Stillborn Armadillos (John Lee Quarrels Book 1) (11 page)

Chapter 21

"Do you know where turpentine comes from?"

"I'm sorry, I don't," John Lee admitted.

"Pine trees. Pine trees just like we got all around here. Collecting turpentine dates back to Colonial times. Back then we had wooden ships, and they used pitch, which was rosin made from turpentine gum, to caulk the seams between the timbers on ships' hulls. They also used it on ropes and rigging on sailing ships to preserve them. That's how turpentine products came to be called ‘naval stores’ and that's what gave birth to the turpentine industry. But turpentine had a lot of other uses, too. People used it to polish furniture and clean floors and windows, and as a solvent for paint. It was also used to heal cuts and insect bites. The whole South was part of the industry, from the Carolinas down to Georgia and here in Florida. Right here in Somerton County the Somerton Lumber Company had half a dozen turpentine camps. It made them rich."

"Somerton, as in the Somerton family?"

"Yes, sir. Ezekiel Somerton first settled this county way back before the Civil War. As I recall, his family was from Alabama and he was kind of the black sheep. I don't know if they drove him off or he left on his own, but he wound up here."

Everybody in the county knew the Somerton family, and though John Lee knew their roots went deep into the past, he had never really thought about how they came to prominence. The Somertons owned several businesses in the county, including Somerton Forest Products Company, one of the biggest employers around. A lot of local people worked for the Somertons, lived on property owned by the Somertons, or did business with them in some form or another. And John Lee had his own unfortunate connection to the family.

"From 1909 until 1923, Florida led the country in production of turpentine gum," Chester said. "It was Florida's second largest industry, and big corporations bought or leased huge tracts of forest land and set up turpentine camps. Things started to slack off a bit with more and more steel ships and when they switched from sail to steam, and then diesel power. But the industry continued way past that. I think the last turpentine camp in the state shut down in about 1952. The last one here in Somerton County closed in 1950."

"I never even heard of them. Where were the camps located?"

"I've got an old map here someplace, I can find it and show you. I know one was just about three miles from where you guys found those skeletons."

"Really? Then they could have come from the camp."

"It's entirely possible," Chester agreed. "Now, you need to understand something about these camps, officer. They wasn't pleasant places to live or work. Before the Civil War they used slaves to work in the woods harvesting turpentine. They'd cut a slash in a tree and when the sap came out they collected it in buckets. Then it was hauled back to camp and run through a still, just like the new moonshine. It was dangerous work and men were killed and maimed by equipment all the time, not to mention getting snake bit or attacked by gators."

"Sounds like a hard life," John Lee said.

"It was, and after the Civil War when they didn't have slave labor no more, they came up with new ways to keep people working. So they hired the negroes who had just been freed, but all they was really doing was making slaves of them all over again. They worked from sunup to sundown Monday through Saturday. The pay was about ten cents an hour, and most of the camps didn't pay with real money. They paid with scrip that could only be used at the camp store. You ever hear the old song about the coal miners and I owe my soul to the company store? It wasn't any different down here in the turpentine camps. If a fella needed to feed his family, or clothe them, or anything else, he had to buy what he needed at the camp store. Besides the camp store, workers lived in little shacks owned by the camp, and they had to pay rent. At the end of the month, he always wound up a little bit more in debt than when he started."

"Then how did he to break the cycle?"

"Most of them never did," Chester said. "The law was on the side of the companies, and if the worker tried to leave without pay'in his debt, the camp captain, who was, like the overseer, could chase them down and bring them back, and whip them or do just about anything he wanted to teach them a lesson. And if one of the workers did somehow manage to get away, any cop could pick him up anywhere and bring him right back."

"And this went on right here, in Somerton County?"

"Not just here. All over the place," Chester told him. "And it wasn't just negroes. The law made it possible to arrest any male age 18 and over who didn't have a visible means of support, and then they had a convict-lease system. The local sheriff could lease out those prisoners to the turpentine camps. It made a lot of good old boy sheriffs rich back in the old days."

Chester stood up and opened the back of the case and took out a short leather riding crop. "That captain I told you about, the overseer who ran the camp? He'd ride around on a horse and use this to whup a worker upside the head or across the back if he didn't think he was performing hard enough. And at the end of that long workday, when they finally drug themselves home from the woods, life in the camps could be just as dangerous. Folks lived in little shacks and shanties almost on top of each other, and there was always fighting and stabbing and stuff like that going on. And the captain and his thugs that helped him keep things in control, a lot of them weren't above taking a woman if they wanted her. Didn't matter if she was black or white, didn't matter if she was married or not."

