ST. PETERSBURG
ON WEST sits quietly, almost obediently, on his couch. He isn’t feeling well. He doesn’t even know how long he can talk. But he loves to talk, and so he has dressed up very fine in tan pants, a blue vest and a scarf tucked neatly into his shirt. He is a tall man, thin and straight as a reed, with a hollow face lit by pale blue eyes.
If he were 20 years younger, he’d be walking the picket line with striking Eastern Airline workers, shaking his fist and singing I Don’t Want Your Millions, Mister, a favorite union song. Or maybe he would be in the western United States, organizing miners who have yet to join their unionized brothers and sisters in the Eastern U.S. coal fields. West saw those people fight, starve and get shot during labor struggles of the 1930s. He got shot at, too.
Such activities have made him an American legend, many people say. West, 82, is not a celebrity in the traditional sense. But many people know about him in labor unions and in the mountain South — North Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia — where he grew up and spent most of his life.
He has become in his old age “an institution,” says Ken Sullivan, editor of Golden Seal magazine, the official magazine of the West Virginia Department of Culture and History. The magazine has published several articles about Don West. So have other smaller publications, and National Geographic featured West in a 1972 article about the mountains. [See excerpts here.]
“Don West is a radical of considerable standing,” Sullivan says. “He was at one time, I am sure, controversial wherever he was. Don has made it his business to afflict the comfortable, and he’s never made any secret of that.”
‘Crusty old radical’
Today, West is a crusty old radical of considerable standing who spends his winters in shuffleboard-safe St. Petersburg, known as a retirement mecca.
His house is a museum of sorts, the way some houses get to be when people reach their 80s. Papers and books fill some shelves to the left. Several are books of poetry written by West during more than 60 years of struggling on behalf of the poor and oppressed, most notably as a union organizer.
Many poems were written about actual incidents: a black man who was lynched and thrown lifeless at his mother’s door; a union man shot to death on the steps of a company store; a black woman beat to death by a white man wielding his cane at a socialite’s ball while others watched; a migrant woman clutching her starving baby. They are plain-talk, political poems, like this:
And this:
Hit shore was painful
The way Bill Dalton’s wife
Lay up thar on Bull Creek
An’ suffered out her life.
The granny women from
Over on Wolf Creek’s head
Come to tend the labor
An’ thar found Lizzy dead.
The baby was crossed, Bill said
The doctor wouldn’t come —
Bill was powerfully in debt
An’ couldn’t pay the sum.
Paintings of people West has known hang on every wall around him. “All these characters are characters,” West says. There is a black man wearing a hat. He was separated from his parents when they went through the Underground Railroad in the mountain South, and he was raised by a mountain family back in the 1800s. Mountain folks, West says, don’t turn people away. The young white man in horn-rimmed glasses is a labor organizer West met in the ’70s. Another large canvas shows an old woman needling a great quilt.
“She lived across the mountain from us,” West says. “She lived in an old log house. Of course, she was very friendly. I asked her how much she got for her quilts. She said, ‘Well, sometimes I get five dollars, once I got six dollars.’ I said, ‘I think I can make contact with people who would be willing to pay you more than that.’ So I sold every quilt she could make for $100, $150.”
The portraits, faces, mostly, expressions created by broad-brush strokes, were painted by West’s wife, Connie. She sits in the chair across from him. Her hair is longish, soft and not perfect; it curls the way it wants to. She has stood by West’s side since 1929, when they rented a mule on their honeymoon and rode 30 miles into the Kentucky mountains to a cabin, then let the mule loose so he could go back home.
Despite all that has happened, Connie West wouldn’t have had it any different, she says. There are few women who could say that, much less live it. Moving constantly. Running and hiding at times. Getting hauled off to jail one night in the ’30s, when their daughter was 3 years old. West has told many such stories many times. That is all that remains of the days of great struggle and great commitment, and so he tells it again:
“One night about dark, six deputies cam out. They were hired by the coal operators. I looked up and through the window, there was a man with a six shooter in his hand. There were six of ’em all around. They said I was under arrest. They came in and got all my books off the shelves and put ’em in the trunk and carted ’em off to Pineville, and took my wife and myself — I asked ’em, what about the baby, they said they didn’t give a damn about the baby. But some of the neighbors saw us and came down and took care of her.
“They kep me six weeks. At that time, it was awfully difficult to find a lawyer in the coal fields who would defend a union man. They were afraid to do it. ...”
West had an “unbelievable impact on the South,” says George Brosi, a book seller in Berea, Ky. He met West during the ’60s at a meeting of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a radical organization that had chapters on many college campuses.
“He is one of the most important writers from the Appalachian South,” Brossi says. “If you were to say who were the most influential Southerners over the last 50 to 70 years, Don West would be one of them.”
In the 10 years since the Wests have wintered in St. Petersburg, West has made some impact here as well. He helped a group of tenants petition for improvements in a housing project. He led a group picketing the St. Petersburg mayor’s office during the ’70s in singing Solidarity Forever, a union classic. He has worked with Mexican immigrant farm workers.
