Beneath a Ruthless Sun Read online

  ALSO BY GILBERT KING

  Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

  The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder, and the Search for Justice in the American South

  RIVERHEAD BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Gilbert King

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: King, Gilbert, author.

  Title: Beneath a ruthless sun : a true story of violence, race, and justice lost and found / Gilbert King.

  Description: New York : Riverhead Books, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017053110 | ISBN 9780399183386 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399183430 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Daniels, Jesse Delbert, 1938– . | Discrimination in criminal justice administration—Florida.

  Classification: LCC HV9955.F6 K56 2018 | DDC 364.15/32092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017053110

  p. cm.

  Version_1

  FOR MARY JANE MILES AND IN MEMORY OF DOROTHY KING

  To gain these fruits that have been earned,

  To hold these fields that have been won,

  Our arms have strained, our backs have burned,

  Bent bare beneath a ruthless sun.

  —James Weldon Johnson, “Fifty Years (1863–1913)”

  Racism has never been a “simple” story. Ever.

  —Ta-Nehisi Coates, on Twitter

  CONTENTS

  Also by Gilbert King

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Aerial View of Okahumpka

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Killing Freeze

  CHAPTER TWO

  Real Sunshine

  CHAPTER THREE

  Smoked Irishman

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Make Tracks

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sensational Lies

  CHAPTER SIX

  You Will Not Turn Us Down

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  No Suitable Place

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Well-Laid Plan

  CHAPTER NINE

  So Much Race Pride

  CHAPTER TEN

  Don’t Talk to Me About Conscience, Lady

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Way of Justice

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  If It Takes All Summer

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Troubled by It

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Faith in Blanche

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Someone Should Write a Book

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Whether They Be White or Black

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  A Newspaper Woman

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Credits

  Aerial view of Okahumpka

  PART ONE

  Okahumpka teen Jesse Daniels

  CHAPTER ONE

  A Killing Freeze

  IN OKAHUMPKA he was known as the boy on the bike. Most any afternoon, as soon as he heard the Atlantic Coast Line train blow its whistle on its approach to the depot a few miles south of Leesburg, he would be pedaling his way to pick up the afternoon post. At Fate Merritt’s grocery, Mayo Carlton might grab hold of the store fiddle and play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” for him while postmaster Sallie Reeves sorted the mail in the next room. Buster Beach would be there, too, well before the West Coast Champion arrived, to share the day’s gossip or to tell the boy a corn-fed tale. The men of Okahumpka spoke kindly to him. They’d offer him a wedge of tangerine and tousle his uncombed hair with their meaty, sunbaked hands. They were sure to ask about his daddy.

  Some days the boy would linger at the grocery, a nickel in his palm, his eyes on the penny treats, until Mr. Merritt would hand him his favorite Black Cow candy and patiently narrate the financial transaction. The boy would smile and say thank you, but the arithmetic lesson would be lost on him by the time he reached the door.

  Other boys and girls his age had finished high school, but Jesse Delbert Daniels had fallen behind early. It had taken him four years to pass the third grade, and by the age of sixteen he had advanced only two more. He was “not educable,” the fifth-grade teacher at Leesburg Elementary School told his mother, and although he’d been granted a social promotion, it came with the condolatory recommendation that he be withdrawn from further schooling.

  The mail pocketed in his baggy trousers, and the trousers tucked into his socks so they’d not catch in the bike’s greasy chain, the boy would pedal back toward home. The way took him by the fishing hole where he often passed his days. Often Jesse would dawdle, mail in pocket, with no notice of the hours passing, until he found himself caught in a summer downpour. The torrential afternoon rain soaking his hair and clothes, he would stand up on the pedals and lean into the blustery wind while the clay kicking up from the tires spattered his pants and shirt. His mother, Pearl, would rush him inside their humble wooden house, take the wet mail, and dry him briskly with a towel. She’d remind him to pedal home fast when the sky over Sumterville began to darken, and Jesse would say, “Sorry, Mama.” But he’d be no more mindful the next time he saw cascades of black and gray clouds billowing in the west, and he’d hear no alarm in the volleys of distant thunder.

  Jesse’s rides almost always took him past the fifty-four-acre Knowles estate off Bugg Spring Road. The imposing two-story Georgian frame house with two white columns on its front porch stood grandly among oaks and palm trees and a small grove of Florida pines that towered over the surrounding fields and scrub. Joe Knowles sometimes hired Jesse for seasonal work there. In summer it was watermelons. The fifty-pound Garrisons and Tom Watsons demanded more strength to pick, load, and pack without bruising than a scrawny boy could offer, however. While some Lake County farmers hired white football players from Leesburg High, who took the opportunity to bulk up their muscles “pitchin’ melons,” Jesse usually worked with black laborers, trailing behind the “cutters.” Alongside pint-sized Negro boys, brush in one hand and in the other a jar of thick copper sulfate paste, he’d paint the freshly cut stems to reduce the threat of parasitic fungi. Or he’d glue labels on melons before they were stacked in the railcars. When spring came around, Jesse got hired on to drop seeds for a new crop and to fertilize the young vines for eighty-five cents an hour.

