The Archivist kept a category for the accounting of the responsible.
It was a category of observation: people who, by position, role, or knowledge, held some part of the condition in their hands before the event and still held some part of the accounting after it.
The foreman on the south shore muck plain of Lake Okeechobee in September 1928 was such a figure.
* * *
He was not a single man.
The Analyst used foreman as a functional term, not a single name. On the south shore the foreman was the link between the labor system, the camp, the warning, and the count after the water went down.
The laborers who came from Georgia and Alabama and the Carolinas to pick beans and dig cane and haul produce in the Okeechobee muck did not come as individuals seeking independent employment. They came as gangs under foremen who had recruited them in their home communities, advanced them travel costs against future wages, and transported them to the south shore in the beds of trucks.
The foreman’s economic position depended on the labor completing the harvest season. The laborer’s economic position — the recovery of the advance, the accumulation of wages — depended on the same.
The storm arrived before the season ended.
* * *
The Analyst marked the foreman’s accountability in relation to the warning.
A foreman with a gang of forty laborers in a camp on the south shore muck plain on September 16th, 1928, held information that his laborers did not independently hold: he knew, or had access to knowing, that a hurricane warning had been issued. He could read the newspaper that was brought to the camp store. He could hear the radio that the camp store kept on its counter. He had a truck, which meant he had the means of departure.
His laborers, in the aggregate, had none of these things independently. They were in a place they had not chosen to be in, at a time determined by the harvest calendar, with their travel costs advanced against wages not yet earned, in housing provided by the operation, in a landscape they had arrived in weeks before.
The distance between what the foreman knew and what his laborers knew, and what he did with that distance, stayed open in the Analyst’s reading of the disaster.
* * *
Some foremen moved their gangs.
The Archivist held accounts of camps where foremen moved their gangs in time. Those camps survived in greater numbers because the person controlling the labor also chose to move it.
Some foremen did not move their gangs.
The reasons are not always recoverable. The harvest was not finished. The foreman was uncertain about the storm’s path. The foreman calculated that the levee would hold. The foreman had moved his gang once before for a storm that had not materialized and had lost the labor to men who had not moved their gangs and had completed the harvest while he had not. The economic logic of the decision not to evacuate was the same logic that structured all decisions in the labor system: the cost of departure was certain, the cost of staying was probabilistic, and probability had previously favored staying.
The storm removed the probability from the calculation.
* * *
The foreman the Archivist kept closest was the one whose count never closed.
A foreman is expected to know, at all times, how many men are in his gang. The requirement is practical: he pays the men, which means he must know who is present. The daily count is a management function, not a humanitarian one, but it means the foreman holds the names.
After the flood, the foreman who had kept his gang on the south shore began the count that every foreman in every damaged camp began: locating, accounting for, confirming the survival of each man he had brought from Georgia, from Alabama, from the Carolinas, from wherever the recruitment had reached.
The count did not close.
Some of his men were confirmed dead and their bodies recovered. Some were confirmed dead and their bodies were not recovered — carried into the Everglades by the water that had moved south and east from the lake, into the sawgrass and the sloughs, into the country that did not give back what it received.
Some of his men were neither confirmed dead nor confirmed alive.
The Archivist held this category separately: not confirmed dead, not confirmed alive, still absent from the count.
* * *
The foreman returned to Georgia with the men he could account for.
The Archivist kept another part of the entry as well. The foreman returned. Some of the men he had recruited did not. Their families inherited uncertainty instead of notice.
The families of the men who were neither found dead nor found alive waited for information that the information systems of 1928 were not designed to provide. There was no mechanism by which a Black laborer drowned in the Everglades in September 1928 would become a confirmed entry in a system that could be queried by his family in Georgia.
The foreman’s count remained open.
It remains open in the Record the Archivist carries.