In an attempt to alleviate his debts, he brings his two young sons to work with him.
The Lloyd family is less fortunate: Dillon’s brother Clabe begins working for the mine and soon finds himself indebted to the company store, unable to earn enough “scrip” to pay it off. ends up in Annadel, WV, one of the few towns in the area that operates outside of the coal companies’ jurisdiction. and his surviving family are forced off the land they had occupied since 1801.Ĭ.J. Papaw Marcum is the last bastion of the “old way,” and after his death, C.J.
witnesses his grandfather murdered for refusing to sign away his land rights to the coal company, an event that makes tangible the philosophy espoused by his friend and mentor, Dillon. Marcum, stick around because they have no other choice others, like Dillon Lloyd, retreat to the mountains rather than witness their homestead become “… all mud and ugly, men sellin their souls for the almighty dollar.” C.J. The novel begins with the coal companies driving families off their land through both legal and illegal means. The story’s action culminates in the Battle of Blair Mountain, a labor uprising that pitted workers who wanted the protection of a union against the coal companies and the U.S. Through these characters and others, the reader witnesses the rise of the coal companies in Kentucky and West Virginia and the stranglehold they have on their workers. and an avid union organizer and Carrie Bishop, a nurse from Kentucky who becomes embroiled in the union’s fight against American Coal. Marcum, a West Virginian who resents the coal companies encroaching on family land Rondal Lloyd, kin to C.J. This work of historical fiction opens in 1890, “ the year the railroad come in and took up our land, two year before the land was give out from under us to the coal company.” Spanning three decades, Denise Giardina’s novel Storming Heaven follows families in West Virginia and Kentucky as they navigate a transformed landscape.
0 kommentar(er)
