by Brad Ricca
Pettek again tried to show his identification card. He tried to explain that he had been talking to a Sunny Side farmer who owned his own land and therefore couldn’t be accused of trespassing. None of it mattered to Owens, who wouldn’t even look at him.
“I’m acting under the specific instructions of my superior officer, the assistant attorney general of the United States,” Pettek said, with added emphasis.
Owens spat. “If the president of the United States comes down here on such an errand, we will put him in the chain gang, too!”
Tom and Shelby Wright gathered up some clerks to serve as a de facto jury. Pettek’s heart was beating fast. Owens judged Pettek guilty, on-the-spot, as someone who “rides, ranges, or hunts” across the properties of others. Owens sentenced Pettek to three months in the chain gang or a fine of one hundred dollars. Pettek couldn’t believe this was happening to him, but he knew these small-town justices had the power to do what they wanted. Pettek only had fifty dollars on him, but he knew that as soon as they took it, they would then charge him with vagrancy, which was very serious in Mississippi. Thinking fast, Pettek made a desperate gamble and asked if he could telegraph for the money.
For the first time, Owens looked thoughtful. After some deliberation, he allowed Pettek to telegraph for the money. Using the store machine, the sum was requested and finally sent. Pettek looked relieved. Owens said that the money should be wired directly to a justice of the peace named O’Bannon located in Greenville. This transaction was very strange, but Pettek was not in a position to ask questions. He knew that the company that owned the plantation, Crittenden & Co., had their offices in Greenville.
Once they were square, Owens let Pettek go, albeit a bit reluctantly, walking him back to the dock himself to make a show of it to the workers. When Pettek arrived back in New Orleans, he called the person who had wired him the money. He told her everything that happened and how they had to get back into Sunny Side. He had proof of nothing, but the plantation bosses obviously had something to hide. They were on the right track, Pettek said.
On the other end of the line, Grace agreed.
Grace knew that this investigation was going to be bigger than all the others. After all, she was at Sunny Side because the Italian ambassador to the United States had specifically requested her. Baron Edmondo Des Planches had been receiving strange letters from Italians living at the plantation. Concerned, Des Planches himself visited Sunny Side and was given a personal tour by the manager, LeRoy Percy. As they walked the green fields of the plantation, Percy showed the ambassador many profitable Italian farmers, most with large, smiling families. Afterward, Des Planches dined extravagantly at a restaurant called The Mirror—all at Percy’s expense. Des Planches seemed pleased and promised Percy that he would encourage Italians—as many as he could—to come work at Sunny Side.
But when Des Planches returned to Washington, he made an appointment to talk to Assistant Attorney General Russell. He was very much disturbed. “The Italian immigrant at Sunnyside is a human production machine,” Des Planches said. He wanted Mary Grace Quackenbos, whom he had read about in the papers, to investigate immediately. Once Grace was informed of her assignment, she wrote Percy for entrance but received no assurances. Now she was stuck in New Orleans. Grace had few leads, but they all pointed to Greenville. For one, that strange payment for Pettek’s release was wired there. There were also some employment agents who had offices there. In Greenville, up the river, she might get closer to the source of things.
On this trip, Grace was accompanied by Hannah Frank, her legal secretary, and Michele Berardinelli and Charles Pettek, classified as “special employees” of the U.S. government. Pettek, although understandably nervous, didn’t hesitate for a second. They set out for Greenville in July 1907.
Once Grace arrived, she set up her small band at the Cowan Hotel, a tasteful, four-story affair near the center of town. After unpacking her suitcase, Grace began to think of ways she might find leads into the shadowy plantation down the river. As Grace pondered her options, she saw a white envelope with her name on it. Of all the things she expected to read inside, a personal invitation from the man she had been writing to in vain for weeks was certainly not one of them. She looked down in disbelief at an invitation to a dinner that night in her honor hosted by LeRoy Percy and his wife.
