Things are changing all around June Ellen Thackeray in the novel "The Holy Ghost and a Shine of Coal," written by Peggy Konert. June Ellen is 10 years old and she's growing up in Paris, Arkansas, a community that for generations has been economically fueled by coal mining. But the glory days for coal and Logan County are ending, and that means uncertainty for June Ellen's family, and her older sister is changing. She's now in high school and more interested in makeup than going on summer adventures with her little sister and the family dog. When the family's future becomes even more perilous and June Ellen's father's health is compromised by his work in the coal mine, she seeks understanding to a world that is transforming around her.
Peggy Konert's ancestors worked in the coal mines of Logan County, and she was raised in the Ozarks in the River Valley, spending her summers in Paris. The book is a work of fiction, but Peggy says she had plenty of connections to the area and to coal mining to inspire the work.
Konert: My mother's family of 11 was from Paris, Arkansas, and my father's family of 10 was from Scranton, Arkansas.
Kellams: You had a lot of aunts and uncles.
Konert: I did in almost a hundred first cousins.
Kellams: Oh my goodness.
Konert: And they were part of the German Catholic migration through St. Louis. And if you ever drive down Highway 22 to all those small towns, you'll see a big cathedral in every, like church in every town. They're amazing. Hand-built.
Kellams: You already mentioned Catholicism, which was is part of the era of this book in Logan County in that area. But obviously coal mining is too. Did you have ancestors who worked the mines?
Konert: Yes. My grandfather leased the mine after the two world wars, the good coal. They had the hardest coal anthracite, which was an incredibly hot burning, smoke free coal. And the world wars took a lot of that. And but after that, someone like my grandfather could lease an old coal mine. And with a shovel, a pick, some dynamite and a crew go in and try to make a living. And that's what he did. He had a lease to one of those old coal mines.
Kellams: Did you hear stories growing up about the coal mines?
Konert: I must have, because so much when I started writing it, I didn't know I was writing it. I was in a book club or a writers group, and we just wrote from, we'd come up with some kind of a, like a title, a book poem, something. And we'd write and this 10-year-old girl who I named June Ellen in the book just started coming through me having these adventures. And it got to where in the kind of writing we did was stream of consciousness. So you didn't think about what you wrote. So I just started writing and it all started coming through and I just kept going.
And at that time, when Nightbird Books was on Dickson Street, there was a woman's night of reading called HOWL, herself reading out loud, where women could come and read, and I'd go and I'd start reading these short stories. I was writing in 15 minutes, basically, and people loved them.
And when I had a stack of them, I also went to a writing workshop with Pat Carr, who the book is donated to. She was an incredible. She had won the Porter Prize of Arkansas for her work. And again, the stories just kept coming out. And the one about in the book where Freddy, who has gone off to the Navy.
Kellams: That's June's older brother
Konert: Comes home. And I wrote that whole story just one time, and I don't even remember what the prompt was. Maybe it was a coming home thing.
And she was so amazed by it, how good it was and just the idea. And I said, well, I have a bunch of these. Would you look at them? She said, yes, she would, but she doesn't edit anymore or do any of that. But she's glad. So the next time I saw her, she had read, looked at them and she loved them and said she'd do it. And she told me how much she charged, which then she never charged me a cent. And for almost eight years we worked on it. And she wanted so badly for it to get published. But then she died before it got published. But she really taught me how to write and put it together. She was incredible. We had such a great time together.
Kellams: "The Holy Ghost and a Shine of Coal" is set post-World War II.
Konert: Yes.
Kellams: So it's a time when the coal mining is beginning to wane.
Konert: Yes.
Kellams: In this part of Arkansas.
Konert: Right. Definitely. And like I said, the big companies had pulled out, and people like my grandfather could go in. And at that time, he already had some black lung starting, and they didn't have a name for it then. And they denied at that time that it came from coal. Much like with cigarettes. I think it was 10 years after he died, before my grandmother got any benefits, because that's how long it took to prove that coal mining caused black lung. And he had worked for other the big coal mining companies off and on, too, at that time before he went and got his own lease with his brother, my Uncle Albert.
Kellams: So the economy of Logan County, Paris and this part of Arkansas is beginning to shift because this had been a vibrant part of the economy.
