DIANE WILLIAMS: As a little girl, I would go with my granddad to the company store.  And all the coal miners would be around and they would say, sing me that song and they would pay me. So I would get a few pennies for penny candy and it was 16 tons. So I would sing 16 Tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Say Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store. Laughs and chatter

ANA GONZÁLEZ: That’s Diane Williams. She's sitting with me and Yo-Yo and a group of coal miners in New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia. It's the first weekend of fall. And we're outside of a historical mine called Nuttallburg. The Appalachian hills around us are tight and thick with summer leaves. The river behind us is a constant flow. We just had a picnic of pepperoni rolls and mr pibb [soda crack foley] from real life coal miner lunch buckets. Then Yo-Yo stood up.

Yo-Yo Ma: As a stranger, I'm so overwhelmed with a sense of appreciation and gratitude for what you have done. It's important to unite all of us because you've united us once before in what you've done. So what would you like us to take away 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Coal has formed the lives of so many West Virginians. It formed this country, really. But there’s a dark irony to coal. 

DIANE WILLIAMS: Say Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: You hear it in that song “16 tons”

DIANE WILLIAMS: I owe my soul to the company store

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And that irony makes it hard to get to know coal, if you are an outsider, especially today, coal faces another challenge: the industry, especially in West Virginia, is shrinking. Coal is changing. But the culture of it is still there in these Appalachian towns. So, in this episode, we dig into the music and the stories of West Virginians whose lives are defined by coal to see what keeps people holding onto this place and the black fossil falling out of its hills. 

Hi, I'm Ana González, and this is Our Common Nature, a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma through this complicated country to help us all find that connection to nature that so many of us are missing. We climb mountains, play music, drive dirt roads, recite poetry, traverse rivers and oceans and our own brains –  all to figure out how to better live on our planet. Together.

 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Can I get you to do the classic intro? Who are you and what do you, what do you do? 

Yo-Yo Ma: Um, I'm Yo Yo Ma and I play the cello. Always great to see you. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Always great to see you. Isn't it weird that we have a podcast together? 

Yo-Yo Ma: I know it's fantastic. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yo-Yo and I travelled deep into the heart of West Virginia because its a place we both don't know very well. And this trip -- winding through Appalachian mountain towns -- was a way to learn more about this place that holds so much of our country's history and identity.

Yo-Yo Ma: I was struck by the immense beauty of the landscape, and the rivers, and the mountains, and how extraordinarily kind the people we met were.

FADE UP $2 bill up for a second for the music 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Back on that riverbank in New River Gorge by the old mine. We're here with a bunch of people whose lives were touched by coal: miners, of course, but also a poet and some musicians. We want to get to know this place, so we start on some common ground. 

Coal miner: You know, Coal Miners is gospel music, country music.

Dom Flemons: Oh, lovely. 

Coal miner: Kathy Mattea.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Kathy Mattea, he said. She's a West Virginian singer songwriter. And she’s here too. 

Kathy Mattea: Well, they're my people. I mean, they just are. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Both of Kathy's grandfathers worked in West Virginia mines. 

Kathy Mattea: My grandfather mined a 30 inch seam of coal. He did it with a pick and would pick sideways into the coal and work his way in. And my grandmother would sew leather patches onto the backs of the top of his shirt, so that when he wedged himself in against the ceiling, it wouldn't wear through his shirt.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Kathy grew up hearing stories like these from everyone in her family. They’d all gather in one of her grandparents' homes and tell stories and play music. That’s where Kathy started playing guitar. Her parents would get her to perform. And this was around the 1970s, and a new song was taking over West Virginia radio.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: How many times would you estimate you've played “Country Roads” in your lifetime?

Kathy Mattea: Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds. 

MUSIC: Almost heaven, West Virginia … Y'all have to sing with me though because that's the whole point, you know.” Life is old here. Older than the trees, younger than the mountains ..

ANA GONZÁLEZ: “Take me Home, Country Roads” is quintessential Americana music. People all over the world know it. And in West Virginia, this song is the song. West Virginia University football games, high school graduations, weddings. It is so nostalgic for this version of West Virginia that feels good. And it’s absolutely beautiful. But it's not really true. 