Grace knew little of Percy himself other than that he was a man of money and land. She wondered how far back down the roll of American history that distinction went. The property filings she had pulled on Sunny Side showed that the plantation was owned by an O. B. Crittenden, though it was largely run by Percy, along with another partner named Morris Rosenstock, who handled the financial and legal part of the business. Crittenden and Percy were not the original owners of the land, nor the first to use Italians as workers there. The previous owner, Austin Corbin, contracted with Prince Ruspoli, the mayor of Rome, to use Italian workers. But this version of Sunny Side disintegrated when Corbin died in an accident and yellow fever and malaria decimated the workforce. Only the vampiric idea of using immigrants as plantation workers lingered long after the death of that other plantation.
Grace knew that Percy was fiercely dedicated to Sunny Side’s success. He took trips to Italy to recruit workers and to hire labor agents. Percy and his agents had already brought several thousand Italians to the Delta. Percy boasted about his workers in southern agricultural magazines. “The Italians,” he said, “were in every way superior to the Negro.… If the immigration of these people is encouraged, they will gradually take the place of the Negro without their being any such violent change as to paralyze for a generation the prosperity of the country.”
Grace heard shadows in those words that gave her pause. And now this man had invited her to supper, deep in the heart of his southern homeland.
Percy was handsome, certainly, but also had the trait of his fellow southerners. He was a charmer, a ladies’ man, and a man’s man all at once and in the proper amounts. At dinner, Percy behaved as Grace expected: he smiled, bowed, and acquiesced when the moment required it. His hair was parted down the middle and longer on the sides and back than was generally accepted in the North. He wore a three-piece, light-colored suit with rounded collars. He wore his fluffy mustache like it was some kind of battlefield medal. Percy smiled easily, but his eyes were hard to interpret. He was small, though he carried himself with a perfectly straight posture. He looked, Grace thought, in between a state of glad-handing and bragging, like he was always a little tired. Grace wondered if his demeanor was a result of the heat or a general melancholic disposition. Or just a good old southern bluff.
At the same time, Grace couldn’t help liking the man and, admittedly, some of his ideas. She found herself surprised by this. Opening American opportunity to immigrants was, on paper, an interesting solution to several problems. But Grace still needed to see it for herself to know if any wrongdoing was going on at Sunny Side. Luckily, Grace was capable of some charisma herself. The girl who once balked at going into a courtroom was now capable of directing an entire dinner table. She started an instant friendship with Percy’s wife, Camille Bourges, who was French. Grace even said aloud that she hoped that Camille would take her on a private tour of the, according to Percy, beautiful fields of Sunny Side.
The next day, Grace wrote Percy, saying that she was looking forward to her visit. When Percy politely declined, Grace chafed in frustration. Maybe the old costumes would be necessary after all. But Grace was still convinced that this case just required more finesse. She tried to get in touch with Humberto Pierini, a local Italian travel agent who, rumor had it, had his own problems with LeRoy Percy. Grace then tried a few more times with Percy, but to no avail. Remembering something Percy had said about the acting governor, Xenophon O. Pindall, Grace decided to write him. It was an election year, after all. The governor wrote back swiftly, granting Grace full access to Sunny Side.
A few days later, after a two-hour, somewhat shaky boat trip, Grace
saw the plantation with her own eyes. She saw the same cotton grass and wooden cabins of all shapes and sizes that her man Pettek had. Helped off the landing, she was met by Percy himself, who was very welcoming despite his coldness through the post. Excusing his rudeness, he seemed determined to show her how well his plantation was doing. He looked even smaller here, and he was perspiring a great amount, but he was also quite imperial while walking on his own ground. Percy explained that Sunny Side was actually four separate plantations, held together by a rail line that ran to a central gin facility. Percy plucked profit numbers out of the warm air like they were fruit and recited them to Grace with great satisfaction.
Percy and his men took Grace to a few homesteads over near the central store, a wooden plank building stacked high above the thin road. Grace eyed the store with a bit of nervousness after Pettek’s previous visit. Out in the fields, things were more horizontal. The cabins were sturdy, and the men and women were robust and smiling. This was nothing like what Pettek had described. Percy, like a proud papa, explained that these happy families were making heavy profits in cotton. They had scores of smiling children, running through the crop.