  The money was needed. Jesse’s father, Charles, was an illiterate sixty-nine-year-old veteran of World War I with a long history of arthritis as well as a debilitating heart condition that, for the past decade, had rendered him unemployable. His meager monthly welfare benefits and Army pension could not keep pace with the family’s rent increases, and almost yearly, they’d had to relocate from Okahumpka to ever smaller houses in ever more remote corners of Lake County�
��Yalaha, Howey-in-the-Hills—until they’d settled, once again, in rural Okahumpka.

  Jesse’s mother, Pearl, was twenty-six years younger than her husband, but likewise debilitated by a weak heart. She had had four miscarriages before Jesse was born in 1938, and would go on to suffer two more. During her pregnancy with Jesse she’d been stricken with malaria, which devastated large swaths of the American South in the 1930s, as a growing number of poor people built shacks in swampland. Doctors had therefore advised Pearl to wean the newborn quickly, but Jesse’s health was precarious, too. In infancy he contracted whooping cough, and in childhood he suffered three bouts of rheumatic fever. The second attack, at age ten, left him “slow to think,” as Pearl put it, and the last, at sixteen, left him with a stammer and perhaps damage to his heart valves.

  In 1956, Pearl had applied to have Jesse admitted to the Florida Farm Colony for Epileptic and Feeble-Minded Persons in Gainesville, a state-funded facility that had been established in 1919 to habilitate children with mental deficiencies. Pearl saw the Colony as an opportunity to give her son a more independent and productive adult life. Using Intelligence Quotient testing developed by the French psychologists Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon in 1905, the institution adhered to a classification system for the “feeble-minded.” Jesse was an “imbecile,” with an IQ in the 25–55 range, not as high-functioning as the “morons,” whose IQs measured in the 55–75 range, but capable of being trained to perform repetitive tasks. By 1956, however, the Colony had become congested with bedridden “idiots”—persons with IQs below 25, who had “difficulties communicating and [were] often incontinent”—and as their discharge was infrequent, no bed was available for Jesse. Pearl had had to accept that her boy would have to make do with eighty-five-cent hours in the citrus groves and melon patches of Lake County.

  By the spring of 1957, the Danielses were renting an unpainted, weather-beaten four-room wood-frame house that stood on pilings amid a cluster of similar homes on tiny lots along Bay Avenue. With a corrugated metal roof overhanging a short front porch outside and a tin wood-burning stove inside, such Florida Cracker houses had become as familiar as any feature in the rural landscape of northern and central Florida. Only clay County Road 470 separated them from the even smaller, vertical-boarded shacks of the Negro families on North Quarters Road—a vestige of slavery times when blacks lived in clusters of cabins often called “the quarters.”

  The Danielses “kept to themselves and didn’t interact with others much,” a neighbor recalled. “They were quiet and depressed-looking. Like those Dust Bowl photographs of migrants from the Depression. Their lives were hard.” Another neighbor, Carlton “Red” Fussell, remembered the family as “near starvation.” Red’s father, Lewis, had hosted weekly fish fries to feed Okahumpka’s poor during the Depression, and in the winter, when he killed a hog, he’d have his son deliver a shoulder of fresh pork to Pearl, along with some homemade cane syrup stored in old whiskey bottles. “My daddy would help anyone if they looked like they needed it,” Red recalled. Summers, too, were oppressive for workers who toiled in the shadeless melon patches of Lake County. Mr. Knowles would admonish Jesse and the other pickers about the dangers of sunstroke. “Don’t let the bear get you,” he’d say. None of them could afford to be treated in local hospitals, and if severely afflicted, they might be unable to work for a week or more—an economic hardship on their families. Pearl continually reminded her son to drink plenty of water, especially in the sweltering afternoon heat. From season to season, her worries about the boy never abated.

  * * *

  —

  SINCE THE FALL OF 1957, there had been constant rumblings in the skies over Cape Canaveral, eighty miles to the east of Lake County. Ballistic missiles with names like Thor and Jupiter and Snark glowed like Roman candles as they soared over the groves of Okahumpka and ripped through the ragged clouds above. America’s Space Race with the Soviet Union had hit full throttle, and as the two nations battled for aeronautic supremacy, unannounced launches on the coast had become a part of everyday life in east central Florida. Not all of the American rockets ascended with grace. Many failed spectacularly, their engines losing thrust at liftoff or exploding on the pad or bursting into flames over the Atlantic. One long-range missile, failing to respond to controls, was last seen “headed for the jungles of Brazil.” Another crashed fifty miles to the south, just outside a popular Vero Beach restaurant, blowing out its windows. Undeterred, scientists and engineers kept trying. By day and by night, the giant, liquid-fueled cylinders, shaking the earth along Florida’s coastline as they shot skyward like flaming white arrows, afforded irrefutable evidence that a new age had begun.

