The Path Was Steep

Read The Path Was Steep Storyline:

Sue Pickett was a coal miner's daughter who became a coal miner's wife and witnessed and lived through the turbulent years of the Great Depression and the sometimes violent struggles between labor unions and coal mine bosses throughout the Appalachian South—especially her native Alabama. The dramatic central episode in her account is a March 1934 standoff between striking miners and the mine owners. She writes of that "wild night when an armed mob gathered at Coleanor, ready to fight and, if necessary, die for the rights to which they had newly awakened. . . . One black man wept as he ran, afraid that someone else would kill [the dangerous and feared coal company enforcer] Mike Self, whom he believed it was his right to kill. . . ." Pickett's story is peopled with memorable characters, including her irrepressible husband David and an almost Biblical cast of other family members; a roaring, fire-belching automobile nicknamed Thunderbolt; Irene, a fiercely proud...