Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal by Catherine Young

Non-Fiction: 265 pages

Published September 2023 by Torrey House Press

Reviewed by: Janice P. Kehler

I started reading Black Diamonds while on a writing retreat in the quaint bedroom community of Belmont, North Carolina. We walked the narrow sidewalks from our rented house to unique stylized restaurants alongside a busy Main Street several times a day. The traffic was primarily cars passing through town on their way to Charlotte, but also large trucks. An elevated set of train tracks crisscrossed the road, and a refurbished train station, now café, sat on a busy street corner. The train passed, never stopping, three times a day: early morning, midday, and midnight-ish. It announced its presence each time with a loud, prolonged blast that hurt my ears. Once, I waited, wanting to see it, reasoning that it was close due to the crescendo of noise accompanied by the trembling earth beneath my feet. I waited as long as I dared, mindful of the work of the retreat, and then had to run to catch up to my colleagues. I never saw the train, but I had heard and felt it and imagined that it was the train I had discovered in the story of Catherine Young.  

Whenever I picked up Black Diamonds and put it down, I studied the train on its cover, embedded in a painting commissioned by George D. Phelps, president of the Delaware Lackawanna &Western Railroad in 1859. The second part of the cover was a photograph from the same vantage point of the painting taken in 2003 by Park Ranger Ken Ranz. Later, he would combine the two images, forming a story about human progress that spanned 150 years. Notably, in that new image, the train had disappeared. 

 Deep inside these renderings are where Catherine, as a child, walked hand in hand with her mother: to the grocery store, the cemetery, and the downtown shops, passing the residue of coal mining and slicing through the clouds of coal dust that settled everywhere. Just as the cover is bracketed by time, the book is bracketed by entries in the World Book, beginning in 1957 when Scranton was on the verge of decline, ravaged by coal mining. Today, Scranton is the home of an international correspondence school, universities, and colleges and is a significant center for manufacturing textiles, household appliances, shoes, cigars, and electronic equipment. With each chapter, I flipped between the cover and the words of the World Book, drawn by the mystery of a world transformed—a brilliant shaping of a personal story to a changing geography. 

Young weaves the intersection of her personal stories with Scranton's history. Her prose has a poetic flare as each chapter unravels the past: the decline of the coal history parallels the transformation of the Lackawanna Valley. The reader is present as change invades the life and community of Scranton and as a young child confronts the realities of a life ‘colored by coal.’

The black diamonds provided, on the one hand, life-sustaining jobs but also harbored inhuman working conditions and the devastation of Lackawanna Valley. Amongst this chaos, Young weaves a sense of gratitude for her family rituals: attending church, weekly visits to relatives, providing food for elders, and baking Christmas cookies (my favorite scene). The writing flows and trembles like the trains that huff and puff their way out of the valley: poverty, illness, and hardship arise, yet the author does not fall into a mournful rant. 

The geology of the valley is prominent. Everywhere Young walks with her mother, there is a steepness that feels like a metaphor for adapting to the changes in their lives. Steepness invades her childhood, which is probably why the coal is so close to the surface and easy to mine. The valley’s steepness is forever a challenge to Catherine's daily life as she walks with her mother, the trains as they climb out of the valley, and, eventually, to the highways that bypass the lives of a hardworking community. 

Catherine’s coming-of-age story reveals a graceful resilience that will stay with you long after you have finished reading. It will come to mind as the uncertain future of climate change hits our headlines. It is truly a story of the past that informs our future. 

Reviewer Janice P Kehler, MS MSc (jpkehler.com) has over 30 years of healthcare experience working in Canada and the US. Her debut book of personal essays, Ode to Olympic Dreams, is the story of her life as an Olympic hopeful that weaves its way through a history of athleticism and exercise science.