It’s easy to understand why Rhonda Browning White’s debut novel, Filling the Big Empty (Redhawk Publications 2024) was shortlisted for the 2022 Neilson Prize. The novel is a tour-de-force, relentlessly examining environmental issues in Appalachia. While never losing focus on a young couple’s relationship, the story drops readers into the horrors of mountaintop removal to extract coal, the clear-cutting of forests, a chemical spill in a river, and opioid addiction. Despite all those problems, the story remains hopeful. It glows with love for Appalachia and its people. Filling the Big Empty joins Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been and Robert Gipe’s Trampoline in revealing the damage wrought by resource extraction in mountain communities.
As the story opens, Romie and Jasper Grodin call Stump Branch, West Virginia, home. The point of view alternates between them, providing both the wife’s and husband’s perspectives. Jasper makes decent money digging coal for Prospect Mining, while Romie worries he will get injured on the job. She spends her days nursing Paw, Jasper’s dying father. Paw, who was a miner himself, surprises Romie by encouraging her to attend anti-Mountaintop Removal meetings. Paw says “underground mining might not be the best way to treat Mother Nature, but it sure beat chopping off her head like Prospect has started doing now.” Romie is concerned that Stump Branch is no longer a good place to live or to have a child. More than anything, she longs to have a baby of her own. But her home, she fears, is now “Only a place for dying. A place for destroying those who destroy the good earth.” After two miscarriages, it is small wonder she feels the land is poison.
Jasper, in contrast to his father, is appalled to learn his wife is attending these meetings. He feels Romie doesn’t understand that mining is his “family legacy, how it is something to be proud of, this digging out the buried sunshine that lights up our world, keeps all of America bright and warm.” Yet Jasper also hates the new method of mining:
“Made me feel sickly, too, watching the monster that stands taller than Lady Liberty eat two-hundred-forty tons of mountain in every bite, two bites a minute. Progress, they call it. Progress that puts thousands of underground miners like me out of work. Progress that changes the land forever. Progress that pumps sickness into the water supply, kills fish, and deer and daddies and babies.”
Disheartened by the destruction, Romie and Jasper move to Greensboro, North Carolina, where Jasper finds work with a construction company and takes a course to become an EMT. Romie studies with him with hopes of becoming a nurse eventually. Jasper’s boss, while paying for his education, cautions him against letting Romie become smarter than him:
“You can’t let your woman pass you by, Jasper. Got to stay one step ahead of her. Be smarter, be stronger, keep her under control.”
I have to laugh. He don’t know Romie like I know Romie. There ain’t no keeping that woman under control.
These misogynistic ideas about women are not the only concerns Jasper has about his boss and job. Jasper runs a machine he calls the Killdozer because it clearcuts a forest quickly:
“A big empty part of me longs to talk to Daddy one more time, to ask him if what I’m doing is right or wrong. . . . I’m proud of the paycheck I’m earning, of how well I take care of my family, but when I look around me at the trees I’ve slaughtered, I’m ashamed. I can’t do this much longer.”
After Jasper quits and moves back to West Virginia, he and Romie visit their best friends, Jimbo and Missy. Jimbo says folks are being forced off their land by Prospect Mining, forced to sell whether they want to or not so that the entire mountaintop can be removed to extract coal. Although Jasper finds it hard to believe that people could be forced to sell, Jimbo assures him Prospect has its ways:
“Bullet holes in the side of your house. Dead pets on your front porch. I even heard somebody broke poor old Widow Shrewsbury’s bedroom window in the middle of the night, dumped in a box of timber rattlers and copperheads. And her blind as a bat in broad daylight.”
While Filling the Big Empty refuses to gloss over Appalachia’s problems, including the opioid addiction that is destroying one of its characters, the novel also offers hope. Jasper and Romie finally find satisfaction in careers they can be proud of, they finally get the baby they have longed for, and most importantly, Romie no longer wants to run away to a new place at the first sign of trouble. She and her family are home, for good, on the land that they love.
Rhonda Browning White’s fully developed characters prove to be courageous and resilient when facing problems, no matter how grave. Ultimately, as Romie and Jasper build fulfilling lives in a less than perfect world, they offer us hope that we can do the same. This is a fine novel that deserves a wide audience.
Rhonda Browning White
Rhonda Browning White resides in Hickory, NC. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Converse University in Spartanburg, SC. White was awarded the Sterling Watson Fellowship in 2015 and a Standiford full scholarship in 2017 to Eckerd College’s Writers in Paradise. She is the winner of the 2019 Press 53 Award for Short Fiction for her short-story collection The Lightness of Water & Other Stories. Four of the stories were nominated for 2021 Pushcart Prizes. White’s work also appears in Ignatian Literary Magazine, Entropy, Prime Number Magazine, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Qu Literary Journal, Hospital Drive, HeartWood Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Steel Toe Review, Ploughshares Writing Lessons, Tiny Text, New Pages, South85 Journal, The Skinny Poetry Journal, WV Executive, Mountain Echoes, Gambit, Justus Roux, Bluestone Review, and in the anthologies Appalachia (Un)Broken, Ice Cream Secrets, Appalachia’s Last Stand, and Mountain Voices. Her blog “Read. Write. Live!” is found at www.RhondaBrowningWhite.com.
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