“I want to come home, Mama,” his letter said. Dated April, 1916, this poignant letter from my grandfather to his bride, and the mother of their infant son, was not from the battlefield of World War I.
It was from a battlefield of a very different sort.
By the time my grandfather was two years old, he had lost both of his parents. A kindly aunt took him in, but she had many children of her own to feed. At nine, my grandfather had to quit school to make his own way in the world.
Because he was tall, and older than he looked, he took up work in the lumber camps. How long he stayed I don’t really know.
Peonage labor. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, hundreds of poor men—both black and white—worked in the lumber camps of North Florida and South Alabama. Lumber barons wanted the old growth forests clear cut—the money was good, and the more quickly the massive pines and oaks—many the diameter of a good sized car—the more money poured in.
The work was hard, and the labor pool was scarce. The heavily populated centers of the country were northern rather than southern. Therefore, an incentive to keep the workers was necessary– the workers were kept in virtual slavery. Bonded to their bosses by the money they “owed” for food, clothing and board, most were unable to leave.
I don’t know the circumstances of my grandfather’s lumber camp. He never wanted to speak about it.
In Annie Laura’s Triumph, James (the character based on my grandfather) does not show up for his wedding week. Annie Laura hunts him down, and finds him in a peonage labor camps, a virtual slave. Her quest is to free him and bring him home so that the child that was taken from her at birth—James’s fiancée — might have a chance at a happily ever after. It’s all fiction, of course.
At least as far as I can tell.