Review
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Title: Black Diamonds, A Childhood Colored by Coal
Author: Catherine Young
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Genre: Nonfiction
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 288
Format: Soft-cover
ISBN: 978-1-948814-83-6
Price: $17.95
Reviewed by Gregory Brooks for the Association of Mormon Letters
“There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
All good memoirs enthrall their audience with a sense of place – they invite the reader to observe unique landmarks along the riverway of one person’s life. This is no easy task. What elevates memory into art – or a loose collection of childhood stories into a thematic tale? Honesty, good editing, and a central metaphor or two.
Catherine Young’s Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal is never anything but honest. Her sensitivity to the socio-ecological milieu of 1960s coal country and a sharp memory for conversations many years in the past is coupled with an eye for exactly what to cover in 266 pages. Black Diamonds is an accessible work. Childhood stories are always at risk of becoming saccharine, or worse, meandering. Instead, Young is frank with us about the haunting gray dust as it subsumed Lackawanna Valley, year by year, tree by tree. The landmarks of her memory are painted “…grimy black with coal and obscured in a smoky haze.” Looking down into this Pennsylvanian valley, trains stitch through the earth “…like a continuous black thread.” Her use of color to frame the story is a powerful theme that keeps the story vivid, often contrasting with an idyllic mid-19th century George Inness painting of the same area.
The opening pages make a compelling case for anyone to think first before disparaging a worse-for-wear town on the road to somewhere richer: how much control does anyone truly have over where they live? Below the poverty line, in Scranton, folks are stuck.
This is not to say that Black Diamonds revels in misery, or lacks humor, but Young is challenging us to be nuanced in our existential worry for those places we hold most dear. You can’t glance out the window as you barrel down I-81 and understand the depth of experiences in the town’s blurring past. Her book carries empathetic cargo for those left behind in America’s mad rush to fuel up and move on. As the earth shifts beneath our feet, as we get older and not necessarily wiser, Young insists that putting our ear to the ground is an exercise of maturity, longsuffering – maybe even love.
Reading this book, you may find yourself thinking of the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, or Oil! by Upton Sinclair, and of course: Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. In other words, this book is a strong blend of authentic, personal observation with an eye toward the ever-present social and ecological systems that suffuse our lives. The influences Young has spoken about (Aldo Leopold, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Robin Wall Kimmerer) are also extant on every page. Some of the best creative nonfiction originates from polishing field notes: stitching them together with meditations or philosophy, or anecdote – they invite the reader to engage in more than just passive consumption of the words. To anesthetize ourselves from the wounds of the natural world is a “spiritual danger” as much as it is an ecological one, and cuts us off from opportunities to both acknowledge our faults and grow as a community. However, Catherine Young manages to still be gentle – even when holding us humans accountable or painting a scene in its starkest hues.
Black Diamonds provides a unique counterpoint to arguably the most famous coal country memoir: Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam Jr., which describes events that take place in roughly the same time period (late ‘50s). In Hickam’s book, Coalwood is a town that young men are trying to escape or else circle the drain of mineshaft disasters and stagnant wages. Rocket Boys aims to regale, or charm, with its distinctly masculine coming-of-age happenings—while the women often fade into secondary roles. Black Diamonds brings forward the stories of women and centers them in the narrative. More than just a yarn about escape or adventure, Catherine Young’s work is concerned with fundamental, deep-in-your-veins change.
We don’t merely tour Lackawanna Valley, by the end we are embedded like a railroad spike. High schools would do well to pair this book alongside Rocket Boys, which is a common choice for assigned readings. If they threw in Coal Mountain Elementary by Mark Nowak (2009), a book that includes excerpts from the American Coal Foundation’s curriculum for school children (a fascinating controversy), then you might have created a perfect trifecta of Coal Country creative nonfiction.
Ultimately, the power of Black Diamonds thrums with a deep ecopoetic sensibility, where it recalls that fundamental human fact – one that has been with us since the beginning: we are irrevocably bound to the minerals and atmospheres and living tissue of this world. Though sometimes we fool ourselves into thinking we stand apart, all of us are colored by some version of coal, as we extract energy from below our feet and plod along into that future we so insistently declare belongs to us humans, first. As if every antecedent creature and landscape could, and should, bend the knee in our shadow. It’s humbling to remember how easily we forget, pave over, or move on. I write this review from a second-floor apartment, where once there was a meadow.
While reading Black Diamonds, I found myself slowing down, looking closer at my city and the people flowing through its freeway veins. I wondered what it meant to extract less and give back more. Catherine Young carves out some space for such thoughts, as the reader falls deeper into the stories of her book. The prose is generous for that kind of self-directed prayer: to plead with yourself to remember that the heat comes from the grid, which sparks by burning the coal, which comes from machines and shovels in an acrid, sulphuric-smelling mineshaft, fingers given freely to the snapping gears of a machine their supervisors want running 24/7, all of this burrowing – the wounds becoming a ghost in the machine long after the machines rust away – deep below a town that may never return to its initial boom.
It’s possible that our descendants will find that books like these were canaries in the coal mine all along.