  “The character of east central Florida is changing nearly as fast as the rockets that streak across the sky from Cape Canaveral,” the New York Times reported. Governor LeRoy Collins had prioritized Florida’s commitment to the space industry, and the military, as well as aviation and defense corporations like Northrop, Douglas, Boeing, and Martin, had been flocking to the region. Relocated engineers and their families made temporary households in the roadside hotels that had sprouted up along highway A1A in the booming town of Cocoa Beach. Market centers were mushrooming in the scrubland and swamp, and luxury hotels, real estate, and banking were booming as the population swelled. New schools were needed, and new highways, airports, and waterways.

  Scores upon scores of the missile industry’s support workers were packed into blistering-hot trailer offices that one newspaper deemed to be “the worst sweatshops this side of New York’s garment jungle.” The workers and their families lived in overcrowded trailer courts, and their low wages pushed more and more of them inland, where ultimately they took refuge in makeshift homes at the edge of undrained, mosquito-infested swamps.

  Orlando, long the epicenter of Florida’s thriving citrus business, was deep in “the grip of a giant fist of change” by 1957. But all evidence of central Florida’s transformation halted at the Lake County line. The citrus elite cared not to trail the flaming paths of missiles in the sky, and on the ground they were spared the unsightly sprawl generated by the aerospace “glamour” industries. Indeed, as the Times reported, “some of the old-line citrus growers, financially secure, resent the thrust of industrialization.” For while cattle ranching still counted as a major industry across central Florida, it was agriculture—particularly the profit from millions of orange trees—that made and kept the area so independently prosperous that it needed no help from Governor Collins and his cadre of out-of-state investors. Lake County alone took in nearly $25 million from citrus in 1956, more than the entire state of California. The county finished construction on the 226-foot-tall Florida Citrus Tower in Clermont that same year, in which half a million tourists would ascend to the observation deck to gaze over miles of orange groves in every direction. It was a time and place, one journalist observed, when “citrus was king, and Lake was where the princes lived.”

  Secure in their cocoons of wealth and privilege, the citrus princes barely felt the crisis in confidence that shook the country when, despite the best efforts of the U.S. military and Florida’s burgeoning defense industry, America failed to outstrip its Cold War competitor in the Space Race. On October 4, 1957, the USSR succeeded in placing the first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit. A month later, the Russians launched Sputnik 2, and Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow, became the first animal to orbit the earth.

  President Eisenhower had pinned the nation’s best hopes of demonstrating primacy in the Space Race to the Cape Canaveral launch of the first Vanguard rocket on December 6. It proved to be a disaster. The flight, broadcast live on national television, lasted barely two seconds after liftoff. Four feet from the ground, the rocket crashed back onto the launchpad, toppled over, and exploded. Across east central Florida, in their cramped homes at the edge of swamps, thousands of Florida’s “space itinerants” stared in horror and disbelief at their black-and-whi
te screens, wondering what future this strange, unforgiving wasteland held for them.

  The princes of Lake County, meanwhile, continued to thrive. With kingdoms of orchards, they had no desire to conquer the skies, and no suspicion that from them would soon arrive an unimagined misfortune.

  * * *

  —

  ON DECEMBER 10, 1957, a blast of Arctic air bore down on the American Midwest. In Okahumpka, farmers and citrus growers prepared for battle as high winds forced the cold front south. They lit smudge pots and built bonfires—fat pine, diesel fuel, and old tires set aflame in pyres a hundred yards long—to keep the orchards and citrus groves warm. Attended by black-eyed “smudgers,” the fires smoldered all night, reeking of scorched rubber and spewing thick black soot into the groves.

  Farmers with crops near canals raised the water table in an effort to keep the ground warm. Others flew crop dusters at low altitude to douse the groves with water; extra water in the soil would store more heat from the sun, which would help neutralize the chill at night. Ice, as every Florida grove owner was keenly aware, begins to form in citrus tissue at 28 degrees Fahrenheit, and more than four hours at or below that temperature would irreversibly damage the fruit.

  By Wednesday, December 11, Lake County farmers, eyeing their thermometers, were bracing for the inevitable. Warren Johnson, head of the Florida Frost Warning Service, had issued a statement as dour as it was discouraging: “Hard freeze in North and Central Districts and frost and freezing temperatures in Southern districts Thursday morning.” Snow was falling in Jacksonville, and the coldest front of the season was moving rapidly to the south with winds gusting 20 to 35 miles per hour. Twenty-five people had been killed in fires caused by overheated stoves, and the national death toll from exposure had already reached fifty.