At the end of the day, Percy instructed his men to take Grace back to the boat landing. Stopping still, Grace instead insisted—politely—that she stay the night. She wanted to see more. When Percy squirmed about her request, she showed him her letter from the governor. Percy backed down in a huff and consulted with his men. He instructed one of the Wrights to give her an available cabin. Percy cautioned that it might not be to her liking, in which case they could easily transport her back to Greenville. With that, Percy said good night.
As Grace walked to her cabin, she saw the same lopsided huts that Pettek had told her about. She saw the tired men and women with sun-dark skin. She could hear that they spoke no English. When she got to her cabin, there were no screens on the windows or door. The Wright brother who had escorted her left, not even acknowledging her. She set out her notebooks. The mosquitoes came in and out as they wanted, as if they were part of the air itself. A bit later, someone brought her a metal bowl filled with water that was murky red. She knew it was only iron, but it looked a lot like blood, especially under the darkening sky. She was a long way from Fifth Avenue.
The next day, Grace woke up at five thirty in the morning to get a good look at the truth of the place, once and for all. When Grace stepped outside, all the tenement farmers were already in their fields, moving like wraiths in the stony-blue dawn. Above her, she could see faint stars.
That day, Grace realized that Sunny Side was, through and through, a real cotton plantation. Everyone she saw was working toward that purpose with abandon. Every family had their own cabin, worked their own land, and seemed to be the master of the cotton they sold. There was shared equipment for ginning on site, at the end of the rail line. There was a doctor on call from a nearby village and a priest who lived on the plantation. For the most part, these workers ignored her. They were so very busy. The fluffy flecks drifted in the air and gave everything a sweet smell.
After this first day of discovery, Grace was very impressed by Sunny Side. She knew she wasn’t entirely wanted there, but that was to be expected, she supposed. These plantation owners were rude men, airs aside. Still, she found Percy to be far more upright than she had guessed, though she imagined he was behaving well because of the injuries done to Pettek. She met Crittenden, the owner of the plantation, whose ancestry stretched back to the earliest settlers of the Old South. He was cordial but dismissive. Percy’s men took her to see even more successful families on the plantation. They smiled back through their black mustaches and shook her hand with vigor.
Later that afternoon, as Grace walked through the cotton, she passed a patch of high, unshorn stalks. She brushed by the brittle sleeves of green and wandered in farther. She caught a man’s eye watching her. She stopped and walked up to him. He seemed as if he wanted to say something.
Through her interpreter, Grace found out that the dark-haired man was named Pasquale Georgina and that he lived on fourteen and three-quarter acres with his wife, Maria. Pasquale led Grace to his simple cabin, which consisted of a single room and a shed in the back. When the back door to the shed opened, they saw his aged mother, stooped in a chair, the skin of her wrists like paper. In the main cabin, there was another chair pulled up to a nicked-up table. The bed was wet from the leaky roof. And in a corner of the room was a small box that looked as if it had been made of old boards. It was a cradle, Pasquale said. Maria, his wife, had recently given birth. They stood and stared at the jumble of wood, almost as if they were waiting for it to move. The child died, Pasquale said quietly. The baby starved, he said, even though Maria denied herself food in an attempt to save it.
Just like the first one, he said.
Pasquale explained that under the Sunny Side system, his family was allowed $15.00 a month by the company to buy food with. But after they were charged $7.00 for their mule and $6.00 for a barrel of flour, they were left with only $2.00—a month—for any food other than bread. They had to frog gig and fish—but who had the time? Even the growing of any other vegetables on their parcels of land for meals had to be approved by the Wrights. The company—not cotton—was king.
When Grace left that hot cabin, sickness rising in her chest, she wondered about these numbers. Their cotton crop looked healthy enough—why weren’t they making any money? She wrote down the few names and numbers that the farmer had told her. She was framing her case. But Grace needed more proof. She needed numbers she could point to and share. She had to see the books.
