Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105i/Section 026/Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2020/Fall/105i/Section 026/Sam Jackson

Sam Jackson was a turpentine worker interviewed for the Federal Writers' Project by Lawrence Evans on September 21, 1938.

Family Life
Sam Jackson was a turpentine chopper born in 1915 in Stapleton, Alabama. His father had worked in turpentine for thirty years, and by the age of sixteen Jackson had joined him in his work. Jackson never once set foot in a school.

By the age of twenty-three, Jackson was married with two kids. His home was rudimentary at best. It was located in a turpentine camp eight miles from the nearest highway and sixteen miles from the nearest town. It consisted of unpainted pine and a metal tin roof. There were no rooms; instead, the house was divided by partitions. Jackson and his wife slept on a crude iron bed, and his two children used a quilt on the floor as their bed.

Work Life
Jackson’s salary and working conditions were pitiful. Jackson arose at dawn each morning to go out and tap trees for turpentine. In a good day of work, he could tap up to two thousand trees, but fifteen hundred was a more common amount. For every thousand trees Jackson chopped, he was paid eighty cents. Over the course of a week, Jackson usually could expect to make six dollars to support his entire family.

Every Saturday, the boss of the camp sent a truck to fill out grocery orders for the workers in the camp. The cost of Jackson’s groceries was taken out of his pay every two weeks. While sometimes Jackson had money left over after the cost of groceries was deducted, often he did not, and often his groceries did not last until the next Saturday, in which case he and his family went hungry.

Jackson never voted, nor knew anything about politics. Of voting, he said, “turpentine [expletive] ain’t got no business voting.”

Antebellum Turpentine Industry
Prior to the Civil War, turpentine was harvested largely in slave camps in the South. After cotton and rice, turpentine was one of the largest export products of the southern slave states. Slaves would be organized into camps and assigned various sections of trees. Once their sections were cleared, they would move on. While the end of slavery in the U.S. meant that slave labor could no longer be used to harvest turpentine, the industry continued to exploit black labor long after the end of the Civil War (Hughes 2004).

Peonage and Forced Labor
Although the Civil War and the 13th Amendment officially ended slavery in the United States, the southern states were unwilling to give up their way of life, and they often found ways to circumvent these limitations and exploit black laborers. Turpentine camps worked in close partnership with local officials to round up poor black workers and force them into debt through various underhanded methods (Jones 2009). Under one such method, “turpentine operators and others requiring laborers could recruit individuals, furnish them transportation to the work site, assess an advance charge for the service, and subsequently hold the worker until he paid the debt” (Shofner 1981). Even more nefariously, “in other cases, men were still picked up on vagrancy charges by local officials, fines were assessed, prospective employers paid the fines, and the individuals were suddenly peons obligated to work off the debt” (Shofner 1981). Often, these men were severely uneducated and quite destitute. They did not have the resources or the knowledge to combat this kind of exploitation, and as such, these tactics were often allowed to go utterly uncontested. When the federal government was able to intervene, they often found horrible accounts of life on these camps. In one such case, federal officials brought up the overseer of a turpentine camp on “charges of murder and peonage… the depositions paint a repelling picture of life at [the turpentine camps]” (Lauriault 1989).

The impact of these practices can hardly be overstated. Employers were able to exert almost unfettered control over the young black workers in their states. Numerous different codes and laws heavily restricted worker freedoms: “Enticement acts prevented employers from hiring workers away from other operators; emigrant-agent laws imposed fees on agents who tried to move workers between states; and vagrancy laws criminalized any failure of black workers ‘to sign and stick to labor contracts’” (Nash 2011). Because of these intense restrictions, workers did not have the power to negotiate or fight for better hours or pay. The average pay for most workers was eighty cents a day, and additionally, many camps paid in company scrip, meaning that the workers could only buy from company stores, contributing to the debt-peonage system (Nash 2011). Because of the cooperation between turpentine companies and local officials, black workers were kept oppressed and disenfranchised.