From the dust of roasted phoenix feathers lays the darkened coverings of the dilapidated wooden furniture widdled to shape by the hands of my withered ancestors. As I sift through that black dust, the final remnants of the mountain diamond, I discover a toy train. A train with three metal wheels and a wooden fourth, the ultimate reminder of a darker smaller sized adulthood we mistakenly describe as childhood. For this small broken train is like that of my family’s ancestors and many others, broken. Broken and missing pieces of themselves, whether it be a foot, lung, back or soul.
This toy… a slap in the face to generations of children from the hills who never fully understood the feeling of a full belly or warm night sleep since they left their mothers’ bosom. Where this child was forced to play with the machine that would send away his land’s fortune. That would send away his father and brother to a prolonged death sentence in the prison known as Peabody Coal. To play with a toy that would open this child to generations of ridicule, speculation and misunderstanding by the outside world. This little toy, how it’s chipped paint and rugged edges fill the photographs of a thousand pains and a million agonies.
I imagine a small child running this toy, a present from a Christmas of happiness; a time long removed, running it along the cold dirty floor and imagining himself one day working by the trains like his father and uncles, mistaking the hard cough and ginger walking as a normality rather than a sign of physical abuse. This child will walk bravely and proudly into the deep belly of the mountain, proud and ignorant to all other possibilities no different than a child soldier in Africa.
However, the difference that we see between the child in the mountain and the children of these warring parts of Africa is that one group is noticed by the world and the other is not. You see daily we as a world fight to stop the atrocities of Central and Eastern Africa. This is a righteous and noble fight, yet somehow we forget about the generations of deceased children and young men in places like Letcher County, in Pike County, in Harlan, in Wise, West Virginia as they fight, fought and died in our war for more extracted resources.
As the children of Africa pick up Soviet era machine guns and hatchets the children and men of the mountains picked up pick axes and helmet lights. As the African child tends to bullet wounds the mountaineers deal with broken backs and black lung. The back and forth fighting of Africa wiped out entire generations within countries. The continual destruction and gutting of the mountains left Appalachia cold, barren, and empty of opportunity forcing an evacuation of people and culture. From the oldest and proudest European American group to a forgotten place on the American map. As countries in Africa rebuild and attempt to rebirth themselves, the world community stands guard making sure that all is well. All I want to know is where are the people caring about the poor child in Stinkin’ Creek Holler? Where are the Hollywood actors raising money to build houses in the flooded and destroyed areas of Johnson County where the weakened ground from generations of mining caused flooding never before seen in the region?
Many hear words such as these and they roll their eyes and would call me delusional or insane. I may be crazy and I may occasionally be delusional, but that is still up for debate. What isn’t up for debate is the fact that nearly 25 percent of Appalachian Kentucky is unemployed, that the average income of a household in Appalachia is roughly 13,000 dollars less than the US average and the fact that 32 percent of all counties in Kentucky are viewed as economically distressed counties; all of which are in Eastern Kentucky.
26 counties within the Appalachian region of Kentucky have 2.63 people in poverty for every one person who is above the poverty line. If you are a doctor, to pay off school debt, many organizations will pay your debt if you will work in a third world country… or Eastern Kentucky because in the eyes of the medical field and outside organizations the issues of the impoverished African and South Asian countries is equivalent to what’s happening in a region of one of the richest countries in the world.
When you are an area set up for one job and that job finally begins to end it is no wonder that that region falters, but should it not be up to all those who were so thankful and ready to use our resources and our hard work, blood, sweat and tears to help rebuild this area? When the coal seems dried up, the companies move out. And as the final trains leave the stations with the last dollars worth of coal from these mountains, so goes the hope of ever being saved. So now we are left with dust-covered toy trains as we hope and pray to once again hear a train whistle blow through our valleys, because only then will we know that anyone still cares.