Kathy Mattea: Because all the specific locations they mention are in Virginia. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Blue Ridge Mountains. Shenandoah River. Those are Virginia landmarks. And while the mountains and the river both technically travel into West Virginia, it’s the most Eastern side. And the song is just clearly not written for West Virginia. Kathy said the songwriters had never even been to West Virginia when they wrote the lyrics. They were singer songwriters in Washington, DC who started naming pretty landmarks in that general area. One of them was thinking about his home in Massachusetts, but they decided to use “West Virginia” because it sounded really nice. 

Kathy Mattea: The people who wrote it didn't know. But, you know, where else are you going to find a song that's coming out of all the dashboards of all the radios and all the cars in the country that screams, West Virginia, mountain mama, take me home.” 

MUSIC: take me home, country roads…

Kathy Mattea: It's like a place where people feel invisible. And so, to have that celebratory song that's proclaiming our existence and that yearning to be there is profound for people who are from there.  And we might be on completely different sides of the political spectrum and the social spectrum and all those things, but we can sing country roads together.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: So this song that the whole world thinks of as representing West Virginia actually doesn’t. At least not literally. And as we sit along the riverbank, a coal miner named Dorsel brings up another musician that he thinks represents West Virginia. 

DORSEL: Bill Withers, he's from here. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Bill Withers, like Aint No Sunshine When She’s Gone, Just the Two of Us, Bill Withers, he grew up in a coal mining town in West Virginia.

Yeah, Slab Fork. Lean on me. 

Kathy Mattea: He told me, Dorsal, that he wrote “Lean On Me” about living in the coal camp. 

MUSIC:  Just call on me, brother, when you need a hand. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Kathy met Bill one time and he told her his song about people leaning on each other, supporting each other... was written about coal miners. 

Kathy Mattea: And nobody cared what color anybody was. He said, and nobody cared. It just wasn't a thing. In the community, everybody just helped each other. 

DORSEL: So always look out for each other.  

DOM: As long as you're on that same crew, everybody's the same crew. 

MINER: There’s a lot of black men and they work just as hard as the white man. And as long as everybody did their job, everybody got along really good.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: So, they’re saying that “Lean On Me” is about the ways miners supported each other no matter their race. And I’d love to believe life actually played out like that, but in the crowd are two Black women. Diane, who spoke at the top of the show and sang 16 Tons, and her mom, Zora.  

ZORA SPEAKS: I’m Zora. I worked underground for 20 years.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: It’s hard to hear Zora because she spent decades in the mines, and now her lungs are damaged. So her daughter, Diane, who’s sitting right next to her, and holding her hand– she speaks up  

DIANE WILLIAMS:  This is my mother Zora. She worked in the coal mines down at Maple Meadows, uh, for 20 plus years until it closed. As we were growing up about the young men that she worked with, but she always had a story to tell about how the men would pick at her and would make her do their work if she, if she cleaned her belt, they would always leave some more for her to do, and how she used to threaten to beat their you know whats when she got them outside.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Ok … that’s a little different from Kathy Mattea’s read on Lean on Me. And it turns out that Zora and Diane come from a big mining family. 

DIANE WILLIAMS: You talk about history. So my granddad was a coal miner. My uncle was a coal miner. My mom, I still have a brother, Christopher Saunders, that's still working in the coal mines.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: If I want to get to know this place some more, I have to meet Chris.

Chris Saunders: I mean, uh, in coal mining, we always say, “Everybody going to be Black at the end of the day.”

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris Saunders, after the break. 

BREAK 1

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Our Common Nature is back. We’re in West Virginia meeting up with present-day coal miner, Chris Saunders. Who also happens to be Black. 

Chris Saunders: And when you underground, you put all that aside. If you have any prejudice in you, all that, because you gotta work together, you gotta work safe. And now when they come back up, it might be a different story. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: We met up at a local history museum in West Virginia. It focuses on coal mining and there was an exhibit dedicated to his mom, Zora. 

Chris Saunders: Yeah. And this is one of the pictures. This was the crew that she worked with at the end. And that's her. That's her.

