Beneath a Ruthless Sun Read online

  The family’s Christmas card that year had shown the Knowleses posed formally at the window of their Okahumpka living room. Blanche, in dress and heels, and dark lipstick, is sitting with Mary propped on her lap; David stands on the right and Steve on the left, both of them in pin-striped blazers and bow ties. Behind them hulks Joe, in a business suit and crisp white shirt and a tie. In that same room, with the cold front descending on Florida, the family had gathered to decorate their Christmas tree in front of a crackling fire. The boys had helped Blanche hang ornaments while Joe treated them to the holiday croonings of Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole on the record player. Outside, on the dozens of acres of citrus where, in warmer weather, the boys climbed trees and hauled a little wagon packed with sandwiches and fruit that Blanche prepared for their picnics, smudgers, their faces black with soot, were attempting to ward off the worst of the cold by “firing the groves” off Bugg Spring.

  On the morning of December 18, though, the Knowles boys awoke in strange beds in a strange house, its windows offering no familiar view of the citrus groves, and their mother told them they would not be going home. By then she had been informed by Robinson that Sam Powell, her husband’s close friend, had driven to Tampa to locate Joe and bring him back to Lake County. Meanwhile, the sheriff’s department, Robinson had also reported, was leaving no stone unturned in its efforts to apprehend the young Negro who had raped her.

  The lives of the family in the Christmas portrait had been altered, irreversibly.

  * * *

  —

  THE ELDEST OF FIVE CHILDREN, Blanche Bosanquet had grown up in a proud, tradition-steeped family on Fair Oaks, a grand estate in the small citrus town of Fruitland Park, just ten miles north of Okahumpka and only a few miles north of Robinson’s Leesburg home. The Bosanquets’ house, by far the largest in a town of fewer than five hundred people, was a sprawling eleven-room mansion that had been built by Blanche’s British ancestors when the site of the estate was the colony of Chetwynd.

  The Bosanquets traced their pedigree back to seventeenth-century France. As Huguenots, they had been driven from their Catholic homeland to Protestant England. By the nineteenth century, they had established a generations-long dynasty of bankers and merchants with close ties to the British crown and the East India Trading Company. Blanche’s grandfather Louis Percival Bosanquet left London in 1888, at the age of twenty-three, to join his older brother, Augustus, in central Florida. Like dozens of other wealthy young English bachelors in the area, the Bosanquet brothers were seized by “citrus fever.” Together, they purchased one hundred acres of land bordering Zephyr Lake in Chetwynd from a freed slave. Relying on skilled black laborers, they set about building Fair Oaks from the rosin-rich cores of the region’s plentiful yellow pines, because rosin deterred termites. They dedicated twenty acres of the land to citrus, mostly oranges and mandarins; the rest they cultivated with seeds imported from their native England and thus introduced to Florida fruit like the Red Ceylon, a tropical peach that would become widely popular.

  In her novel Golden Apples, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings dubbed such young Englishmen “remittance men”—black sheep who were provided a monthly remittance by their wealthy families back in England so long as they stayed out of the country. Blanche’s father, Alfred Bosanquet, did not view settlers like his father and uncle as ne’er-do-wells or irresponsible adventurers, however, and in a speech he gave to Chetwynd descendants, he set the record straight: “The young men who came here were interested in grove culture, travel, and a new country, and were sons of good English families.” They worked and studied hard; no doubt they played hard, too, and always they maintained their “English pride,” never more so than on Sunday mornings when, handsome in their “white riding breeches, white jackets and red scarfs,” they’d ride through the woods to Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, which the Bosanquets had been instrumental in founding and constructing.

  Bosanquet family lore had it that twenty-five-year-old Ellen Lewis Hall of Marietta, Ohio, riding past Fair Oaks on a visit to her mother’s Fruitland Park home in the fall of 1891, caught Louis’s eye from an upstairs bedroom window—although, in another version of their first encounter, it was he who was riding by the Hall house when he spotted the young Ellen, possibly dressed only in her nightgown, at her bedroom window. However their courtship started, it ended in what was, in Chetwynd at least, a scandalous marriage, for the Bosanquets vaunted their ties with English royalty, and Ellen Lewis Hall was a descendant of Betty Washington Lewis, a sister of George Washington, “who stole the United States from Great Britain.”

