The Warmth of Other Suns Read online

  The planter’s men came and pistol-whipped the uncle right then and there.

  The family had to get him out that night. “To call a white woman a lie,” George said, “they came looking for him that night. They came, fifteen or twenty of them on horseback, wagon.”

  George’s grandparents knew to expect it. “We got to get you away from here ’cause you done call Mr. Reshard a lie. And you know they ain’t gon’ like that.”

  George was too young to understand what was happening but heard the grown people talk about it in whispers. It was the middle of the 1920s, and George never knew exactly where the uncle went. The particulars were never spoken.

  “They hid him out” was all George would say. “He left from out of there.”

  Lil George and his parents didn’t stay in Alachua much longer after that. They fled to St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Mexico, where they would no longer be under a field boss or overseer. They could work in the big high-rise hotels going up, and with all the tourists from up north and the building boom in the beach towns on the coast, they could be free of the farm and find plenty of work.

  They were living in a row house off Fifth Avenue in the colored district. The father found work in construction, and things were good. But by the late 1920s, when the Great Depression descended on the country, things weren’t so good. Big George took to drinking and would lie in wait on the porch for Lil George’s mother to get back from church on Sunday. Once, instead of coming straight back, she stopped a few doors down to chat with a neighbor. Big George saw her dawdling, and that set him off.

  “You making plans to meet some other man,” Big George said.

  He jumped on her and started hitting her. Lil George and his half brother, William, were sitting on the porch and could see it.

  It wasn’t the first time. Lil George cried over it. He was torn between the two of them. Sometimes William, who had a different father and was two years older than Lil George, would throw rocks at Big George to make him stop. Lil George hated it when William did that. He adored his parents. This time, Lil George got mad. The two boys went and got a brick from under a wash pot in the kitchen and hit Big George with it. Then they ran down the street to get away. Big George was hurt more by the pain he had caused his son than by the brick itself and went calling after his namesake. Son, come back, here. I’m not gonna bother you.

  The marriage gave out after that, and the family split up. The mother kept William on the Gulf Coast with her. And Big George headed east to the town of Eustis, where he said he would send for Lil George after he got established. For the time being, Lil George was sent to live with his mother’s mother in Ocala, a town in the scrublands midway between Alachua and Eustis.

  The grandmother was a root doctor named Annie Taylor who was a big-boned woman as tall as a man. She lived on a corner lot and grew pole beans alongside the fence. She was already raising one daughter’s two boys, and here came another one from another daughter, Napolean, now that she had quit her husband.

  Annie set George to work right away. She took him and his cousins out to the woods and showed them which twigs and roots to dig up: sassafras, sulfur, and goldenrod. They would tramp behind her through the scrub and wire grass back to the house—George and his cousins James and Joseph, whom they called Brother. She would stir the roots into foul-smelling potions that people bought to thin their blood, cut a fever, shush a hacking cough. She knew all the roots and could identify them, and she knew what they were good for.

  The boys were her nearest patients, and every season brought a new torture. Sulfur and cream of tartar at the first sign of spring to thin the blood for the summer. Castor oil to clean your system out in the winter. Balls of asafetida hung around the neck to ward off flu and tuberculosis, the asafetida resin rolled up like flour dough and smelling only slightly worse than cow dung. She put the asafetida paste into little sacks and made necklaces for the boys to wear (which they took off and put in their pockets as soon as they got from around her). In between, she plied them with goldenrod for fever, asafetida with whiskey for a bad cold, and any number of bitter-tasting concoctions that made the boys hate to get sick.

  If she detected a cold in the chest, she unscrewed the top of the kerosene lamp, tipped it over a spoonful of sugar, and let four or five drops of kerosene saturate the sugar. Then she stuck the spoon into their tight faces for them to swallow. There was no point in trying to run and hide. “You better not be talking about no run-and-hide,” George said years later. “She didn’t play that. ‘Now you gonna get a whippin’ on top of it.’ ”

  The three little boys were left in Annie Taylor’s care because there was a great churning among the young people of working age like her daughters. Her oldest girl, George’s mother, was off on the Gulf Coast. And her two youngest girls, Annie (whom they called Baby) and Lavata (who actually was the baby but whom they called Date), were up in New York. Baby couldn’t keep little James and Brother in New York with her, so she left them with her mother to raise, like a lot of migrants did when they went up north.

  Young people like them weren’t tied to a place like their slave grandparents had been forced to, and they weren’t content to move from plantation to plantation like their parents. Ever since World War I had broken out and all those jobs had opened up in the North, there had been an agitation for something better, some fast, new kind of life where they could almost imagine themselves equal to the white people. And so they had gone off to wherever the money seemed to be raining down—to the Gulf Coast rising up in a construction boom or the orange groves at picking season or the turpentine camps if they couldn’t manage anything else; or, if they had nerve in the early days of the Migration, they’d hop a train to the edge of the world, straight up the coast, past Georgia and both Carolinas and straight through Virginia and up to New York, where people said you could get rich just mopping floors.