 ANA GONZÁLEZ: There’s this great photo of Zora in a hard hat and aviator sunglasses leaning up against a chain link fence. And she has the face of a woman who’s put up with a lot of shit. 

Chris Saunders: And it's so true because there's still a stigma about women being in the coat mines. So, plus she was a Black woman. So that stigma was there. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ:  Chris told me his mom came to coal mining as a single mom of four. She moved down from New York City to take care of her aging parents. And her dad actually WAS a miner.  For Zora, working in the mines was a livable wage. It would pay for the house, the kids, the parents. But the other miners let her know that a woman, and a black woman at that, wasn’t part of the boys’ club.

Chris Saunders: My mom's a hard worker. She said, “I'm gonna prove to you I can outwork you, I can outthink you, uh, I'm gonna treat you with love and kindness regardless of what you say or do to me.” She said, sometimes you just gotta let it roll off your back and keep on doing what you gotta do. She had a guy that was always wanting to tell her the N word jokes. She said, “Oh baby, I ain't got time for that.” She said, “I'll tell you what you do. Write them out for me. And let me read them.” So every day, he's writing these big long jokes. And she'd just fold them up. Fold them up. And then he'd come to her one day and he'd say, “I'm the one dumb enough to be writing these jokes out. And you ain't doing nothing but throwing them away.” She said, no, “I got them all. I'm making you a book.” Like that. And buddy, he just laughed. He said, “Mama, I'm sorry.” You know. And that's just the way she was. She said, now he gonna set up and waste his time writing these jokes out every day. And I let him do it. That's my mom, y'all. I mean, that's just her. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And this was just one of the stories Chris had about his mom warding off bullies. They'd steal her lunch

Chris Saunders: She baked brownies and put Ex-Lax in them. And so she knew exactly who was getting in her lunch buck, or her bucket, that's what they call 

 ANA GONZÁLEZ: Some days, she didn't have a good comeback or the energy to bake brownies. Some days she was tired.

Chris Saunders: She would always say, “I done the best I could for y'all.” So I know that mom, you know, and she would apologize for not being there a lot.  So. But I had a great mom. Yeah. Still do. I’m a big softie. And she taught us how to love people. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: The sentiment behind “Lean on Me” was probably not true for Zora. But it is for Chris. He’s committed to the job and his coworkers through thick and thin. 

Chris Saunders:  You know, the money was good. To be in Appalachian, to go to high school and get out and can make a hundred grand right out the gate. Eighteen years old. Huh? I'm just telling you, that's the type of money they paying you and give you health insurance for everybody in the family. And I look at it like this, I chose to do this, but if I got to be on oxygen again, I don't want it.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. Do you think about that with your mom? 

Chris Saunders: Yeah. Yeah.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Zora’s condition has worsened since I saw her along the river and now, she can’t speak without oxygen. Chris is worried about her. But that’s not the only thing he’s worried about. 

Chris Saunders: We have what I call, I'm gonna keep it right, kiss my butt curves like you're gonna go around and then you go. So we we get ready to go through a few of them down this way

ANA GONZÁLEZ: If you look at a map of Route 3 heading West from Beckley, West Virginia, it looks like a squiggle. It follows every twist and turn of the Coal River. Through Eccles, Glen Daniel, Rock Creek, Dry Creek, my producer Alan is swerving in a rental car with Chris Saunders as a passenger. I’m in the back seat trying not to get carsick. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: I see a lot of Trump.  

Chris Saunders: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, all of us, love Trump. Yeah. Everybody here.  

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Is that because of the coal? 

Chris Saunders: That and now he's an outlaw, so. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Oh, they're like, it's that guy. Like, how much of the population is related to coal? 

Chris Saunders: Probably 90%. Got it. Yeah. Mm hmm. It's either railroad,  coal, or timber. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And the railroad is how you move the coal and the timber. 

Chris Saunders: Right. Right. Right. 

ANA IN CAR: Is this weird for you to be in a car with people asking you all these questions? 

Chris Saunders: Yeah, yeah, but it's alright. I like to talk.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris, like a lot of miners, isn’t quick to trust people with microphones. We couldn't get permission to even enter the parking lots of any of the coal mines that we’re driving by. People are even suspicious of the North Carolina plates on our rental car. 