Konert: Coal mining pretty much built Paris. At that time, you were either farmers or coal miners or you were supplying them. And in the very early stages they coal mined in the winter when people bought it for heat and in the summer they farmed. And then that gradually grew and changed. But many coal miners still left for the summer to go farm their land.
Kellams: How did, so you have these ancestors. You think you must have been told some stories, but where did you get some of the details of this kind of coal mining in this era?
Konert: My uncle was a coal miner in the early 2000s. Some people got together and they wanted to do oral histories and they started interviewing all the coal miners still left alive. All the store owners, everybody who knew anything and who knew Doctor John, who was the doctor. And I don't think he was alive at that time, in the hospital. And they, anyway, they put it into a book, "Paris, Arkansas, and Its People," and from there and they did a bibliography and everything. And they all got together and started a coal miners museum and pretty much raised the money and built it themselves.
Kellams: June Ellen, our protagonist, is 10. When we meet her, she turns 11 before the end of the book.
Konert: She's 9 when we meet her.
Kellams: Oh, 9 and then turns 10. So she's an adolescent, right? Who is going, she senses the change around town. Her father is ill, has coal dust in his lungs. That's how it's referred. Her older sister is discovering makeup and boys, no longer as interested in going on adventures with her in the summer. I really feel for her because so much is shifting that she can't control. And it's frustrating.
Konert: Yes, but she's very adventurous and she always figures out how to keep going. So she and her dog, her dad's dog, Rex, become best friends, and he becomes her adventure dog like Lassie and so many of the others in the book she read. And he was her father's bird dog. But her dad could not go hunting anymore because he had to, he couldn't walk far, but he had to save his energy for the coal mine to make a living. So Rex becomes her ally and her partner in so many of her adventures, until her best friend Gracie comes back to go to school. She went to the St. Joseph's Catholic School in Paris, Arkansas. And then she had Gracie. But otherwise it was her and Rex.
Kellams: One of the adventures, it's told in past tense when she's talking to a newspaper reporter, but she found a dead body in this shack. Is that it? Is that completely.
Konert: That, I made that up. There's nothing in my historical readings about that area or in that book about a dead body. And it came out of thin air, as most of the stories did. And then I filled them in with using the "Paris, Arkansas, and Its People" book and, and talking actually to Darlene Becker, who's the director. And so I just started filling in and that book is so detailed. It was so easy.
Kellams: Well, I love this because it's in the first part of the book when she's talking to the newspaper reporter about this, but it establishes that she is a fearless girl. I mean, things that would bother some of us. She's out for the adventure.
Konert: Yes, definitely. Definitely. And I don't know how all that came through me, but it did. My mother, when she retired, always told me she wanted to write a story of her life and how she grew up. And sometimes I think she and my other aunts, grandmothers, that they came through me because that stuff had to come from somewhere because I didn't ever, when I wrote, I didn't think, I just let whatever come out, come out. So it was like I was channeling it.
Kellams: Set in Paris in the 1940s. What do we know about Paris, Arkansas post World War II?
Konert: What we know is there's no industry basically at that time. And after World War II, so many people left the small towns. They didn't, they went to war and they weren't going to come back and sit on a farm and farm. And it was part of the big industrial revolution at that time. Everything they learned about how to make airplanes and bombs and everything else, they could turn into other industries and manufacturing. So people left and it was basically a town of older people. And some of the younger people who stayed and it still remained rural and there were farms and cattle farms and that sort of thing.
Kellams: One of the characters in "The Holy Ghost and a Shine of Coal" is Mr. Mackey, who moves in to Paris. He is not a Paris or an Arkansas native. And he's buying up leases of coal mines. And when he does that, he will assume debts that the family that owns this mine. So he can take their livelihood. Did that sort of thing happen?
Konert: That is what happened to my grandfather. He and the little mercantile owner, they had a deal and Jeremy actually profited from that deal. And he always let my grandfather, when he could pay him off. So my grandfather once again goes and he gets some guys. They found a vein. I don't know how much, but he and Uncle Adrian felt like there's enough here. We can, this will do it. We can really make some money here and get some materials from Jeremy, the whole bit.
