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Nights like this—soaked and swampy from rains,
hot already at 5 a.m., the dark refusing to wake—
make me think of the road to Umatilla that night
back in 1951 when Sheriff McCall’s car pulled
over and then the rest and the cars settled there
like smoking white beasts of prey. No one
recorded the Sheriff saying end of the road boys
but what followed was exactly that: The
two black prisoners lined up next to the car
with all that wild forest night everywhere
and then shot three times each. The Sheriff
settling the score at last no matter what those
Supreme Court judges had ruled. End of the line.
A white teen girl said four black youths had raped her
—the flower of Southern youth the banjos crooned—
and so Lake County found some criminals, four
black men, wrong place wrong time.
Two GIs who’d gotten uppity while in Europe,
a Bolo operator and his unwitting accomplice,
a sixteen year old boy just wanting to work the groves.
Lots of reasons to string those four up. It was
about time white justice prevailed again.
The Bolo operator skedaddled just in time
but the police caught the others. In the Tavares
jail they were tied to pipes and then two deputies
took turns beating them with lead-filled hoses.
Making them stand on shattered Coke bottles
until after hours of beatings the three confessed.
Meanwhile white fury kindled, burned.
Fury at the flower of black youth. Fury at black
farmers who were too good to work the groves.
Fury at the grove workers listening to those
labor organizers. Fury at the black GI who presumed to
wear the same uniform of glory. Uppity niggers,
defiant and so black in the white Florida
heat. The Klan was already strong in Lake County
but soon engorged with hundreds coming in
from all around the state, from Georgia and
Alabama too. A mob descended on the
jail in Tavares demanding the police give
the boys up for the hanging tree. Florida
the capital of Southern lynching, hidden
in dark groves while the rich played romance
on beaches white and clean as cane sugar.
Sheriff McCall would have gone for it
but he was beholden to the rich orange
grove owners who couldn’t afford
to have all their workers chased off.
So he had the boys secreted off to the
state prison in Raiford. The mob went
home to load up on whiskey and ammunition
and put on their white Klan robes. They
said they were the ghosts of dead
Confederate soldiers, burning Atlanta
back with their flaming nigger cross,
leaving behind only ruin and smoke.
Then headed for the black houses in
Groveland. The residents had already
fled for the groves but still the mob
took a long hard swig on hate’s bottle
and emptied their shotguns in the walls
and hurled torches through the windows.
Groveland burned and how. Let justice
be swift and cruel, the Orlando newspaper
declared, posting on its front page
an editorial cartoon of four chairs plugged
into Old Sparky. White smoke, black death.
News came that the fourth suspect had
been spotted up near Gainesville and
so Sheriff McCall deputized a posse of
nearly a thousand men to hound the
nigger in the woods. When they caught up
with the exhausted terrified man
he was shot not thrice or ten times
but hundreds, even a thousand times.
So bad his father couldn’t identify him
a few days later in the morgue. End of the road.
A white court sentenced the three remaining
black youths to death (the youngest, because
he was still a minor, got life in prison). When
Henry Moore, working with Thurgood Marshall
and the NAACP legal group, finally got the
sentence overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court,
Sheriff McCall took two of the prisoners
for a ride up past Umatilla. The last light of
civilization gets lost out there, just the great
sweltering black forest of Ocala and eternal
nigger night and just a few lonely brave white men
fighting for dominion and justice against dark things.
They said Sheriff McCall defended himself nobly
when they attacked him trying to escape.
Emptied his six-shooter into them. The Boss of
Lake County, hero of white men. Only one of two
wasn’t killed, he just lay there faking his death
until the ambulance came. Walter Irvin, one of
the two GIs. On the night of the bogus rape he’d
been partying in Eatonville in Orlando,
the all-black town where a man could party
free and in the open. Irwin never admitted
to trying to escape. He was brought to trial
again for the rape and found guilty again
and sentenced to death all over again.
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Henry Moore lobbied to get McCall removed
from office for his abuse of black prisoners.
On Christmas night 1951 Moore and his wife
(both teachers) were killed by a bomb.
McCall was implicated but the FBI failed
to find enough evidence. That’s how it works—
the killers all fade back into those woods,
whispers of Die Nigger turning to smoke.
Thurgood Marshall eventually got
the death sentence commuted to life in
prison, which back then was the equivalent
of not guilty for a black man. In the late ‘60s
Irvin finished his sentence and was freed.
For some reason he traveled back to Lake County
in 1970 and was found one morning in his
car, dead of causes never fully declared.
Justice served in a coil of white smoke.
When McCall finally failed to get reelected
in 1972 (a black prisoner had been beaten
to death in his jail), he retired to his home in
Umatilla. The road near his house was renamed
after him in 1985. Black residents who had
lived there for 50 years complained and complained
and finally Lake County commissioners
changed the road back to County Road 450A—
a blank, nondescript way of remembering
the road to nowhere is named after smoke.
Nothing to be afraid of where I live, but that’s
exactly the point: all that can’t be reconciled
lives on the black side of town where there’s
churches and shack homes and beater cars,
unemployment and welfare, drugs and teen mothers.
Sometimes late at night I hear a car go by
with Compton rap blasting and I wonder
what are they complaining about anyway?
On such night as this, so blanketing, so
swelteringly dark, with a house like mine to
coil back into? Perhaps the ghost of Sheriff McCall
is still on rounds, lanky and gentlemanly with
a cracker twang, wound in his dread Klan sheet,
two smoking holsters stuffed with bloody black feet.