  When Augustus Bosanquet departed Florida to assume the post of secretary of the Royal British Club in Lisbon, Portugal, Louis claimed Fair Oaks as his own. With a staff of black caretakers, he and Ellen maintained the mansion, the citrus groves, a vegetable garden, livestock, chickens, and a stable on the property. Louis proved to be a “horticulturist extraordinaire,” cultivating around the mansion more than a thousand varieties of trees, including camphors from India and hibiscus from Hawaii—to say nothing of “14 varieties of bamboo; at least 14 varieties of palms; 100 varieties of fancy-leaf caladium; 75 varieties of roses; 16 varieties of cranium lilies along with citrons, which bore a heavy crop annually”—and amassing what was reputed to be the most extensive horticultural library in the state. He would in time hybridize a magenta lily, Crinum “Ellen Bosanquet,” named for his wife, as well as a small lavender one, the Crinum “Louis Bosanquet”—both of which would be introduced commercially.

  Chetwynd exposed the English citrus arrivistes to environmental challenges they hadn’t encountered before. The heat could be relentless, the humidity oppressive, the rains torrential—not to mention the abundance of mosquitoes, alligators, panthers, snakes, and other “wild animals that roamed the land and ate their crops.” The climate forced the young Brits to abandon at least some of their boarding school formalities, Eton and Cambridge be damned. “This is a nether region,” wrote one of them. “Because of it we have not been obliged to adapt civilized manners such as wearing coats and ties at dinner.” By the end of the decade, however, with their businesses burgeoning and their fortunes growing, Chetwynd seemed to them less a netherworld than a tropical paradise.

  “The Blizzard” changed all that. Much as would happen more than sixty years hence, as 1894 was nearing its end a brutal cold front from the north descended on Florida. Temperatures dropped as low as 13 degrees, and within three days an entire year’s citrus crop had been destroyed, most of it on the tree. An unseasonably warm, wet January subsequently engorged the trees with an abundance of sap, and when a second, equally bitter freeze—“The Blizzard”—arrived in central Florida a few weeks later, it caused the sap-filled trees to literally explode, “the sounds of their cracking and splitting limbs and boughs echoing over the desolate landscape.”

  “The disaster is overwhelming,” one Lake County resident entered in his diary. “Don’t know how we will come out of it. No Sunday School. Too cold. Everyone feels about as blue as can be.” Another local walked into the middle of his hundred-acre grove, “looked at what was the end of all his dreams and hopes for the future,” and put a gun to his head. Growers in Mount Dora referred to the calamity as “Florida’s Funeral.” With no government or state aid to be had, it was “root, hog or die” for the farmers and growers. The value of their land and homes collapsed. The erstwhile carefree young Brits were trying now to survive on turtles, rabbits, cabbage—on anything they could scavenge that unsparing winter. Many of them had no choice but to abandon Chetwynd. The Bosanquets stayed on; their income-producing properties in London ensured their solvency.

  In 1897, with three young daughters toddling about Fair Oaks, Louis and Ellen Bosanquet welcomed a son, Alfred, into a more hopeful world. Two years later, though, another “Great Blizzard” wreaked havoc across the South, the fourth hard freeze to strike the grovelands in just two decades. (Freezes of such devastating
magnitude were generally reckoned to occur in Florida just once every forty years.) The freeze of 1899 was estimated to have killed more than 90 percent of the state’s citrus trees. Most of the remaining Chetwynd colonists fled. Alfred recalled seeing, as a child, abandoned houses years after the freeze, the tables still set and blankets still on the beds. Virtually overnight Chetwynd became a ghost colony; the name disappeared from maps. By the turn of the century, only fifteen Chetwynd families remained, among them the Bosanquets. They diversified their crops to limit their exposure to future freezes. In the nearly twenty years it took for the citrus industry to fully recover, they kept Fair Oaks and Holy Trinity Church free from debt.

  By then, Alfred had come of age. In 1925, accompanying his indefatigable brother-in-law, David Newell, on a hunting trip in Missouri, he met Ruth Marion Ward, the daughter of an English-born coffee salesman. After a brief courtship and a wedding in St. Louis, the newlyweds moved into Fair Oaks with Alfred’s parents. Although Ruth was not wealthy, she was educated and drawn to the refined sensibilities and social rituals that defined Chetwynd colony life. The following year, Blanche was born. Four more children followed.