And then Jeremy's situation changes. He moves to Ozark with his wife, and he sells out to Mr. Mackey, who he's convinced is going to do a coal miner's like my grandpa. He's going to do them well. Well, like Fred, he's going to work with him, and then that doesn't happen. Basically, he wants what's in there. And probably there's some new machinery. I think they could strip off the top now, which they couldn't do before, because the coal walls where they got the coal were only four feet. They worked bent over on their knees and those coal mines. And so my grandfather or Fred is working hard now to get a load out, pay off the tickets and have some money that they can live on. And instead, Mr. Mackey ends up with the tickets and gives him two weeks.
Kellams: Mhm. There's an incident in the book where there is, I guess a collapse or Freddy, who's June Ellen's older brother, is trapped.
Konert: Yes.
Kellams: He does. I'm not going to give away too many spoilers, but Freddy gets out. But and it's detailed how crawling on bellies is that something based that you know about?
Konert: Yes. My Uncle Adrian, he was in the coal mine, and it was the one my grandfather, his father Fred leased. And it did collapse. And then Fred, who was my grandfather, who had been coal mining for years for other companies and knew all those back tunnels that they had dug out, found a way to get in there and get them out and watch what was a pretty harrowing escape.
Kellams: June Ellen, 9 years old, 10 years old. She really wants to get into a coal mine. Did you ever want to get into a coal mine?
Konert: No.
Kellams: Because you're smart, you're wise.
Konert: But I have gone back and looked at some. But at some point they filled them all in for safety. There were so many. So you couldn't get in them. And I do believe someone has told me around Booneville they still have a couple going in that area.
Kellams: Wow. You've mentioned Darlene Becker.
Konert: Yes.
Kellams: Who was a help. She has a museum.
Konert: She's director of the Logan County Coal Miners Museum. And it's an incredible museum. The historical pictures and tools and the things they've created. They're a little blacksmith shop showing different parts of a working coal mine. A big pile of coal, whatever they call it. And she knows all the story and all the families in that whole area. And she is an amazing legend and really needs someone to tell her story and videotape and get that record down because she will blow your mind. And I've been there when people have walked in, coming back from California to visit and saying, my grandfather had this, and she'd say the name of the mine. How long it was, how long it was open, who worked there? I mean, she has incredible facts and details.
Kellams: Coal mining was a big part of our region not that long ago. But it seems, Darlene Becker aside, that there aren't a lot of people, even in the western part of the state that remember or know just how important coal was to this area.
Konert: Many people say to me, I had no idea. But then other people come up to me and say, my grandfather had a mine there. He was killed in an explosion. Someone was telling me he owned the coal mine, and they set the fuse or whatever to go off and after and it didn't. So he went after an hour or so, I mean, a great period. He went down to check it and got down there and it went off. I mean, I hear stories all the time. My grandfather walked on his knees his whole life. That's all he had. He couldn't use his legs. I mean, I get stories still about that, which is why I want Darlene Becker's story to be videotaped. And she still has these books for sale. And I think last time I talked to her, she sells probably $10,000 worth of these a year.
Kellams: Oh, man.
Konert: People coming in and buying them, the heirs of these coal miners, there are amazing stories, and they have been recorded and written down extremely well, extremely detailed.
Kellams: Finally, when we leave June Ellen, she's not yet a teenager. Do you allow yourself to think what happened to her?
Konert: I do. And many people who read it say you need a sequel. And but my life has gone other ways. But it seems to be coming back. So I've tried often to think of her as a little private detective starting her own business, or deciding in her teen years that there's too much happening around and people can't figure it out. And she better help them. So those things come up. But it's so interesting how this book came to me since I didn't really know how to write a book and I didn't know I was writing one and I didn't know where these stories were coming from. So it's like, where do I go from there?
Kellams: "The Holy Ghost and a Shine of Coal." Peggy, thanks so much for coming in.
Konert: Thank you, Kyle, so much. It's been delightful.
Peggy Konert's novel is "The Holy Ghost and a Shine of Coal." She'll discuss the book at the West Fork Library tomorrow afternoon from 2:30 to 3:30. You can find the book at the Paris-Logan County Coal Miners Memorial and Museum in Paris, the St. Scholastica Gift Shop and at Pearl's Books in Fayetteville. Our conversation was recorded in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio yesterday.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
