Deep in
the vast pine forests the turpentine camps subjected thousands of blacks
to a more subtle violence, punctuated by beatings and killings, that
carried the technical name peonage, a system more plainly described
as forced labor. Although the state had outlawed convict leasing, another
legistlative act, in 1919, authorized turpentine operaters to hold nonconvict
workers for debt. Under this law an operator recruited black workers,
and the company provided them transportation to the work site, placing
them in debt for that service. The workers' annual bill for grits, pork,
calico, and shoes always added up to more than his wages. The system,
ensuring as it did that the blacks would never be out of debt, made
quitting almost impossible. 'You is born into the teppentine,' one worker
said, 'Ain't nothing you go into. Something you get out of.' White riders
wielding pistols and leather whips kept the blacks at constant work.
The squalid forced labor and the overseers' justice in these pine pitch
gulags would continue to stain the heart of Florida through the following
decade, and in Alachua County until as late as 1949. (Gannon Florida:A
Short History87-88)