Chris Saunders: Hhe know he can't drive down here. What he doing up here? Yeah. But this one here. This is the kiss your butt one, I call it. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: West Virginia is an isolated place. It’s not only the geography, but the culture. People not from here don’t always get it. And the truth is that coal formed these towns. Coal built these houses and set these families up for generations. Coal formed unions and made billion-dollar deals. But coal kills, and coal releases massive amounts of pollution into the world. People today don’t usually understand why anyone in the 21st century would work in this industry.

Chris Saunders: Yeah. And that's why I was kind of leery about talking to you at first. I'm just being truthful. You know, because I said, now I don't want to say, you know, be nothing negative to what I do. And it's negative to every job. It really is, but it has been great to my family. Financially and stuff like that.  

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: But for Chris, mining is about more than just making money. It's about survival.

Chris Saunders: In the 80's and stuff, I got into the drug trade. Got on some stuff and had no business doing, you know, and then I started going to church in ‘93 is the year I went into the mines. That was just a prayer. I was like, “Well, God, here I am. Now I need to provide for my family. The street life ain't gonna get it.” You know, and God opened doors. I wanted to follow in my mom's footsteps. And it's been a great way to provide for my family. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: I think that's what we're trying to get at. 

Chris Saunders: Right.

Alan Goffinski: And it's complicated. 

Chris Saunders: Yeah, it is. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: The history and culture of coal is complicated. Human beings have actually used coal for fuel for thousands of years. People would just pick it out of the hills and burn it. Cause coal itself is actually fossilized plant material that’s millions of years old. But it's only in the past century or so that coal mining in the United States has grown to be King Coal. So much of our world is made with coal and specifically West Virginia coal. Because this is a special type of coal. They call it high metallurgical coal, meaning it's higher in carbon and lower in moisture than thermal coal, which we use for fuel and heat. High-met coal is some of the best in the world to turn into iron and steel. 

Yo-Yo Ma: That's the pride that I think that people in West Virginia must feel for having actually been the power source behind the development of iron and steel in this country, which meant the westward movement, building railroads, cities. That connection was completely lost on me until I went there. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And it's still going today. so there is still that pride that people who mine coal for generations, they still love it. 

Chris Saunders: The company that I work for, I know they export to China, South Korea. You have a lot of big steel mills in India. And then you have Ukraine right now is shut up, but Ukraine was a big steel producer for Europe.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And they're buying U.S. coal. 

Chris Saunders: Yes. Yeah. Because again, you have the best coal in the world to make steel. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: The culture of coal mining is baked into West Virginia, but it is from another time when more people could get coal jobs. The mines themselves have become more automated and mechanized. The work is different and they need fewer workers. Even though coal is STILL being used to make everything from electric cars to solar panels and housing, as we drive deeper down Route 3, the towns get smaller. We see abandoned company stores and downtown ghost lands. 

Chris Saunders: This was the old grade school. Alright, during the explosion, they were lined up from there, CNN, on both sides of the road. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: He’s talking about TV reporters from CNN and other outlets.

Chris Saunders: Yep, all the way down. That's where I had to drive through them every day. They would start right there. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: What those news outlets were covering, after the break.

BREAK 2

ANA GONZÁLEZ: This is Our Common Nature. I’m Ana. Before the break, coal miner Chris Saunders was taking us on a road trip all along Route 3 in West Virginia. And now, we’ve reached our destination

Chris Saunders: Now look on top of the hill right here. You see where the tube went in? That's the coal seam right there.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: We pull off the road and park on the gravel beneath a long metal tube connecting one mountain to another. It's the conveyor belt that transported coal between mining operations.

