Amelia Soth
A Few Links of Rubber
Eleven links of chain, round like sliced olives, rescued from the privy of an old girls’ school in Boston: a Victorian rubber necklace. Dusty brown now, it was once mourning black, worn by someone unknown in remembrance of someone else forgotten. Spare remnant of a little life, unearthed with other bits of girlhood detritus: dollheads, dominos, a shard of a porcelain statue, showing a tear dripping down a child’s chubby cheek.
Once, this black chain was white sap running through the veins of a tropical tree. It made its way north to Boston, perhaps three thousand miles from where it first bled out from a wounded trunk. Then it was hardened into chunks, sold, mashed and molded into links.
The Victorians called their rubber jewelry “Vulcanite,” invoking the Roman god of fire. They made the word by jamming a mineral suffix onto a classical allusion; they made the material by melding together rubber and sulfur. Unlike precious stones, vulcanite does not feel cool to the touch. It has an illusory animal warmth, as if it just came from someone else’s hand to yours. If you rubbed it, it would release the smell of burning. But it was cheap, and it was black, the right color for mourning.
For the Victorians, mourning was a feeling, a fashion, a business, and a social stricture. It formed a kind of net around the body. Satiny black serpents coiled up wrists, and beads of chilly onyx wrapped around necks, white light winking from their mirrored facets. Inside the bands of rings, the names of the dead circled living fingers. Curls of hair were held in hidden compartments or displayed behind crystal windows; bracelets of braided hair hugged against skin.
So the rubber necklace was a chain that linked a living person to a dead one, and then it was broken. Wrenched somehow—a fight, an accident, a theft—from its connecting links, it tumbled into the outhouse pit. But it was only waiting to be rediscovered. Ghosts and garbage have a lot in common: they’re the scraps of a past that is never really gone.
And the rubber factories produced their share of ghosts. In the haze, workers suffered from “naphtha jag,” brought on by the fumes of petrochemicals; they heard roaring in their ears and felt a prickling on their skin, like crawling insects. They found themselves laughing without reason and fighting without cause. When they came out of the factory into the open air, they staggered like drunks.
The carbon disulfide that drove the vulcanization process was even worse. The hallucinatory frenzies it brought on obliged some operators to fit iron bars over factory windows, to keep the workers from flinging themselves out. The limbs of the afflicted went numb as if frostbitten. When they lay down, monstrous animals ran stampedes through their brains. One man woke up from a long fume-induced stupor. His memories of the factory had vanished, replaced by a long story about “lumbering down a river.” In these early days of the rubber boom, from the mid-1800s to about 1910, much of the industry was supplied by wild rubber, gleaned in trickles from the dark maze of the forest. In the Amazon, the rubber tappers trekked through the jungle in the dimness before dawn, following winding paths slashed through the undergrowth. When they came to a tree gnarled by past incisions, they clambered up the trunks to make a slit high up, using the old scars as footholds. They slit open the bark with a sharp knife, and the milk began to seep out. This is the beginning of our necklace: a white trickle running over bark.
From every part of the tropics, rubber arrived at the factories shaped into a thousand forms: bricks made of thin stacked sheets; rolled balls of dried scrap; odd-shaped chunks called “nuts,” “knuckles,” and “thimbles”; sticky slabs called “tongues”; spongy pink balls with pores full of salt water; expensive Para rubber smelling of “fine old Virginia ham”; rotten rubber crawling with maggots. Sometimes the tappers even sculpted the rubber into whimsical little animals. But it all went into the masticator, to be kneaded into homogeneous dough, then shaped into boot soles, macintoshes, pneumatic tires, balloons, and gloves. The rubber industry itself was a masticator. One end is a gnashing mouth, tearing indiscriminately through human beings; the other extrudes vast sums of money.
The agents of Peruvian Amazon Company called it “the civilizing company.” The “civilization” they inflicted was shaped like a nightmare. Run on forced labor, the rubber machine could not operate without terror. The indigenous people were beaten to death; they starved; they perished in uncontrolled epidemics; overseers murdered them for sport. The dead lay unburied around the rubber camps. Meanwhile, the rubber barons built grand estates in the middle of the jungle.
Time grinds away context, and history is an attempt to reach into the moving jaws and pull something out. So I grasp at this necklace, this bare, broken bit of trash.
As plantation rubber replaced wild, the industry abandoned the Amazon. Traveling through the region decades later, one geographer found the empty mansions of the rubber barons rotting there. Searching for what had once been a populous settlement, he wrote:
I could not even recover the site of the village with any degree of certainty. Along a ten-mile stretch only one mound and a broken mirror frame indicated where it might have been.
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I would like to express my gratitude to the leaders and volunteers at the Boston City Archaeology Program, whose compassionate and imaginative writing about the Dorchester Industrial School for Girls served as the spark for this piece, and to John Tully, whose meticulous scholarship in The Devil’s Milk: A Social History of Rubber provided the backbone for this piece. In addition, I am indebted to the scholarship of Michael Taussig, Søren Hvalkof, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Paul David Blanc, and Eduardo Galeono, whose classic Open Veins of Latin America has lost none of its fire.