FNP 51 Page 3 working the [trees] in the summertime. You're constantly pulling and chipping, and then when you're dipping, you're carrying that [heavy] bucket. You're down in that tie-tie and heavy overbrush. There is zero wind blowing, no wind. You got the sun bearing down from the top, and it's like cooking in an oven down there. So people that turpentined were an unusual breed. They were just turpentine folks. One of the things that I learned from way back, if it wasn't right, don't do it. My daddy stayed hellbent for leather all the time, and I guess maybe that's where I got my having more energy than control [life- style]. I remember one problem that we'd have was that with my daddy's big sawmill, we built a lot of houses. [I had to collect the rent anyway I could get it.] At that time, he was working over 300 blacks, probably about half that many whites, [that mostly lived in these houses], and they were just scattered all over. He called [his cross-tie territory] a triangle. It was from Sneed's Smokehouse in Jefferson County to the Okefenokee Swamp up in Georgia all the way down to Gum Swamp, I believe it was, down below Chiefland. One problem we would have is stealing [families], where the other turpentine woodsmen would come in and steal your help through the middle of the night, just load them up, because all of these people that [were] turpentiners would wind up getting heavy in debt. They were kind of a hand-to-mouth people. So, you would go to pick them up the next morning, and the house would be empty. [Once,] We hired a woodsman, before I took over the operation. He was the one that rode the woods and made sure everything ... kind of the boss, the labor boss. He pulled up to my mother and daddy's house about eleven o'clock one night and [said], come ride with me. I said, okay. So, I went out to get in his truck-he [drove] a big flatbed truck-and he [told me], bring your gun. So, I went back in and got my rabbit gun and started back out. He says, no, bring your pistol. I knew then [he] was having some problems, and this was not really unusual. I thought we was going to stake out one of our houses where he had found out somebody was coming, and we [were] going to wait on those people, which we did, and we [caught] them. It wasn't unusual when they backed the truck up to unload one of our houses; we'd just walk up there and shoot the tires out from the truck and send them walking. Then they would have to come get the truck the next morning, and that's when we'd have the law waiting on them to explain our law. So that's what I really thought we [were] going to do, when he started off and headed on up through Madison and headed towards Jasper. I asked him- his first name was Coby, I think-Coby, where are we headed? He said, just ride with me, we got something we got to go do. By then, I realized-and he had been with us probably six months-that he was going to steal a family. And I was telling him then, that's something that we absolutely just do not do. Now, we can buy a family-and that is when you go in; if this family wants to move and if they owe the crew chief or if they owe the man-and it was usually the man that owned the operation-if they owe him $400, $500, $600, then you would pay out their debt, and then you would load up their family. That was the right way to do it, but that was not usually the way it was done. So I was riding with him, and we went on up and went into Fargo, Georgia, that night. We must have gotten up there sometime around one o'clock because he kind of took his time going. He went down there in the quarters of a black section of town and turned in there and backed up to this house and got out. Just as soon as he backed up, these people started bringing