Chris Saunders: I don't know if you can see the black on top of the hill. Then you usually have other seams below it. But that's the eagle seam that we mined. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Seams are layers in the earth where the coal is. It's where the mines are set up to extract the coal. And until I saw this, I didn’t really understand how modern coal mining worked. I thought it was still like Kathy’s grandfathers described: 30 inches tall and picked out with hand tools. This mine, the Upper Big Branch Mine, is a colossal compound in the hills. Upper Big Branch used to be one of West Virginia's largest coal producers. It was owned by Massey Energy, a huge name in coal for decades. And even as there were more safety regulations placed on mining, Massey was consistently cited and fined for not following them. The heavy machinery used today to dig into coal seams brings up more and more coal dust, which, suspended in air, is explosive. In a perfect world, coal dust is blown out of the mines with giant ventilation systems. But nothing is perfect. On April 5th, 2010, a little after 3pm, one of the teams at Upper Big Branch burrowed into a pocket of methane gas that exploded and ignited the unventilated coal dust.

Chris Saunders: I was underground. I was a section boss that evening. And it was just a crazy evening outside. You could see this storm coming in. And we was doing our safety meeting about the time the explosion hit. I heard Everett telling Leon “It's bad.” I said, “Leon, what's going on?” He said, “Been explosion.” He said, “32 people could be dead or trapped.” He said, “Don't say nothing yet. I don't want to cause panic.” 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: But the news got out. 

Chris Saunders: And see they actually suffocated. Everything pulls out of the air and they was all like packed in there you know, like instantly you done dropped down to 15, 16% oxygen.

Alan Goffinski: These are friends of yours?

Chris Saunders: Yeah. I lost a lot of friends. Yeah. Knew every one of them. 

Alan Goffinski: I'm sorry about that. 

Chris Saunders: Yeah, yeah, 29 people that day. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris has led us to a makeshift monument. 29 hardhats sit on 29 crosses.  Family and friends have placed Christmas trees and lunch pails, necklaces, bottles of liquor, next to the names of their loved ones killed in the explosion. 

Chris Saunders: I actually worked with Joel, Robert Clark, Steve Harrah, we called him Head, Maynor, Willingham, Persinger, and Spanky. Me and Spanky was close. Only two people lived. Mousy, but he's, his mind went, I guess the lack of oxygen. Then another boy named Bennett, he, he doing fine. He was younger.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Like, losing this many people, was that fear ever there when you went into it? 

Chris Saunders: Yeah. Oh yeah. After this. Yeah. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. But before this, did you ever think this was possible? 

Chris Saunders: No, you don't, I don't know. You, like I say, you get complacent. You never think about no disasters like this. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: The Upper Big Branch explosion was the worst mine disaster in the U.S. in 40 years. In its aftermath, the families of the miners who died were thrust into the headlines of national news cycles. Meanwhile, they had 29 funerals to plan and attend, and 29 families had to face a new reality. And begin rebuilding their lives. The surviving miners, like Chris, had to show up for work the very next day. 

Chris Saunders: Why didn't we just take at least a day for respect. At that time, you know, far as I guess in the corporate mind, well, we don't want to admit that we've done nothing wrong. Buddy, you already in this now you might as well just shut down, regroup. You know, 29 people dead, regardless, who wrong? Let's show some type of respect. And that always bothered me. It still bothers me because if I was a CEO of a company, that's what we would have done. Regardless of who wrong, who right, what happened. You know, we, we going to hash that out later. These people, the lost friends, family, regardless, let's show some kind of compassion. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris never speaks too harshly about his employer. He’s careful to tow the line. HIs life, his livelihood, his identity as a coal miner would be at risk. But Crystal Good can speak up.

Crystal Good: The poem came, but it came, What you know about black diamonds, black diamonds, black diamonds? Hey, hey, hey, hey. For like two years. So I just walk around the house singing just that, right?

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Crystal is a writer, an activist, and a West Virginian who watched the news of Upper Big Branch as it played out on TV. 

Crystal Good: (POEM) Black diamonds form on days like April 5th, 2010, the day that started just like all the other days. The other days just like all the days, the hundreds of days that the earth fell in on miners. Trapping them underground with nothing but their prayers. This time on April 5th, 2010, 29 men died in what they call a mine disaster.

Crystal Good: So much of the Upper Big Branch was like national news organizations seeing black people on the news and being like, Wait a minute, Black coal miners? Like, this country doesn't even know about the history. You know? The labor of Black men in West Virginia and, and the families, you know.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: The injustice of it all stuck with her: West Virginia, a place where people feel invisible, on a national platform for a disaster. She watched some Massey executives pay fines and go to jail. And she talked to the widows of miners who never got a chance to tell their side of the story. 

