Not long after Raymond Thompson Jr. arrived to start a new job in West Virginia, a driver trying to make polite conversation dropped a familiar refrain about the Appalachian region.
“He’s like, ‘You know, it’s not like we’re not racist or have a problem with Black people, there just aren’t any Black people here,” Thompson — who, between 2012 and 2021, worked as a media specialist at West Virginia University — tells Pittsburgh City Paper.
Thompson, a Black photographer who now serves as an assistant professor of photojournalism at the University of Texas at Austin, took the statement with a grain of salt. When he learned about Hawk’s Nest, however, he realized how deeply that sentiment defined the state, as it chose to forget over 700 majority-Black workers whose lives were claimed by what is now considered one of the country’s deadliest industrial disasters.
Pittsburgh audiences will soon become more familiar with the tragedy when Thompson visits Bottom Feeder Books on Fri., June 21 to discuss his first book Appalachian Ghost: A Photographic Reimagining of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster (The University Press of Kentucky), described as using poetry and photographs to “give voice to the silenced, resisting revisionist narratives that often ignore the sacrifices of African Americans and erase their instrumental role in the development of America’s infrastructure.”
Hawk’s Nest, located in Summersville, W. Va., now attracts visitors with its natural beauty and proximity to New River Gorge, a recently created national park located four hours from Pittsburgh. But during the height of the Great Depression, it was the site of a massive construction project led by the Union Carbide Corporation, a chemical company that set out to divert the waters of the New River to power a hydroelectric dam.
The project, which started in 1930 and required blasting a three-mile tunnel through Gauley Mountain, needed thousands of workers to complete, many of whom were Black migrants escaping systemic racism in the southern states.
Hundreds of these workers died due to exposure to silica dust, a mineral discovered in the tunnel that, as one 2019 NPR story put it, “slices the lung like shards of glass.”
The disaster became obscured due to factors ranging from corrupt company practices to West Virginia’s hesitance to address its tragic industrial history, especially as it relates to mining (Hawk’s Nest is often compared to the black lung epidemic that has affected many miners).
Thompson cites poet Catherine Venable Moore, a West Virginia-based writer whose work covers Hawk’s Nest, as a direct inspiration for Appalachian Ghost.
“I was working at WVU and I got a copy of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, which has a forward by Catherine Venable Moore,” says Thompson. “And I remember reading her essay and it really captured my attention. Like, ‘Oh, this is wild, I can’t believe this happened.’ I was trying to make up pictures in my head.”
Thompson spent three years photographing sites Moore mentions in her writing, including Hawk’s Nest State Park, the Hawk’s Nest Workers Memorial Cemetery and Grave Site in Summersville, W. Va., the Gauley Bridge area, and the dam itself.
His final stop was Alloy, W. Va., the location of a Union Carbide plant that was powered by the Hawk’s Nest hydroelectric dam.
“Everything was basically to provide power for Alloy,” says Thompson.
He calls Appalachian Ghost a “speculative archive” that weaves Moore’s words with his images. One part of the book, titled “Tunnelitis,” comes from a poem by Moore that references a vague medical term used by doctors to describe the illness affecting Hawk’s Nest workers.
To some degree, Thompson views his photos as being in contrast with the few archival images of the Hawk’s Nest tunnel project, which were either lit to favor white managers or chemically manipulated to erase Black workers.
“I wanted to pull Black folks back into the conversation about the labor history of West Virginia and that they are part of the fabric that built the space,” he says.
The workers who died from toxic silica exposure, or silicosis, were also not reported or buried properly, and remains were relocated to various sites over the decades. As a result, Thompson says the Hawk’s Nest disaster death toll varies wildly — one public marker claims 109 died, another 764.
Thompson says he views Appalachian Ghost as educational material as opposed to an art photography book. He hopes it can be used to “create a starting point for more conversations about the various experiences of Appalachia” and West Virginia, a state he remembers fondly as a place where he lived, worked, and rode his bike for miles on the rail trail.
“Their experience is important to understanding what the region is and what Appalachia is,” says Thompson.
Appalachian Ghost Book Signing and Discussion. 6-8 p.m. Fri., June 21. Bottom Feeder Books. 415 Gettysburg St., Point Breeze. Free. instagram.com/bottom.feeder.books
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2024.
