“At the end of one week,” Bennie said, “I was informed that I had earned $6.30, but I owed the company $7 for food. I knew this was false, but what could I do?” Bennie explained that if they stopped to rest, they were beaten on their bare backs with switches. He told of a kid named Jake Leonard from Essex Street who dropped right into the swamp from exhaustion. Wilenski grabbed some water and threw it on his face. The bosses beat both of them. No water was given to the men unless they paid for it.
“The men were always trying to escape at night,” Bennie said. “We would open the only window at the back of the house and let them out. Sam Fink got away to the woods three times, but they always got him back. I hear they have put him in prison now, because down in Florida, if you owe money to a corporation and try to run away you are a criminal.”
Bennie continued his story. After working for ten days, he received a $30 money order that somehow found its way to him from his wife in New York. The foreman intercepted it but let Bennie keep $10 of it because he felt bad about the water incident. But $10 was enough for Bennie to discharge himself. He paid his fee, then made his way through the swamp to Jacksonville and then borrowed more money from a Jewish Relief Society to get back home. By the time he had reached the city, he was a nervous and physical ruin. He was being seen by Dr. J. Schlansky for injuries to his back.
Grace sent some men to snoop around the S. S. Schwartz Agency, and they found a lot of activity and willing men waiting in line. Meanwhile, Grace persuaded Bennie to testify, and they got Schwartz arrested. The agent claimed that he knew nothing of the actual conditions at the turpentine camp, which was run by the Hodges, O’Hara & Russell Company. Schwartz also pointed a finger at a man named J. Francis de Lauzieres from something called the Southern Agricultural Colonization Society.
When Schwartz was finally arraigned, it was on a charge of peonage—forced human slavery through debt—in violation of section 5535 of the Revised Statutes. As the U.S. government prepared its case, Grace found several other men to corroborate Bennie’s story. One such man was Edward Schoch, who worked at Buffalo Bluff and was paid ten cents for a fortnight’s worth of work. He returned with a severe case of ague. As Grace was taking down his affidavit, Edward’s face started burning up, and he had to be taken to the hospital.
After collecting more bits and pieces of information, Grace tracked down J. Francis, the Sunday school teacher at the Italian Episcopal Church of San Salvatore on Elizabeth Street. Schwartz had initially revealed Francis as one of the plan’s masterminds. Francis said he knew nothing about the company except what he had been told by B. F. Buck, leader of the Italian-American Agricultural Society. So many societies, Grace thought. All of these people looking for ways to join together. Francis told her that Buck earned two dollars a head for recruiting workers for the camps. Francis also said, in a whisper, that Buck had the backing of Bishop Bonaventure F. Broderick, who was listed as the treasurer of the group. They had Schwartz, but Grace knew that he was only one tentacle of a larger creature, an “atrocious, bloodthirsty system.” Grace needed to see it for herself. She needed to go to Florida.
Grace found an investor for her trip south to explore the conditions at the work camps. The S. S. McClure Company, the publisher of McClure’s magazine, was the place for good, solid muckraking. They agreed to pay three hundred dollars for Grace’s travel expenses. All Grace had to do was write about what she found. Grace smiled and agreed. This wasn’t what she normally did, of course, but it would serve her purposes. No one could talk her out of it.
Before Grace left New York, she worked up an itinerary of the places she planned to investigate, just in case she disappeared while undercover. She took the list to her sister Jessie, who lived with her family at 9 Park Avenue. Jessie, who was fashionable and had a personality full of laughter, had married a businessman and lived the life of a New York society woman. The sisters were close, but obviously different. Jessie respected her sister’s intelligence and passion for justice and helped her whenever she could. So, though she shook her head, Jessie smiled, list in hand, and told Grace that she would pray for her.
For her trip, Grace finally decided it might be time to ditch her black attire. So she paid a visit to her friend Martha Bensley Bruere to borrow a coat. Martha was entertaining her society friends, as usual, but immediately fetched a blue silk coat for her friend. Grace still wore a black hat, of course, but she borrowed one that was trimmed with a gorgeous flower instead of her traditional veils. As Martha piled clothes onto Grace’s arms, she asked her what she was going south for. “Professional business,” responded Grace.
“Oh, detective work!” Martha said. She was a society lady herself, unlike Grace, and was also a writer of some renown. Grace didn’t know if Martha wanted more information for her gossip circle or details for a story. Not that there was a difference anymore. Grace responded in a vague, but truthful way. “Some very strange stories,” Grace said. “I can’t get the facts from this distance; so I’ve got to go.”
Once Grace left Martha’s apartment, her friend remarked, reaching for more tea and cookies, that such an adventure was “so like her—to feel that the wrongs of anyone within her country’s gates were her concern: to treat the whole Unites States as though it was just a household and she a careful housewife dispensing domestic justice!” Martha also dispelled the notion that Grace’s recent divorce had anything to do with her leaving the city.
Grace traveled through the South for seven weeks in the fall of 1906, leaving New York on a train at 12:25 and settling in for a trip that would get her into Florida by 12:10 the next day. They served chicken, roast turkey, and chicory salad on the train. Fruit, toasted crackers, and coffee were also offered in slightly shaky containers. Once Grace arrived on steady ground under the palm trees, she disappeared.
Grace made her way through Florida, Mississippi, and Arkansas by hiding in wagons or disguising herself as an old woman selling scissors. Some of the workers even reported a shabby-looking man in a hat hanging around some of the turpentine camps, sometimes taking notes in a book. Sometimes, she used her maiden name of Winterton to throw off any possible discovery. She watched from the forest, hidden, as men hacked into the tall loblolly pines with their hatchets. They fixed tin pots with curved rims onto the bare trees and cut notches on the side so that the sap seeped slowly down into the pail. A week or so later, the men lugged the full, heavy pots out to the angled still that smelled like licorice.