Crystal Good: (POEM) When every coal miner's wife sheds a tear, there comes the pressure. Compacted, compacted, compacted….

ANA GONZÁLEZ: This is her performing the poem next to the New River.

Others, industrial homicide, homicide, homicide. Dead. 29 miners. Black diamonds, black diamonds?

POEM:  in pages where black ink fades until somebody digs and some brave heart will always hear the call and dig deep inside the earth so that millions and millions of years from now, they will hold up and marvel at our diamonds and wonder at their priceless, priceless love, formed by the pressure, the pressure, the pressure, and the salt of her tears. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Crystal has performed this poem on the steps of the West Virginia Capitol. She’s performed it on stage and among people, and whenever she performs it

 Crystal Good: People cry. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: The biggest thing I’ve learned about West Virginia is just how much coal seeped out of these hills and into people's lives here. Everyone has a story about how coal has either enriched their lives or taken from it. And a lot of the time, it’s a mixture of both. Crystal knows that as a writer and a poet, she has the almost responsibility to articulate those complex emotions that people aren’t always able to express themselves. And part of that responsibility comes from yes, identifying as an artist. But the other part comes from identifying as Black in Appalachia. 

Crystal Good: West Virginia is 3 percent Black. It's survival. Tell me how you're going to survive in a coal mine talking about, you know, Black power and, you know, fuck the police. And uou know, so I think people have to survive here, right?

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Like Zora and like Chris, there are days where it’s harder for Crystal to find the energy to survive here. Like the day that she woke up to find that a coal company had poisoned her water supply.

Crystal Good: And it stunk, the whole air, everything smelled like licorice. UGH I can't even eat licorice to this day. It makes me sick just even thinking about it 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: After weeks of buying water to drink and shower, Crystal found it in her to sue the company. And she won. 

Crystal Good: And then folks got their checks, uh, which weren't much, I think people might've got 500. It just kind of made me think, what really is a win?  

ANA GONZÁLEZ;  Like it wasn't worth it? 

Crystal Good: I lost all of my friends. They all left.  

ANA GONZÁLEZ: A LOT OF CRYSTAL'S FRIENDS WHO COULD LEAVE WEST VIRGINIA DID. Because of the fear that this could happen again. Crystal stayed. But now it’s been more than 10 years. And she’s tired of fighting.  

Crystal Good: I only have so much energy, and I only have so much time on this planet, and living in West Virginia, the statistics, You die earlier. Like, the statistics suck.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: West Virginia’s life expectancy is the second lowest in the nation. Its population is declining faster than any other US state. That’s because of new epidemics, like drugs, but also old ones like poverty, and the pollution from coal. If Chris and Crystal met, they probably would disagree on some core things, but they are also both part of the 3% of Black West Virginians who have chosen to stay in this place despite the statistics, the disasters, and the daily grind of finding a way through. Because outside of all of that, West Virginia is more than coal. And that’s where Crystal finds her strength.

Crystal Good: You know, the coal barons are gonna coal baron. But maybe the coal barons couldn't coal baron so hard if we actually kind of built our everyday lives and our school systems and our nursing homes and everything, you know, with nature in mind. And I have no idea how to do this or what I'm talking about, but what I can do is take another group of kids down the New River, you know, next year and the next year and the next year.

WATER SOUNDS

Yo-Yo Ma: Absolutely, I mean the natural world is all energy. It is the transfer of energy, and life takes place. That's the miracle.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: I asked Yo-Yo about how he finds the energy to keep going in his life. When the days feel long, bbut he still has to perform and be “Yo-Yo Ma” for the world. And it turns out, he also goes to a place in the mountains. 

Yo-Yo Ma: There's a stream, the sound of a rustling brook is maybe one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. And you could see the stars. I saw birds, some blue jays. There was a cardinal. I was listening to the chirping, the tweeting. And it was the most beautiful music in the world. So I carry this memory. It stays there. That will help me get through what I need to get through. I think about really the whole cycle of living, it's inseparable that we are part of this world. We are part of nature. We are part of the stars. We are part of the earth. And I used to not think that. But I now do think that more and more.

