The Path Was Steep

by Suzanne Pickett

  “We found your place,” David said, just in time, and saved the day—or what was left of the night.

  “See you did.” Tandy reached up cautiously, as if he might damage the cord, and turned off the light. Then he marched into the living room, closed the door, made undressing noises, and flung his shoes against a wall.

  There was little sleep for yours truly the rest of the night. When I dozed, I dreamed of footsteps on the porch and guns being flourished. Other times, I dreamed that all of us had been arrested. The charge: breaking and entering, and we were carted off to jail. Those were not the most pleasant hours I ever spent.

  A steady downpour awakened us the next morning, and a cold, wet wind blew around the house and through cracks in the doors. Hap built a fire in the kitchen stove. The men and children huddled near as Vic and I hunted through our groceries for bacon and eggs and bread. We breakfasted, washed dishes, and began to load groceries into the car. A bag or so, still damp, burst, but we found boxes and stored the overflow in them. On our last trip, Tandy, pouring the last of the coffee, said, “Think I’ll go home with you.”

  Thunderbolt, as always, made room for one more. Vic and the girls entered the car. I sat under the wheel, the men pushed, and I steered down a small hill. The car roared and emitted smoke. Wet, laughing, congratulating each other, the car, and even me, they found seats among the groceries. David slid into the driver’s seat, and we bowled along towards Bibb County.

  For some reason the whole thing seemed hilarious, and we laughed and talked as we roared southward. The windshield wiper was a hand-operated gadget; you turned a button inside the car to make it swish back and forth, so I bent to operate it every minute or so. David, Davene, and I, and the groceries piled at our feet and beside us, were comparatively dry. Those in the back had no such good fortune. Rain poured on them through cracks and holes in the curtains. Vic held Sharon on her lap. Boxes of groceries were heaped between Hap and Vic, and Tandy perched somehow half on the seat.

  Water for the radiator was no problem. David stopped at rivulets along the roadside to dip muddy bucketfuls and pour into the steaming vent. We left Jefferson, crossed a corner of Tuscaloosa County, then entered Bibb and came to the “Y” which was named for the shape of the road as it forked to go to West Blocton and on to Piper. A large, sagging old dance hall stood at a corner of the Y. In the golden twenties, this place had been known for fun and frolic, had seen raids and bottles of contraband whiskey thrown in all directions. Deserted for three years, showing signs of decay as deserted places do, the old dance hall stared with forlorn, paneless windows as we stopped.

  “Maybe there is an empty bucket in there, and I can help Dave,” Hap said. David stopped and Hap ran to the place. Tandy hopped out of the car, found a can, and dipped water for the radiator from an overflowing ditch. But Hap had found greater treasure.

  “Now we can keep out the rain,” he laughed and hugged a dusty quilt to keep it from getting wet. What was an old quilt doing in a deserted dance hall? Sometimes children were brought to dances and parked in corners on such while their parents danced. Someone, evidently, had been too giddy to remember this one and had left it for a wet, chilly group of people to find.

  “You are not going to use that?” I asked, horrified.

  “Better than rain in the face.”

  “But no telling who used it?”

  “People, like everybody else.”

  I watched, fascinated, as Hap pulled the quilt over them all. Spatters of rain dampened cheeks as we headed toward West Blocton, but they seemed warm and happy under their log-cabin quilt.

  We made it home. The sun came out, and wet leaves glistened as if made of green-gold. Thunderbolt expired in a last snort. Tired, dirty, and damp in spite of the possibly vermin-infested quilt, we staggered from the car to unload groceries.

  We’d stopped to let the Hendons and Tandy take themselves and their groceries out of the car. Very happy to be safely at home after spending the night in a strange home and sleeping in a strange bed, we brought in loads of groceries, then went to the bedroom. “David,” I backed out and stopped him, “there is someone in our bed.”

  A head full of dark hair raised. “Where have you been all night?” Lucile asked. Ezra had made a trip to Birmingham. Lucile had packed her clothes, gone with him, and caught the bus to Piper.

