Moonshine and Marx

DAN SIZEMORE in 55 and in 1974 is talking about emigrating to Canada. His two oldest boys did--one with the fifteen-year-old girl he'd just eloped with, the other not long after he'd been arrested in a 1967 Pentagon demonstration. Dan has a daughter who studies sociology in college, and another who does yoga every night before she goes to bed. Three other sons were kicked out of school for wearing their hair too long--Dan and his wife Margaret went to the ACLU and got it all fixed up. Margaret is getting a college degree. Walk into their house and The New York Times is on the table, near books by Eldridge Cleaver and Philip Roth, near Joan Baez records. The Sizemores loved John Kennedy and hated Johnson, hate Nixon. Once they alienated all their neighbors when they had a black friend of one of the kids stay at the house for a couple of weeks. He was trying to kick heroin at the time, and wearing an afro before the style was too big in the area.

I guess now I should tell you about the Volvo with the "Save The Whales" bumper sticker on the back and the peace medallion Mrs. Sizemore picked up at Saks Fifth Avenue, and the other kid who is a ski bum, and how much they enjoy New York magazine and African art.

But Dan Sizemore is a coal miner who has practically no money and lives in a rented house in Appalachia, where the hallow he lives in is choked in a layer of "red dog" coal slag left by the strippers for "surface miners," as the industry calls them). He's been broke more than once, drives a '68 Ford after going three years without one and wheezes like a train when he walks around because he has second-stage black lung. He lives in a place where school teachers quote from the National Enquirer and where the deputy sheriff pistol-whipped him once when he had that black kid visit. A place where in some countries they didn't even need draft boards during the war because young men were enlisting like Tennessee volunteers; where eight-year-olds with distorted inbred faces and rifles in their hands stare blankly at the cars from a porch fronting a house with no plumbing, may be a TV. Where Jock Yablonski ran for president of the UMWA and got himself, his wife and his daughter murdered in their beds for it. And where things haven't changed since a long time ago when coal companies from Pittsburgh and New York and Philadelphia came down to buy up land for fifty cents an acre, dig coal mines, and take away the coal and practically all the money the coal was worth. Dan Sizemore was out of a job a month after this book about him was published (the company cited "economic conditions") and cannot get another because of his black lung. (He can go on compensation--since 1969 he can, anyway--like the 230,000 who have enough of their insides eaten out to qualify.) He has been a miner for 36 years.

36 YEARS--except for one time, a crucial time because it couches the explanation George Vecsey gives for why this coal miner literally has a jar of moonshine in one hand and a copy of Das Kapital in the other. Vecsey had to get at this somehow, because Sizemore is no quintessential miner-mountaineer. Yet he is not freak show, either. How could this socialist grow out of these barren hills? It has something to do with being suddenly laid off for nine months during the fifties, having some time to think, and making a decision. The tragedy of Appalachia--which Vecsey seems to ignore--is that Dan Sizemore made the decision alone. "Nobody brainwashed him; nobody forced him into it. Certainly peer pressure had nothing to do with it." So up in his hollow Dan Sizemore read books, decided he was against the profit system, and prepared to keep his belt on when his kids began to sprout their locks. Fifteen years later the neighbors still hate the guy, and especially when they see out-of-state license plates (the people who bring him Philip Roth books?) flash by on the way up to his house. Who knows what goes on up there? A man in the shack next door to the Sizemores killed himself and no one but the insects noticed for several days. This is a place that could use a little peer pressure.

Vecsey makes certain that he's not showing us an oddity in this "Story of a Coal Miner," and he tells how Sizemore deals with his fellow workers in a locker-room sort of way (Vecsey, who used to be a sportswriter until he went to cover Appalachia for The New York Times, gets into the camaraderie of the miners' bathhouse). But the powerful images are still the pistol whipping, and the time one of Dan Sizemore's neighbors shot the dog belonging to his retarded son (Blackie, as Vecsey tells us several times), and the silent looks when they pack up to visit their draft dodger sons. Vecsey responds to the sense of alternation most, just as he stresses the frustration he feels when he's driving with the Sizemores searching for some nice music like James Taylor on the radio when all it plays is top-40 and mediocre country.

Vecsey deeply wants the Sizemore to have a better life, for Dan Sizemore to respect his work. But does he want them to drive a Volvo too? He projects his own cultural alienation onto his subjects. Just as their outsider friends do, as though there's no viable culture in Appalachia. His style suffers for the same reason--the well written and thorough approach to the Sizemores only fails when Vecsey goes into the house and transcribers domestic babbling, the "universals" of home life. Or when he refers to people we already know as the "sensitive" so-and-so-or the "intense" Jess Calkins--as though the way people shine through their context isn't enough and we need to see their transcendent virtues before we can understand them.

BUT FAULTING Vecsey may be a crummy trick, because there is so much here--the people and the context, even if often separated, and in fascinating detail. And maybe the needless universalizing of a local way of life happens because the writer is genuinely moved by people managing to stay human in such dehumanizing circumstances. The first day that Dan Sizemore drives Vecsey to the mine shaft where hundreds work, the reporter is amazed by the roads. Driving through Appalachia plays hell on a car, anyway--mud and garbage all over, trucks barreling around tortuous curves without guard rails, heaved-up pavement everywhere. But the drive from the Sizemore house to the Big Ridge mine is frightful, and ends on a dirt road so bombed out that any vehicle cuts its life in half driving on it every day (when the execs visit they drive company cars, and the road isn't even scraped anymore since the superintendent got a helicopter). The drive takes 45 minutes. When they jolt to the end. Dan Sizemore points out the coal train that hauls thousands of tons through a cement tunnel and out to society. In ten minutes the boxcars will pass within a quarter of a mile of the Sizemore's house. "Tells you where we stand," he says.

Vecsey might have worked out some of the flaws of perspective in this very fine book if he had put himself into it more. He is silent and unobtrusive throughout, which is fine when he glides into a section about union history or a polemic on strip mining, but we miss knowing what effect he has on the folks he is writing about. He only shows himself in the last few pages, when he writes in a queer objective tone about the gulf between him and Dan Sizemore. It is Sunday, and we have been with the miner and his family all week long, and longer. The book began with Dan Sizemore defending his two packs of cigarettes a day ("no reason to fear that coal dust") and it is ending with a few too many shorts of home brew. They are arguing furiously about baseball. Vecsey is trying to convince Dan Sizemore that Oakland ball players have more strikes against them than Cincinnati players (the Reds are the mountain team), more of an inferiority complex about their city. Dan Sizemore won't listen. "You don't understand what it's like to be a hillbilly." As he throws down the moonshine he gets mad that Vecsey keeps refusing a second glass and a third. The reporter explains that he doesn't "like losing control of myself in any way because it spoils my discipline as a person and as a writer." Dan shakes his head and goes to sleep. The next morning he says to Vecsey, "George, you say you don't want to lose your control over your mind. But I do."