Voice: Let’s go forward five strokes again.

Kids: Greetings, greetings recording friends. 

IZZY: I'm wearing the newest fur fashion. I got the new blanket. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: What did we just do? 

Kid: Water rafting and I'm cold. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: It's early fall on the New River. There are three big blue rafts filled with kids from a middle school program called Step By Step.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: So who am I talking to? 

KID 1: You're, you're talking to Josiah

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And who else?  

KID 2: My name is Brandon  

KID 3: Israel 

KID 4: Angel 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Have you ever been whitewater rafting before? 

Kid: No, this is my first time.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: I’m in one raft. Crystal Good, the poet, is on another. And we're all paddling down the New River to meet up with Yo-Yo. 

Kid: hHey yo-yo! You on a first name basis? (quick beat)

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yo-Yo’s waiting on the banks of the river with his cello, and he begins to play Bach Cello Suite 1 Prelude in G major obviously.

Yo-Yo Ma: I told you there was a cellist everywhere! 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: After he finished playing, Yo Yo hopped on one of the rafts and challenged everybody to a race.

Yo-Yo Ma: Well, of course. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: You were, like, yelling. You were like Coach Yo-Yo, like, “come on, everybody!”

Yo-Yo Ma: I think we lost, but that's okay. We had such a good time. We had such a good time.There's nothing like being in nature and doing something participatory. And that breaks the ice. And the kids were so different from before and after.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Oh yeah, big time. At the end, a couple of them performed a song that they wrote from scratch.

Kid: Mhmm. It has a beat and all of that.

 

Kid singing: I been makin that money I been makin it since I was ten Ay! That’s the main part of the chorus.

Yo-Yo Ma: It's great. It's fantastic. And that's how it comes out, right? You know, you're relaxed enough. You're safe enough, and it's, it's fantastic. It's goofy. It's fun. And guess what? It was memorable. You still remember it. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: The sun set and we made it off the river to get a good West Virginia dinner of barbecue and mac and cheese under the string lights of a riverside pavilion. There's a mix of river guides and kids of all ages fixing plates and chit chatting. It’s our last night in West Virginia, so a lot of familiar faces have come out to join in on the food and get a little song going. 

Dom Flemons: You ready maestro? 

Yo-Yo Ma: I'm no maestro. I'm not sure I'm ready.  

Dom Flemons: Alright, well let's see if we can get it. One, two, three. 1, 2, 3.

LOST RIVER BLUES PLAYS

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Banjo player Dom Flemons is here playing this tune he wrote with Yo-Yo. And pretty soon, he switches to an old line dancing song 

Dom Flemons:  And this is a piece called, uh, Great Big Eight here.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: And starts calling dances 

Dom Flemons (calls dances and sings)

Yo-Yo Ma: Boy, we need one another in order to function and survive and thrive. We need one another and we need to do things together in order to break the ice and to break the cycle of fear, of mistrust and territoriality. We build up these walls when we're kind of scared. And when we're on the water together, we're doing something, afterwards, it's different.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: There was time for one more song. Any guesses? 

Kathy Mattea: So this would be like the national anthem for West Virginia. Except that all the geographical references are wrong. People were requesting it this afternoon and it's just always like a great, uh, it's a great opportunity for everyone to sing along. 

Country Roads singalong 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: If I wanted to get to know West Virginia, I think this is a good start. It’s singing the words to “Take Me Home, Country Roads” even though I know they’re not technically right, because it feels good to sing by a river with people who love this state and will continue to love it even through disaster and heartbreak. And who all share a future in this place, if they keep fighting for it. 

A notable absence, though, was Chris and his mom, Zora.

Phone rings

Chris Saunders: Hello? 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Hey, Chris, it's Ana from the podcast. 

Chris Saunders: Hey, Ana. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. Yes. I was just calling because I was just so sad to hear about your mom and I just wanted to 

Chris Saunders: Yeah

ANA GONZÁLEZ: See how you're doing. 

