Steve Nathans-Kelly
A lot of the coal wars histories describe the Redneck Army as an integrated one. There’s a moment in Rednecks where Big Frank thinks of the battle they’re fighting as another war of emancipation. Are you aware of Black miners who talked about the West Virginia mine wars this way?
Taylor Brown
There’s a book by Joe Trotter about Black miners in Appalachia called Coal, Class, and Color, that brings in the voices of a lot of different people. I don’t remember specifically somebody saying “This is like another war of emancipation,” but I gathered that impression from reading the various things. On the other hand, let’s not act like this is uncomplicated, or some grand story of a multicultural, integrated army. I tried to avoid idealizing that too much.
But there’s an article from 1921 by a reporter who went to Matewan right after the shooting of Sid Hatfield. He’s on the train with an old white man next to him, and a Black worker sits down. And the reporter said he knew immediately that the white man next to him must be from West Virginia and not from Old Virginia because he didn’t change his body language, he didn’t make a face, he didn’t say anything. They had a common enemy there, and I think that helped them be more unified.
Steve Nathans-Kelly
One of the historical figures who really comes to life as a character in Rednecks is the legendary labor leader Mother Jones. The Battle of Blair Mountain wasn’t her best moment. When the miners catch her reading them a fake telegram from President Harding telling them to stand down, a lot of them begin to see her as a traitor. Was that one reason you made her a major character in the book, to make sure readers understood how important she actually was?
Taylor Brown
I found that a lot of historians focus on just that moment with the telegram, but she was around, and she really went and talked to the Secretary of War and all that stuff. So I felt like the story that gets told about Mother Jones isn’t the full story. She didn’t talk about it a whole lot either, because she was really hurt. She had a nervous breakdown after this happened, which I try to show in the book when she’s having the panic attack. She had been such a force and part of it for so long, and I wanted to get that across. I was trying to understand why she did that, and it’s still unclear. You’ve got conflicting accounts, but my feeling was she knew that this was a trap. [The coal company] wanted the Redneck Army to come in and they wanted it to get crushed.