The Path Was Steep

A Memoir of Appalachian Coal Camps During the Great Depression

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. 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 ten-year-old mountain girl left homeless by the hard times; and many others. The memoir is a saga of determined working-class people making do and getting by, but equally of their love of family and land.