Mrs. Sherlock Holmes

by Brad Ricca

  So this was revenge, thought Grace. They were all in on it. Every last one of them. Everyone but the people working in the cotton fields. Grace thanked Pierini and took the piles of paper to her hotel room, where she read them closely, well into the night. Through Pierini, Grace began to see a new version of Sunny Side. She began to see that lake, cool and inviting, as more of a moat for a prison.

  When Grace returned to Sunny Side the next day, something had changed. As she got off the train, none of the tenants would look at her, and whenever she looked over her shoulder, she saw one of the Wrights somewhere in the cotton behind her. To make matters worse, Percy insisted that she leave the plantation at the end of each day. Grace resisted, but he would hear nothing of it, his will resolute behind his sugary smile. Since the boat took two hours each way, that trip alone took a full four hours away from her investigation every day.

  At some point over the next few days, Grace was finally able to lose her escort and enter the company store at the part of the island that Percy had first shown her. The words painted on the outside were almost bleached white. A small bell rang over the door as she entered. Grace looked around at the clean counters and sharp concrete floors. The ceiling was whitewashed. There were fluffy white cotton towels on the back shelves. Hanging from hooks was everything from coffee and tobacco to fabrics and socks. There was even a lit glass case. It did not look like a makeshift courthouse; it looked like a rustic Wanamaker’s.

  But Grace was shopping for something other than merchandise. Everything good here was behind the counter; everything else was just empty space. Grace had seen farmers come in and ask to look at their books. There was a big wooden riser on the counter that would hold the bound records of each family. They would be allowed to look, if they asked for it, but would almost always leave with a sad look on their faces. And anything she saw people buy wasn’t even with bills or coin, it was with “monkey money,” little round coins that were stamped “Sunny Side.” The plantation even had its own currency.

  At the store, a man in straps and shirtsleeves stood behind the counter. He nodded and produced the book for Grace to look at. There was no one else in the room. Or maybe there was. All that mattered was that there, in the fine print of the ledgers, Grace finally read the secret history of Sunny Side. What Grace found was meticulous individual accounting of everything: cotton, machining, ginning, food, and even doctor and priest visits. Percy and Crittenden were charging their tenants for all of those things.

  Grace remembered that Percy had told her that they paid tenants an average of $34,000 last year. Subtracting that number from the company profit statements, Grace estimated that the company’s profit last year must have been $86,950. But in looking at the books, Grace quickly realized that Percy’s quote of $34,000 per family did not include expenses like rent, rentals of mules, ginning expenses, and the transportation, baling, and wrapping of cotton. Grace realized that all of these costs were coming out of the farmer’s pocket and going into the company’s. The problem was that the farmer’s pocket didn’t exist, or could never be deep enough. To top it off, the company charged a flat 10 percent interest on everything, including visits to the priest.

  Grace finally understood the real horror of Sunny Side. It wasn’t physical coercion that had turned these families into slaves. It wasn’t chains or whips. It wasn’t the voodoo practiced in the dark swamps for luck or love or the loud religion of song that rose from the white churches on Sundays. It was simple economics. It wasn’t that Sunny Side farmers couldn’t escape chains, it was that they couldn’t escape their debts to Crittenden, to Percy, and to their own mortgaged lives. They had sold their souls to the company and were pushing rocks up a mountain only to fall back down again under the crushing weight of that never-ending 10 percent interest that bound them to the island. No matter what they did, most families would never get out of debt. Not only did Sunny Side have its own currency, it also had its own cemetery, located on a green hill with a crooked iron fence. No one was leaving Sunny Side.

  But Grace knew that she had to, immediately. As she left the store and walked toward the train, she saw a little girl of about ten years peering at her through the brittle green stalks. The sad girl had yellowing skin, pale lips, and drying eyes. Grace stopped. She could see the girl’s bones at the corners of her body, poking out like sticks in a river.

  When Grace got back to her room in Greenville, she started to write a letter to the attorney general of the United States of America, Charles Bonaparte.

  “Something is radically wrong at Sunnyside,” she wrote to Washington.

  Before she sent her letter to Bonaparte, Grace sat down with Percy and his wife to discuss her findings. Grace did not want to recommend that Sunny Side be disbanded; she could only imagine what something like that would do to its poor tenants. Instead, she thought that there were simple solutions that would make things better. To start, the workers wanted the free sale of cotton, kinder supervisors, and smaller doctor fees. Grace told Percy that she had heard that farmers who had asked for these changes, especially “those who told that lady,” would receive no advances and “could take the road.” Percy squirmed. Grace had no more use for airs. Over passed gravy boats and folded napkins, this was now a chess match between two accomplished lawyers. Percy knew that Grace had a report to file. At the same time, Grace knew she was dealing with a powerful man on his own fertile territory.

  In her finished report, Grace called the Sunny Side experiment a complete failure. She pointed out that the Italians were tenants in name only, having signed contracts that were written in English, when they could neither read nor write. “Everything is all right,” the families were told by the company agents as they made their marks. “Everything is all right.”

