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On the afternoon of September 23, 2001, thirty-two miners were repairing drilling machines and hoisting tunnel supports into place in the No. 5 mine of Jim Walter Resources Inc., in Brookwood, Alabama. The No. 5 is North America’s deepest coal mine, tracking the six-foot-high Blue Creek seam almost half a mile beneath the rolling hills just east of Tuscaloosa.
Today, there isn’t much left of the farms and folks Billingsley knew back then. That era in Perry County, his county, is as much a place in the mind of the people as it is a place on earth, a memory of when the majority was oppressed, subservient and disenfranchised. It is a representation of tyranny passed, of an exceedingly dark chapter, a long chapter that seemed never to end.
Early McAlexander looks through the window of his granddaughter's car onto a wide open hill fringed by a line of white pines. "All this land used to belong to my father," Early says in a voice that's surprisingly steady and strong for a man of 92. His Virginia accent twists and pulls the vowels like taffy. "I was raised up where that house is now," he adds, looking in the other direction across the blacktop road to a large, modern red-brick house with a quasi-colonial portico. It's a far cry from the house in which he and his six brothers and sisters grew up: a four-room log cabin built by his great-great grandfather before the Civil War.
What began in 1968 as a ten-day trip to Appalachia became fourteen years of visiting and photographing in coal mines, miners' homes and communities in the hills and 'hollers' of West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia and western Pennsylvania. In the year 2002, I decided to revisit Appalachia to see what had transpired since my last visit. In the following photographs I hope to share what I found in the coalfields of Appalachia in the new millenium.
In 1890, the federal Census Bureau announced that the nation's frontier was closed. It's opening up again.
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Starbucks calls its coffee
worker-friendly, but in Ethiopia,
a day's pay is a dollar
GEMADRO, Ethiopia – Tucked inside a fancy black box, the $26-a-pound Starbucks Black Apron Exclusives coffee promised to be more than just another bag of beans.
Not only was the premium coffee from a remote plantation in Ethiopia "rare, exotic, cherished," according to Starbucks advertising, it was grown in ways that were good for the environment – and for local people, too.
Three boys stumble out of the back of a border patrol van. Their sweatshirts, jeans, and boots are filthy, and their lips are flaky. One boy has red cheeks, chapped by the cold desert wind. The boys each clutch a small bag. They are silent and watchful as their driver – a man in a green uniform with a gun on his belt – hands them over to a woman in the parking lot of a low-slung brick building near El Paso. “Mucho gusto, jóvenes,” the woman says to them. The boy with the red cheeks understands the most Spanish. At home, in their small village in southwestern Guatemala, the boys speak Mam, a Mayan dialect.
Sandra* lost her address book somewhere between her home in Santa Barbara, Honduras, and the border town of Eagle Pass, Texas. So the 17-year-old girl sought out the police after crossing the Rio Grande in August 2005. Pregnant and broke, she thought they’d help her find her brother in Florida. Instead, they notified immigration authorities, who arrested her, assigned her an alien number, and served her a notice to appear in immigration court for deportation hearings.
Astaghfirullah is an Arabic expression known to Muslims the world over, no matter what language they speak. Roughly translated, it means "I ask forgiveness from God." Muslim parents employ it regularly to express exasperation with kids who sneak out on dates or go dancing, while some Muslims use it to condemn drinking alcohol or excessive shows of vanity.
To work in Abigail Salyers' laboratory at the University of Illinois, is to play matchmaker to some unlikely couples. Standing at her laboratory bench, PhD student Kaja Malanowska lifts the cover from a petri dish to pick up a half a billion or so Escherichia coli bacteria with the tip of a sterile needle. She adds them to a tube containing about as many Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron floating in a tiny puddle of antibiotic-laced broth. Finally, Malanowska transfers the tube to an incubator set at 98.6° F – human body temperature – where she will leave them to co-mingle for the night.
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Click here for two biographies on Alicia Patterson
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