Kingsolver Holding the Line

A true story of female-led resilience from the bestselling author of Demon Copperhead
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-39210-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

FROM THE MULTI-MILLION COPY BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DEMON COPPERHEAD FROM THE WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FROM THE TWICE WINNER OF THE WOMEN'S PRIZE '[Kingsolver] means to save us by telling us stories . . . She comes closer than anyone else I know.' ANNE PATCHETT 'A mesmerising account of women finding their voices.' THE TIMES 'A jaw-dropping and warm-hearted read.' WOMAN & HOME A true story of female-led resilience during the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 - now available for the first time in the UK. In the summer of 1983, Barbara Kingsolver was assigned to cover the Phelps Dodge mine strike as a freelance journalist. Over the year that followed, she recorded stories of striking miners and their stunningly courageous wives, sisters and daughters. She saw rights she'd taken for granted denied to people she had learned to care about, and she was determined to share their voices. This is the true story of the courageous women and girls who held the line, who discovered themselves in their fight for rights, and of Kingsolver's commitment to showing the sparks that fly when the flint of force strikes against human mettle. 'Readers will discover what made Kingsolver the novelist she is now.' NEW STATESMAN

Barbara Kingsolver is the global prize-winning and bestselling author of novels including Unsheltered, Flight Behaviour, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible and Demon Copperhead, as well as books of poetry, essays and creative non-fiction. Her work of narrative non-fiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than thirty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Prize for Fiction and is the first author to win the Women's Prize twice. Barbara lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Kingsolver, Barbara

Leseproben

Introduction

This is the book I never planned to write. When it started, I’d never written anything but short articles for publication and lots of poems and stories I kept to myself. In the summer of 1983, fresh out of graduate school in biology, I found myself drawn past science into writing of all kinds, so maybe I’d begun to hope I might write a book someday. But I had little confidence, no creative or financial support, and no earthly expectation of the career and readership that have come to me in the decades since. What I did have was a day job as a scientific writer. To that, I tacked on the plan of spending weekends cutting my teeth as a freelance journalist. A series of hopeful queries landed me the assignment of covering the Phelps Dodge copper mine strike for several news outlets. The scale of the project was daunting: I’d be driving out from my home in Tucson to a constellation of small, strike-gripped mining towns strung out across southern Arizona. But my job, I thought, was simple: get the story, meet the deadline, earn a paycheck.

I spent that summer wearing the tread off the tires of my dirttan Nissan pickup. I’d never given much thought to auto makes and models until I arrived in the blue-collar outpost of a mining town where the credo “buy American” is food on the plate. The first time I parked on the main street of Clifton, summoned my reporter’s nerve, and crossed the pot-holed street to talk with some men outside the Steelworkers’ Hall, they looked me up and down and asked if I belonged to that little Japanese truck. I replied defensively that it was put together at a plant in Tennessee. I hoped I’d said the right thing. The men gave terse answers to my questions about strike negotiations and no hint that they approved of me or my foreign transport.

Two weeks later I was back, talking to picketers near the mine’s main gate. I knew nobody in this town, had never set foot there before the strike. As I stood asking questions and taking notes, a young man across the street suggested at the top of his lungs that nobody ought to be coming around here in a Japanese truck. Some others in the crowd, complete strangers to me, shouted back, “It was made in Tennessee!”

By summer’s end it was not just my truck getting recognized protectively in Clifton. I was now known as “that gal that’s writing the book about us.” Nobody could have been more surprised to hear it. I’d never told my interviewees I was writing a book, only that I found their story remarkable and wanted outsiders to hear the truth. Newspaper work restrained me to a word limit, so I’d been thinking of “truth” in small doses. But the citizens of Clifton apparently felt that Truth can’t be confined. Did they know or care that I had no publishing contacts or experience? No, they did not. My truck was from Tennessee, and I was writing a book.

Their confidence surprised me, but not their assumptions about my connection to their cause and the responsibilities attached. I spent my whole childhood in a town roughly the size of Clifton; it hid in other foothills at the opposite end of the U.S., but the rules of small-town life apply everywhere. Rule #1 is that nobody stays a stranger very long. A newcomer has two options: become known or deliberately hold yourself apart from the people and curiosity and worries of the place. A journalist is supposed to be exactly that kind of stranger: an outsider who holds no attachment to her subjects. But I came back to these little towns too often to stay invisible and cared too much in the long run to pretend I didn’t. Clifton declared me the biographer of a place and time. If the shoes didn’t fit, no others were offered.