"And back then the law was part of it?"

"Like I said, a lot of sheriffs and other politicians made a lot of money off the system. That stopped after a fella named Martin Tabert, who was arrested for vagrancy and became part of the convict-lease system, was beaten to death by the overseer at a camp over in Dixie County in 1922. After that the state got so much bad publicity that they put an end to using prisoners that way. But they still had plenty of ways to get workers. The law still said that anyone who accepted anything of value from one of the companies had to work off that debt. And anything of value could be whatever they wanted it to be. Not just something they bought from the camp store or the shack they lived in, it could be as simple as a ride someplace, or getting treated by a doctor when somebody was sick or injured."

"Damn Chester, it really was just like slavery."

"In a lot of ways it was worse. At least back in slavery days the plantation owner owned the slave. He had an investment in him, just like he would a horse or a mule. Now I'm not saying they were nice people, because there was a lot of abuses back then, too. But you're usually not gonna kill a horse or mule just for the sake of killing it. Same way with a slave. But here in the turpentine camps, a worker died or wound up getting killed, so what? There was plenty more where he came from, and it didn't cost you a penny."

"And these workers wore ID tags like these?"

"Yep, that SL stands for Somerton Lumber, and the number was their individual worker number. They were worn around their neck on a string or a leather thong or something like that. That way the overseer and his men knew who was who. When they started their work day the captain noted the number to know they was on the job, and he checked them off at the end of the day. And when they went to the camp store to buy something, they showed that tag. Probably better'n half the people working in the camp stores couldn't read or write much, if any at all. So that was an easy way of record keeping."

"Do you have any way of knowing which workers these tags would've belonged to, Chester?"

The old man shook his head. "Sorry, I don't. And I don't know if the company has any records going back that far, either."

"You said something about the camp captains being able to beat workers if they tried to run away?"

"Not just if they tried to run away. If the boss man felt like they were slacking off, or be'in uppity, or for any reason he wanted to, he could whip them as punishment and to set an example of what happened to people who were shirkin."

"And that was legal?"

"Who was going to complain? And who were they going to complain to?"

Chapter 22

John Lee had never been much of a student when he was in high school. He always did enough to get by, and graduated with a B average, but he was just putting in his time. But over the two hours he spent with Chester, he found himself becoming fascinated with the history of Somerton County. How could he have called this place home for so much of his life, yet know so little about it?

Chester had explained how the turpentine business had enabled the county to survive during the bleak Reconstruction period following the Civil War, and how it had continued to thrive through half of the next century. The Historical Museum had several photographs from the old turpentine camps, faded black and white pictures of men and women who looked tired and worn down by their hard lives. Blacks and whites lived and worked side-by-side, united in their common misery. In one of them, a young white man sat astride a horse, holding a double-barreled shotgun and watching several workers loading a cask onto a horse drawn wagon. A coiled whip hung from his saddle horn. The man looked familiar, although there was no way John Lee could know him, since the picture had been taken so long ago.

"Do you have any idea who this fellow might be?"

Chester studied it and shook his head. "I have no idea. Obviously he's one of the overseers or woods riders. Those were the captains' underlings. Each camp would have three or four of them, depending on size."

John Lee looked at the photograph again. "Sure looks familiar to me for some reason."

"Well, unless you was reincarnated and lived back in those days, I don't see how you'd know him."

"I guess not," John Lee said, then had an idea. "Would you mind if I took up a picture of this with my phone?"

"Help yourself."

While John Lee took a picture of the old photograph, Chester opened up a closet and sorted through several boxes before coming back with an old map, which he opened up on top of the showcase.

"This map dates back to 1939," Chester told him as he carefully unfolded it.

The paper was brittle and the ink was faded, but he was able to point out to John Lee the locations of the six turpentine camps that had been operated by the Somerton Lumber Company. One was north of a line that was identified as Turpentine Road, and though there was no scale on the map, John Lee estimated that Chester's three mile guesstimate was pretty close to where the skeletons had been found. Another camp was a little further west, and the other four were scattered further away around the county.

"Can I take this with me, if I promise to bring it back?"

"I'd really hate to see something happen to it," Chester said. "It's one of the few maps we have of the county back in the old days."

"I understand that," John Lee said. "Listen, we've got a copy machine over at the sheriff's office, can I just take it long enough to make a copy? I promise I'll take really good care of it."

Chester thought about it for a moment and then nodded his head. "Sure, just bring it down to my house when you're done."

John Lee thanked him for his time and promised to be back in just a few minutes. Chester saw him out and locked the museum's door. He shook the deputy's hand and said, "My old lady's got the Alzheimer's and I don't like leaving her alone for too long, so I'm going to head back over to the house."

