Heat of Darkness
Gilbert King’s new book takes a deeper look at justice in Jim Crow Lake County
by David Cohea (djcohea@gmail.com)
Gilbert King’s first non-fiction work set in Lake County, Devil in the Grove, was the kind of book that you can neither put down nor get behind you. His account of Jim Crow justice in the talented hands of Lake County sheriff Willis McCall (with significant assistance from his deputy James Yates, who lived in the Pistolville section of Mount Dora) against four innocent black men was harrowing. It takes you places in ghostly groves where an unquiet past will not go away.
If you are white and live in Lake County, much that is written there may be surprising — a different world. Until the publication of Devil in the Grove, it’s very likely that few here could imagine the Old South so local and so dark. Unless, of course, you grew up black.
Having lived in Mount Dora these past twenty years, it was also strange to read something so dark and yet so familiar. The streets of its narrative are ours — Groveland, Leesburg, Mount Dora, Ocala. Citrus groves have receded greatly around here since the freezes of the ’80s, but they are relic presences amid the rise of sprawling single-family home development. The past of Devil in the Grove are just outside my window as I write, faint now yet belying an impermeable stain.
It may have been the wish of many long-time Lake County residents to “let sleeping dogs lie,” as a relative of Norma Jean Padgett told Gilbert King when he tried to approach the woman who had falsely accused the Groveland Four, sixty years after the crime: But so much gets stirred up you just can’t. And though it’s a local story, the book immediately had national implications. Published in the aftermath of the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting and the rash of killings of black men by police officers soon to follow, Devil in the Grove brought so much unquiet business close to the surface of the present. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2013 and a runner up for the Dayton Peace Prize, King’s book was a real harbinger of justice not yet served. (Lionsgate was said to have been producing a movie version of the book, but that seems to have been backburnered.)
As if to underscore that there is no redress for what has not yet been fully accounted, King found he wasn’t done yet with Lake County. In his research into the Groveland Four tale, he uncovered another story in some ways darker than the original — not for the black community (they are peripheral actors in the later one, almost to a fault), but as a measuring stick to show how low the white community was willing to go to allow an injustice to keep the peace.
I got to know King while he was researching this story; we had coffee several times talking about Lake County, and he paid me to research back issues of the Mount Dora Topic from microfilm in the Eustis library. I probably wasn’t much help, as the crucial year of 1958 was missing from the collection of reels. (One has to wonder how purposeful that gap, and who might have been responsible.) Fortunately for King, there was an abundance of source material available elsewhere, and his instincts and dedication for digging out a story served him well for this next book. King admitted that the tale would be more difficult to compel readers than the Groveland Four narrative, and I was curious to see how he worked that out.
Also, the hours spent at the Eustis library going through years of weekly Mount Dora news provided me an even deeper level of expectation as a local reader.
The just-published Beneath A Ruthless Sun: A True Story of Violence, Race and Justice Lost and Found (Riverhead Books, $28) returns to Lake County’s old heart of darkness to probe the case of Jesse Daniels, a retarded 19-year-old white man accused of the December 1957 rape of a wealthy Okahumpka grove-owner’s wife and his subsequent incarceration in Florida state’s notorious Chattahoochee mental institution. Oddly, several black men had been rounded up immediately after the crime; surely one of them would have met a similar fate as two of the Groveland Boys (one was shot hundreds of times by a posse outside Gainesville, and the other was shot and killed by McCall “attempting to escape”). Yet within a week they were freed and the amiable white boy-man who couldn’t recite the months was arrested, deemed unfit for trial and committed.
Jesse’s distraught mother Pearl reached out to Mount Dora Topic editor Mabel Norris Reese, and from the beginning Reese smelled the familiar rot of Lake County law enforcement heat — how the boy had been handled, the lack of access, the stonewalling and speed in which judgment had been cast. Reese had already had much experience with McCall covering the Groveland rape case earlier in the decade, and more recently stood up to the tall sheriff when he declared that the Platt children looked “too black” to attend Mount Dora schools. Reese also knew the cost of standing up to McCall. During the Platt family drama, fish heads had been poured in her yard, a cross burned there and several bombs had been tossed. The “KKK” painted in red on the main window of the Topic’s downtown office at Fourth and Donnelly, and the financial losses suffered by local ostracism were enough to eventually cause Mabel and her husband Paul to sell the paper and move on.
When another rape was committed in Leesburg soon after Daniel’s commitment, Reese asked in a newspaper editorial whether the real perpetrator was still on the loose. It looked to her like Jesse Daniels had been framed, but why?