  I forgot that I had ever been tired. We built a fire in the stove, heated water, and almost scalded Sharon against possible vermin from the quilt. And we talked and talked. Then Lucile took a card from her purse. “Who is Herbert Allen?” she asked. The card read, “My name is Herbert Allen. Who the hell are you?” He had been on the train with her. She didn’t speak, of course, but kept the card.

  Herbert, we explained, was the mine foreman’s son. Mr. Allen was foreman at No. One mine, Mr. William Hayes at No. Two. In Piper, any bossing job put one in the upper echelon socially. Even the store clerks—they were white-collar men—at salaries of perhaps $50 monthly, along with their wives, thought themselves on a slightly higher social scale.

  Herbert learned that Lucile was visiting us, so did other young men, and the living room sofa was seldom unoccupied on evenings. Bud Harris, Billy Harrison, and others, like bees, were attracted by Lucile’s dark hair, fair skin, and hazel eyes.

  Billy Harrison suddenly became very buddy with David and planned a night on the river, going in his car. We took the log-cabin quilt for cover. On Monday after our grocery trip, Lucile and I had built a fire under the boiling pot, lifted the quilt with a stick, and put it in the pot. Vic had refused to take it home with her. “Burn it,” she told me. But Lucile had a better idea. She shaved a bar of Octagon soap into the pot, and we threw the quilt in. It came out faded but boiled, then rinsed, and very clean. Someone had put a great deal of work into this quilt. A log-cabin design, the stitches were small and even.

  We raked pine straw to make a big, fat bed for the girls and covered it with a blanket and a quilt. Snuggled under it, they slept. David and Billy put out trot lines and checked the lines hourly. Their catch was one small catfish and an eel. For breakfast, we had white meat, fried potatoes, and a few bites of catfish. David and Billy wallowed eel around in their mouths, chewed, and managed to swallow a bite or so.

  As the girls slept that night, we sat around the fire. The night wind was sweet and the April air soft. We sang old songs while fireflies danced the night away. Fish, though they didn’t bite, leaped in the nearby river. A herd of cows, attracted by our singing, came to stand near the fire. When the singing stopped, the cows left, to sleep no doubt under nearby trees in case the entertainment started again.

  Lucile, from past visits, was under the spell of Piper. When her visit ended, Thelma came as soon as school was out. She had resisted Piper’s spell in the past and thought I was half-crazy to enjoy living so far from what she considered civilization. But June, on the road to Piper, was too much for her. “Sue, that road is the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” she exclaimed over and over, her enchanted eyes still viewing it in memory. “It was like heaven, all the green overhead, and the sun shining through the leaves, and the rocks and flowers and ripple of water.”

  The old road wound through the laurel-gorged ledges on one side and a small creek called Little Ugly on the other. A few pink blossoms still hung on the laurel. There were dark, fern-decorated rocks, oaks, maples, hickories, and vines and blooming plants climbing the steep hill to the right. Trees from both sides made a canopy for the road, meeting overhead. On the left, Little Ugly foamed over rocks and boulders, and sun shone on the giant poplars, sycamores, and other trees that met over the road.

  Little Ugly was possibly named for its many turns and the rocks that bedded the stream. Water rippled cheerfully over, under, and around the rocks and made small waterfalls here and there with white spray and the sound of far-off bells. The road followed the winding stream, then veered sharply to the left to cr
oss a bridge over the creek where it flowed into the Cahaba River. The road then followed the river for a mile, to turn right and cross a high bridge. Beginning in May, Cahaba lilies blossomed in incredible whiteness.

  Thelma had seen the lilies and the great trees and everything. After crossing the river, you climbed up and up and around and up again, with trees, flowers, rocks, and red banks on either side, all the way to Piper.

  “You see?” It was I now who had invented the road and Bibb County and Piper on those rolling hills above the river.

  “Yes, I see why you love it here,” Thelma said, and smiled that dreamy smile that came to all when the enchantment of our Camelot hit them. “I always thought you a little crazy. But if I ever lived here, I’d never want to leave, either.”

