Beneath a Ruthless Sun

by Gilbert King

  Florida vegetable farmer W. E. Tyler took one final, stoical glance at his forty-five-acre tomato crop and decided to go hunting. “The freeze killed the whole crop,” he lamented. “That’s the chance you take when you plant in the fall. I never had time to go hunting before, but now I don’t have to worry about the tomatoes.”

  Still, at the peak of the holiday shipping season, Okahumpka’s citrus men clung to the hope that they might somehow salvage enough fruit to meet the demand. In advance of the freeze, they dispatched armies of pickers into the groves with twenty-four-foot ladders, to attempt to pick as much of the crop as possible. More vital than saving the crop, however, was saving the trees themselves. With the freeze looming, everyone in the community was expected to pitch in. For two straight days, from sunup to sundown, Jesse Daniels, his nostrils blackened and burning from the oily soot in the air, worked alongside other locals, including women and children, building banks—cone-shaped piles of sand two to three feet high—around the bottoms of the trunks. “It was hard work,” Jesse recalled. “Made my whole body ache.”

  With each hour after the sun set on Thursday, December 12, the farmers’ hopes dwindled. The temperature dropped to 12 degrees overnight, and the following morning Warren Johnson’s office tersely declared the freeze a “major disaster” for the state. Temple oranges and tangerines had been especially hard hit, and scores of citrus shippers and juice-concentrate plants across the state closed for the day to assess the damage. The product to fill an estimated ninety million boxes had gone unharvested.

  That Friday, Jesse Daniels again got up at dawn to prepare for another long day’s labor in the groves. At least he’d not be soil-banking. Instead, he’d join the fruit pickers at local groves, where they’d harvest a crop of mid-season Parson Brown oranges. The Parson Browns not only offered sweetness but also tolerated cold, even into the teens, and citrus growers like Joe Knowles were trusting that the frozen oranges would still be acceptable for the production of concentrate. They would have to be picked immediately, however, and the juice would have to be squeezed from the fruit within days. Pressed for time, grove owners competed for available workers, who, under such circumstances, could count on receiving a little more than the usual twenty cents per box of picked oranges.

  Pearl Daniels made sure her son was properly dressed for the weather. Jesse didn’t own a pair of gloves, so she protected his hands with two pairs of socks. At the grove, Jesse helped in the “cleaning out”: gathering the fruit that hung inward on the frosty branches or that hung low on the trees but was obscured by the pickers’ ladders. With the harvest from the injured trees, Joe Knowles was striving to cut his losses against the impact of the freeze as well as a rumored statewide citrus embargo by the Florida Citrus Commission, which would prohibit the use of freeze-damaged oranges in producing concentrate. Should damaged oranges go to market, the commission reasoned, consumers and dealers were likely to be wary of Florida fruit for years to come. The state had not imposed an embargo since the freeze of 1948, however, and Knowles was determined to ship as much product as possible before the ban took effect.

  The next few days brought a return of moderate temperatures to the region—too moderate, in fact, up into the mid-seventies. With the rapid warming the leaves on even the strongest trees turned brittle; then they took on the burnt reddish cast every grower feared: the unmistakable indicator of severely freeze-damaged trees. Early surveys from the state’s Agriculture Disaster Committee estimated the losses to citrus growers at fifty to a hundred million dollars. The governor’s forecast was even more dire; he told his cabinet that as much as 75 percent of the state’s orange crop had been lost. He was therefore planning to meet, on the evening of December 17, with citrus-industry leaders who were arriving in nearby Ocala to discuss emergency federal loans and other assistance. “I do not know what we can do,” Collins said, “but we should do everything possible.”

  * * *

  —

  LATE IN THE EVENING OF THE 17TH, in a ranch house east of Eustis, Noel Griffin Jr. was lying asleep in bed with his wife, June, when the telephone rang, startling them both. It was Sheriff Willis McCall, with an urgent ten-eight that put his twenty-nine-year-old deputy into immediate service. A woman had been raped in Okahumpka—a woman “from an important family.” Still groggy, Griffin was thinking he should ask the street address when the sheriff spluttered the victim’s name. Griffin no longer needed to ask the address.

