Grace remembered that Percy had told her that they paid tenants an average of $34,000 last year. Subtracting that number from the company profit statements, Grace estimated that the company’s profit last year must have been $86,950. But in looking at the books, Grace quickly realized that Percy’s quote of $34,000 per family did not include expenses like rent, rentals of mules, ginning expenses, and the transportation, baling, and wrapping of cotton. Grace realized that all of these costs were coming out of the farmer’s pocket and going into the company’s. The problem was that the farmer’s pocket didn’t exist, or could never be deep enough. To top it off, the company charged a flat 10 percent interest on everything, including visits to the priest.
Grace finally understood the real horror of Sunny Side. It wasn’t physical coercion that had turned these families into slaves. It wasn’t chains or whips. It wasn’t the voodoo practiced in the dark swamps for luck or love or the loud religion of song that rose from the white churches on Sundays. It was simple economics. It wasn’t that Sunny Side farmers couldn’t escape chains, it was that they couldn’t escape their debts to Crittenden, to Percy, and to their own mortgaged lives. They had sold their souls to the company and were pushing rocks up a mountain only to fall back down again under the crushing weight of that never-ending 10 percent interest that bound them to the island. No matter what they did, most families would never get out of debt. Not only did Sunny Side have its own currency, it also had its own cemetery, located on a green hill with a crooked iron fence. No one was leaving Sunny Side.
But Grace knew that she had to, immediately. As she left the store and walked toward the train, she saw a little girl of about ten years peering at her through the brittle green stalks. The sad girl had yellowing skin, pale lips, and drying eyes. Grace stopped. She could see the girl’s bones at the corners of her body, poking out like sticks in a river.
When Grace got back to her room in Greenville, she started to write a letter to the attorney general of the United States of America, Charles Bonaparte.
“Something is radically wrong at Sunnyside,” she wrote to Washington.
Before she sent her letter to Bonaparte, Grace sat down with Percy and his wife to discuss her findings. Grace did not want to recommend that Sunny Side be disbanded; she could only imagine what something like that would do to its poor tenants. Instead, she thought that there were simple solutions that would make things better. To start, the workers wanted the free sale of cotton, kinder supervisors, and smaller doctor fees. Grace told Percy that she had heard that farmers who had asked for these changes, especially “those who told that lady,” would receive no advances and “could take the road.” Percy squirmed. Grace had no more use for airs. Over passed gravy boats and folded napkins, this was now a chess match between two accomplished lawyers. Percy knew that Grace had a report to file. At the same time, Grace knew she was dealing with a powerful man on his own fertile territory.
In her finished report, Grace called the Sunny Side experiment a complete failure. She pointed out that the Italians were tenants in name only, having signed contracts that were written in English, when they could neither read nor write. “Everything is all right,” the families were told by the company agents as they made their marks. “Everything is all right.”
Grace made it clear that at Sunny Side, hard labor was on one side of the equation, and heavy profit was on the other. With 158 families made up of 900 individuals, the plantation was paying very little yet reaping enormous profits. Though the company made money, it was, as Grace put it, “for the Italian a complete bankruptcy.” The company was only making money because they weren’t paying their workers; they were keeping them immobilized by debt. According to Grace, the enforcers of this system meant to imprison the immigrants were “men without education whose lives have undoubtedly been spent in driving Negroes.”
Grace did add that Percy had promised, at their most recent meeting, to make some real changes. The company had agreed to hire an Italian representative during the picking, ginning, and selling season to better protect the interests of the workers. It was a start, and Grace was glad to include it in her letter. But, overall, it was damning prose. Grace spilled the beans on everything she had: she told of Pierini; of the sad, lonely cabin; the 10 percent; even the girl with the yellow skin. Grace told Bonaparte that she had all of Pierini’s paperwork as evidence of a network of agents operating in Italy, the ports, and in Sunny Side itself. She even remarked on the haunting, beautiful Italian women at the camp and how there were “perhaps dangers far more grave … which should be investigated.” When Grace finally finished the letter, she signed her name in a flowing black script on September 28, 1907. Her last name, Quackenbos, was stopped with a period.
A few days later, Grace came back to her hotel after another day tracking down evidence. She took off her hat and undid her hair. As she sat down to add to her report, she was shocked by what she saw. Her desk was empty. All of her notes, including her interviews with potential witnesses and her invaluable records from Pierini, were gone. Grace moved through the room in a panic. She felt the empty space of the information in the room; it was gone. As a lawyer, she understood the grave danger here. Even though she had already sent the letter, this was the evidence itself and thus infinitely more important. The other side of her then became aware that someone had been in her rooms. She was furious with herself. Grace called her assistants. She knew who was behind this. Percy. But she also knew she could never prove it. He probably owned the hotel. Grace made some calls to Washington, but it was rapidly sinking in that there was nothing she could do.
A few days later, Thomas Catchings, the retired congressman from Mississippi, returned the stolen files to Grace, having valiantly “recovered” them from an unknown felon. The details were unequivocally vague. Catchings was a notorious associate of Percy. Grace knew the game. Percy seemed to be telling Grace that she could not touch him, no matter what her threats were. He also, very practically, wanted to know what she had, and though it was incriminating, there was no real evidence for what she had been sent to find evidence of: peonage. Now that Percy knew this, he could better plan his counterattack.
Peonage was a tricky thing to prove in this particular case. The Sunny Side contract was impossibly unfair, but it was still frustratingly legal. What Grace needed was proof that the owners were making people stay and work against their will. They already were, in a sense, but not in a way that could be legally seen as criminal. There were no whips and chains as in the turpentine camps. So Grace searched, as she always did, for more clues. For stories.