The History of Florida (80 page)

of the industry’s workers were black. Florida nature in yet another way be-

spoke economic potential, and the drudgery of subduing it fel il -fatedly

to the dispossessed. Remarkably, the cotton field as workplace was prefer-

able to the industrialized pine forest. Researchers have found that southern

blacks who spent peaceful lives in coniferous woods developed a special

attachment to the forest and an acute lay knowledge of its ecology—the

wildlife and wiregrass and the lightning that struck the columnar trees and

ignited fires integral to healthy regeneration. But timber and turpentine

camps cast a different glow on the woods. Too few men sought employment

in the camps, where the work was toilsome and dangerous, and where one

was perpetual y at risk of involuntary internment. The industry relied on

state and county penal institutions for labor, meaning their woodsy work-

places were veritable convict camps, nearly all black and corporeal y bru-

tal. The infamy of Florida’s camps earned them the collective branding, the

“American Siberia.”

The state’s convict-lease system lay at the intersection of environmental

justice, where culture, economy, and nature formed the crossroads. When

the ground was moist and the trees quenched, the gum ran strong. Un-

shackled after a short night’s rest, turpentine crewmembers labored from

proof

sunup to sundown, exposed to heat, poisonous snakes, wild boars, and

mosquitoes—vectors of malaria and yel ow fever—day after life-threatening

day. Workers went from tree to tree, hacking chevron-shaped streaks in

the trunks for draining the gum. Hurston called the tel tale hack marks the

“10,000 faces of the piney woods,” the trees’ equivalent to the tormented

countenances of the oppressed workers. Tapping did not bring the trees

instant death. They lived ten years on average; a relative few survived into

the twenty-first century. The mortality rate of the workers was little better,

several times that of the state’s already high rate for black males and per-

haps twice that of the general prison population. “The onliest way out is to

die out,” a turpentine worker told Florida folklorist Stetson Kennedy in the

late 1930s. Those who managed to survive were, like the turpentine tree,

scarred for life. Whippings, maiming, and torture were routine. Research-

ers have accessed an incriminating paper trail of abuse, and in a state and

of an industry that apparently felt no compulsion to cover the trail. Those

who executed the brutality did so with a sense of security that their behavior

was countenanced by the law and moral code of white society. Eventual y,

the nation awakened to the realities of the system. A spate of bad public-

ity exposed the inhumanity at a time when Florida was promoting itself as

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 383

a natural paradise and tourist destination and hawking its real-estate as a

good investment. Local and state officials were forced to reconsider their

convict-for-hire practices. In 1919, Florida ended convict-leasing in the state

penal system. It continued at the county level until the legislature ended it

altogether in 1924 (too many county sheriffs were accepting kickbacks from

the turpentine industry).29

For those who tapped the trees, the rural life was not the good life. Cas-

sandra Y. Johnson and Josh McDaniel, students of the “turpentine Negro,”

argue that a long history of economic, political, and social disfranchise-

ment segregated the black experience from a quality life on the land. “It

is difficult,” observes Florida nature lover Doug Alderson, “to contrast the

lives of turpentiners with the peace of the piney woods.” At the thought of

wilderness, many blacks called up memories or stories of mistreatment and

oppressed labor, a “context of exploitation” and horror, rather than tran-

quility and solitude. Memories could be potent and dark: fugitives escap-

ing through the woods from the slave quarters, baying hounds chasing the

wrongly accused through the swamp or pine barren, the stout bough of

an oak tree employed for the noose strung by the lynch mob. Oppression

in the wilderness reinforced the draw to the city, confounded by its own

tragic history of racism. The social memory of the camps and the history of

proof

woodland abuse, according to researchers, contributed to a general aversion

to outdoor recreation and conservation. For their part, champions of the

predominantly white middle-class environmental movement failed to ac-

count for the wild outdoors filtering through the differing lenses of cultural

experience. Nature that was acceptable to one group was unacceptable to

another.30

As with the social consequences, the environmental consequences of the

turpentine industry were lasting. When a tree could no longer produce, the

sawyer came in to cut it. Relieved of its gum, the tree more surely floated

downriver to sawmil . Once the longleafs were gone, the slash and loblol y

pines that grew in their place, natural y and through planned propagation,

were a poor substitute in stoutness but useful nevertheless. The substitutes

were faster growing, bearing a softer wood that was the key element of the

pulp and paper industry, which by the 1930s had begun spoiling the sky and

water with noxious, foul-smelling toxins—sulfuric acid, ammonia, hydro-

chloric acid, methanol, and dioxins. It was a blight that persisted, along with

massive consumptions of water drawn from the aquifer, into the twenty-first

century.

Witness to this fate, Leo Lovel wrote at the beginning of that century,

384 · Jack E. Davis

“Mother Nature is the ultimate provider for all of our lives.” For thousands

of years, nature provided for the multiple cultures that occupied Florida. It

gave food for the table, tranquility for the spirit, scenery for the artist and

writer, health for the sickly, timber and thatch for shelter, transportation

for goods and people, a way of life for a countless many, and recreation for

al . Representatives of Western societies arrived in the sixteenth century

with an appreciation for Florida’s natural endowments. But they also carried

a strong belief in their supremacy over all other cultures and things. One

of the weaknesses of indigenous cultures, from the Western point of view,

was their deep affiliation with other living systems. Westerners, by turn,

expressed little or no humility toward nature. As they sought to possess and

control other peoples, they sought to possess and control the nonhuman

world. Rather than reconciling the natural world as beneficent ecosystem,

Floridians continual y summoned new genius to exploit its endowments,

sometimes to their end, and to impose upon nature an unnatural regime.