  To the old folks who stayed, the young people looked to be going in circles, chasing a wish. Some went crossways to someplace in Alabama or Georgia, where they heard things were better, only to find the South to be the South wherever they went. Some went north, high and mighty, and came back south, low and broke. Some people’s pride wouldn’t let them come back at all. So they shoehorned themselves into tenements and made like they were rich or just plain made do and dazzled the folks back home with all the money they wired back.

  Some people back home came to depend on that money, to half expect it, and they got agitated when it didn’t come. They figured the people who left were making all that money up north and just about owed it to them, especially if they left children behind. Baby and Date kept up fairly regular payments to their mother to cover Baby’s two little boys. George’s father sent money for George, too. At first. But after a while, it got to the place where he wouldn’t send any money, and the grandmother had to stretch what her daughters sent for two into enough to take care of all three of them.

  Sometimes George heard his grandmother fretting about how she was running out of money and hadn’t heard from Big George. It was the Depression, and sometimes even the daughters got slow sending money for the two which had stretched to three, and the grandmother had a problem on her hands. The daughters had gotten themselves out in that big world way up north—who knew what kind of fix they were in?—and here she was left with the little ones.

  When the money got low, Annie Taylor got in her rocking chair on the porch and rocked back and forth. She hummed and sang as she rocked. Guide me o’er, thou Great Jehovah, pilgrim to this barren land. I am weak, but thou art mighty. Guide me with thy loving hand.

  George and James and Brother heard her humming.

  “Grandma humming that song again,” George told James. “Somethin’ gonna happen soon.”

  The palm of her hand started to itch, or so she said. And before long, a Western Union man came rolling up the street, announcing a telegram for Miss Annie Taylor.

  “Somebody would be done wired us some money,” George w
ould say years later. “Yes, sirree.”

  The waiting and hoping went on for two years, and then it was decided that it was best for George to be with his father, and he joined his father in Eustis.

  Big George worked at the loading dock of a packinghouse and ran a one-room convenience store over on Bates Avenue. He sold baked goods and castor oil to the fruit pickers and day workers and the children on their lunch break from the colored high school across the street in a citrus farming town in the underdeveloped midsection of a still-isolated state.

  Lake County and the rest of central Florida were far from the lights of Miami and the palm-tree version of paradise that tourists came for. This was the Florida that had entered the Union as a slave state, where a Florida slaveholder could report without apology, in 1839, that he worked his slaves “in a hurrying time till 11 or 12 o’clock at night, and have them up by four in the morning.”54 Florida went farther than some other slave states in the creativity of its repression: Slaves could not gather together to pray.55 They couldn’t leave their plantations, even for a walk, without written permission from their owner. If they were accused of wrongdoing, “their hands were burned with a heated iron, their ears nailed to posts,” or their backs stripped raw with seventy-five lashes from a buckskin whip. The few free blacks in the state had to register with the nearest probate court or could be automatically enslaved by any white person who stepped forward to claim possession.

  As the country neared the point of collapse over the issue of a state’s right to slavery, Florida, in the early winter of 1861, became one of the first to secede from the Union in the months leading up to the Civil War.56 Florida broke away on January 10, 1861, three weeks after the first rebel state of South Carolina, and a day after Mississippi. Florida heartily joined a new country whose cornerstone, according to the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”57 This new government, Stephens declared, “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

  Thus began the bloodiest war on American soil, after four years of which the Confederates fell in the spring of 1865. Immediately, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas took steps to begin imposing a formal caste system, becoming the first in the South to do so. They hastened to pass laws restricting the newly freed people barely before the cannons had cooled. Florida’s 1865 law set forth, among other things, that “if any negro, mulatto or other person of color shall intrude himself into any railroad car or other public vehicle set apart for the exclusive accommodation of white people,” he would be sentenced to “stand in pillory for one hour, or be whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, or both, at the discretion of the jury.”58

  Florida was shut off from the rest of the world by its cypress woods and turpentine camps. It was another country, with its own laws and constitution. And all through the 1920s, when George was a toddler and then in grade school, the grown people hung their heads over the violence that descended over them and passed the stories among themselves and to the children when they got old enough to understand.

  They talked about the white mob that burned down the colored section of Ocoee, over by Orlando, when a colored man tried to vote back in 1920, how the man was hanged from a tree and other colored people were burned to death and the remaining colored people packed up and never returned. They whispered about the time the white people burned and leveled Rosewood, a colored settlement by the Gulf of Mexico, halfway between St. Petersburg and Tallahassee, because a white woman said a colored man had attacked her. It was where, a survivor said, “anything that was black or looked black was killed.”59 That was in 1923.

  And then, in the fall of 1934, when George was a teenager and old enough to take note of such things, perhaps the single worst act of torture and execution in twentieth-century America occurred in the panhandle town of Marianna, Florida, a farm settlement halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee.60

  That October, a twenty-three-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. Neal had grown up across the road from Lola Cannidy’s family. He was arrested and signed a written confession that historians have since called into question. But at the time, passions ran so high that a band of more than three hundred men armed with guns, knives, torches, and dynamite went searching for Neal in every jail within a seventy-five-mile radius of Marianna.