  By all accounts, Ruth ruled the roost while Alfred pursued his botanical interests. “An English gentleman always has a garden,” he was fond of saying, and he took great pleasure in importing plants from around the world. Ruth sustained Fair Oaks’ most venerated tradition, hosting Sunday-afternoon high tea. Dozens of tables would be set up on the front lawn to serve finger sandwiches and dainty cakes to the parishioners who, dressed in their finest, arrived by horse and buggy after the church service. Ruth would pass on the tradition to Blanche and her two sisters and their Newell cousins, all of whom continued it well into the twentieth century.

  Verbal and vivacious as a child, Blanche—or Bampy, as she was known—crossed proper English manners with native Southern sass. On her first day of school at Leesburg Elementary, when Ruth presumed to answer the questions with which the teacher peppered her new pupil, Blanche interrupted. “Who’s going to kindergarten,” she asked, “you or me?” She was remembered not only as a “chatterbox,” but also as a calm, sweet, gregarious, independent child, who was as bright—in the words of her first-grade teacher—as “real sunshine.”

  For Blanche and her siblings, Fair Oaks was an idyllic place, albeit the idyll was redolent of a bygone, paternalistic American South. The family still employed various black caretakers, including Sam and pipe-smoking Lilla, an older married couple who lived just up the road and served as handyman and cook. A handful of other neighbors did the laundry, milked the four cows, and made sure the household ran smoothly. After the deaths of Louis (in 1930) and Ellen (in 1931), Alfred inherited the Bosanquet real estate interests, which included forty-one rent-rich flats in London.

  But the prosperity did not last. It may have been the case that “Daddy wasn’t a good businessman,” as Blanche’s brother Bud recalled, but, in any event, the Bosanquet interests could not withstand the cataclysmic effects of oncoming world events. After World War II broke out in Europe, it was difficult to get money out of England. To maintain Fair Oaks, the family was forced to go into business. Converting Alfred’s formal English garden into a commercial enterprise that grew flowers for sale rather than for show, they opened a flower shop in Leesburg. Everyone pitched in. The boys helped with deliveries and the girls assisted Ruth in the shop. Fancying herself the “floral designer” helped Ruth come to terms with running the till.

  Then, in December 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the United States entered the war. Fear of another sneak attack by air took hold of the nation, especially in Florida with its thousand-plus miles of vulnerable coastline. In conjunction with the national Aircraft Warning Service, twenty-four-hour plane-spotting stations situated atop tall buildings and towers sprouted up across Florida. They were staffed in shifts by volunteers like Alfred Bosanquet, who made note of any visible plane’s specifics—its altitude, direction, speed, and number of engines—and transmitted them by radio to a military base in Tampa.

  “Swear to secrecy,” Alfred bade his daughter, and she promised never to tell anyone—not her brothers or sisters; not even her mother—where she went so many evenings. She’d park the family’s Chevrolet convertible by Earle Fain’s theater and glance about to make sure she hadn’t been followed. Then she’d begin to climb the fire escape at the rear of the four-story First National Bank, known as “Leesburg’s skyscraper,” with her father’s dinner in tow—Lilla’s roast pork with his favorite black-eyed peas and biscuits, still warm from the stove. Blanche wasn’t good with most secrets, but this one, couched in the demands of patriotism, she took seriously. “I was honored,” she recalled, to be trusted with keeping her father’s location secret and to be allowed to assist him. While he settled into his supper, she’d lie back on the blanket spread out on the tar-and-gravel roof and train the binoculars on the night sky. Friendly plane or shooting star? Whatever Blanche did, she did it diligently.

  The bombing of Pearl Harbor brought the war to Leesburg in other unmistakable ways. Gas rationing limited travel by car, and Blanche’s horseback rides around Fruitland Park and bicycle rides to Leesburg became a necessity rather than an afternoon’s diversion. To boost morale for servicemen, the United Service Organizations set up clubs in abandoned buildings, barns, and even train stations across America. Alfred served on the approval committee for the Leesburg USO on Main Street, and when Blanche turned sixteen, she volunteered as a junior hostess at the Saturday-night dances. “There was one short serviceman, and he could polka,” she recalled. “The minute they’d start up a polka, he’d come over and get me, and we’d be the only two dancing. I’d never done the polka before, but, boy, we had a good time . . . The soldiers would start clapping their hands and say, ‘Yeah, Sergeant! Yeah, Sergeant! Yeah, Sergeant!’”

