Book review: The Price of Bread and Shoes

One hundred years ago, and until middle of the last century, southern West Virginia coal miners crowded into small and medium-sized coal camps scattered throughout the steep hills. There were few good roads and many miners didn't own cars, nor did the camps have any form of local government or police force. Instead, the mining companies who erected the camps controlled every aspect of residents' lives, from what they could buy at the company store to where they could live. Miners were paid decently but prices at the store were high; miners were forced to use the private currency, or "scrip," of whatever company they worked for. (I grew up in one of these coal camps and was born just as the era of the company store and private currency was ending. There was still scrip in circulation but no store would take it.)

These modern fiefdoms were patrolled by private security agents, often from the Baldwin-Felts company, who ruthlessly tamped down any talk of unions or other initiatives against the company. Company stores extended easy credit to miners, for food and rent on their shabby little houses and medicine and coal to heat their homes and clothes for their children. But it was easy for a miner to get overextended, and if he was injured or ill, he and his family, or his widow and children, could find themselves summarily evicted with nowhere to go. The wives of miners were particularly at risk for being tossed out if their husbands couldn't work, and Lonormi Manuel's deft and often poetic novel The Price of Bread and Shoes captures both the hard rhythms and everyday dangers of life in such coal camps and the cynical exploitation some women experienced there; the fulcrum of the novel is a second, secret type of scrip—the Esau, named after the biblical brother who traded his birthright for food—that compels the women to do what they must to keep their families together.

The novel is set in 1923. Alafair Slone is only nineteen, a new bride of one month when she is reunited with her husband in the tiny coal town of Chemame Creek. But her husband Travis has a secret, and not just that he's impetuous and house-proud and gets deep in debt at the company store. Alafair's journey to understanding how life really works in a company town requires a series of hard-won lessons about trust and truth, helped along by the friendships she makes with women already navigating the web of deceits and compromises necessary to survive there.

The private money issued by the company that owned our little coal campn

Based in part on oral histories from that era, The Price of Bread and Shoes hurtles the reader forward toward a harrowing climax. The characters are well-realized, and the relationships between the coal camp women are believable and insightful. The novel should find a readership among those who want a realistic and humane glimpse into a hard way of life that few alive today remember, but shouldn't be forgotten.