Baker County is the rural South Georgia setting that underlies Charlie Croker’s cultivated image of himself as a country-born man and repeatedly unsettles that image with the region’s harder histories. It is at once the place of his childhood, the site of Turpmtine, and a landscape whose plantations, industrial labor, racial violence, and summer insects resist being reduced to nostalgic scenery. When Croker returns there in old age, the county is not simply a refuge: it is beautiful, historically charged, and physically difficult to cross.

Rural Setting and Historical Memory

Baker County is presented as so rural that Newton was the only town large enough to appear on the Esso road map. In Croker’s childhood, poor white residents had few places to work beyond plantations and the pulp mill. This restricted local economy is central to the county’s significance: the country life Croker later evokes was not only hunting, horses, and pine woods, but also labor shaped by the landowners and industries that controlled what work was available.

The county also carries the memory of racial violence. Peepgass recalls that one of the early major civil-rights protests of the 1960s began there after Sheriff Gator Johnson shot Ware, a Black man who had made a pass at the Black mistress of a white plantation overseer. The episode connects Baker County’s plantation economy to the racial hierarchy that persisted beyond it. The county’s rural isolation does not place it outside the conflicts of the wider South; it becomes the ground on which those conflicts are exposed.

Croker’s Childhood and the Labor Landscape

Croker’s memories of Baker County begin not with the grandeur of Turpmtine but with his parents’ precarious work. His father worked at Ichaway, the plantation owned by Robert Woodruff, as well as at Turpmtine and other places, before going to the pulp mill. He lost the index finger of his right hand there. Croker remembers visiting the mill as an encounter with workers who had lost fingers and eyes, and he regards it as the worst job in Georgia.

That memory gives his later comparisons a pointed edge. He thinks of the modern warehouse of Croker Global Foods, where unionized Teamsters earn twelve or fourteen dollars an hour and forklifts handle heavy lifting, as a country club beside the dangerous work his father endured. The comparison makes Baker County more than biographical background: it is the measure Croker uses to judge labor, hardship, and what counts as a difficult life. His recollection of the pulp mill also returns when he feels insulted by a younger man’s remark about losing fingers in war. His father’s injury and his own combat service become intertwined in the anger he restrains rather than voices.

Turpmtine and the Plantation Inheritance

Turpmtine occupies 29,000 acres in Baker County. During the creditor meeting, Croker explains that it has operated since the 1830s. For its first fifty or sixty years, turpentine was its only crop; the workers’ pronunciation of the word gave the place its name. Croker says that descendants of those workers still work there. The account makes the estate’s history audible in its name while underscoring how much of that history is bound to plantation labor.

Croker describes the property as an experimental farm, while Harry Zale challenges that label and calls it a plantation. Croker answers that, below the gnat line, almost any holding larger than five hundred acres might be called a plantation. He acknowledges that Turpmtine is known for quail and that quail are shot there. The exchange reveals the unstable boundary between the estate’s modern presentation and its older social form: an expansive working property can be described in the language of agriculture and experiment, yet its scale and inherited vocabulary continue to evoke the plantation.

That tension is sharpened by an article about Turpmtine that Roger White reads while assembling a file on Croker. Its description of the Big House, an overseer, and a master prompts Roger to see the estate as a living arrangement that recalls slavery. The account says that employees refer to Croker as Cap'm Charlie; although the article does not identify them by race, Roger understands them to be Black. His response is shaped by his own perspective and anger, but the details he seizes upon—title, house, overseer, and master—show why Turpmtine cannot be treated as a neutral symbol of Croker’s success.

Land, Ownership, and Political Association

Baker County also figures in the contrast between Croker’s rural origins and his later real-estate ambitions. In describing Croker’s dealings elsewhere, Martha explains his theory that Atlanta’s next major growth would move outward into rural counties. Croker had expected to find inexpensive acreage, but the southern part of Cherokee County was already investor land: land too valuable for farming or timber yet not ready for development. The account distinguishes that speculative frontier from the Baker County Croker remembered, where his father had worked plantations and a mill. The rural landscape changes meaning as Croker moves from childhood observer to investor seeking land ahead of urban expansion.

His Baker County past also connects him to Darwell Scruggs, a school acquaintance who, according to Martha, had joined the Ku Klux Klan as a teenager and later organized a local chapter in Cherokee County. This recollection does not establish that Croker directed the subsequent march in Canton or paid Andre Fleet to lead it; Martha explicitly says she does not know. It does, however, place Croker’s old acquaintance and his memories of Baker County within a broader story of racial politics, land values, and the uses to which public conflict can be put.

Return to the Big House

Late in the story, Croker travels back to Turpmtine with Serena, moving on aluminum crutches after his knee surgery. He can no longer arrive in his customary way by plane; the group makes the drive from Atlanta, and he resents the slow journey. His physical limitations alter his relation to a place he once traversed as its powerful owner. Approaching the Big House, he cannot raise his hands high enough to fend off the gnats, and he hears them in his ears as he struggles toward the entrance.

The estate retains its sumptuous beauty. The Big House stands among live oaks, magnolias, and dogwoods; magnolia leaves gleam, and Confederate roses crowd the trellises beneath the porch. Yet the approach is governed by heat and insects, not by an owner’s command. Tent caterpillars strip a tree, their droppings make a crunching sound, cicadas rattle overhead, and mosquitoes, flies, and chiggers make even a shaded resting place hazardous. Croker knows the season’s particular discomforts, including June’s mosquitoes and chiggers, but knowledge offers little relief while he is exhausted and dependent on crutches.

The house itself carries the cost of a former scale of wealth. Croker remembers that central air-conditioning cost $110,000 when installed ten or eleven years earlier; now he cannot assemble that amount to buy anything. The contrast joins bodily fatigue, sleeplessness, and financial decline to the estate’s physical grandeur. Baker County thus returns as neither a simple lost home nor a picturesque backdrop. Its beauty remains, but Croker encounters it from a weakened body and a collapsing fortune, while its labor history and racial past continue to complicate the authority he once exercised there.