P.S. If you have not money to send passage fares to your parents, I have the possibility of making them come here, with the understanding that they will place themselves to where they are assigned; lands of the most fertile, and conditions the best.
With a nervous voice, Pierini told Grace that his agents targeted everyone from barbers to musicians, bricklayers to mechanics—all of whom were looking for a better life, income, or something in between. The agents offered these wide-eyed people free tickets to America, with the promise of work—and land—at the end of their journey across the sea. The Italians were often interested but would say they had no money for the ship’s passage. That is when Pierini’s company men would smile and say not to worry about it, that they would pay for it. The Italians were expected to pay them back, of course, but easily, over time, as they worked on the farm. Pierini’s agents even told prospective workers that the company’s wagon would stop at each house at daybreak and hang a large piece of fresh meat on the doorknob. It sounded like heaven to these poor families. At Il lato esposto al sole. At Ed Sunny Sidre. Sunny Side.
The only thing that the company asked, just as a favor, was that the new recruits not mention this agreement to the authorities at Ellis Island or the Port of New Orleans. The Italians bound for Sunny Side were asked not to mention that the Crittenden Company was paying for their Atlantic passage. The heads of the families were given exact language on what to tell the authorities. These instructions were put on a small piece of paper, written in Italian, that the men studied and learned by heart the whole voyage over. When they reached America, the men tossed these black words into the sea.
Grace wondered why Pierini was telling her this. Pierini sheepishly admitted that while he worked at Sunny Side, he had been acting as a subagent for some of the company’s employment agents, earning an extra buck or two off of each new recruit for himself. Pierini took two dollars off each steamship ticket sold. Crittenden then took one extra dollar for himself. It was a nice side job. But a worker at Sunny Side named Augusto Catalini was jealous of Pierini’s powers (and profit) and worked to oust him. So Pierini left and opened up shop on his own as an employment agent in Greenville.
Pierini admitted that he would sometimes see people in his office who had escaped from Sunny Side. When they asked for his help, he would secretly find them work elsewhere. Grace couldn’t tell if he did this because he felt guilty or because he wanted revenge on Percy. Pierini then showed Grace a letter from Percy dated March 1907 in which he accused Pierini of helping his escapees find work. Pierini also turned over prepaid ticket stubs, lists of families canvassed, and more letters from Percy. Looking through the letters, Grace knew this was very dangerous for Pierini. “I know that an unfriendly attitude on my part would be an injury to you,” wrote Percy, “and I don’t want to assume it without cause, but I will.”
So this was revenge, thought Grace. They were all in on it. Every last one of them. Everyone but the people working in the cotton fields. Grace thanked Pierini and took the piles of paper to her hotel room, where she read them closely, well into the night. Through Pierini, Grace began to see a new version of Sunny Side. She began to see that lake, cool and inviting, as more of a moat for a prison.
When Grace returned to Sunny Side the next day, something had changed. As she got off the train, none of the tenants would look at her, and whenever she looked over her shoulder, she saw one of the Wrights somewhere in the cotton behind her. To make matters worse, Percy insisted that she leave the plantation at the end of each day. Grace resisted, but he would hear nothing of it, his will resolute behind his sugary smile. Since the boat took two hours each way, that trip alone took a full four hours away from her investigation every day.
At some point over the next few days, Grace was finally able to lose her escort and enter the company store at the part of the island that Percy had first shown her. The words painted on the outside were almost bleached white. A small bell rang over the door as she entered. Grace looked around at the clean counters and sharp concrete floors. The ceiling was whitewashed. There were fluffy white cotton towels on the back shelves. Hanging from hooks was everything from coffee and tobacco to fabrics and socks. There was even a lit glass case. It did not look like a makeshift courthouse; it looked like a rustic Wanamaker’s.
But Grace was shopping for something other than merchandise. Everything good here was behind the counter; everything else was just empty space. Grace had seen farmers come in and ask to look at their books. There was a big wooden riser on the counter that would hold the bound records of each family. They would be allowed to look, if they asked for it, but would almost always leave with a sad look on their faces. And anything she saw people buy wasn’t even with bills or coin, it was with “monkey money,” little round coins that were stamped “Sunny Side.” The plantation even had its own currency.
At the store, a man in straps and shirtsleeves stood behind the counter. He nodded and produced the book for Grace to look at. There was no one else in the room. Or maybe there was. All that mattered was that there, in the fine print of the ledgers, Grace finally read the secret history of Sunny Side. What Grace found was meticulous individual accounting of everything: cotton, machining, ginning, food, and even doctor and priest visits. Percy and Crittenden were charging their tenants for all of those things.