The Path Was Steep (3 page)

And there were friends in Piper. Real friends. In happy times or troubled times, you could count on them. Most people belonged to the Baptist or the Methodist church, and very large crowds attended the services.

Hoover was elected president in 1928. There would be two cars in every garage, two chickens in every pot. David was so sure of this that he came home one afternoon to announce that we were leaving for Detroit, and we left the next day, in June 1929.

Homesick for my loved friends and the Piper hills, I wept at night. But I’d learn to like it. Detroit offered a million opportunities. No one dreamed what October would bring. But some of the plants did not wait for October. Budd Wheel, where David worked, began to lay off men. Thousands, jobless, knew distress, but David and I packed our few belongings and caught a bus to Alabama.

Mr. Randle, the superintendent at Piper, was glad to give David work. People still speak of David as the most beautiful man they ever saw, with the most beautiful speaking and singing voice. He had a special electric charge, lightning-streaked eyes, Greek-god features, but he also had something else. “Mrs. Pickett,” Mr. Randle told me, “Dave is the best damn worker I ever saw, and he has the worst damn temper.” I knew. I certainly knew. The temper meant talent, a determination to succeed. Finally, with God’s help, the temper was almost conquered.

Piper coal was the best coal in the state, and work was steady that winter. We bought furniture, rented another three-room house. There was the living blaze of autumn, smoke from chimneys, friends. Dreams? Mine were here, but all across America, dreams became nightmares. Winter passed. Davene was born in June 1930, another beautiful blend, and the Depression swooped down on America as a giant bat swoops for its prey.

America reeled under its impact. Coal mining, a sleeping giant, suffered through hard times, then roused, walked, and grew until in full strength, the men—400,000 of them—at one word from their leader could bring to a dead stop the war effort of America—if they so desired. One shake of John L. Lewis’s eyebrows, and kings and presidents listened. Lewis, the greatest of the labor leaders, had worked in the mine himself. He knew the danger, sweat, exhaustion, the griefs, heartaches, and joys of the men. He spoke for them, and they trusted him utterly.

The twin villages of Piper and Coleanor, and their sister town of Belle Ellen across the Cahaba River, began the movement that spread through Bibb County, Alabama, and the South to join their northern brothers. Then, united, coal miners fought until the nation recognized their power and acknowledged their rights as human beings.

Late in 1933, Jim Ledford and Bryant Berry began a list that grew until every man in Coleanor and Piper (except the officials) had signed. The men had organized the once-dead (in the South) United Mine Workers of America.

On a wild night in March 1934, an armed mob gathered at Coleanor, ready to fight and, if necessary, die for the rights to which they had newly awakened. Men raced from Belle Ellen; some, too-hurried to take the long ride by car, swam the Cahaba River to reach Coleanor, just over the hill. One black man wept as he ran, afraid that someone else would kill Mike Self, whom he believed it was his right to kill.

Legends had grown and multiplied about Mike Self. Half of them may have been true. Self was company deputy at Acmar—shack rouster, a deputy was called. His duties included rousing a late sleeper from his bed and forcing him to work. Another was ejecting families from company houses if, having been discharged, they refused to move.

Mine owners, too, fought for their lives during the Depression. Living over the mountain* in Birmingham, as a rule—with Cadillacs, jewels, furs, and trips to Europe as an accepted way of life—they were scarcely aware from the top of the turbulent base of the pyramid that held them aloft. The owners hired general managers. Next came the superintendents, then mine foremen, or wall bosses. The latter were part of the workers and sympathized with them.

Wounds received during the Depression festered. Bitterness grew, and finally the day of reckoning came. Coleanor, Piper, and Belle Ellen had come out on strike. Word came that Mike Self and deputies had been hired to guard the men who would be brought in to break the strike. Miners across the Cahaba field gathered with one objective: to fight, to kill! kill! kill! if necessary.

But I am getting far ahead of my story.

3

As Long as I’ve Got a Biscuit, You Won’t Starve

The Wall Street crash had come unexpectedly to a prosperous, joy-mad America. This was followed by the burning summer of 1930, with drought and parched fields. The topsoil of many farms blew away in the Dust Bowl. Former millionaires, not knowing how to face life penniless, jumped from skyscrapers. Work across America slowed; wages plummeted. Few were able to buy cars. Plants in Detroit closed or operated two and three days weekly. With the production of cars dropping, steel companies suffered. Men in the giant mills were laid off indefinitely. These unemployed men could not buy other products, and plant after plant suspended operations.