  As the war went on, Blanche became a volunteer plane spotter in her own right, as did her cousins. She and Priscilla Newell often shared shifts on the roof of the bank. Late one afternoon, they caught sight of the Ku Klux Klan parading down Main Street in their white hoods and robes. The girls crept up to the edge of the bank’s façade and peeked over, “scared silly that somebody would look up and see us and come after us,” Priscilla remembered.

  As a result of the Lend-Lease Act of 1941, by which foreign allies were provided U.S. military aid, cadets from England’s Royal Air Force had been arriving at Lodwick Field in Lakeland, Florida, about sixty miles south of Fruitland Park, to receive pilot training. In Florida, the cadets were spared Britain’s foul weather, chronic shortages of fuel and aircraft, and Luftwaffe bombings. Thinking that they might enjoy some English hospitality and the variety and abundance of an American larder, Alfred made arrangements for seven RAF pilots-in-training to visit Fruitland Park whenever a leave or time off allowed them the opportunity.

  At Fair Oaks, the cadets sat down to Lilla’s generous Southern meals and the high teas now held in their honor on the Bosanquets’ lawn. They enjoyed, too, the attentions of Blanche and her cousins, and entertained their hosts in turn with tales of youthful derring-do: how, high in the skies over Florida, they’d discovered some prankster had planted live snakes in the cockpit; or how, stealthily, in low-glide approaches, they’d spied on college girls sunbathing nude on rooftops, risking that the coeds might catch the numbers on their planes and report them to the base.

  On occasion, cadets would get a week’s break between class sessions, which would allow them a more leisurely visit with the Bosanquets. So it happened that Ted Bennett and Fred Mitchell came to stay. And to woo. Blanche was amused to discover that both pilots seemed to be interested in her and jealous of each other, and even more amused that her mother confused one with the other, determined though each was to make a singular impression.

  It was Ted, the nineteen-year-old son of a shipping company secretary from the East End of London, who captured Blanche’s affections. The p
hoto album she kept, chronicling the wartime experience in Lake County, included photos of various cadets posing or horsing around with Blanche and her sisters and cousins at Fair Oaks, but the fellow it featured most was Ted. There he was, reclining in a rowboat on nearby Zephyr Lake; having Blanche straighten his tie; riding shotgun in the convertible, with Blanche at the wheel; walking hand in hand with her down a dirt road in Fruitland Park; kissing her as she leaned against the open door of the Chevy, her hands clasped around his neck.

  From time to time, Blanche and her sisters and cousins, accompanied by Ruth, visited the pilots at Lodwick Field in Lakeland, and in August 1942, she and her mother made the six-hour drive to Napier Field in Dothan, Alabama, for Ted’s graduation ceremony. He was initially stationed to Montgomery, but he and Blanche still managed to see each other on the occasional weekend, and for her birthday, he sent her flowers from the family’s shop. Ruth herself took down the accompanying message: “Hello, Darling, wish we could spend this leave together. Miss you very much, all my love, Edward.”

  Come September, Blanche began her freshman year at Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee, and Ted was sent to the European Theater. By late September, he had successfully completed nineteen bombing operations, most of them over France, in support of land forces, and a few over Germany that targeted weapons and fuel facilities. One day soon thereafter, Ruth arrived unexpectedly in Tallahassee, saying she thought Blanche might like to come home to Fruitland Park for the weekend. At home, Blanche learned that Ted was missing in action. On September 24, he and six crew members had set out across the English Channel toward Calais, when they encountered heavy German anti-aircraft fire from the ground. In a letter Ted had written before the ill-fated mission, he urged her not to lose heart if ever he were reported to be missing in action. According to Bud, the letter said, “I might be alive in Germany,” and in it, the Englishman went on to explain that it wasn’t uncommon for RAF pilots and their crews, after they’d been shot down, to be taken as prisoners of war. It could be many months, Ted cautioned, before news of their survival made it back to loved ones. So instead of grieving, Blanche abided by Ted’s urging and chose to believe that he was alive in a German camp, and that soon the war would end and she’d move to England and marry him. She’d always wanted to travel by ship to England.