The Saints of Swallow Hill

Turpentine has long been part of the history of the American South. According to Everhart, turpentine farms and camps became popular in the United States during the Colonial era, during which the navy made ships out of wood and used turpentine and tar to seal the ships (363). In the early 20th century, turpentine farming remained a successful and vital business in the United States, particularly in the South. People frequently used turpentine in household remedies, paint thinners, and wax.

Throughout the early half of the 20th century, labor camps promised work and stability for workers, especially for desperate working-class people during the Great Depression. These included turpentine camps, which were common in the South due to the region’s large forests of pine trees, the most common source of the sap used to make turpentine.

Though they promised hard work and opportunities for workers, these camps offered brutal working and living conditions for minimal pay under a system that strongly favored owners. In her Author’s Note, Everhart explains that she read Zora Neale Hurston’s observations of the turpentine camps in Florida in the work Mules and Men and learned the following:

[C]amps used a peonage system, ensuring workers were always at a financial disadvantage. Add in the woods riders (camp bosses specific to turpentine) and the forms of punishment to address issues, and many compared the camps to a form of slavery (366).

These practices appear in the novel, with the commissary owner, Otis Riddle, keeping track of the workers’ debts and taking delight in their inability to pay them. Del Reese mentions that all his men owe some debt to the camp and that it was a “vicious cycle” even his father could not escape despite his carefulness (180). Further, the hardest work—including “chipping,” which entails cutting chevron-shaped “catfaces” into the pine bark—was often delegated to Black men, with supervisory positions like woods riding reserved for white workers.

While Jim Ballard and Del Reese are examples of good woods riders who treat their men well, Crow is an example of a cruel, authoritarian woods rider who lords over his men and, at his whim, punishes them with sadistic glee. However, the isolation and beauty of the forests still gave turpentine camps an appeal for workers, according to Everhart (366).