There’s a piece of coal sitting on my desk in Seattle. An ancient, dark vestige of the world that has been ripped from its place deep under Carbon County. I remember picking it up in Lansford, on a dead end street by the quarry. It was sitting on the sidewalk, and as I leaned over, my sister said, “You should hold on to that. Those are your roots.” My inheritance.

My grandmother was with us that day, and we had taken a drive up the line to tour the №9 Mine, where her father worked his entire adult life. On the way, Gram told us about her father, who “went into the mines before the sun came up, and came out after the sun went down.” Some weeks he only saw the sun on Sunday.

At the time, those words didn’t mean as much as they do now. I was born and raised on the west side of Los Angeles, about as far as one can get from the Panther Valley’s scarred hillsides, deep hollers and deeper veins. I visited the hills of my mother’s youth on family trips, but I’m not sure I ever connected that place to myself. I was drawn to the stories, but they weren’t mine. I was from California, nowhere else.

I got older, and my interest in history developed. I read books about the region, marveled at the challenges, fumed at the injustices, laughed at the homboky. I wrote a thesis, turned it into an academic pursuit written from a library in Berkeley. But still, just words on a page. It didn’t feel like much more than that.

Then I spent some time in the South, interviewing people about their lives. The stories I heard, though endlessly varied, centered on triumphs, defeats, routines, sacrifices, unachieved dreams and contentment. None of the folks I talked to shared history with my relatives, but in each story and its teller, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of familiarity.

I would catch a mischievous look from a reminiscent Arkansas man and be brought back to my Uncle John’s stories of hopping freights outside of Summit Hill. I’d hear an Alabama woman talk about her baby brother, and think about the glimmer in my Gram’s eye when she told me about hers. I’d shake my head to stories of unfairness, and remember my Popsie’s hardening tone when he spoke of injustice in the coal regions. At the time, these moments oftentimes did little but put a smile on my face. It wasn’t until later that I began to put together some meaning behind all of it.

A friend of mine once said, “Always remember that people’s stories are important to them, and it is your job to make them know they are important to you too.” Listen to enough life stories, and you begin to realize that the act of storytelling is more than recording events. Annotated history books are good at that, and certainly more accurate. Stories have an older, and more fundamental, purpose. They give us a sense of who we are and where we come from.

The people we interviewed in the South who started their stories with, “Oh my life hasn’t been that interesting or exciting,” were oftentimes the most generous with their stories once they got going. It became a reflection on who they were, a way to place themselves in this world and make sense of their history, no matter what it was.

This brings me back around to that old piece of coal that sits on my desk in Seattle. I haven’t spent a day mining for anthracite, I wasn’t born in the Panther Valley, I can’t claim that I know what it’s like to live there. But my Gram did, my Uncle John did, my Popsie did. And the stories that they told me around that dining room table in Bethlehem gave me roots, a sense of place in this world. Those stories of happiness, heartbreak, injustice and perseverance. Those eye glimmers, laughs, head shakes and mischievous looks. Those are my inheritance. And I’m so grateful.