Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Spring 2021 - 16

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Book Review
Soul Full of Coal Dust

A Fight for Breath and Justice
in Appalachia
By CHRIS HAMBY

Reviewed by Donald F. Smith, Jr., Esquire

ttorney John Cline is a godsend to the coal miners he
represents, combining a tenacity for digging into medical
records with an exercise in strong advocacy, always
focused on benefiting the client. He has been described as " saintly
in the way he devotes himself to his clients. "

A former community organizer, carpenter, and rural medicalclinic staffer but now an attorney, graduating from law school at
the age of 56, John Cline is a leading character in the book titled
Soul Full of Coal Dust-A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia
by Chris Hamby, an investigative reporter for The New York Times.
When Hamby did his thorough research, earning him a
Pulitzer Prize and leading to this book, he was a reporter with the
Center for Public Integrity's team focusing on the environment,
labor and public health. Undertaking the award-winning effort
was inspired by his reading a seven-paragraph sidebar buried
in a 120-page report on the 2010 explosion at Massey Energy
Company's Upper Big Branch mine in southern West Virginia,
killing twenty-nine men. Autopsies showed that seventeen of
them, ranging in age from 25 to 61, suffered from black lung
disease. The report noted, " This astronomical rate of disease
accompanied by the relative youth of some of the miners whose
lungs bore the hallmarks of it was 'an alarming finding.' "
Black lung, black lung, you're just biding your time
Soon all of this suffering I'll leave behind

But I can't help but wonder what God had in mind
To send such a devil to claim this soul of mine

Black lung, black lung, oh, your hand's icy cold

As you reach for my life and you torture my soul
Cold as that waterhole down in that dark cave

Where I spent my life's blood diggin' my own grave. 1

For most of those 30 years, Gary worked as a roof bolter, " one
of the most difficult and dangerous jobs a miner could do. After a
machine with a spinning drumhead studded with carbide-tipped
teeth chewed through the coal seam, the roof bolter was the first
person to venture into this freshly cut area...The immense weight
of the mountain above had, over millennia, pressed decaying plant
matter into an energy-rich black mineral, and those same forces
now pressed on the small cavity where the roof bolter set to his
task: using a machine to drive metal bolts through rock, pinning
together unstable layers to render a cave-in less likely. Only then
did the rest of the crew enter the new section; they all depended
on the roof bolter to do his job quickly and well. The price of a
mistake was measured in crippling injuries or death. "
The work required Gary to spend nine hours underground,
six days a week, sometimes seven. Hamby's descriptive writing
makes clear the effect coal dust has on all the miners he writes
about, but particularly about Gary, whom he describes as making
" a miraculous attempt to scrub his world of coal dust. But over
the years, it had seeped inside him, lodged itself so deeply that
there was no scrubbing it away. It was amassing in his lungs,
and each day underground added to that load little by little.
Gradually, these fine black specks would stain and scar what
they touched; specks would reach toward other specks until they
coalesced and turned chunks of tissue into useless black masses. "

After meeting with John Cline, Gary took the first step to
seek benefits by filling out a claim form with the U.S. Department
of Labor. Thereafter, the miner is hit with a lot of paper and has
to undergo two medical exams-one by a doctor chosen by

Excerpts from " Black Lung " by Hazel Dickens (written for her brother, who died of the disease). A different poem introduces each section of the book.

16 | Berks Barrister

John Cline's work, as chronicled in the book, has benefited
many miners, but his representation of one client impacted the
coal industry in a major, lasting way. Gary Fox worked in the
mines for more than thirty years because he was determined his
daughter would go to college without incurring debt; he only
retired when his breathing had become so bad he could not
continue.

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Berks County Bar Association The Berks Barrister Spring 2021

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