Silicosis (n.);

The American Lung Association defines silicosis as the following:

Silicosis is an interstitial lung disease caused by breathing in tiny bits of silica, a common mineral found in many types of rock and soil. Over time, exposure to silica particles causes permanent lung scarring, called pulmonary fibrosis.

Silicosis is an occupational lung disease, and typically occurs after many years of exposure. The disease has no cure, and can be characterized by progressively worsening shortness of breath, difficulty breathing and persistent cough; cyanosis, weakness, fatigue and more can also be identifiable symptoms. Impacting the immune system, silicosis can leave sufferers vulnerable to lung cancers, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and (again) more.

The Hawks Nest Tunnel Disaster occurred between 1930 and 1935 – concurrent with economic (The Great Depression) and ecological (The Dust Bowl) crises – recognized as one of the worst industrial disasters in U.S. history, in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia. Tunnel diggers and miners were exposed to silica in their excavation of a tunnel ready to provide a nearby plant with material. In her docu-poem sequence “The Book of the Dead” (1938), Muriel Rukeyser wrote following the incident:

Never to be used, he thinks, never to spread its power,

jinx on the rock, curse on the power-plant,

hundreds breathed value, filled their lungs full of glass

(O the gay wind the clouds the many men). (71)

Rock and “glass” (that is, silica – silicon dioxide, quartz, SiO₂) were thrown up into the air to such an extent that, according to Catherine Venable Moore, in her introduction to Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead:”

… conditions were so dusty that the workers’ drinking water turned white as milk, and the glassy air sliced at their eyes. Some of the men’s lungs filled with silica in a matter of weeks, forming scar tissue that would eventually cut off their oxygen supply; others wheezed with silicosis for decades. (6)

Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation, their contractors too, failed to provide personal protective equipment to workers digging the tunnel and a historical marker at the site now reveals that there were only 109 admitted deaths, next to 476 determined by a Congressional hearing (and numbers between 400 and 2,000 provided elsewhere). William ‘Rick’ Crandall and Richard E. Crandall also note that the contractors themselves noted the death toll at only 65. Indeed, Moore has written:

When stricken, the migrant workers either fled West Virginia for wherever home was, or they were buried as paupers in mass graves in the fields and woods around Fayette County. The death toll was an estimated, though impossible to confirm, 764 persons, making it the worst industrial disaster in U.S. history. (6)

Rinehart and Dennis (the company contracted to build the tunnel by the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation) admitted no knowledge of the dangers of silicosis. Crandall and Crandall, however, observe that “one problem with the contractor’s alleged lack of knowledge of silicosis argument is that their engineers wore respirators in the tunnel” (269). Silicosis was observed in the 1800s amongst potters in England, and by the time of Hawks Nest measures were already in place to prevent the disease: “wet drilling for example, keeps the dust to very low levels, and this practice was mandated by 1911 in South African mining” (Crandall and Crandall, 268). No such practice was in use here.

What is clear from reports of the incident is that the precarious and lowest paid workers (largely black and migrant), housed in segregated shacks, likely suffering the effects of the economic slump of the period, were allowed to die through industrial negligence. This negligence is deeply registered by Rukeyser who, as above, asserts in uncharacteristic metonymy that “hundreds breathed value, filled their lungs full of glass.” Of course, value cannot be breathed in or out. In the progress of her prosody, Rukeyser imbricates the scene of capital with the scene of drowning and as such apportions responsibility for the disaster. Drowned in glass to make a buck. This short stanza runs as a truncated list: “Never to be used, he thinks, never to spread its power, | jinx on the rock, curse on the power-plant, | hundreds breathed value, filled their lungs full of glass” and each line-unit raises itself to a greater pitch. “Never… used… thinks… never… spread… power” push my vocalizing down into their vowel sounds and suddenly, at the end of the next line after more deep sounds I get the ‘ah’ of “plant” that moves me right back up, followed by the internal rhyme of the ‘ah’ in the ‘u’ of “hundreds” – and up higher to the sharp vowel of “value” pushing forward breathlessly to “glass” that is not followed by a comma and we push forward with the enjambment it teases only to find parentheses. Suddenly we are away from this list and into an entirely different register all together, slowed by the syntax and disappointment from unrequited enjambment, and “O” in reverie and apostrophe “the gay wind the clouds the many men”. Suddenly subtending the list is this side-note that makes the wind “gay” rather than fatal as it carries hauntingly the toxic clouds reconfigured as ghostly in recognition of Steven Zultanski’s recent formulation:

But beneath (or beside, or above, or within) the vindictiveness and greed are the words and voices of the dead: these voices give life to these dangerous men while reviling them justly, dreaming against them. (57)

And “O” the many men are remembered just as the prosody threatens to lift off into hysteria.

 

Works Cited:

“Silicosis,” American Lung Association, < https://www.lung.org/lung-health-diseases/lung-disease-lookup/silicosis> [accessed 12/09/20]

Crandall, William “Rick” and Richard E. Crandall, “Revisiting the Hawks Nest Tunnel Incident: Lessons Learned from an American Tragedy,” Journal of Appalachian Studies, 8:2 (Fall 2002), pp. 261-283, <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41446542> [accessed 12/09/20]

Rukeyser, Muriel and Catherine Venable Moore, The Book of the Dead (Morgantown, West Virginia: West Virginia University Press, 2018)

Zultanski, Steven, On the Literary Means of Representing the Powerful as Powerless (York, UK: Information at Material, 2018)