  Clarence came for a visit. Ambitious to be a newspaper man, he interviewed the Witcher brothers. They were hermits living between Piper and Coleanor. They drove a team of oxen and never shaved or took a bath. Through one of FDR’s programs for polio victims, Clarence had a job with the Birmingham Post newspaper.

  The lovely days passed, and summer wore its way into autumn. More and more new laws came from Washington. Piper men began to meet, to talk; the old call “United we stand, divided we fall” was on every tongue. “If we don’t unite, the operators will have us over a barrel for the rest of our lives,” they said. Somehow, the men and their wives managed to hate the company and yet love individuals. Mr. Randle, the superintendent, was affectionately known by his first name, Percy—but only behind his back. Times were more formal then. First-name basis for an employer was not practiced.

  “What did Percy say?” was usually asked when a man had been called to the office. What he had said was usually known by anyone within a quarter of a mile. Mr. Randle had a tremendous voice. A favorite tale among the miners was that once, when trying to talk over the noisy telephone from the office to No. Two mine about a mile away, Mr. Randle, exasperated, finally stuck his head out the window and shouted the message.

  There had been too much love for too long a time for the miners to hate Mr. Randle. You were supposed to hate anyone in authority, but we never did. Mrs. Randle was one of the most perfect ladies I have ever known, always kind and courteous, and she won my undying love by opening her library to me and letting me read the stacks of magazines she had been saving for years. Though members of the “Royal Family,” the Randle family was well-loved. Wilcox, their son, was “just like his mother,” always friendly and courteous and kind. The girls, Rosalyn and Anne, too, were beautiful, but so sweet and friendly, we didn’t feel jealousy or hatred for them.

  Summer passed, and I was not well. Not anything that I could put my finger on, just headaches, backaches, and never, never feeling well.

  I took aspirin and diagnosed my own illness. One day it was tuberculosis, the next heart or kidney trouble. We were cut two dollars monthly for medical insurance, both local and hospital, so a complete examination would not have cost us anything, yet not once did it occur to me to have a medical checkup.

  Well, David finally told our young, very good doctor, Bill Stinson, of my ailments, and he insisted that I be taken to the hospital that very day. My condition was complete retroversion of the uterus, and all of the ligaments were broken. I will spare you the details. Surgery was a must, and I could never, never again have a baby. For many years, when I saw a nursing child, I had a very special sadness and pain in my heart.

  But the operation was successful, and life went on as usual—no, a new, different life began for us at Piper.

  Jim Ledford, John Nash, Bryant Perry, Charlie Erwin, and others talked among the men, reminded them of past abuses. They brought out a petition to have a union, and soon every blue-collar worker in Piper and Coleanor had signed as well as all the men in Belle Ellen and those across the Cahaba field. The government had given the men the right to organize a union and to strike if they thought it necessary to obtain higher wages and better working conditions. United, coal miners became a growing power to be reckoned with through future years.

  Christmas and the traditional tree again brought unity between the company and the men for a short time. But after the holidays, little bits of hatred and hurts were dug from their rotting earth and polished. One man reminded another of the miseries of the past, and with that voice from Washington to encourage them, they were ready to fight.

  All over the world, men were growing literate. Communication bounced from pole to pole, and workers everywhere were united. In Russia, communism seemed a bright example to many. In Germany, Hitler promised immortality, a thousand-year reign for the Third Reich. In Italy, the voice of Benito Mussolini was heard in the land.

  In America, land of the free, in the country born of and for freedom, there were new thoughts and new ideas. Many trembled. Would America turn communist? Or fascist? Would she sell her soul for bread? Or had decades of freedom bred giants? Would men, could men throw off shackles of one kind without donning others?

  It took us eight years to learn. It took that “Day of Infamy,” December 7, 1941, for us to learn that we could fight and strike and demand our rights—that we could wrangle and cut ourselves until we bled, and yet that the seeds of freedom were deeply sown. We settled our battles among ourselves. No fascists, Nazis, or communists could tell freeborn Americans how to run their country.

