Still, every vote counted, so while Jack was off giving a speech to West Virginia local unions, I stood by the cash register of the rundown neighborhood Big Bear supermarket to greet the hardscrabble coal miners waiting in line. As at home as I’d felt in New Orleans, the gruesome reality of Appalachia coal country’s grinding poverty had me at a complete and utter loss. Black coal dust was pervasive in this county: caked into the corners of the store’s peeling linoleum, limning the deep crevices of the men’s gaunt faces, and ground beneath the ragged fingernails of women grown old far before
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