  The deputy jumped into his uniform and holstered his revolver. Okahumpka lay twenty-five miles southwest of Griffin’s ranch, but at this late hour, with Griffin’s much-reputed lead foot applied to the accelerator of his 1956 Plymouth Belvedere, it wouldn’t take long to get there. Cherry top flashing, he ran the red light past the courthouse in Tavares, then raced west on U.S. Route 441 toward Leesburg, where so many of the state’s citrus barons lived. On the outskirts of town, he sped by the vibrant neon sign announcing the BIG ASS MOTEL. Local kids with air rifles had so unfailingly shot out the sign’s second neon-tubed B that the motel’s owner had finally given up on fixing it. Few people in Lake County knew it as the Big Bass, anyway.

  Minutes away from Okahumpka, Griffin picked up the radio crackle of McCall’s voice. All deputies converging on the scene were receiving the sheriff’s command: “Round up every nigger you see.” Griffin followed the flashing red lights of the other cruisers into North Quarters, a pocket of small unpainted shacks. His high beams cut into the dazed eyes of black women roused from bed in the middle of the night, standing silent outside their homes or bouncing sleepy babies in their arms as they paced. Griffin stepped out of his Plymouth. Up and down the road, harried deputies were shuttling shirtless young black men away in handcuffs. Barking hounds were pulling their white handlers into homes yet to be searched.

  “Evvie!”

  Griffin turned at the sound of his nickname, a relic of his childhood inability to pronounce a shortened version of his middle name, Edward. It was Doug Sewell, tugging a cuffed Negro by the arm. “Take in every swinging dick,” Sewell told him.

  The cacophony continued through daybreak. Griffin thrust three young men into the back of his Plymouth and hauled them off to the jail in Tavares, where two other deputies were interrogating suspects. Curious white neighbors from South Quarters ventured onto the scene and stood in the gray light, speculating, nodding and gossiping as the last of the deputies’ cars packed with the black boys of Okahumpka lurched into gear and sped north through boundless acres of rotting citrus.

  * * *

  —

  JESSE DANIELS WOKE on the morning of Wednesday, December 18, to the sound of a car churning sand outside. “Uh-oh,” he said to his mother, who was busy fixing breakfast for Charles, “there’s a deputy car.”

  “Jesse,” Pearl said, “I need some things at the grocery. Why don’t you bike down there for me, and maybe you’ll hear what happened.”

  “Okay, Mama,” Jesse replied. “Maybe I can get to talk to a deputy—”

  “No, son,” Pearl interrupted—she always tried to protect Jesse from “unkind” people, strangers who might mock him for his stutter and childlike speech—“you just listen.”

  In minutes Jesse was on his way down to Merritt’s. He spotted a deputy’s Plymouth parked in front. He laid down his bike, went inside, and sidled up to the lawman.

  Half an hour later, Jesse returned home from the store with the flour his mother had wanted. He looked shocked and embarrassed, and he was hesitant to speak.

  “I found out,” he stammered. “A Negro raped a white woman.” And added, “I think I know what that means.”

  * * *

  —

  FOR MABEL NORRIS REESE, Wednesdays had a special routine. Wednesday was the day the Mount Dora Topic, the weekly newspaper that she and her husband, Paul, owned and ran, went to press. The alarm clock would go off at four a.m. in their house on Morningside Drive in Sylvan S
hores, a small, upscale community of Mediterranean Revival and ranch homes along the west side of Lake Gertrude. Within the hour, Mabel would be barreling along the few miles to the Topic’s office in downtown Mount Dora. There she’d go over that week’s edition, making corrections in the lead galleys, before heading back home to cook breakfast for Paul and their daughter, Patricia.

