Coal Dust in the Wound: Ghostly Laborlore as an Appalachian Response to Trauma

In 2010, 29 West Virginia coal miners lost their lives in the United States’ worst coal mining tragedy in 40 years. One possible response to these mining tragedies comes through Michael Knost’s collection of ghost stories, Specters in Coal Dust (2010). Interestingly, the stories in Knost’s collection usually move away from demonic ghosts and toward more helpful ones, and in a shocking reversal of expectation, the real ghost, the real terror, the real demon becomes something that lies not only beneath the plot of the story and beneath the earth in the coal mines but also beneath the skin of coal miners: black lung disease. In fact, this terror, this pneumoconiosis, transcends even the material body to become the body of death. Most of the miner specters return through coal dust, incapable of escaping the dust that permeates their bodies even after their material selves are gone. Using these ghost stories to understand the science and constant role of coal dust in the Appalachian life functions not only as a type of laborlore that connects worker culture to storytelling but also as a type of what Stacy Alaimo has called a material memoir, which seeks to understand the personal corporeal role within science. Trauma theorists like Rob Nixon and Arthur W. Frank suggest wounded storytelling has the power to make the unseen seen, to make downplayed and slow violence quickly witnessed, and to help the wounded storyteller become the wounded healer. The tragedies and loss experienced both inside and outside of this ghostly laborlore collection—in conjunction with the counterterrorism storytelling gives to control real-life terror—give power to memory as a form of representation that hauntingly transcends time and space to connect people to place