Hubert Skidmore’s 1941 novel Hawk’s Nest is a searing indictment against the greed of American capitalism and the suffering that it caused the numbers of people who worked on the Gauley Bridge tunnel in West Virginia in the early 1930s. A proletarian novel in the tradition of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Hawk’s Nest recounts the story of scores of dispossessed Americans who converged upon the West Virginia mountains in the early years of the Great Depression with the promise of jobs and the hope of better days for themselves and their families. While they indeed found jobs, they were not prepared for the dangers under which those jobs existed, nor were they prepared for the untold injustices visited upon them by a company that was more interested in the bottom line than in the welfare of workers or for a community that was not prepared for the disruption caused by the migration of vast numbers of strangers and outsiders to their formerly peaceful hills.
Skidmore skillfully weaves a tapestry of horror from the individual stories of the Reip family, West Virginia hillbillies trying to escape their worn out farm; Lessie Lee Rucker, recently abandoned by her husband; newlyweds Lock and Daisy Mullens, casting their lot anew; Jim Martin, Long Legg, and Owl Jones, an interracial band of hoboes in search of better times; Ralph Owens, an out-of-work insurance salesman from Elmira, New York, whose only concern is his wife and daughters; and scores of other families and individuals who made their way from all points of the United States in search of work. For a short period of time, the work was fine, and these and other men and women thought that perhaps their lives were on the verge of improvement. But then the men who worked in the tunnel began to experience problems with breathing, and the matter grew worse day by day. What the company officials called “tunnelitis,” was ultimately diagnosed as “silicosis,” a pulmonary disease for which there was no cure. In all, the death toll from the disease numbered in the thousands, most of those African Americans who had the worst jobs for which they received the least pay.
Not only is Hawk’s Nest the story of “the worst industrial disaster in American history,” it recounts again just how ill-treated are the “wretched of the earth.” Most of the people who came to work on the Gauley Bridge tunnel were required to live in quarters provided by the company, which in fact were little more that tarpaper shacks; they were paid less than promised and were required to cash their checks for a fee at the company commissary, and they faced hostility and derision from the townspeople who were horrified at the sheer numbers of people—white and black—who were now over-running their town. Not surprisingly, the African Americans were subjected to even worse treatment. They were required to live in communal housing and sleep in shifts; they could not buy their own food, but were required to eat what was provided for them by the so-called boardinghouse, and they were put under the charge of a redneck deputy transported in from North Carolina to keep them in line. They were threatened repeatedly with firings and visited often with physical violence. Skidmore captures these and other horrors in his narrative and renders a compelling story that is at once vivid and heart-rending. The prose is fresh and powerful, and while there is an occasional misappropriation of one dialect or another, or the misapplication of a colloquialism here or there, the novel exudes realism at every seam.
Although Hawk’s Nest was published by Doubleday, Doran and Company in 1941, it was immediately withdrawn from the market by the publisher and the original production run was destroyed. Skidmore claimed that he was the victim of a conspiracy between the publishing house and the Union Carbide and Carbon Corporation—a credible charge, yet one with only conjecture for proof. Even so, the few extant copies of the novel were the province of a handful of rare book dealers even though the subject of the novel was fodder for many a myth in the region. Its re-issuance by the University of Tennessee Press as one in its Appalachian Echoes series is the result of much research and detective work, and its restoration to the Skidmore canon and the canon of Appalachian literature is most welcome indeed.