CAPÍTULO III METODOLOGÍA
3.9 PROCESAMIENTO Y ANÁLISIS
I thank the Lord with all my heart for his goodness in granting me admission to this magnificent realm.
– John Muir, 1867, in a pine forest somewhere between Thomson and Augusta, Georgia1
The demise of the turpentine industry has brought near silence over the pine forests of the American South. Take, for instance, the expansive tract of natural- standing pines that surrounds the home of George Music, Jr. in Waycross, Georgia.
Timothy C. Prizer
Today, Music’s forest stands much as it would have before turpentiners ever ventured into this part of the pine belt. Apart from whispers of wind through the pine needles and the sounds of wildlife along the forest floor, the woods sit silent and empty, devoid of the labor that for so long clattered here. But like all seemingly empty pine forests, George Music’s remains a sensory wonderland, just as it would have been before it became an arena for work. Accept, first, that no one needs to be present – nor does even a tree need to fall – for the forest to make a sound. With or without human company, the woods hum a tune of nature’s choosing. As wind brushes through the woods, the wiregrass groundcover hisses softly, then more loudly as the wind picks up, then descends to the faintest of whispers, and repeats without ever ceasing entirely.2 It is much like Lawrence Earley describes it: “a low and constant tone like the surf crash of a distant sea” (1998:7). Overhead, the treetops reverberate as breezes rush through needles like breath through a woodwind instrument. No doubt, it is this combination of wood and wind in a pine forest that accounts not only for its gentle sounds but also its vivid sights and smells. Flashes of sunlight glint off of auburn pine straw and swaying pine needles. Shadows thrown long over the forest bed are offset by hazy beams of sunlight that shoot between widely scattered pines. Meanwhile, the wind carries fresh scents of pine sap and balsam. Just as the force of the wind determines the forest’s natural volume, it too controls the potency of the woods’ natural aroma.
By the 1880s, less than two decades after John Muir’s heavenly experience in a virgin forest of Georgia pines, turpentiners moved into these tranquil worlds and began tapping pine trees for gum resin. For the next century, the serenity of the woods blended with a bustling occupational culture based on the production of turpentine. The industry brought to life the already vibrant woods in a whole new way. Each morning, as the sun
broke darkness to dawn, echoes resounded through the woods, signaling the start of the day. First were the 4:30 am hollers of the “shack rouser,” whose job it was to ride on mule-drawn wagons – and later in pickup trucks – through the workers’ quarters shouting wakeup calls or sounding truck horns. At the sound, workers rose from their beds and emerged from their shanties – lunch buckets in hand – for the ride deep into the woods to begin chipping, dipping, and “tacking tin.” At dawn, with a coat of dew still draping the forest floor, workers arrived at their “hang-up ground,” where they hung their lunch pails from tree branches before locating the “drift” of trees to which they had been assigned (Wright 1979:100). Back at the camp, workers’ wives maintained small garden plots while their children locked hands and sang as they played traditional ring games in yards of dust and sand.
Nearly every task in woods work involved its own rhythm and produced its own distinct sound. The forests rang out from sunup to sundown as turpentine hands labored to meet their quotas. While workers affixed cups to the bases of pine trees, the woods echoed with the drumming of hammers driving nails through aluminum and into pine. A chorus of voices accompanied the percussion as workers shouted personalized calls and hollers to alert tallymen of their progress. The tallymen, usually on horseback, kept a running count of the number of faces each worker tacked throughout the day. When workers finished cupping a face, they hollered their nickname, their favorite number, the name of their female companion, or the name of their hometown, and tallymen scribbled a mark on the tallyboard beside the name of the corresponding worker. Raised within earshot of a turpentine camp, anthropologist Gay Goodman Wright recalls the “rough beauty” of the turpentiners’ “rhythmic chant” (1979:106). As debt often bound workers to the commissary, many of their calls drew on themes of mobility, travel, and life away from work. Wilburt Johnson shouted “Can I Go?” as he
moved from one tree to the next, while others hollered “Automobile!”, “Rail line!”, “Greyhound!”, or “Long gone!” Some chanted their own nicknames. Junior Taylor, for his part, hollered “Poor Boy!” or “Iron Man!” as he met his daily quota. The woods echoed with “Sweet Betty!” as one turpentine hand shouted the pet name of his female companion. Others chanted “Nahunta!,” “Race Pond!,” and “Hahira!” – the respective south Georgia towns in which they had been born on turpentine camps. Other rhythms echoed across the woods from the coopers’ shed, as skilled craftsmen hammered
together the staves of wooden barrels. Coopers often hammered in distinct, rapid-fire beats, and many accompanied the work with the singing of spirituals and the blues. Listening to the coopers’ music was a favorite pastime for camp children and adults alike (Butler 1998; Prizer 2004).