The drought summer of ’30 was followed by a warm and gentle winter. How lovely the Piper hills and soft air were, but worry kept us from enjoying the beautiful weather. Coal miners ardently wished for cold weather. When frost hardened the earth, people managed to buy coal. But on mild days they burned sticks, chips, cardboard boxes, even newspapers, if one was lucky enough to subscribe to a paper.

Six days a week was the rule at Piper. Now, towards spring, a day’s work depended on the morning train. We listened agonizingly for the shrill whistle and the clonk of couplings, as a loaded car was hitched onto the train and an empty car left behind.

One April afternoon, I took Sharon, now three, and ten-month-old Davene into the garden to survey prospects for spring planting. Davene found a chicken dropping and tasted it experimentally. I grabbed for it, expecting her to wrestle for her find, but she threw it to the earth and cried, “Daddy!”

Black with coal dust, David stood in the kitchen door.

“Watch the baby while Daddy bathes,” I told Sharon, and put Davene back on the porch. It was very low; a fall wouldn’t have hurt her, but Sharon was better than a watchdog. She loved her baby sister and had never heard of “sibling rivalry.” If Davene crawled near the edge of the porch, Sharon pulled her to safety.

In the kitchen, I looked at the cornbread and stirred the butterbeans. The cornbread was crisp and brown. I pulled it from the oven and emptied the beans into a blue bowl.

David took the kettle from the stove, poured boiling water into a large zinc tub, and cooled the water with two buckets from the back-porch hydrant. Then he undressed and hung his black work clothes, stiff with dirt and sweat, on a nail behind the stove. “I’m leaving Piper,” he said. On his knees beside the tub, he washed his face, head, and shoulders; dried them; then stepped into the tub. Muscles rippled with every movement: timber-setting, coal-shoveling muscles.

I’d expected this, yet was not prepared. We knew that things were bad. Women fought hunger and despair with soap and water. Clothes might be worn thin and patched, but they were clean, starched, and ironed. The men, scarcely able to feed their families, had grown careless. A week’s growth of beard grizzled many chins as they gathered daily at the commissary. “There ain’t no work anywhere,” they’d say.

Rumors of jobs in Kentucky and West Virginia drifted into town. Other rumors told of long lines of men waiting in every place to find jobs. A man would take work at half the usual pay.

Slavery? In free America? Yet he must feed his family.

Now I was silent as the fair wind stilled, and the birds stopped their singing. The only sound was the slosh of water as David soaped and rinsed. Black streaks ran down his sides and into the tub. Black drops spattered the old tow sack* I’d spread around the tub. Blackness hid the late sunlight and the sky, and pulled a curtain across my heart. But what could I say? It was David’s job to earn a living. He was not equipped to sit and starve. Jaunty and confident, he was sure that a good job, somewhere, had his name on it.

“Times are bad everywhere,” I said. “Maybe they will get better.”

“Not in Piper. Work always slows in summer.”

Nothing could stop his leaving. Desolately, I packed clothes and personal belongings. The furniture, bought on payment after a summer in Detroit, went back to the store. My father lived on a farm, and there was always plenty of food there. Tears dimmed my eyes as I held Davene and took a last look at green hills. Sharon’s fair head leaned against me. I stooped to kiss her. Would we ever see these hills again?

My sister Thelma and her husband, George Johnson, managed a form of survival on the small wages he earned at Woodward Iron. A neighbor took us to Dolomite, where they lived. The neighbor was one of the rare greedy ones. In Piper, we helped one another, but not this man. Dolomite was not even a block out of his way to Fairfield, but he charged five of David’s lonely dollars to let us ride.

He knew we had a small sum from the sale of a few things—bedding, etc.—at half their value. But few were like him. Near hunger brought out the best in others. They were willing to share to the very last.

Bag and baggage, what little we had, we arrived in Dolomite unexpectedly, just before noon. If Thelma and George felt consternation, they didn’t show it. George grinned, his black eyes alight. Jean, almost three, and Ailene, seven, grabbed the girls. Thelma kissed us all, then started over. Who wouldn’t? With David there to kiss?