June 2015
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Submitted to Real Toads’ Tuesday Platform
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NOTE
Gilbert King supplies many of these details in his Pulitzer-prize winning book, Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America (2013).
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A photo taken 15 minutes after Sheriff McCall shot two of the Groveland Four
as they were allegedly trying to escape, Nov. 1951.
So nauseating, and so necessary to talk about now, today, rather than chalking this outrageousness to “history.” I appreciate that you have brought this story out now.
Been finding it difficult to write, myself. I suppose something will eventually come but it all seems insignificant.
Note: In stanza 3, line 12 you have “descending” where I think you mean “demanding.”
This is so intense!
Boy I wish I could do what you do. You’re the best narrative poet I know. Since Ferguson and #blacklivesmatter lots of well meaning folks have been exerting peer pressure to white poets to get off our lazy silent tongues and speak the fuck up. But poetry doesn’t work that way. Pandering, maudlin threnodies to the dead or formless bursts of rage aren’t going to serve anyone. Here is an example of how it should be done.
P.S. If I felt I could do it justice, I’d like to try a reading of this, with your permission.
Thanks Mark — Agreed that “pandering, maudlin threnodies to the dead or formless bursts of rage aren’t going to serve anyone,” though I couldn’t have said it as well. This theme found me, or has been lurking around for a while. I went to the library and researched old issues of my local paper when its feisty editor faced off and how with McCall. Her house was bombed twice, her dog poisoned, “KKK” scratched on her front door, all for questioning his methods. Reading King’s book really raised the hackles. That shit was in my back yard, and still is.
If you want to try reading it, fine. Though it’s a narrative, I’m not sure it’s smooth enough for a human voice.
Thanks again – b
Such a painful story to hear recounted – the injustice and abuse of power is sickening. So hard to scrub the worst of human nature clean, even in these times, no doubt in times to come too.
Thanks Kerry, don’t you have your own round of dark stories in South Africa? That past is even closer than my own. Not sure there’s any way to clean the wounds without letting them properly bleed first. -b
I feel sick by a story like this, and in the light of the confederate flags and the murders in Charleston it feels even worse. I’m afraid it will happen in Sweden too, there are some dark undercurrents of racial hatred here as well.
Heartbreaking to me that so little has changed. Yet again, encouraging to note that so much has.
Intense, heartbreaking… what’s even left to say? More than the sorry vessels of my words can carry.
Such a compelling narrative.. its horrifying that this ever happened or that humanity continues to find new lows across the world. Bookmarked to read again. Thanks for sharing this.
I read this and would like to think that I’m reading about a more savage, less enlightened time. I mean, the Klan? Then, I read in my newspaper that the Klan papered a town in my state with leaflets over the weekend. Is the world going to hell or have we always been there?
Thanks MZ–I don’t know if this narrative tells us that we’ve come so far or that we fell so low. And both oberservations are about being white, which is the smoke of this poem coiling around such random cruelty and indifference. White people get to think how things have improved, and they get to not think about it at all until the next act of terrorism by WISIS rouses the rabble. There were Klan from elsewhere in this story, but most of them were neighbors. Putting on the sheet showed how little civility actually counts. Online anonymity is like putting on the sheet.
defiant and so black in the white Florida
heat
I once had a thought I tried to put in a poem(and failed) about how black flesh does not show bruises in the same way that pale white flesh does, and so white hands are always resentfully trying to make it do so, to make the pain they are dying to inflict viciously visible–this poem, of course, does exactly that. Read it yesterday but my mind was a bit fogged with my back meds–reading it again, it just incises itself line by line, very much like the newspaper stories you cite, a journalism encounter of the poetic kind. I find it so ironic that all the repubs are suddenly calling for the Confederate battle flag to disappear, as if they just suddenly noticed it–such bad press for the party of bigotry and hate!. but i digress–this is a dark journey, out to that deserted road in the middle of nowhere where our most despicable acts can somehow be justified–I would love to hear Mark read it–he is the best with such things-but the voice I hear in my head is Walter Cronkite-like, some old school newsman baldly reporting the facts and making the ears bleed to hear them. As you’ve been told,this is superlative writing all through, but really, it is the authenticity you give to horror and the systemic nature of it you expose for which I give most credit.
Thanks H, sorry that your back has you up on the cross again — I’d like to see that poem come out somewhere … I had read up some on the McCall – Groveland Four story before, but Gilbert’s book opens the unhealed wounds so brutally and surgically that writing this as a response was blood for blood. How else can one with any honesty? Prospero’s comment about Caliban at the end of “The Tempest” — “This thing of darkness I call my own” — is somehow a pun or trope on slavery, that the darkness is inside of us, the bondage is white mastery, Bacon’s declaration that dominion by the European male is ordained by God. Twisting Scripture into shackles. Florida has such a hidden legacy of racist outrage, sheeted over by travelogue. I was so surprised at Mark’s offer — and not sure how it will result, because there’s are many rough shanks in the narrative — and agree that the voice belongs to newsman’s, or a court official at the reconciliation trials in South Africa. Get well.
We must remember and we must change as a nation. The horrific discrimination and violence has to end. Thank you for writing this.
Before seeing Mark’s offer, I also wished to hear this aloud, wondering if you record your pens, since, more than most, your poetry asks for voicing. Terrific, in that sense of terror underpinning that word. ~