This is the tale I found to tell, ostensibly the story of a dramatic miners’ strike. The conflict lasted roughly eighteen months, between June 1983 and December 1984. It appeared to be an important moment in U.S. and global labor history; the decades that followed have proven that it surely was. When the trade unions representing Phelps Dodge mine workers were decertified, a half-century of organized labor in Arizona met its end. The rise of foreign competition and deregulation in the 1980s allowed employers to fragment and break unions everywhere, in one industry after another. Union membership in mining and construction was decimated. President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in a single morning and banned them from federal service for life, signaling that his anti-union authority outweighed any compassion for workers or the safety of travelers. Collective bargaining power has continued to decline throughout the industrialized world, contributing to—and compounded by—wage stagnation, rising income inequality, and the erosion of every kind of security, from employment, health, and housing to democratic governments and the global climate. Long story short, the four decades since I wrote this book have not been kind to workers of the world. Whether it’s in spite of these mounting calamities or because of them, union membership is beginning to rise again in the public eye as a treasure worth fighting for, beyond the traditional domain of mines and factories. (I’ll also add schools, since educators in the U.S. have been organizing since the 1950s.) Labor unions have become more diverse and widely based, reaching into tech and service industries—and, I’m proud to say, writers. The Writers Guild of America, in which all working U.S. screenwriters are enrolled, offers income protections and the holy grail for American workers: health insurance. In 2023, when negotiations with film production companies fell apart, WGA members went on strike to protect our livelihoods from a variety of threats including the industry’s use of Artificial Intelligence. For the first time in my life, I closed my keyboard on the projects I’d agreed to deliver and joined fellow workers in the anxiety and solidarity of a five-month strike. I cheered with them when we finally ratified our new contract. In new places every day, workers are learning that however creative or educated we may be, we’re still replaceable cogs in a wheel, and our only real power is collective.

I couldn’t have foreseen any of this in the 1980s, nor did I have the expertise to place the Phelps Dodge strike into the full context of modern labor history. My hope was to record a story and make it public, the sooner the better, so I finished my work before very much context had revealed itself. Qualified labor historians have written more analytical accounts, notably Copper Crucible: How the Arizona Miners’ Strike of 1983 Recast Labor-Management Relations in America, by Jonathan D. Rosenblum (1995). The author explains this strike as the turning point of a battle between two giants: a national union organization and a multinational copper corporation. Many people were hurt in this clash of Titans, and the ending of that tale is more discouraging than the story I’ve chosen to tell in this book, which played out on a smaller stage in the space of less than two years. I didn’t choose the plot of Holding the Line on account of its happier ending. I chose it because I was there, it’s the story I witnessed, and I found I couldn’t walk away. I hope the reading of this book will bring you some of what the writing brought to me, whether or not you have any special interest in a gritty little town in the middle of the desert that hosted a long-ago mine strike. This is the story of the courage of the people who once lived there. It’s about the sparks that fly when the flint of force strikes against human mettle.

In those days, I never heard anyone talk about representation or authentic voices in the written word. I was aware of oral history mostly as a medium of anthropologists and family memoirists. But I had strong feelings about honoring different truths as different people see them. I’d grown up in a part of rural Kentucky that teaches nothing if not the lessons of class struggle, but in my adult life I kept running up against the overarching myth of America as a classless society. I’d also spent part of my unconventional childhood in an extremely remote Congolese village, where a great many of the truths I’d previously observed—spiritual, material, and otherwise—turned out to be untrue, irrelevant, or tragically inappropriate. Likewise, I spent years in school learning almost exclusively about the experiences and accomplishments of men—in literature, history, science, you name it—but I could see very well the world was abundantly populated with women. In my twenties, when I did the work that became this book, I was starting to think about balance. Now, forty years later, I can see the beginnings of a long path I was going to cut for myself through high weeds of cultural difference and prevailing assumptions. I’ve spent my writing life trying to listen to people who aren’t getting heard and poking sticks at biases—my own, and those of others. That path has taken me more places than I can count anymore, from the Arizona deserts to the mountains of southwestern Virginia and well beyond. I’ve explored secret wars in Central America; colonial arrogance in Africa; Mexican revolutionaries and U.S. government witch-hunts in...