Of the approximately 5,000 men who worked the dig, about two-thirds were Black men, and, according to Thompson, these were mostly men who had come north from the deep south to work.
“I read somewhere that the reason why they hired Black migrant workers was because generally ‘West Virginia negroes were too rowdy’ — more likely to pull a gun than to listen,” said Thompson.
That could be fact or mountaineer legend, but either way, it feels right — West Virginia miners of all races were known to be rowdy. The West Virginia Mine wars stretched from 1912 when violent battles occurred between workers and hired thugs along Paint and Cabin Creek and stretched through the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. West Virginia miners and their families, both Black and white, fought for fair pay and fair housing and took up arms in the face of armed forces hired by draconian mine owners.
Included in “Appalachian Ghost” are some of those archival photos from the West Virginia Archives & History housed at the Capitol Complex in Charleston. Thompson was both surprised and disappointed to find that the photographs documenting the dig are photocopies. He said that the negatives were made from nitrate which is an intense fire hazard.
The lack of the originals makes it hard to really interrogate these photos; Thompson noticed that the photos may have been altered using the practice known as “dodging” — altering photos to obscure part of the image while bringing other aspects into sharp relief. It looks a bit like old fashioned soap opera style, racking the focus to blur one person and bring another to sharp clarity, a technique used to hand-hold the viewer and make sure they are looking where you want them to.
“I imagine someone from Union Carbide needed a picture for a report and wanted to make sure that certain people stood out who were important, that you could see them. Anything that is super bright is what you’re meant to see first,” Thompson explained.
Those are traditional techniques used since the advent of the medium, but there are other instances where it looks like people in the photos have been rubbed out. It actually looks like somebody went through with a graphite pencil or a piece of charcoal to cover or obscure certain people from the frame — a photographic manifestation of the practice of erasing working people and specifically Black people all through Appalachia.