  The manhunt forced the authorities to move Neal across the panhandle, from Marianna to Panama City by car, to Camp Walton by boat, to Pensacola by car again, with the mob on their trail at every turn. Finally, the Escambia County sheriff, fearing that his jail in Pensacola was too dilapidated to withstand attack, decided to take Neal out of state altogether, to the tiny town of Brewton, Alabama, fifty-five miles north of Pensacola. Someone leaked Neal’s whereabouts, and a lynching party of some one hundred men drove several hours on Highway 231 in a thirty-car caravan from Florida to Alabama. There the men managed to divert the local sheriff and overtake the deputy. They stormed the jail and took Neal, his limbs bound with a plow rope, back to Marianna.

  It was the early morning hours of October 26, a Friday.61 Neal’s chief abductors, a self-described “committee of six,” an oddly officious term commonly used by the leaders of southern lynch mobs, set the lynching for 8 P.M., when most everyone would be off work. The advance notice allowed word to spread by radio, teletype, and afternoon papers to the western time zones.

  Well before the appointed hour, several thousand people had gathered at the lynching site. The crowd grew so large and unruly—people having been given sufficient forewarning to come in from other states—that the committee of six, fearing a riot, took Neal to the woods by the Chipola River to wait out the crowds and torture him before the execution.62

  There his captors took knives and castrated him in the woods. Then they made him eat the severed body parts “and say he liked it,” a witness said.

  “One man threw up at the sight,” wrote the historian James R. McGovern.

  Around Neal’s neck, they tied a rope and pulled it over a limb to the point of his choking before lowering him to take up the torture again. “Every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or toe,” the witness said. Then the men used hot irons to burn him all over his body in a ritual that went on for several hours.

  “It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could stand such unspeakable torture for such a long period,” wrote the white undercover investigator retained by the NAACP.

  The crowd waiting in town never got to see Neal die. The committee of six decided finally to just kill him in the woods. His nude body was then tied to the back of a car and dragged to the Cannidy house, where men, women, and children stabbed the corpse with sticks and knives. The dead girl’s father was angry that Neal was killed before he could get to him. “They done me wrong about the killing,” the father said. “They promised me they would bring him up to my house before they killed him and let me have the first shot. That’s what I wanted.”

  The committee hanged the body “from an oak tree on the courthouse lawn.” People reportedly displayed Neal’s fingers and toes as souvenirs. Postcards of his dismembered body went for fifty cents each. When the sheriff cut down the body the next morning, a mob of as many as two thousand people demanded that it be rehanged. When the sheriff refused to return it to the tree, the mob attacked the courthouse and rampaged through Marianna, attacking any colored person they ran into. Well-to-do whites hid their maids or sent cars to bring their workers to safety. “We needed these people,” said a white man who sat on his porch protecting his interests with a loaded Winchester. Florida Governor David Sholtz had to call in the National Guard to quell the mob.

  Across the country, thousands of outraged Americans wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt dem
anding a federal investigation. The NAACP compiled a sixteen-page report and more files on the Neal case than any other lynching in American history. But Neal had the additional misfortune of having been lynched just before the 1934 national midterm elections, which were being seen as a referendum on the New Deal itself. Roosevelt chose not to risk alienating the South with a Democratic majority in Congress at stake. He did not intervene in the case. No one was ever charged in Neal’s death or spent a day in jail for it. The Jackson County grand jury, in the common language of such inquests, reported that the execution had occurred “at the hands of persons unknown to us.”

  Soon afterward, it was learned that Neal and the dead girl, who had known each other all their lives, had been lovers and that people in her family who discovered the liaison may have been involved in her death for the shame it had brought to the family.63 Indeed, the summer after Neal was lynched, the girl’s father was convicted of assault with intent to kill his niece because he suspected that that side of the family had had a hand in his daughter’s death.

  In sentencing the father to five years in prison for attacking the relative, the judge said, “I hate to pass this sentence on an old man such as you, but I must do it. To be perfectly fair with you, I don’t believe you have any too many brains.”

  The father replied, “Yes, judge. I am plumb crazy.”

  Thereafter, Florida continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South. Violence had become such an accepted fact of life that, in 1950, the Florida governor’s special investigator, Jefferson Elliott, observed that there had been so many mob executions in one county that it “never had a negro live long enough to go to trial.”64

  The grown people’s whispers of unspeakable things seeped into George’s subconscious like a nursery rhyme, even though he was too young to know the particulars or understand the meaning of it all. Surrounded as he was by the arbitrary violence of the ruling caste, it would be nearly impossible for George or any other colored boy in that era to grow up without the fear of being lynched, the dread that, in the words of the historian James R. McGovern, “he might be accused of something and suddenly find himself in a circle of tormentors with no one to help him.”65