to them. All they wanted to see was the male. And I’m glad Bo was there and said what he said, but I just kept listening and watching because I thought: ‘OK, I’m being peaceful, I’m gonna listen.’ So I did.
“I could have just kept going. That really would have got their attention. But I never thought about that. There was a calmness and a peacefulness in me. I felt like I was doing the right thing.”
Bo and Judy ask that someone in authority come out to receive and discuss the list of demands. Massey security people say no one will meet with them, and ask them to leave. By now, Judy says, one of the guards “was becoming a smart-aleck, and he was beginning to make Bo very angry. Bo controlled his anger pretty well though, until the man took his hands and fluttered them out like we were insects and said: ‘Go on, go on, get off here. You’re trespassing. If you don’t leave, we’re gonna arrest you.’ And the policeman said: ‘It’s over.’ And Bo said: ‘No! Trespassing? You say I’m trespassing? If you think I’m trespassing, then I want you to keep your coal dust and your flyrock off my property, Marty,’” calling the security guard by name.
“And at that point I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing,” Judy recalls. The guard said: “ ‘Go away, go away, you!’ And so Bo said, ‘You know, I’m not going anywhere. What happens if I just stand here?’ And the policeman said: ‘Well, we’ll just have to arrest you.’ Bo said, ‘I reckon you’re gonna have to arrest me.’ And then the policeman looked at me and said, ‘What are you gonna do?’ And I said: ‘Well, I’m with him.’ So they took Bo, got him by his arm and walked him away. No one even come near me,” Judy continues. “No one put their hands on me. They acted like I wasn’t even there.” (Bo sees this a little differently: “I really believe it’s because they did not want to arrest Judy Bonds,” he later tells me. “They know she’s a powerful force.”) “So I looked at the policeman and I said: ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said: ‘Oh! Just follow this way.’”
It feels sad to see them led away. When I tell Bo this later he says: “That’s good. That’s good that that was the effect.”
On the way to the car, Judy continues, “I said a prayer thanking God for the safety of the people [at the demonstration] and asking Him to watch over everyone while we were gone, that they would do what they should be doing, stay calm, and not get in trouble.” When Bo and Judy reached the police car, “they had no idea where they were gonna put me, so they finally cleared out the front seat. They were stunned,” Judy thinks, about having to arrest them, “and they were really very respectful.”
Meanwhile, the crowd is chanting: “Massey close the plant.” The driveway re-opens for business, and a cement truck comes on through.
The police car holding Bo and Judy drives away, heading for the state police substation downriver near Whitesville. “I have to say the ride to Whitesville was scary,” Judy says. “That was the scariest part of the day”—though not because she’s just been arrested, but because of the driver’s speed. “That guy flew!”
At the police station Bo and Judy are charged with trespassing and are released after the demonstration disperses. The police apologize for having had to arrest them.
Later that day, at 8:30 PM, not much more than an hour’s drive away, sixty-eight people gather in the dining hall at the Appalachian Folklife Center near Pipestem, West Virginia, for the opening circle of Mountain Justice Summer’s training camp. (Two more MJSers are stationed at a table near where the driveway enters the camp. They’re being cautious about security. Already either law enforcement or coal company operatives are keeping an eye on the camp. As I drove into camp for the first time myself, I passed a black sedan with tinted windows with a man in the driver’s seat talking on a cellphone, parked in a good position to note the license plates of cars heading to camp.) The group here tonight includes most of the faces I’ve been seeing at MJS meetings, plus quite a few new ones. It’s a young crowd. While many of those who’ve been organizing MJS these past months are in their thirties, the majority of people here at camp are in their twenties; only a very few older people, in their forties and fifties, are here. There are more men than women, but not overwhelmingly so. Dress trends toward hippie or crusty punk or camouflage, with an overlay of hiking/camping gear.
One by one, going around the circle, the MJSers identify themselves and state what they hope the campaign will accomplish this summer. Larry Gibson says: “My people are an oppressed people,” and it’s hard to reach oppressed people who don’t know they’re oppressed. It’s MJS’s work to reach them. Nineteen years ago, when he first started fighting MTR, he says he “couldn’t get two people together” to work with him. He’s deeply touched, teary, to see so many people here today. Later he tells me: “Before, for so many years, I would look behind me and I wouldn’t see anyone. When I first started talking about this, I couldn’t even get my own family to listen to me.”
Most of the other people in the circle simply state their names and give brief, one-sentence summaries of what they’d like to see this summer. Abigail Singer, an Earth First! activist who’s lived in Knoxville off and on for several years and has been involved with MJS since its beginnings, wants to “inspire the rest of the country to transition to a sustainable lifestyle.” One of the Asheville organizers says: “What I’d like to see is National Coal Company’s stock prices drop like a rock.” Hyena, from Kentucky, wants to work on developing “a real clear picture” of the way of life we want to have, not just what’s wrong with what we do have.
john johnson’s supposed to deliver a rabble-rousing rant after the go-around. Instead, he starts crying. Like Larry, he’s touched to see so many people here—and he says more people are coming. He says he hopes that MJS will be the spark that begins the end of the “death machine that’s gripping the entire planet.” MTR, john says, represents everything that’s wrong with the modern industrial commodity-market way of life. He says he doesn’t have much of a “spiritual practice,” but believes that “the mountains are asking for our help.”
More campers arrive overnight, bringing the total at breakfast to about eighty. Workshops scheduled for today cover nonviolence and de-escalation training, MTR issue education, and mountain culture and cultural-sensitivity issues. All are mandatory for anyone here who wants to participate in the coming campaign.
Also relating to cultural sensitivity, a “potty mouth jar” has been set up in the camp’s main meeting hall and dining room. Anyone who cusses (defined as using a word you would not use in talking to someone else’s grandmother) owes 25 cents—and the fine is 50 cents for each “Jesus Christ!” or “Goddamn!” The idea behind this is to train MJSers from outside the region not to inadvertently offend religious, personally conservative locals. Because the language of many of the folks here is customarily pretty salty, this turns out to be a pretty good fundraiser as well as a cultural sensitivity tool.
At lunch, I catch up with Dave Cooper, who just arrived this morning. Dave gave a talk in Louisville last night, then stopped at home to get some sleep with the intention of driving here in the morning and arriving midday. “I woke up at 2:30 in the morning. I was so excited I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I just got in the car at 3:00 and was driving all night.” Finding more than eighty people here was “a dream come true,” he says. “We worked really hard to get to this point, there’s real good energy here, the weather’s nice, it’s a beautiful spot, everybody’s in a good mood—so we’re off to a really good start.”
Chris Irwin, too, thinks MJS is off to a good start, his ambitious goal earlier this year of thirty or forty full-time MJS volunteers looking pretty realistic now. “I think maybe 30 percent of the people here will travel from place to place” for the whole summer, he says. “But then another 35 to 40 percent are going to [stay in one place]—like we’re going straight back to Tennessee [after
