While Grace did more digging, Percy had gone to Memphis for the largest convention of Mississippi River city officials ever held. Those present heard President Roosevelt belt out a speech about how the in-progress Panama Canal would lead to other ventures like hydroelectric dams and massive irrigation works here in the United States. “The whole future of the nation is directly at stake!” Teddy shouted to the packed hall of more than ten thousand people. The crowd cheered and cheered.
As Percy soaked in this vision of technology and progress, Grace snuck back into Sunny Side to spend another night with a tenant family. But a Wright brother spotted her and ordered her off the property. Grace refused to obey unless Percy himself told her to leave in writing. Before sunrise the next day, a young black man delivered her a note from Percy doing just that. Grace left Sunny Side—for the last time—but sent Percy a note accusing him of “untrustworthiness and ungentlemanly behavior.”
In her room, Grace pored over the lists of families living at Sunny Side. The official accounting showed 183 families at Sunny Side. But the priest’s lists, which he had slipped her, only showed 158. There were twenty-five families missing. These were the ones Grace was looking for. If she could find them, she might find evidence of peonage.
One by one, Grace began to collect stories of the escapees of Sunny Side. She began compiling a list of names for her report. One group of three paid a boatman to cross the levee at midnight. The small band hid themselves until morning and then crept up to the outskirts of Lake Village, Alabama, in the middle of the night. They wore little more than rags. The dazed men walked into the store. One plunked down ten lumps of monkey money; it was worth fifty cents. The other had a $6.00 small barrel of flour that he sold for $3.50. As they left the store, a man watched them. Crittenden had spies in all the outlying towns. The man contacted Tom Wright, who got on his horse and took off for Lake Village at once. Tom then got on a steam launch, reaching the three men just as they were ready to board a train.
Hearing this story, Grace knew that she was one second away from a federal case. If Tom pulled out a gun or a whip, she would have them. She would have them all. Forcing people to work was slavery. That would hold up.
But Tom Wright had real smart bosses. That, or he wasn’t as dumb as Grace had thought. Instead of hurting the fugitives or threatening them, Tom silently took every particle of their poor personal belongings that he could claim under their contracts. The fugitives were allowed to leave, but they were left with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
Grace heard story after story of smuggle attempts, railroad concealments, and late-night swims to escape the green island. The stories were all sadly the same. Then she heard the story of the Muzzi Brenno family. They, like many of their kin, had had enough of Sunny Side and decided to make a run for it in the warm night. But as they tried to make it across the peninsula, they were caught. The Wrights rode high on their horses and ran them down. They had shotguns at their side, but they didn’t raise them. The family pleaded for mercy, pointing to their quivering child, sick with fever. The Wrights then took all they had and made them stay in the field all night. Miraculously, the child didn’t die and the family made it to Alabama.
The Wrights were obviously smarter than Grace was giving them credit for. She knew they wouldn’t screw up Sunny Side. But maybe someone else might. With that thought in mind, Grace began to fish for stories involving Percy or, better yet, the one who stood to lose the most in all this: O. B. Crittenden himself.
Grace found a story of a family who made it all the way to the train. But this story was different. As the family waited on the train, Crittenden himself showed up on horseback, flashing his silver pistol. In every other story, the Wrights would take the escapees’ belongings or escort them back by choice. Not this time. In this story, Crittenden got on the train, with his gun, and shoved the people back into the night, back toward the weak light of Sunny Side.
Grace knew that while the Wrights were protecting their paychecks, Crittenden was protecting what he saw as his property. She only wished that Percy had been there, too, but beggars and all that. Grace located the witnesses and prepared the affidavits. On October 25, 1907, Grace sent a wire to Attorney General Bonaparte in Washington, happily informing him that “O. B. Crittenden arrested for peonage.” Crittenden, who was well known in the South for his success in the railroad concern, was vilified with the headline MILLIONAIRE HAS SLAVES ON FARM.
Local newspapers began to take notice of Grace’s work at Sunny Side. “Who Is She?” asked the Greenville Times. The paper called Grace “a lady lawyer who is stirring up the Italian immigrant question from center to circumference.”
She comes with a formidable retinue of employees.… She has already closed up one importing joint and has the planters of that vicinity worked up over the peonage question. In other words, she is just raising——, as is usual with a professional woman.
In the wake of Crittenden’s arrest, Percy barred Grace from ever visiting Sunny Side again. In addition, he sat down to write a strong letter to President Theodore Roosevelt himself.
Attorney General Bonaparte, who hated any sort of electrical transmission, called for a meeting with Grace. She thought that she was going to get fired. Instead, Bonaparte explained that he wanted her to come to work directly for him, as special assistant to the attorney general of the United States. Bonaparte wanted her to undertake a secret mission to break up the lumber trusts in Florida. She accepted and traveled to New Orleans. Her arrival marked the first time in the history of the U.S. government that a woman served in this capacity under a cabinet member. But she didn’t have much time to work.
By November 15, Grace was called back to Washington because the president wanted to hear from her firsthand about the details of her Sunny Side report. She sat down with him in his dark office, and he was much impressed. But the next day, Assistant Attorney General Russell called her in. He read the complaints from the telegram that Percy had sent to President Roosevelt. These were serious charges, Russell said. Grace listened without comment.
“I’ve kept quiet on this subject heretofore, but I’ll do it no longer,” Grace said to a reporter outside the attorney general’s office. She stopped. “Of course, when you arrest a man on a criminal charge, you would expect his joint owner to fight you, wouldn’t you,” she asked, her voice getting louder and higher.