  But at this time, our Armageddon was eight years ahead. We now searched the past and we feared, and our men, savage in their determination to stand united against whatever oppression the future might hold, stood as one man.

  Demands were made.

  They were refused.

  The men laid down their tools and brought lunch buckets home; Piper, Coleanor, and Belle Ellen were on strike. All stood firm in their demands.

  Rumors spread through February and into March. Strikebreaking can be a bloody business. Armed guards were brought in to guard imported strike breakers—“scabs,” we called them. Hunger could face miners again. Hunger was not easy to forget, but was there strength to see this through?

  Mr. Ben Sherrod, general manager of Piper and Coleanor, spoke for the owner. Not one demand would be met. The men could return to work or else—.

  One night as David and I listened to the radio, a car roared down the road, brakes squealed, and steps bounded across the porch and to our door. As the door opened, I heard the trample of feet and an angry murmur, low but growing.

  O. C. Busby stood at the door. Then Raymond Jones and Hap Hendon followed. Raymond and O. C. had come to warn David and Hap. “If you have a gun, Dave, bring it,” O. C. said. The men were white-faced. Hap’s eyes were wild, and his hair was bushed high on his head. “The company has brought in a bus-load of guards. Mike Self is their chief!”

  “Where are they?” David asked and kissed me hastily.

  “In the Coleanor office.”

  Terror sent cold chills over my body. I fell on my knees beside the bed. Then I raised my head to listen to the tramp of feet as men took the road that led to Coleanor. I would have stopped David if I could, if I’d had time to think. Stunned, I opened the door to another knock, and Vic Hendon and her children came in. They were crying. We went to sit in the living room. Sharon and Davene joined in the tears; then we became strangely silent, numbed, just waiting, and I wondered, is this a deathwatch we are keeping?

  23

  All Men Brothers

  Mike Self! Legends had made a demon of him. Half of them must have been purely legends. Possibly he was a good neighbor, a loving husband, and father. Possibly he went to church on Sunday and lived a good moral life. Coal miners across Alabama hated the very name of Mike Self, yet all had to admire his courage. He was not afraid of the Devil himself, and he was now in Coleanor with his henchmen. They had been brought in to guard men who would take the very bread from the mouths of our children.

  Self was company deputy at Acmar—“shack rouster,” he
was called. Coal companies had been fighting for existence. The owners lived, as a rule, over the mountain in Birmingham. Cadillacs, furs, jewels, trips to Europe: these had been the accepted way of life for them.

  Coal miners were mostly just figures on a ledger to them. At the top, they scarcely were aware of the turbulent base of the pyramid that held them aloft. The owners hired general managers. Under these were the superintendents. Next came the mine foremen and on down to the common workers.

  Now, in Coleanor, one question was answered. The tramp of running feet had answered it. Miners were not afraid. Many had ancestors who had fought in the Revolution and all other wars. They, too, would fight if necessary.

  This dread night, as feet thundered past our house, David joined the men who ran, some cursing, some weeping. A black man from Belle Ellen swam the river and climbed the hill to Coleanor. This man wept as he ran, afraid that someone would fire the shot and kill Mike Self, whom, he believed, it was his right to kill.

  “I was sick,” he wept, with what breath he could spare for weeping. “I wasn’t able to work, and he made me—he had a gun—he’d a killed me. Made me hold to the tail of his horse. I had to run or he’d a dragged me to the mine—and he laughed at me as I run—and they made me work all day. I got the right to kill him.”

  We’d heard the story before, and we believed it. Yes, the man was black and did not have the rights of white men then. But in a coal mine, all faces are black, and all men brothers. Rights taken from one miner were considered taken from all, and each had a tale of bitterness.

  Many stories had come from Acmar. One said that the village was ruled by armed thugs. And these men had come to bring the same rule to our peaceful, tree-surrounded area. Jim Ledford had prepared the miners for such a night as this. “Kill a man’s spirit, and he is forever yours,” Jim warned. If any could kill the spirits of these men, it would be such guards.