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AL-49

Alabama
Sam Brakefield (White)
N.S. McDonald

COAL MINER

"If I had it all to go over with again," Sam Brakefield said, "I'd have
a business of my own. I'd have that, even if it was nothing but a peanut
parcher. Since I was fourteen years old I've been a coal miner; and it's a
hard, uncertain sort of life. It's always a 'feast or a famine;' living good
when wages are high, and doing without when times are bad."
He sat on the edge of a ditch he had been digging, slowly scraping the
red clay off his high rubber boots. Beside him was a gun and a bucket of
water. The gun, he explained, was to shoot hawks that had been molesting his
chickens.
"You can see by what I'm doing today---digging this ditch across my
land --- that I'm something of a farmer too. But I sure ought to be able to
tell you about coal mining. When I was a boy growing up, I talked my dad out
of letting me leave our hillside farm that was so poor we couldn't even raise
enough for the cows and pigs to eat. That was back in '87, and I soon went to
work at the Gamble Mines."
Pausing to light a stubby pipe, he removed his hat and ran strong fingers
through his graying, sandy hair.
"Oh, but I felt like a man," he laughed. "I remember, they paid me
eighty cents a day, and a day in those times was from sunup to sunset. At first
they put me to digging coal, but when I learned a little more, they gave me a

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