Like beauty that attracts the vil ain determined to destroy beauty, nature’s

al ure in Florida was in the end nature’s undoing. Long ago, Florida natu-

ralist Charles Torrey Simpson lamented, “The only attraction belonging to

the state that we do not ruin is the climate, and if it were possible to can

and export it we would do so until Florida would be as bleak and desolate

proof

as Labrador.” He was wrong in the first instance, of course. Floridians had

already begun to change the climate.31

Humankind’s damage to Florida’s environment is a story historians of

Florida have begun to tell with insight, detail, and objective passion.32 As

they continue in their service, they might avoid the oversight of those about

whom they write. They might pay closer attention to nature’s powerful

narrative.

Notes

1. Harriet Beecher Stowe,
Palmetto
Leaves
(Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873), 138.

2. Marjory Stoneman Douglas,
Florida:
The
Long
Frontier
(New York: Harper and Row,

1967), 21.

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Journals
of
Ralph
Waldo
Emerson:
With
Annotations
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 1:23.

4. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, John Ingram Lockhart trans.,
The
Memoirs
of
Bernal
Diaz
del
Castil o
(London: J. Hatchard Lockhart, 1844), 1:14.

5. Carl Ortwin Sauer,
Sixteenth-Century
North
America:
The
Land
and
the
Peoples
as
Seen
by
the
Europeans
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 29.

6. Douglas,
Florida
, 142–43; John Viele,
The
Florida
Keys:
The
Wreckers
(Sarasota, Fla.: Pineapple Press, 2001), vi, 54–55; Sauer,
Sixteenth-Century
North
America
, 191.

Florida by Nature: A Survey of Extrahuman Historical Agency · 385

7. Jay Barnes,
Florida’s
Hurricane
History
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 1998), 1–4.

8. Charles Arnade, “Tristan de Luna and Ochuse, 1559,”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
37

(January–April 1959):208–20.

9. The 100-year storm surge refers to the magnitude of a storm surge expected to be

equaled or exceeded every 100 years, or that has a 1 percent chance of being exceeded in

a given year.

10. Gary R. Mormino,
Land
of
Sunshine,
State
of
Dreams:
The
Social
History
of
Modern
Florida
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 301, 303.

11. In 2002, the production of sod grass and horticultural products, nonfood com-

modities official y defined as agriculture, surpassed oranges as the state’s top agricultural

commodity.

12. Stowe, 18.

13. Mark Derr,
Some
Kind
of
Paradise:
A
Chronicle
of
Man
and
the
Land
in
Florida
(New York: William Morrow, 1989), 40; Christopher Warren, “‘Nature’s Navel’: An Overview of

the Many Environmental Histories of Florida Citrus,” in
Paradise
Lost?
The
Environmen-

tal
History
of
Florida
, ed. Jack E. Davis and Raymond Arsenault (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005), 185; Cynthia Barnett, “Does Big Citrus Have a Future in Florida?”

Florida
Trend
46 (March 2003):46–51.

14. Douglas,
Florida
, 135; James W. Covington ed., “The Florida Seminoles in 1847,”

Tequesta
24 (1964):140.

15. George A. McCal ,
Letters
from
the
Frontiers
(Bedford, Mass.: Applewood, 1868),

295; Wil iam D. Hoyt Jr. and James B. Dal am, “A Soldier’s View of the Seminole War, 1838–

39,”
Florida
Historical
Quarterly
25 (April 1947):359; Fort Myers
News
Press
, April 18, 2011.

proof

16. Leo Lovel,
Spring
Creek
Chronicles
II:
More
Stories
of
Commercial
Fishin’,
Huntin’,
Workin’,
and
People
along
the
Gulf
Coast
(Tal ahassee: privately published by Leo Lovel, 2004), 88–89.

17. Henry James,
The
American
Scene
(New York: Harper and Bros., 1907), 417, 419.

18. Lanier,
Florida
, 20; Edward King,
The
Great
South:
A
Record
of
Journeys
in
Louisiana,
Texas,
Missouri,
Arkansas,
Mississippi,
Alabama,
Georgia,
Florida,
South
Carolina,
North
Carolina,
Kentucky,
Tennessee,
Virginia,
West
Virginia,
and
Maryland
(American Publishing Company, 1875), 408.

19.
Tal ahassee
Democrat
, April 27, 2003.

20. Coppertone, developed by a pharmacist in 1944, was original y intended as a sun-

screen to protect servicemen, but it marketed its commercial product primarily as a tan-

ning enhancer.

21. Ben Green,
Finest
Kind:
A
Celebration
of
a
Florida
Fishing
Vil age
(Cocoa, Fla.: Florida Historical Society, 2007), 33, 47; Mike Davis, interview by the author, October 28, 2011.

22. Leo Lovel,
Spring
Creek
Chronicles:
Stories of Commercial Fishin’, Huntin’, Workin’,

and
People
along
the
North
Florida
Gulf
Coast
(Tal ahassee: privately published by Leo Lovel, 2000), 17, 18.

23. “Ten Fathoms Down in the Gulf,”
Florida
Highways
10 (March 1942):14.

24. John Muir,
A
Thousand-Mile
Walk
to
the
Gulf
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 138–39.