The elusive roots of rosin potatoes (2022)

Summary

• • •The Copelands’ experience working family land and trees represents the zenith of the industry for Black workers, who sold gum to central distilleries as supplemental income. But before Civil Rights legislation passed in the 1960s, the Jim Crow South held a significant number of Black turpentine workers in bondage through debt peonage, most often by forcing them to buy marked-up goods at camp commissaries. Though the practice was illegal at the federal level, Southern states enacted laws that forbade workers from leaving jobs while indebted to their bosses.The industry also leased convicts — a majority being Black men — from the state. Though it had been outlawed elsewhere, Georgia and Florida practiced convict leasing until 1908 and 1923, respectively. Though Prizer found relationships between some owners and Black workers were warm, respectful, and often nuanced, anyone poking through turpentine’s past will find, in abundance, brutality, kidnapping, coercion, paternalism, and searing racism.The more I poked and dug and read, I could not understand why a Black worker in the Jim Crow South would cook his lunch in rosin, a commodity product whose value was determined by its clarity. Were workers really dropping dirty potatoes into rosin that had been distilled and filtered through cotton batting and screens? It sounded like a punishable offense.• • •By this point, I had grown mighty suspicious — like, rosin-potatogate conspiracy theory suspicious. With no collective memory — written, recorded, or alive — of rosin potatoes in turpentine camps, I turned my attention away from workers and toward the industry, the bigwigs, moneymakers, and political influencers who might have something to gain from rosin potatoes. At the University of Florida’s Smathers Libraries, I hunched over volumes of Naval Stores Review, following two-plus decades of industry exploits. Published weekly from 1890 to 1953 (and later monthly and bimonthly), the Review provides a play-by-play of th...