Reese is obviously King’s hero in the tale — her persistence in advocating for Daniels goes on for fifteen years until his release from Chattahoochee in 1972. And Pearl Daniels is the acme of devoted motherhood, earnest to have her boy safe back at home. But the true depth of Beneath the Sun is the characterization of institutional Jim Crow in Lake County, where sheriff, deputies (Yates is back), judge, state’s attorney and all-white juries all but locked out any hope for anything but justice served their way. King has a keen eye for the harrowing detail (in a former occupation, he was a fashion photographer), and he is adept at keeping the on edge as he recounts evidence gathered from his extensive research, including thousands of pages of court transcripts, hospital records, legislative notes and testimony (much acquired through the Freedom of Information Act). McCall is one formidable foe — but Reese’s persistence is unflagging. If there is an archetype for the authority of the state and freedom of the press, it surely has their faces.
It would have been unnecessarily cruel to recount what Jesse Daniels encountered in the Chattahoochee madhouse. Making things worse, because of his crime he was put in the most violent ward of all. I know some guys who served time in the state penn at Starke, and the horror of incarceration in Florida’s darkest wards is something you cannot forget. (The state of Florida does not forget, either, refusing to restore the voting rights of most of the ex-felon population, of which a quarter of Florida’s adult black males are part of.)
Slowly, slowly, times and tide changed. Punitive sanity laws are rewritten (the Baker Act is surprisingly a Florida innovation). In 1972–14 years after the crime — Sheriff McCall is at it again, kicking a mentally ill black prisoner so badly in his cell that a few days later the man died. A different Governor is in office — Reuben Askew — and once again greater authorities try to rein in the renegade Lake County sheriff (one can’t help but think of Joe Arpaio here, the Maricopa County, AZ sheriff no one has yet found a way to successfully bring to heel for his heavy-handed tactics with illegal immigrants). An inquest is ordered, and during testimony by a court reporter who had taken Daniel’s 1958 confession, an astonishing revelation is made that blows the legitimacy of the Daniels case is blown wide open. (Readers will appreciate discovering what the revelation is for themselves.) Aghast at what is revealed, an investigator comments, “someone should write a book.” Reese — remarried now to Harrison Chesley, a former Mount Dora city councilman, and relocated to Daytona Shores — makes it the title of a News-Journal editorial: “A Book There Should Be, and Its Title: McCall.” It still wasn’t enough to put McCall in jail, but his rule as sheriff of Lake County came to an end as his rival Evvie Griffin is elected for the job (Griffin, an essential source for King, died just a month ago.) Someone who knew McCall well said of him that some twenty to twenty-five murders were committed by him or by others at his prompting.
Reese’s daughter Patricia told me in a piece I did on her in 2015 (a year before she died) that her mother had always wanted to write a book but never could get to it (Mabel died in 1995). A box found in the attic of Patricia’s daughter Cindy contained all of Reese’s notes on the Daniels story, giving King what he needed to write the book that Reese never could.
King gets close — damned close, 95 percent sure — but he can’t quite nail the backstory’s ghost with the hammer of fact: That a rich grove-owner paid a young black man to murder his wife so he could marry his mistress; that the man had chickened out on the murder and raped the woman instead; that a white man was imprisoned for the crime because no wealthy white man could stand the stigma of his wife being raped by a black man; and that a conspiracy of sheriff, judge and state attorney pulled it all off.
Not much we can do about that now, is there? The statute of limitations has long passed. The closest thing McCall has gotten to a correction of memory is that the road named after him in 1986 was protested by black residents and in 2005 changed back to County Road 450A.
Maybe there’s still too much family around. Maybe fear of McCall still resonates in these parts, keeping lips shut. Maybe sleeping dogs of this sort don’t wake. Willis McCall, James Yates and state attorney Gary Oldham never burned on earth for their sins, the way so many unjustly accused found themselves in Old Sparky. (We can only wonder about their fate in the hereafter.) Maybe it will take a work of fiction to tell the truth and nothing but the truth in this tangled tale.
Maybe there’s something that can’t be redressed, because Lake County residents like me have done so little to own it.
* * *
Reading King’s new book is a complex experience for one having been moved so strongly by his last one. Contemporary suburban Lake County may bear little semblance to its agricultural forbear, but that doesn’t give it a pass on its old sins. Devil In The Grove made me acutely aware of how little has been done to clean up the Jim Crow past.
For me it felt like a call to action, and what followed seemed like a response. With no local newspaper any more (the last issue of the Mount Dora Topic printed more than ten years ago, in 2006), I took up contributing to a local news site staffed by citizen journalists. (Not the optimal way to address a growing news hole, but what else are ya gonna do?). I researched Mount Dora’s history with its news, tracing the arc of weekly newspapers which this town had for nearly a century. Could a community wake to itself, become one, if someone did a more responsible job of relaying its news?
Sure seemed so, but the reality was that the news has perhaps forever grown too distant, conflicting and difficult, with the silos of liberal and conservative language exacerbated by Facebook’s shouting chambers. “Fake news” wasn’t around yet as a term, yet the site was frequently criticized by those in town from a divide remarkably similar to the national malaise. The local speak had sprung the same deep and widening leak.