  Grace made it clear that at Sunny Side, hard labor was on one side of the equation, and heavy profit was on the other. With 158 families made up of 900 individuals, the plantation was paying very little yet reaping enormous profits. Though the company made money, it was, as Grace put it, “for the Italian a complete bankruptcy.” The company was only making money because they weren’t paying their workers; they were keeping them immobilized by debt. According to Grace, the enforcers of this system meant to imprison the immigrants were “men without education whose lives have undoubtedly been spent in driving Negroes.”

  Grace did add that Percy had promised, at their most recent meeting, to make some real changes. The company had agreed to hire an Italian representative during the picking, ginning, and selling season to better protect the interests of the workers. It was a start, and Grace was glad to include it in her letter. But, overall, it was damning prose. Grace spilled the beans on everything she had: she told of Pierini; of the sad, lonely cabin; the 10 percent; even the girl with the yellow skin. Grace told Bonaparte that she had all of Pierini’s paperwork as evidence of a network of agents operating in Italy, the ports, and in Sunny Side itself. She even remarked on the haunting, beautiful Italian women at the camp and how there were “perhaps dangers far more grave … which should be investigated.” When Grace finally finished the letter, she signed her name in a flowing black script on September 28, 1907. Her last name, Quackenbos, was stopped with a period.

  A few days later, Grace came back to her hotel after another day tracking down evidence. She took off her hat and undid her hair. As she sat down to add to her report, she was shocked by what she saw. Her desk was empty. All of her notes, including her interviews with potential witnesses and her invaluable records from Pierini, were gone. Grace moved through the room in a panic. She felt the empty space of the information in the room; it was gone. As a lawyer, she understood the grave danger here. Even though she had already sent the letter, this was the evidence itself and thus infinitely more important. The other side of her then became aware that someone had been in her rooms. She was furious with herself. Grace called her assistants. She knew who was behind this. Percy. But she also knew she could never prove it. He probably owned the h
otel. Grace made some calls to Washington, but it was rapidly sinking in that there was nothing she could do.

  A few days later, Thomas Catchings, the retired congressman from Mississippi, returned the stolen files to Grace, having valiantly “recovered” them from an unknown felon. The details were unequivocally vague. Catchings was a notorious associate of Percy. Grace knew the game. Percy seemed to be telling Grace that she could not touch him, no matter what her threats were. He also, very practically, wanted to know what she had, and though it was incriminating, there was no real evidence for what she had been sent to find evidence of: peonage. Now that Percy knew this, he could better plan his counterattack.

  Peonage was a tricky thing to prove in this particular case. The Sunny Side contract was impossibly unfair, but it was still frustratingly legal. What Grace needed was proof that the owners were making people stay and work against their will. They already were, in a sense, but not in a way that could be legally seen as criminal. There were no whips and chains as in the turpentine camps. So Grace searched, as she always did, for more clues. For stories.

  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.

  Behind closed doors, Bonaparte recommended at a cabinet meeting to cut Grace loose. Roosevelt listened behind his small, round glasses and said no. They should send her to testify in Florida on another case, the president insisted. On November 20, 1907, the attorney general announced that all the charges levied against Grace had been disproved and dismissed.

  At his desk in the White House, Teddy Roosevelt read Percy’s telegram again and weighed it against the scathing report he had read from Grace about the plantation. In his letter, Percy defen
ded the dream of Sunny Side. He wanted Grace recalled from the South because of her meddling, which was interfering with his workers. Percy also had some strong wishes for the fate of her massive report. “I have no desire whatever to have her report suppressed,” Percy wrote to Roosevelt. “I only ask that no publication be made of it and no action taken under it until it has been verified.” Roosevelt was impressed by Grace’s investigation into the various sins of Sunny Side, but he was also worried about her methods. Still, the president knew that enslavement of a race—of any form—could not be tolerated in the United States. Even in Arkansas.

  But then President Roosevelt remembered the time, many years earlier, when he had gone bear hunting in the Delta woods. There, in the deep woods, Teddy had hit it off with a young, enterprising businessman whose name was staring up at him from a letter on his desk. His old friend, LeRoy Percy.

  Roosevelt sent another friend, the historian Albert Bushnell Hart, to objectively investigate Sunny Side. After he read Hart’s report, Roosevelt wrote back to him:

  I have been very uneasy about Mrs. Quackenbos. She comes in the large class of people who to a genuine desire to eradicate wrong add an unsoundness of judgment which is both hysterical and sentimental.… The fact is that on those southern plantations we are faced with a condition of things that is very puzzling. Infamous outrages are perpetrated—outrages that would warrant radical action if they took place in Oyster Bay or Cambridge; but where they actually do occur, the surroundings, the habits of life, the sentiments of the people, are so absolutely different that we are in reality living in a different age, and we simply have to take this into account in endeavoring to enforce laws which can not be enforced save by juries.… It is like trying to enforce a prohibition law in New York City.