Grace had to return to New York to testify in another case, though she would only be gone for a couple of days. When she returned, she took a day in Greenville because she had finally heard back from the travel agent, Pierini, who agreed to meet with her. Pierini told her that he had worked at Sunny Side. They weren’t recruiting from New York City, he said.
They were taking people directly from Italy.
With his lawyer present, Humberto Pierini showed Grace everything he had. Pierini had ties to the plantation that ran deep. Not only did he use to run the store at Sunny Side, but his father, Allessandro, was one of the watchmen on Prince Ruspoli’s original estate. While at Sunny Side, Pierini amassed a European staff of twelve agents and a ship’s captain named Calenda. Their job was to recruit whole families from Italy to work the cotton. They would be paid up to twenty-five dollars a family.
Pierini told Grace that they found families in Italy not only with men on the ground but also with advertisements. Pierini showed Grace a flier. It read:
Italians!
If you have parents or friends to be called to America, do not lose this great opportunity to buy the tickets from me, which tickets you can have at a great reduction.
I can sell you tickets for the steamer
MANILLA!
Which starts from Italy in the month of August, for $45.30 with railroad fare paid to Greenville, Miss.; but I will give you two dollars commission for each full ticket.
As you well know I can sell you the tickets for any steamship company at lower prices and guarantee the protection of your passages
Yours truly.
Humberto Pierini
P.S. If you have not money to send passage fares to your parents, I have the possibility of making them come here, with the understanding that they will place themselves to where they are assigned; lands of the most fertile, and conditions the best.
With a nervous voice, Pierini told Grace that his agents targeted everyone from barbers to musicians, bricklayers to mechanics—all of whom were looking for a better life, income, or something in between. The agents offered these wide-eyed people free tickets to America, with the promise of work—and land—at the end of their journey across the sea. The Italians were often interested but would say they had no money for the ship’s passage. That is when Pierini’s company men would smile and say not to worry about it, that they would pay for it. T
he Italians were expected to pay them back, of course, but easily, over time, as they worked on the farm. Pierini’s agents even told prospective workers that the company’s wagon would stop at each house at daybreak and hang a large piece of fresh meat on the doorknob. It sounded like heaven to these poor families. At Il lato esposto al sole. At Ed Sunny Sidre. Sunny Side.
The only thing that the company asked, just as a favor, was that the new recruits not mention this agreement to the authorities at Ellis Island or the Port of New Orleans. The Italians bound for Sunny Side were asked not to mention that the Crittenden Company was paying for their Atlantic passage. The heads of the families were given exact language on what to tell the authorities. These instructions were put on a small piece of paper, written in Italian, that the men studied and learned by heart the whole voyage over. When they reached America, the men tossed these black words into the sea.
Grace wondered why Pierini was telling her this. Pierini sheepishly admitted that while he worked at Sunny Side, he had been acting as a subagent for some of the company’s employment agents, earning an extra buck or two off of each new recruit for himself. Pierini took two dollars off each steamship ticket sold. Crittenden then took one extra dollar for himself. It was a nice side job. But a worker at Sunny Side named Augusto Catalini was jealous of Pierini’s powers (and profit) and worked to oust him. So Pierini left and opened up shop on his own as an employment agent in Greenville.
Pierini admitted that he would sometimes see people in his office who had escaped from Sunny Side. When they asked for his help, he would secretly find them work elsewhere. Grace couldn’t tell if he did this because he felt guilty or because he wanted revenge on Percy. Pierini then showed Grace a letter from Percy dated March 1907 in which he accused Pierini of helping his escapees find work. Pierini also turned over prepaid ticket stubs, lists of families canvassed, and more letters from Percy. Looking through the letters, Grace knew this was very dangerous for Pierini. “I know that an unfriendly attitude on my part would be an injury to you,” wrote Percy, “and I don’t want to assume it without cause, but I will.”