Part 2 - Reckoning with Buried History: Thank’s, Ted Lasso

My dream team, AFC Richmond, Premier League, coached by Ted Lasso and Coach Beard.
Fictional? Yes. But they’re guiding me to a deeper truth.

My resume never made me cry before. But an unexpected flood of tears while updating this document made me realize—I’ve got some buried history to tend to. And, thanks to binge-watching the Emmy-award-winning Ted Lasso and deep-diving into the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain for the last four years, I figured out what those tears were about. Here’s how it went down.

The resume was a required part of my application to Carlow University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Since I’m retired and not seeking employment, I was able to reduce my work history to a few bullet points, giving me room to add this personal statement about why I wanted to pursue an MFA:

I’ve always written—for clients, for magazines, and for myself (poetry to help me through the night). With my long and successful career working with nonprofits over, I’m now focused on writing fiction. After four years of research and writing, I’ve completed my debut novel. But there is still so much to learn. And, I now realize why I’m writing. To find a deeper truth.  

That’s when the first pesky tear fell, followed by others.

What’s Coal Got to do with it?

My process to understand those tears was to first acknowledge that my deeper truth was still unmined. What prompted me to write my novel? I’ve been asked more than once why I was writing about coal mining. After all, I’m from Pittsburgh, not West Virginia. My father was a musician, not a coal miner. He was a union man, but the musicians’ union, not the UMWA. He wore a silk cummerbund and dinner jacket to work, not overalls and a hard hat. On the surface, it doesn’t look like a natural fit for me, this story about coal miners.

My go-to response to explain this strange interest has been to talk about Mary, a central character, and how she appeared to me many years ago; how she shared a strange story of a family tragedy in a declining coal town in West Virginia. Her visitation was a compelling experience, to be sure. But that doesn’t really answer the question of why I decided to write her story.

It was the PBS documentary The Mine Wars in 2017 that propelled me on this unlikely journey. That’s where I first encountered Mary’s ancestors; miners who took up arms against coal companies in southern West Virginia in the early part of the Twentieth Century. The documentary revealed that for decades coal operators had acted like feudal lords, the mines and company towns their fiefdom, the miners and their families their serfs. A series of strikes in the early part of the century and murders and an assassination by “detectives” hired by the coal companies followed by violence from both sides, boiled up into the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. The largest armed insurrection in the United States other than the Civil War.

Miners in southern West Virginia in the early 1900s. Men and boys, black and white, immigrant and native born working together and, eventually, fighting together for the right for decent lives.

What drove these desperate miners to gamble their jobs, homes, their very lives? The audacity to demand basic rights others in the United States enjoyed: to be paid in cash (not company paper scrip good only in the company store); to earn enough to feed their family; to shop where they like; to congregate when and with whom they chose; an end to the brutal mine guard system—armed brutes hired by the company to control their every movement, day and night. And, of course, the right to join a union and gain a bit of power.

That documentary, along with my character Mary’s patience with me, moved me to write her story. But I didn’t ask myself the most important question—what button were these miners and Mary pushing to make me turn my life upside down and spend four years digging into this history that had been buried for so long?

We all have a little buried history.

To answer that question, I have to go back to my resume, that statement about finding a deeper truth and those tears. At first, I thought them misguided. But they were like rain from the heavens. They softened the soil just enough so I could begin the unburying of my own history.

I closed my eyes and saw the first images my memory recorded—faces like inkblots in a Rorschach test on the walls of my multi-generational childhood home on the North Side of Pittsburgh. Disappointed women, disappointing men, confused children. Then, little white children turning their backs on little black children in my elementary school, no teachers or parents turning them back around. My eleventh grade English teacher and a writing assignment I didn’t know how to approach—Man’s Inhumanity to Man. And later, young men, my contemporaries, drafted to fight a war in Viet Nam, a war that didn’t make sense; while black people were waging a war for equality at home. I didn’t have the framework or the language to make sense of it then. For most of my life, all of these images formed a Gordian knot at my core. A nagging sense of hopelessness and disappointment in humanity. Current events have only tightened that knot.

Ted Lasso, Blair Mountain and hope

Here’s where Ted Lasso comes in. At first, I resisted signing on to AppleTV+ to watch a show about an unlikely American coaching an English football team (soccer to us). I mean, do I really need another streaming service to keep me from writing? (Turns out, yes, I do.) Also, I’m not a sports fan. And Jason Sudeikis just seemed too milquetoast to catch my attention. (Maybe it was his countenance that didn’t push a button, neither disappointed nor disappointing.) But then all those Emmys rolled in. Who am I to argue with success?

At first, Ted Lasso was a welcomed reprieve from the reality of the world. An escape. But then, slowly, I began to see characters with irreconcilable differences reveal their histories, be seen in a new light by their enemies, and transcend. All under an inked sign over the coach’s door touting, “BELIEVE.”

Jamie Tartt, the star footballer and self-absorbed man-child with a swagger, was showing signs of evolving. In his distinct Manchester accent, he said it best: “I’m becoming the best version of myself. The man you always thought I could be.”

For my entire life, I’d been too afraid to believe. All of a sudden (well, after binge-watching two seasons of Ted Lasso straight through more than once), like most of the characters in this amazingly written philosophical treatise wrapped in a comedy, I was coming under the Ted Lasso spell. What if I let myself believe that it is possible that humanity can transcend itself, before it’s too late? You might be thinking, But that’s fiction. A TV show. Yes, but reality has let me down time after time. Now I’m searching for a deeper truth—through fiction.

So, you might be wondering, how does Ted Lasso connect to the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia? Wait for it.

All my digging into West Virginia’s history revealed something amazing that actually happened: thousands of miners marching to free their brothers in Mingo County, West Virginia, against all odds, wielding outdated guns from World War I, wearing red bandanas around their necks to identify each other. It didn’t matter that they might die (around one hundred did); that they might be jailed (hundreds were charged with murder, sedition and other crimes); that they might lose (and they did, terribly). White, black and immigrant men marched together, putting aside their racial and ethnic distrust for a brief time in August 1921.

And women and children, evicted from their homes by the coal operators, living in tents for over a year, through heat and cold, near starvation, suffering attacks from the Baldwin Felts Detectives; they held their own so the men could fight for all their rights.

Blair showed me a time, not all that long ago, when disparate and desperate people came together. And stood for something. They called it solidarity.

And Ted Lasso gave me hope that it might happen again. That within the heart of every man and woman, there is a place where transcendence is possible. If only we believe. And are willing to lose everything, to fight for something bigger than our individual selves.

And there it is, the ping I felt watching the documentary. The tears I shed revising my resume. The deeper truth I’ve been searching for—all my life. Proof that it happened. Mary led me to that. And hope that it might happen again. Ted asked me to believe that it could.

I will be forever grateful for the resume, for Ted and for Blair Mountain.

*****

We all have buried history that holds us back. I invite you to think about yours. And, maybe, you might leave a comment below. We never know from where or when inspiration will flow. Maybe your deeper truth will help someone find theirs.