Still, I looked about and wrote — about East Town, about the old racial animus here and how much of it remains. (An interview with Gilbert drew more of that out.) But where do you go with that? A year and a half later that site ceased publishing, and I moved my posts to a blog named Mount Dora Topics(named after, yes, the dead newspaper). I turned my attention to Mount Zion Primitive Baptist, an abandoned church on the outskirts of town. I wrote about the drug problem and the looming impacts of climate change in Lake County. (One of the more immediate effects of climate change in Lake County will be massive migration from coastal flooding areas.) But blogs are not newspapers, and their reach is minimal to none.
In King’s new book, Reese laments that her reach as a weekly newspaper editor during the early stages of the Daniels case was very limited — about as far as she could console a grieving family. After selling the Topic in 1960 and going to work full time for the News-Journal in Daytona Beach, she felt that her voice would be heard by peers at powerful newspapers like the St. Petersburg Times. King’s two books involving Lake County give Reese the full attention she well deserves, preserving a legacy we surely would otherwise have forgotten.
I wish King would have delved more into Reese’s newspaper career, for it was both distinguished and surprising. Reese started as a feature writer at the Akron Beacon Journal, coming to Mount Dora when she and husband Paul Norris purchased the Mount Dora Topic in 1947. Crunching out ten thousand words on a manual typewriter in order to fill an 8-page weekly newspaper on one’s own may have seemed like small potatoes to the work produced by a daily newspaper. But in Reese was an editorial department of one, tasked with covering a city’s life entire, no matter how small the city (Mount Dora in the 1950s was around 3,000, a quarter of its present, growing count). And cover it she did, week after week, missing only two editions during her 13-year tenure at the Topic. King does dip into the mechanics of small town newspaper production in the ’50s, and it’s amazing to see how the technology has changed. (For example, every word Reese typed was then transcribed by a Linotype operator, setting words into moveable type for printing). I had a chance to look at Reese’s editions of the Topic the Eustis public library while helping King do research for this latest book, and the scroll of news seems insanely outsized compared to the whittled-to-the-bone newshole of the present, ever-diminishing Orlando and Leesburg dailies.
But Reese wasn’t only dedicated, she was good. Her persistence in covering the Groveland Four Trial, the Platt family case, Jessie Daniels and a number of other incidents where Jim Crow justice in the hands of Sheriff McCall was meted out earned her numerous journalism awards, not only as a “lady journalist” (women journalists had separate awards with the Florida Press Association back in the ‘50s), but in the big-boy categories as well, often winning awards in hard news reporting and commentary, and that as a weekly newspaper editor pitted against peers at regimented and better-staffed dailies. Reese gained attention from the national press during her coverage of the Platt family (using the favorable exposure to bear down on McCall). She also was the first recipient of the Elijah Parrish Award for Courage in Journalism during the National Conference of Weekly Newspaper Editors in 1956, named for her record as “a crusading woman who defied the Ku Klux Klan in her fight for justice in Florida.”
It was not normal for the editor of small-town weekly newspaper to take such stands in the Deep South, not during the civil-rights era of the ’60s but especially not in the 1950s, when Brown vs. The Board of Education was first setting segregationalists on fire. I’ve read microfilm of The (Orlando) Sentinel-Star, Leesburg Commercial and the Eustis Lake News from the period, and they are as silent on Jim Crow justice as the Mount Dora Topic was vocal.
The difference is so remarkable that one has to wonder if Reese in her unremitting coverage of Willis McCall gave him the villainous colors that King much later inks to full Shakespearean augment. Journalists of her era were mostly white and male and fed by the ecosystem of the white South; one has to wonder just how many more Sheriff McCalls there were in Florida, their villainies water under the bridge of the silent local press. (Certainly North Florida, where plantation culture was deeply embedded and Jim Crow justice was far more pervasive and cruel, figures into the account.) It wasn’t until the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, with its dramatic and harrowing lynching memorial, that the local paper, the Montgomery Advertiser, came clean with its long history of acquiescence to Jim Crow. One wonders what it will take for the Tallahassee Democrat and Jacksonville Florida Times-Union to do the same, if they ever will.
One also wonders when Mount Dora will recognize at last the feisty editor who took on the full freight of racism, institutional inequality and economic injustice without a word of thanks, then or ever.
