The Coal Tattoo
Imperfections endear things to us. In faces, music, hometowns, potatoes…we adore the flaws that we’ve come to recognize so well.
In his novel The Coal Tattoo, Kentucky author Silas House binds readers with the people and places in the story. With words, he constructs a kinship. This is House’s third novel; and like the previous two, it is set in his home land and is replete with the nuances of Appalachian life.
The Coal Tattoo is the story of two sisters, Easter and Anneth, facing the trials of young adulthood. Although they take totally divergent paths through life, they are fiercely devout to each other, and to their heritage.
The title derives from a mark known to those from the coalfields, “a perfect symbol,” says the author, “for how the land gets beneath our skin and becomes a part of us.”
In the holler of Free Creek, life is still full of beauty although it grows turbulent throughout the story’s timeline (1950s and ‘60s). The characters’ world, on personal and global levels, is starting to succumb to poverty, war, and the self-destruction of strip mining.
Easter is a dutiful, almost militant Christian. Immediately, at the story’s beginning, we get a sense of how pervasive her sense of piety is as she frowns upon the indulgent life of sinners in a honky tonk.
Anneth, on the other hand, is a wild soul who digs living life on a whim. “She looked for magic anywhere she could find it,” dancing, drinking, and chasing men. Despite her outward joviality, she is plagued by “blues” of some unknown source, and her true fulfillment seems always out of reach.
Silas House doesn’t just develop his characters, he inhabits them. Fellow writer Bev Marshall told him, “For a guy, you seem to have a nearly uncanny wisdom about the hearts of women.”
In the same interview, House said “These characters just did their own thing and I let them, and I think that’s the main reason they come off as being real. They’re in charge when I’m writing.”
Easter and Anneth lean heavily on the people and ideas they hold close in order to carry on. The memories of their grandmothers who raised them, and the healing power of the land, recharge the characters during the worst of adversities. It’s a kind of invisible force, made up of the real, abstract, and largely of faith, that gets them by.
Spirituality and nature are closely wed, in this Appalachian tale. As a child, Easter immerses in the Pentecostal culture of tent revivals, river baptisms, and camp retreats. Her grandmother, Vine, imparts to Easter an appreciation of the “out of doors, where God could see you without obstruction.”
The moving parts of nature become symbols for what’s going on in humanity. The Cumberland River is a connector of peoples, snaking from the hills around Free Creek all the way down to Nashville and beyond. The “mournful song” of a whip-poor-will bird made the sisters conscious of each other, even when they were many miles apart. A “great wind” blew and “trees showed the white sides of their leaves” when the two sisters reunite, nature’s way of expressing the grief they let out after being months without each other.
House’s diction really awakens the senses. His descriptions are a vital potion that illuminates elements of nature and spirit, and lends them corporeality. This is necessary, because so much of the story is told from a character’s current state of mind, or by simple but universal gestures such as “A promise made by skin against skin.”
There isn’t a lot of historical detail in the book; a reader has to kind of triangulate the where and when. However, through sheer descriptive might, the author delivers even a layman reader to a more erudite destination.
I recommended The Coal Tattoo to a family member, an avid reader but to whom coal or strip mining were more of arcane phrases than grim realities. After reading the book, she reflected specifically on the injustice of the broad form deed and destruction of people’s land. Though it only comprised a small portion of the story, it was clearly one powerful vignette.
Writing what he knows best, House births a majestic landscape, full of people we might have bumped into before. We intuitively know that it isn’t completely fiction.
After listening to such a voice, giving our ear to its serenity and angst, we may become emotionally invested past the point of return. The mere thought of disbanding America’s old mountain shire then becomes a very blunt trauma.
(Author Silas House. Photo: MountainJusticeSummer.org)