"You've been a great help to me," John Lee said. "I promise I'll make a copy of the map and get it back to you just as soon as I'm done."

The old man nodded and said, "Whatever was done to those three men out there was a terrible thing. You kinda hate to think things like that happened around here, but they did. I can't help but wonder how many other old bones are buried around this county."

Driving to the courthouse, John Lee wondered the same thing himself.

***

"It's too big to copy all in one piece," Sheila said, "but I can probably make like six copies of different parts of the map and tape them together for you. Will that work, John Lee?"

"Whatever you can do," he told her. "As light as some parts of it are, I'm not even sure how well it will copy."

"I can set the machine to copy it darker than it is," she said.

"Okay, do that if you would. Will that machine blow stuff up, too?"

"Oh yeah, up to four hundred percent."

John Lee showed her the area where the two camps were located closest to where the skeletons had been found and asked if she could give him a blow up of that area."

"You got it," Sheila said. "Give me about fifteen minutes."

While she was doing that John Lee went upstairs to update D.W. on what he had learned.

"Oh yeah, I remember hearin' about the turpentine camps," the sheriff said. "Way I heard it told, it was a good way to get the riffraff off the streets and put them to work."

"Sounds more like slave labor to me," John Lee said.

"Well now, neither you nor me was there, so don't go judgin' things just based on what one person told ya."

"Even riffraff doesn't deserve to be shot in the back of the head like that, D.W."

"I ain't sayin' that, John Lee. Hell, we don't even know if the men those bones belong to came from one of them camps. For all we know it could'a been anything. Bootleggers killin' each other, a family feud, it's hard to say."

"Or the Klan."

"Don't go pokin' sticks at a hornets' nest until you know more than you do now," D.W. warned.

"Wherever this goes D.W., I'm not going to just pretend it never happened."

"Don't expect you to. I'm just sayin' don't be talkin' 'bout things until you know. You know how it is around here, John Lee. There's a lot of good ol' boys 'round these parts that still hang onto the old ways. Just don't go steppin' on toes until we know they're the ones that need steppin' on is all I'm sayin'."

"I understand."

"Okay, get back at it. And keep me posted. I need somethin' to tell those news people."

"Will do," John Lee assured him.

He left the sheriff's office and was headed back downstairs when Chief Deputy Flag Newton accosted him on the wide marble steps. "What's this I hear about you being rude to poor old Miz Darnell?"

"Miz Darnell? I don't know who that is."

"Don't you try to bullshit me, boy! She said you called her and demanded her to come down to the museum and then you got lippy with her. I don't care if you
are
brown nosin' D.W., I won't stand for that!"

"Hazel? Is that who you're talking about?"

"You know damn well who I'm talkin' about! Hazel Darnell. Where do you get off actin' that way?"

"I wasn't rude to her at all," John Lee said. "If anybody was rude, it was her."

"Don't you be makin' excuses, I know what a smart ass you are."

Flag's right hand was swathed in a huge bandage, and he accented his words by thumping John Lee in the chest with it. The deputy was tempted to tell him that if he did it one more time, he was in for another trip to the emergency room, but instead he just said, "Have you ever considered that anal bleaching thing those movie stars are doing out in Hollywood, Fig? Because if an asshole ever needed to lighten up, it's you."

He turned and continued down the stairs, with Flag shouting after him, "There's gonna be a time when you don't have D.W.  to protect your ass. And when that day comes, I'm gonna be waitin', John Lee. Oh yeah, I'll be waitin'!"

***

Sheila had done an excellent job on the map, carefully taping six individual sheets together to make a full-size duplicate, and she had also made three separate copies at different magnification levels that zoomed in on the two turpentine camps and the site where the skeletons had been found. She had also been able to increase the contrast so that details showed better than they did on the original.

"That's perfect," John Lee told her. "Let me get this map back to the fellow at the museum. Thank you, Sheila."

"No problem." She leaned forward and rolled her eyes toward the door and said, "You watch yourself with Fig. He's really on the warpath. When old Mrs. Darnell came in here raisin' Cain, I tried to head her off at the pass but he was walking down the stairs and heard it and he was all over it right away."

"Don't fret over it," John Lee said. "He's just pissed off because he can't get his way about my old gun and that Charger, and because he made an ass out of himself and busted his hand in the process."

"I know, but even so, you just watch yourself, okay?"

"I will. I promise."

He left the dispatch office knowing that sooner or later he and Flag were going to have to settle things between them, and he knew when that day came, it wasn't going to be pretty.