Joining the rhythm of work were the slashing sounds of hacks ripping into pine bark as turpentine hands chipped fresh streaks in the trees’ faces to keep the resin running. Once enough resin had trickled down the face to fill the aluminum cups with pine gum, workers emptied the cups by scraping out the gum – its consistency thick and color white, like paste – with metal dip irons or “dip wands.” They transferred the gum from the cups into larger dip buckets, scraping the wands along the bottom of the cups and wiping them clean along the rims of the buckets. With this, the coarse sound of metal-on-metal joined the clatter of work in the woods. When workers had emptied enough cups to fill a bucket, the gum was again transferred, this time from dip buckets to larger barrels, some of which held up to six hundred pounds of gum. When the barrels became full, workers loaded them on mule-drawn wagons in preparation for the trip to the still. Muleskinners shouted directives to the turpentine mules to guide the animals through the rough terrain of the woods to the fire still, their skillful commands joining
the chorus of sounds involved in turpentine labor.3 The turpentine woods, as C. J. Taylor recalled, “just sounded like a song, all day long” (2002).
At the still, the barrels were unloaded and the gum poured from them into the still’s copper kettle. With log fires heating the kettle from below, thick clouds of smoke billowed through the woods, carrying with them the clean, sweet scent of pine gum and fresh turpentine. People in town knew when the “boys over at the still” had produced a fresh batch of turpentine, for the smell drifted from the depth of the woods to downtown squares. Nighttime on the camp brought thumping beats and boisterous commotion from camp jook joints as workers unwound with alcohol, loud music, and gambling. As the last worker staggered home to bed from a night of jooking, quiet fell over the dark woods and the workers’ quarters, but only for a short time. Soon enough, the shack rouser would rise and harness up the mules, his piercing wakeup calls signaling a new day in the turpentine woods.
For nearly four centuries, naval stores forests in the American South pulsated with the sights, the smells, and the sounds of human labor in the turpentine industry. Today, though, the sounds of turpentiners’ hand tools have been replaced by the racket of mechanized timber industries and destructive industrial deforestation. Industrial pine forests today crack with the force of bulldozers, the buzz of chainsaws, and the clatter of rattling chains. Smells of turpentine and wood smoke no longer drift heavy in the cold air. Very few of the old fire stills are even left standing. Catfaced trees have
3 On the subject of mules, George Ellenberg notes in his book Mule South to Tractor South (2007) that mules involved in forest labor were often the largest and strongest of all the mules used in southern agriculture. According to Ellenberg, turpentine mules would have belonged to the broader category of “draft mules,” a class of animals more physically stalwart than mining mules, cotton mules, sugar mules, or farm mules. “Draft mules,” Ellenberg writes, “…ranged in height from 16 to 17½ hands and weighed between 1,200 and 1,600 pounds” (2007:7). The timber industries found the larger animals particularly well-suited for forest work in that they were most capable of hauling the several thousands of pounds of pine gum or timber over the dense terrain of the forest. Indeed, essentially every former turpentiner in my research agreed that the turpentine mule was, in the words of Gillis Carter, “the hardest worker in the dip woods, human or otherwise.” Milton Hopkins similarly reflects in his book In One Place that “Turpentine mules were real savvy about getting through the woods between close pines. Seems they were able to judge the distance better than a man and could clear two trees by a scant few inches on either side without benefit of a gee or a haw” (2001:118).
been sawed down, turned to paper, crumpled, and tossed into garbage cans. Those that do remain are few and far between. It is important to understand that once, not long ago, it was impossible to travel the roads of south Georgia without seeing at least a few catfaced trees, a roadside turpentine still, or workers’ quarters. Imagine what the landscape must have looked like when, at one time, few counties in the southern half of Georgia maintained less than 100,000 faces and several others kept over 500,000 catfaces in production (Thomas, Jr. 1976:F-6). These were everyday features of the landscape, ever-present to the point of invisibility for many local people in the region. In the relative absence of these scenes today, however, their occasional presence
has rendered them powerful symbols representing history and change. It is thus that workers’ concerted efforts to keep these scenes a part of the cultural landscape are also efforts to have people take notice – notice of the landscapes that they have helped shape and that, in turn, have shaped them; notice of their everyday surroundings; and notice of the histories that have defined their region. They are efforts, in the words of Paul Groth, to resist the tendency of local people to become “like fish who can’t see water” (1997:1). They are also attempts to represent past experience and communicate aspirations and anxieties for the future in the face of the change. Above all, they are profound acts of
memory intended to compel others to remember in equally meaningful ways.