ANA GONZÁLEZ: A few weeks after recording with Chris, he texted me and said his mom, Zora, died. 

Chris Saunders: You knew mama, she done everything her way and, and she told us all, she was ready to go. She said, Jesus got my house ready. That's what she told us. We read her lips. My sister sung to her, she patted her foot and just smiled, and she looked at me and said ain't you gotta go to work?  

ANA GONZÁLEZ: No! 

Chris Saunders: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I mean.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: What did your sister sing to her?  

Chris Saunders: Um, she liked this one song “Jesus on the main line, tell him what you want/ If you need a healing tell him what you want if you need a miracle/tell him what you want.” It was one of her favorite songs.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Hmm. 

Chris Saunders: Yeah, Jesus on the mainline. Call him up. Call him up. Tell him what you want. Yeah, that was one of her songs.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Are you having services for her? 

Chris Saunders: Yes. Yes  And I'm gonna work up until monday anyway, I know you probably think i'm crazy

ANA GONZÁLEZ: You can't get time off?

Chris Saunders: Yeah, but I'm, I'm, they only going to give me three days so I'm going to work, uh, tonight, tomorrow and then Monday morning, I won't go back. My boss is like, “I never seen nobody like you.” He said, “You're all right.” You know, cause they worry about me getting hurt or something too. Yeah. And I said, no, I'm fine. I said, I said, I talked to my mom. I said, my mom loved me and I loved her. I said, and, uh, “We just coal miners,” you know.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Chris told me that when the funeral parlor found out his mom was a coal miner, they gave him a discount. And they’re talking about building a monument to her in the cemetery. 

Dom Flemons SINGS

ANA GONZÁLEZ: I want to end with this song that Dom Flemons sang on the banks of the New River by that old coal mine where we ate pepperoni rolls. He sang it to me and Yo-Yo, to Kathy Mattea, to Crystal, and to Zora. He found this song in the Library of Congress, recorded by John Lomax. It was written and performed by a Black musician named Jimmie Strothers.

Dom Flemons:  He worked in a coal mine outside of Baltimore and he was caught in an accident and he was a blinded by it and he met John Lomax. About a year after he had gone blind and that was the one recording they had made of that song, We Are Almost Down to the Shore.

Dom Flemons SINGS: Peter peter out on the sea, drop your nets and follow me

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Despite it all, coal led us here. To this sweet moment along the New River. And maybe the lyrics of this song aren’t quite true either. Not literally. But the feeling I get every time I hear it transcends that. I go back to the hills and the river. I see Zora holding her daughter’s hand. I see Chris and Crystal and the kids on that raft racing Yo-Yo down the river. I see a place where the river flows clean under cloudless skies, and the country roads take everybody home. 

Dom Flemons: Fight on, fight on, fight on. We are almost down to the shore. Fight on, fight on, fight on. We are almost down to the shore. Fight on, fight on, fight on. And don't turn back, we are almost down to the shore.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: That’s Dom Flemons singing us out..

CREDITS:

Our Common Nature is a production of WNYC and Sound Postings 

 

Hosted by me, Ana González

Produced by Alan Goffinski

Editing from Pearl Marvell

Sound design and original episode music by Alan Goffinski

Mixed  by Joe Plourde

Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado

Executive Producers are Emily Botein, Jonathan Bays, Ben Mandelkern, and Sophie Shackleton

 

Our advisors are Mira Burt-Wintonick, Kamaka Dias, Kelley Libbey, and Chris Newell

 

Music in this episode by Kathy Mattea and Dom Flemons. If you want to hear a beautiful studio recording of “We Are Almost Down to the Shore”, check out Dom’s album Traveling Wildfire. 

 

Special thanks to Matt Eich for letting me use his phone to record on a river raft. To Leslie Baker at the Beckley Coal Mine and Exhibition Museum and to New River Gorge National Park. 

 

This podcast was inspired by a project of the same name, conceived by Yo-Yo Ma and Sound Postings, with creative direction by Sophie Shackleton, in collaboration with partners all over the world.

 

Our Common Nature is made possible with support from Emerson Collective and Tambourine Philanthropies.