Zora Neale Hurston's "Turpentine"

 Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “Turpentine” is a small wonder.

She went to a turpentine camp in Florida in 1939 when she was working for the Work Projects Administration. She was an anthropologist as well as a writer, and you can hear the voice of a turpentine worker singing on this 5-minute audio clip from the Florida Humanities Audio Archive:

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/fhc_audio/97/

She recorded workers in the field and wrote descriptions of how the crews went about their work.

The men specialized as chippers, pullers and dippers, and there was a woodchopper along to supply firewood for the still, where the gum from the pines was refined. Chippers notched the trees to let the gum run into pails or cans. The notches dried up after a couple of years, and pullers then notched the trees higher on the trunk. Dippers scraped the gum out of the pails and collected it for the still.

It was rough work, and turpentine camps were known as rough places. Hurston mentions that the men would unwind in a jook, or juke joint. She expanded on that theme in her fiction.

I’m interested in all this because turpentine camps were once all over the woods of East Texas. The camps were rough, and the men who worked them were poor. Few people thought to take note of what their life was like. Fewer still made a record of it. I’m glad Hurston did.

And, yes, this is another date on my list of heroes. Hurston was born on this day, Jan. 7, in 1891 in Notasulga, Ala. It’s west of Auburn and north of Tuskegee.