“He’s proud and stubborn,” says Ruth Uphaus, a longtime St. Petersburg activist. “He was always on the cutting edge of social change.”
But Florida is flat and warm. It is not home. Come April, if he is well enough, West will go back to the mountains, where he was born in 1906. He has a place on Cabin Creek in West Virginia, about 100 miles from the Appalachian South Folklife Center, which he and his wife established in 1965.
The center, which relies on donations, teaches young people mountain history, crafts and music, and runs a free summer camp for poor mountain children.
The mountain mindset
Don West was born in a small log shack in Devil’s Hollow, in Gilmer County, Ga. He was one of nine children. Life was brutal and poor. But the mountains were beautiful and the people independent. This poetic mixture of beauty and despair profoundly shaped West and has stayed with him. Part of him, it seems, is always in North Georgia.
He was especially influenced by his grandfather, Kim Mulkey, who gave West a sense of his ancestors, and a social consciousness that, West has often stressed since, was typical of the mountain Southerner. Like most other mountaineers who had never seen a slave, his grandfather took up for the Union during the Civil War.
When West was about 15, his family and hundreds of others migrated from the mountains to the cotton fields, Sharecropping offered a better living. Don went to Berry School in Rome. Right away, he made people mad. He was expelled from the school when he objected to a showing of The Birth of a Nation, a classic 1915 film about the Reconstruction Era that glamorized the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1929, he was kicked out of Lincoln Memorial University for leading a student strike for more rights. “Most of the faculty was Yankees who had come down ... as missionaries to save our hillbilly souls,” West says. “We didn’t like that.” He was readmitted to the school by popular demand, and graduated that year.
From then on, West was essentially an itinerant activist. He moves his wife, his two daughters (Hedy, who is a well-known folk singer, and Ann) from one hot spot to another, working odd jobs or teaching at universities until he was fired or lured elsewhere.
“I moved where there seemed to be a need,” West says simply. “It’s natural that if something seemed wrong, you should speak against it.”
During the 1930s, he hitchhiked to Atlanta, penniless, to help defend a black man who was sentenced to the Georgia chain gain for leading poor black and white demonstrators to the mayor’s office in Atlanta. Next, West went to Burlington, N.C., where textile workers, who made $7 for 60 hours of work, were trying to unionize.
In the coal fields of Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee, West joined the bloody struggle to organize miners. “Company-hired gun thugs,” as West describes them, stopped at nothing to fight unionization. Many of his friends were killed during these years. One night, West says, “I was taken out and beaten up and left unconscious on top of Pine Mountain” in eastern Kentucky.
West was a key union leader during his time because he cultivated intellectuals who were sympathetic to leftist causes. He helped connect such people, who had money, to poor people and their struggles by reading his poetry at Yale, Harvard and other prestigious universities. His poems were pointedly political, written for common people. His 1946 Clods of Southern Earth sold the most copies of any book of poetry since Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
West faced constant upheaval for his agitating. In the early ’50s, he appeared before the infamous House UnAmerican Activities Committee and its counterpart, the Senate Internal Security Committee. In 1958, Ku Klux Klan members burned his house and a life-long collection of books, papers, manuscripts and treasured family hand-me-downs. In 1965, when he and his wife established the Appalachian South Folklife Center, the local community objected. A newspaper editor wrote editorials calling the center a “free love colony,” “hippie camp” and “communist cell.”
When a lawyer offered to file suit against the editor, West refused. He said at the time, “I’ve never taken a man to court in my life, and I don’t intend to. And neither do I spend anytime defending myself when I’m attacked. If my life can’t speak for me, then I think my tongue’s a pretty feeble instrument to defend myself with.”
Now, West and the editorial writer are friends. “If I had won the libel suit, he’d have been my enemy, I’m sure.”
Solidarity and the times
The day has aged two hours. West, wound up in his own oral history, seems restless despite his fragility; he can’t help it. He swears he never even had a cold before he had a heart attack, bypass surgery and a bout with cancer a few years ago. Now, he spends too much time going to the hospital and on his couch.
But then, there isn’t that much rabble-rousing going on these days. Hard-hearted commitment is hard to come by in the ’80s. People are afraid. Coal miners are making $15 an hour; young people don’t know the words, much less the concept, of Solidarity Forever. Rich people are buying up the pretty mountain land in North Georgia.
“Jimmy Carter owns a place up there,” West says with a wry smile.
The man from Meals on Wheels stops by with two Styrofoam containers of food. He asks in a booming, friendly voice, “Got any more of those papayas?”
There are papayas and bees in the back yard. Honey. West walks slowly outside and opens the high wood fence that is hardly any taller than his 6-feet-3-frame, and fetches the man some papayas. The grass is scruffy. Florida is flat and warm, and it looks like rain.
