifacts: his headlamp, his lunch pail, his knee pads, his brother’s belt.
Gleaning them down with a wheeze, Bernard placed them on the concrete garage floor while he went to retrieve the lamp battery.
“This was all his real equipment,” Judy said. “He used all of this.”
Bernard found the red battery pack in a drawer in the backroom of the garage. He connected it to the lamp quickly, his fingers moving in a habitual, rehearsed manner, muscle memories from eighteen years prior shoring up without delay.
Judy’s hand moved to the small of his back as he clicked the pack on, but the light didn’t flicker. The pack had sat idle too long in the drawer.
“I didn’t figure it would work,” Bernard said. “Thing’s dead.”
He put the battery pack beside the rest of the relics on the floor, and the couple stood silently for a moment, hovering over their pasts before them, the future where these objects would be looked at behind tempered glass almost visible in the damp, mountain air.
Listen to a moving cover of Ed Pickford’s “The Devil Is in the Dust” about a coal miner with black lung here.
For further reading, check out the Appalachian Citizens Law Center blog blacklungblog.com.
Appalachian Root Trip 