White Dust

In 1930, the mountain was white as Sunday cloth. By 1931, it was killing the men who opened it.

Josiah Easley leaves Alabama with a pencil stub, his father's boots, and a promise to his wife: come home strong. In the Depression-starved gorge of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, he finds steady wages and a tunnel cut through rock so pure with silica that the dust turns men white as ghosts and their lungs to stone.

Verna Cutright, the undertaker's daughter, washes the bodies the company leaves at her back door, fifty-five dollars a man. The death certificates say pneumonia. Her own hands say otherwise.

When a line of pencil in a dead boy's pocket Testament leads her to the one worker secretly recording the names of the dead, Verna and Josiah form a dangerous alliance across the color line. In a town that profits from forgetting, a company that buries men without names, and a country that would rather not know, two people decide that someone must keep the record, whatever it costs.

Inspired by the Hawk's Nest Tunnel disaster, one of the deadliest industrial tragedies in American history, White Dust is a haunting, atmospheric novel of courage, grief, and memory. It moves from the coal camps of Appalachia to the cotton fields of Alabama to the marble halls of Congress, and it never lets the forgotten be erased.

They buried the truth. She kept the names.

Includes an Author's Note separating history from fiction, and Reading Group Questions for book clubs.