Table Of ContentThe Path Was Steep
A Memoir of Appalachian Coal Camps During the Great Depression
Suzanne Pickett
Foreword by Norman McMillan
NewSouth Books
Montgomery
Published in cooperation with
The Cahaba Trace Commission
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2013 by the estate of Suzanne Pickett. All rights reserved under
International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United
States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery,
Alabama.
This work is based on true incidents from the author’s life. Some people and
some situations have been fictionalized to protect the identities of individuals or
their family members.
Portions of this title were previously published by Black Belt Press as Hot Dogs
for Thanksgiving, with the ISBN 1-881320-76-6.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-261-0
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306334-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013034242
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com
In Loving Memory of David Pickett
(1907–1990)
Contents
Sue Pickett's Appalachian World
Foreword
1 - You Could Almost Smell the Depression
2 - What October Would Bring
3 - As Long as I’ve Got a Biscuit, You Won’t Starve
4 - Despite All, Well-fed and Loved
5 - The Community Barber
6 - The Value of Papa’s Teaching
7 - A New Hope
8 - We Never Knew Our Cruelty
9 - Thunderbolt
10 - Here We Rest
11 - Hottest Day I Ever Saw
12 - Such Good People
13 - The Worst Road in the United States
14 - Score One for West Virginia!
15 - Hot Dogs for Thanksgiving
16 - So Dad-Burned Purty
17 - Every River Leads to Piper
18 - Best Medicine in the World
19 - ‘Sleeping Sickness’
20 - A Burglar Wouldn’t Try to Break In
21 - Wild Over Roosevelt
22 - Is This a Deathwatch?
23 - All Men Brothers
Epilogue
Terms and Expressions
About the Author
Sue Pickett’s Appalachian World
Foreword
Norman McMillan
The title of Suzanne Pickett’s evocative and gracefully written memoir, The Path
Was Steep, foreshadows the two primary motifs of her book, motion and
struggle. Wife of an ambitious and restless coal miner, Sue, as she was
commonly called, recreates the challenges and the rewards of life in the
coalfields of Alabama and West Virginia during the years of the Great
Depression of the 1930s. Despite the many hardships her family faced, Pickett’s
great sense of self-worth, her estimable creative powers, her boundless curiosity,
and her impressive energy enable her to rise above circumstances that might
have broken a weaker spirit. Moreover, Pickett places the events of her own life
in a national context. Through reading Sue’s memoir, for example, we can
clearly see the circumstances that led to the often-violent conflicts between labor
and management that were so widespread during this period.
The lives of the Pickett family seem to be defined by motion. In search of
employment, Sue’s husband David—like so many of his contemporaries—
hitches a ride in an empty freight train boxcar to leave Alabama in search of
employment in Michigan and Kentucky and then in West Virginia, where he
finally finds work in the coal mines. Sue and her young daughters, Sharon and
Davene, then journey by train to join him.
Once the family is settled in West Virginia, they manage to acquire a 1926
Studebaker, which becomes like a fifth member of the family, earning the name
of Thunderbolt because of the loud sounds of its protesting engine. David loves
speed, careening around dangerous curves on a mountain road in West Virginia
called the Jumps. As Sue peers beyond the precipices, she can see below the
broken carcasses of automobiles that have slid off the highway, and she fears
that her family may end up with the same fate. But such fears are always
trumped by the desire or need to go somewhere.
Nothing seemed to reduce the Pickett family to idleness and despair, no matter
what difficulties they encountered, and the difficulties were numerous during
those Depression years. First, there was the constant struggle to provide for the
basic necessities of life. In 2013, very few people are still alive who can
remember firsthand the extent of misery and deprivation during the 1930s, and
reading about the period in school textbooks doesn’t fully convey how many
were suffering or how badly. Consider, for example, that at the lowest point of
the Great Recession that began in 2007, some 8 to 9 percent of U.S. workers
were officially unemployed. But in 1931, when David Pickett was roaming in a
desperate search for work, some 25 to 30 percent of the U.S. labor force was
simply unable to find a job of any kind. And in those years before the New Deal
reforms of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration—backed by coal miners’
labor unions—there was no safety net. No Social Security for the aged, no food
stamps for the hungry, no Medicare or Medicaid for the sick, no energy
assistance for those without heat.
We can well imagine David’s sense of relief when he finally found work as a
coal miner in West Virginia. Even then, there was no guarantee of how many
shifts he might be given. Then there was the constant danger in the mines.
Deaths in U.S. coal mines numbered more than a thousand a year in the early
part of the twentieth century. Thousands of other miners were seriously maimed
in accidents each year; Sue considered David lucky in that he merely broke his
foot in a mine accident. “Black lung” was not well understood until years after
the period about which Sue Pickett writes, but that disease, too, caused by
constantly breathing in the fine coal dust which filled the underground mine
shafts, crippled and reduced the quality of lives of many longtime miners.
Nonetheless, the uppermost concern for the Pickett family was that David
find employment. The pay he received was barely a living wage, but somehow
the family made do. Sue even earned $1.50 a week writing for the Daily News in
Welch, West Virginia, crafting poems from the dreary headlines of the day. But
the Picketts were much better off than their family and friends back in Alabama.
In fact, quite a number of Alabamians came to West Virginia to stay with them
while looking for work, often unsuccessfully. Nobody was turned away.
Another struggle the Picketts faced was being confined to cramped quarters.
Throughout the memoir, we repeatedly have the sense of far too many people
crowded into far too little space. Thunderbolt, designed for five passengers,
amazingly transported fourteen family members on a trip of 140 miles. Plus
there was the matter of privacy and modesty in the overpacked houses of that
day. Sue, for instance, became adept at changing her clothes under the bedcovers
while a room was crowded with people.
Both in West Virginia and Alabama, the Picketts frequently struggled with
the elements. Inadequate heating and cooling as well as insufficient clothing and
cover were a constant challenge. One freezing night they arrived unannounced at
Sue’s father’s house to find all sleeping spaces taken. Sue and David managed to
squeeze their girls into beds with others and then took themselves to a cotton
storage room to spend the night covered over by mounds of cotton.
As tough and resourceful as Sue and David were, they could only make it
with the help of others. Sue’s brother-in-law, George, told them, “As long as
I’ve got a biscuit, you won’t starve,” and that seemed to be the attitude of most
of Sue and David’s family and friends.
Despite this mutual support, mineworkers and their families were, for the most
part, no match for oppressive mine owners. By 1933, the ever-restless David had
learned that jobs were again becoming available in the coalfields of Alabama,
which were an integral part of the iron and steel production that had contributed
to the industrialization of Birmingham. So the Picketts moved back to Bibb
County and settled in the company town of Piper, established in 1901 by the
Little Cahaba Coal Company and named for industrialist Henry F.
DeBardeleben’s partner, Oliver Hazzard Perry Piper.
Democrat Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, and in 1933–34 his
policies began to restore hope and bring some relief to the desperate. Still, the
weak economy suppressed the wages of even those fortunate workers who had
jobs. Sue tells of a group of miners who went to their bosses and pled for higher