“I wrote to Papa. He’s coming for us,” I offered, as if giving a present.

“You are going to stay with us,” George stated.

“Dinner is almost ready,” Thelma said.

She had made a dress for a neighbor, who returned the favor by bringing a sack full of cabbage. George, unable to buy shells for his gun, set out homemade traps for birds and rabbits. Six birds, little more than thumb-size, added flavor to a bowl of dumplings. The cabbage, steaming hot dripping with salt, pepper, and a touch of sugar added; light, fluffy biscuits; and gravy, rich with canned milk, made you doubt that there was hunger in the world.

Food! It became more and more important. Not something you took for granted, but worthy of genuine thanksgiving.

Papa rattled up in his old rusty Ford a few minutes before dinner. He was so vividly alive. After the assassination of each of the Kennedys, people would say, “He can’t be dead! He was so alive!” A few, rare people have this quality. Papa had it to a great degree. He registered, cast a long shadow. My father, Lee Mosley, had stubby-lashed gray eyes, a patrician arched nose, and straight black hair. Very thin and pine-tree straight, he was still a handsome man—so virile that less than a year after my mother died, he had married a young, pretty wife.

Papa had never been neutral about anything. His religion came first, then politics, farming, weather, this Depression. He was interested in every subject and deeply involved in it. Earth, water, skies, animals, people—people most of all. Like Will Rogers, Papa never saw a man he didn’t like.

This day he offered thanks for the food. Flourishing his knife and fork, illustrating his remarks with his hands, eyes alight, Papa ate, talked, and, as always, managed to quote a few scriptures.

Then it was time to go. George and Thelma came with us to the car. I was quiet, quelled. This wasn’t happening. We were just visiting. Only little jabs of pain struck through my middle and called me a liar.

I clung to David’s arm, walked beside Thelma, sniffed the nearby gases of the Woodward plant.

“Things are bad everywhere, son,” Papa waved his hands downwards to illustrate his remarks.

“I’ll find work,” David said confidently. He rolled a Bugler cigarette, careful not to spill a grain of the precious tobacco. Finding a match, he lifted his leg to tighten his pants, and scratched. The thin material held, and the match ignited. “Someday,” I predicted silently, “he’ll bust his britches.”

“Do you need any money?”

“No, sir,” David lied.

“I could let you have a dollar or so.”

“Honest,” (how often people use this expression when about to tell a whopper) “I don’t need a thing.” David smoked a few draws and handed the cigarette to George.

“If you can’t find a job,” George inhaled, then returned the cigarette, “come on home. As long as I’ve got a biscuit, you won’t starve.”

“I’ll remember that,” David laughed, as if at a joke. He and George smoked the cigarette alternately, holding it at the last between thumb and forefinger.

“Well, I have to plant some corn,” Papa said.

I kept a smile on my carefully painted lips and blinked to save my mascara. But the smile ached in my throat. Sharon was too young for bravery. She clung to David’s legs and wept.

“Daddy will send for you soon,” he stooped to kiss her.

But I mustn’t cry, though I wanted to scream, “Don’t leave!” I knew his mode of travel. A freight train. I knew the danger. Lose your grip as you caught the train, and you would be crushed beneath the wheels. A “hobo” must spot an empty boxcar, swing onto it, and climb into an open door.

Guards searched the cars. If caught, a man was thrown into jail for several weeks. How the bright plumes of David’s pride would be soiled in jail! If not caught, how would he eat? This, too, I knew. I could almost see him. His face would be shaved and clean; he’d manage that at a creek or someplace. His teeth would be brushed, and his hair, combed slick with water but drying, would be a tumble of bright gold curls. His long lashes would droop over his gray eyes to hide the deep hurt to his pride, but his smile would be wide, showing his unbelievably white teeth as he said, worn hat in hand, “Lady, do you have some work that I can do?”

No woman could resist that voice and that smile; this, too, I knew. He would eat, but at what cost to his pride.

“You write soon,” I whispered.

His face was white, but he smiled; he even swaggered a little; then his shoulders drooped. He didn’t slump; he’d not let himself do that. His smile was crooked. “Don’t worry, I’ll send for you soon.”