An Open Letter to Pennsylvanians

 Annamaria on Tenterhooks

I am spending hours over these final days of this election on the telephone with voters in Pennsylvania.  In these critical days, we are working to get out the vote. So to save time  today, I am sharing something I wrote months ago that encapsulates my plea to the descendants of my father's playmates when they were children in the coalfields, where times are still very tough. 

Hate Is Not the Answer

 

I am not the coal miner’s daughter. I’m the coal miner’s granddaughter.

 

 My father, Salvatore Francesco Puglisi, was born in Hollsopple, Pennsylvania, in what was then a mining village of eight double houses, four on each side of a dirt road near a mine entrance.  In each one was the family of a miner on one side and on the other, four of five men without families.  For the privilege of living in company housing, the wives of the married miners were required to cook, clean, and do laundry for the men who lived adjacent.  I try to imagine what it was like to keep up with the laundry of five or six coal miners with a washboard, a clothesline, and a bar of Octagon soap.  And no water heater.

 Almost all the miners in those days, in that area, were immigrants.  The women in the settlement were, largely like my grandmother unable to read and write or to speak English.  They were Italian, Welsh, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, and German.  Without a language in common, those women managed to help one another give birth, nurse the sick, and survive. My father described them like this: A bird flying overhead would know if there was a house with a new baby or sick person, by watching the women carry pots of soup and clean laundry to the house where help was needed.

 One of my father’s earliest memories was of a night of terror.  He and his siblings were huddled with their mother in the bedroom of the two-room dwelling.  My grandmother sat on the edge of the bed nursing his baby sister.  My grandfather was sitting in a chair just on the other side of the closed door, facing the front door with his loaded shotgun and hunting rifle across his lap.

 

My father, then between three and four years old, was just tall enough to see out the window.  What he saw was this: hooded men, all in white, on horseback, carrying weapons, circling the houses.  And on the hill beyond, burning crosses.

 Why? Because the families in that settlement were immigrants and mostly Catholics.  The KKK considered them vermin, to be despised, threatened, and sometimes killed.  This was their opinion of men who worked at a back-breaking and dangerous job.  And this was their opinion of the women who toiled all day, every day in starkly difficult conditions. Even their babies weren’t spared the hatred of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

 When my father was nine years old, my grandfather died of black lung.  The coal company evicted my grandmother and her children, who ranged in age from 14 to 2.  They conveyed her and her meager possessions to edge of the settlement and left her there.  With the help of other people—also Italian immigrants—she made her way to New Jersey, where my 14-year-old uncle became the family breadwinner.

Over the years, I have been back to Johnstown and Seward with my father, to visit with his friends from childhood and to visit my grandfather’s grave in Holy Family cemetery.  I understood and empathized with the plight of those I met—the descendants of my grandfather’s workmates. So, four years ago, when Donald Trump promised to reopen the coal mines, I knew how appealing such an idea might be to people who felt forgotten. 

 

Having lived most of my adult life in New York City, now within two and half miles of Trump Tower, I also knew that Donald Trump’s sympathies really lay on the side of people more like the heartless mine bosses who threw my widowed grandmother and her children out of their home without a fare-thee-well and not with the hard-working miners and their families.  Then, and since I have seen how, as president—he has curried favor with the moral descendants of the Ku-Klux-Klan members who terrified the immigrant miners and their families two generations ago.

So today, I am asking you this: If—like mine—your ancestors were targets of such hate, please remember them now—your grandmothers and grandfathers—and what they would say about people motivated by hate.

 

Hate is not the answer.  Hate is the enemy.  Those who use hate and fear are not problem solvers.  They are problem makers.  Those who preach hate are not your friends.  And they shouldn’t be our leaders.

Anyone who uses your suffering to make you hate other people is never going to solve our country’s problems.  In the history of the world, hate has never solved anything.  

 

Think.  Think deeply about our grandparents and their generation.  Who would they admire.  Who would they trust? Who would they want to help?