Newspapering has itself fallen such a long way from the ’50s. Internet technology and the financial crisis of ’08 sent major newspapers into an economic tailspin. Print advertising revenues today are below what newspapers made 75 years ago. The dailies in Tampa and Orlando and Daytona Beach and Leesburg are ghosts of themselves. I worked at the Orlando Sentinel for 18 years; leaving in 1998, there were then about 1,650 employees, with more than 500 working in the editorial department and its bureaus across the state. The Lake County bureau was the department’s largest, with more than 30 advertising and editorial employees in Tavares and a regional production center in Sorrento. Today there are less than 100 employees total working at the Sentinel, with only a regional columnist and a couple of interns covering Lake County. Reese’s employment at the News-Journalwas ill-fated; a close associate of the editor, she was forced into retirement in the early 80’s. She would surely hate the turn her profession has taken.
Reese had the hunger for a good story; she was as persistent as she was dedicated. Her sense of right and wrong were compelling. She could be florid in her writing compared to dryer voices of the time, but her passion was undeniable. From conversations with her daughter Patricia, Reese’s passion though was singular — Patricia says she never felt in any way as important to Reese as her mother’s work. Patricia’s sadness over this was palpable, and her love of teaching and later of work with rescue dogs seems like a compensation for playing second fiddle to career. Reese might have been a hero in the profession, but King could also shown the reader what that cost.
Could a Willis McCall return to Lake County? Probably not. First of all, so much growth has come into the county, in Clermont and the Villages and now near turnpike and expressway exits in Groveland and Mount Dora, that the sprawling individual hamlets have far more self-rule than before. But there are more rural counties in Florida where the county sheriff rules with almost total control. Indeed, there is a “constitutional sheriff” movement across the nation, endorsed by the far right, giving their local sheriff autonomy to rule beyond the control of state or federal authorities. A recent New Yorker profile of Nick Finch, the sheriff of Liberty County up in the Panhandle, shows how deep and far that can go. And in a country where white supremacists are on the move and gaining influence, it is very possible for a place far enough out of the spotlight where a sheriff like McCall can gain enough levers of power. And with local news deserts spreading across the country, that’s just enough darkness to get the lynch parties started again.
In a post-truth era, power becomes the only authority. Willis McCall was never fully stopped, and his memory among long-term white Lake County families has endured, like the Confederate statues still standing in many Lake County public spaces. Last August, Eustis city commissioner Anthony Sabatini stepped into the fray by announcing that all Confederate statues facing removal could be moved to Eustis, where “we will gladly accept and proudly display our nation’s history.” Fellow commissioners rushed to clarify that Sabatini wasn’t speaking for the city, and Sabatini eventually resigned from the commission to run as a Trump-style Republican disrupter for the state House of Representatives. Maybe our suburbanization has whitewashed the pall of racism from Lake County law enforcement, but that doesn’t mean the levers of institutional racism aren’t still very much in force.
And that is what is perhaps most disappointing about Beneath A Ruthless Sun. As it was much more acceptable for Reese to write about a white family who looked black than it was to cover the despicable conditions in East Town, so too King’s second book uses up much of the goodwill generated by his previous book looking into the long history of a white man punished for a black man’s crime. It’s an important story but somehow out of joint with the time.
Poor white America has gone that way, neither privileged enough to occupy the front pages of the newspaper (except when they commit a crime), nor discriminated enough to get onto the back pages. It was Pistolville in Mount Dora which first gentrified out of existence — drive around the neighborhoods south of First Avenue and you’ll find duplexes and lots. (You can still see the house Deputy James Yates lived in while he was serving justice for Sheriff McCall — read how he gets confessions from the Groveland Four in Devil in the Grove).
I was once told an East Town story about black minister’s son who was jailed by McCall’s deputies on a rape accusation. The Mount Dora black community, convinced of the boy’s innocence, protested, with many going on a hunger fast. Leaders tried to get Mount Dora’s city council to intervene on the boy’s behalf, but it was too late: the boy was taken out into the grove where McCall’s dogs were set loose. The woman who told me this story, who grew up in East Town in the ’50s, would not give me more details when I said the story should be accounted for.
Like the hamlet of Oklahumpka to the west of town, Mount Dora’s black community is thinning out. Agriculture and home service jobs have vanished. The young graduate from Mount Dora High and move on. They rest have little to cling to. Mount Dora’s future looks bright with the opening of the Wekiva Expressway exit into the east of town. The population of the city is projected to double in the next ten years. Development on the east side of 441 will transform the character of the city. Old Mount Dora should get pricey.
And when gentrification comes to East Town, all memory of Sheriff McCall’s and his shadow heat will be covered in the pale kudzu of progress.
I am thankful that Gilbert King’s second book keeps the smell of rotting fruit hanging round the gallery of idyllic pictures of Florida’s past. If anything, we will better scent the predatory ghost with the white Stetson and aw-shucks ruthlessness when his contemporary likeness sets up shop.
Gilbert King speaks on the Mount Dora Community Center at 4 p.m. May 6. Copies of his book are available at Barrel of Books and Games bookstore in downtown Mount Dora.
Jeffrey Toobin reviews “Beneath A Ruthless Sun” for the New York Times here.