  Once Patricia had been seen off to school, Mabel would return to the office with Paul for the long hours ahead. Side by side, they would dress up the pages of the newspaper together. Harold Rawley, who ran the Linotype machine, would set the pages one metal line of type at a time, to be inked and printed later that night on the Old Topper, the Topic’s big press. Mrs. Downs, a seventy-two-year-old widow who had taken over the print work from her late husband, would stand in the hot air atop the press platform, feeding sheets of paper into the jaws of the loud, cranky machine that birthed the “inky babies,” as Mabel called them.

  In addition to covering meetings, writing stories and weekly editorials, taking photographs, and selling ads, Mabel worked the arm on the wing mailer and slapped name stickers on each freshly printed copy until, as she liked to tell Patricia, “the pile on the left goes way down and the pile on the right climbs to a mountain.” (Patricia herself attended to the wrapping and stamping of the papers, and Paul and his brother delivered the lot of them to the post office.)

  Mabel had performed this strenuous Wednesday routine more than five hundred times in the ten years that she and Paul had been publishing the Topic. She’d missed only two issues—once when she’d been briefly hospitalized and once the previous summer, when she’d traveled to Illinois to accept a journalism award.

  Sturdy and still stylish at forty-three, Mabel favored printed cotton shirtwaist dresses, which she sometimes wore with pearls, and with her bebopper’s cat-eye glasses she was easily spotted out and about in old-fashioned Mount Dora. This week, she had wrapped herself as well in the warm winter coat she’d had few opportunities to wear since she’d left Akron, Ohio, a decade before and headed out to sites around Lake County to see how people had been affected by the freeze.

  Mount Dora had not been spared, as many of its wealthier residents had lost their own small groves. But in the camps for seasonal laborers on the outskirts of town, conditions were far worse, ensuring, Mabel observed, “misery for the men, women and children who annually make their way to Florida to seek a living as laborers.” Lured by ads in local newspapers across the country, promising an abundance of winter work picking fruit in sunny Florida, they’d come to the citrus groves and vegetable farms of Lake County in droves, “on the proverbial shoe-string,” Mabel wrote. The events of the past week had shattered their hopes. The Florida Citrus Commission had imposed the threatened embargo on all fresh fruit, virtually wiping out the one remaining employment possibility for itinerant pickers. There would be no celery to cut, no tomatoes to harvest, no budding trees to nurse, and no fruit to pick—not even freeze-damaged fruit.

  Most of the laborers had arrived in Lake County without money for a return trip, and they had depended on their first week’s wages to cover their rent and living expenses. Local police, overwhelmed by requests for food, pointed the desperate itinerants to the King’s Daughters, a charitable organization. Mabel was moved both by the workers’ plight and by the “quiet work” of the charity, which provided bus fares and gasoline for stranded families, as well as mattresses for workers who were sleeping on the bare floors of houses without electric light or heat.

  But as the weather had quickly returned to more-than-seasonable temperatures, what would become known as the 1957 Freeze was almost as rapidly receding from newspaper headlines into history. So when, in the wee hours of December 18, only a couple of hours before her normal Wednesday routine would have begun, rumors of a white woman’s rape began to circulate, Mabel was free to follow her reportorial instincts. They took her to Okahumpka, where she’d heard that residents of North Quarters were being harassed. There she found that Sheriff McCall’s deputies were not only terrorizing the residents but also arresting on suspicion virtually every young black male in the neighborhood. One of them described how Negro suspects were being rounded up and taken in by up to five carloads at a time. “They woke me up at two a.m. and told me I would get the electric chair if they didn’t kill me beforehand,” he said. Another Okahumpka resident told Mabel, “They took in thirty-three of our menfolk. Not just men, but boys, too . . . A body couldn’t do anything but wait for ’em to come pounding on the door.”

  By daybreak, Mabel had pages of notes to transcribe, and they reverberated with fear—fear that, once again, the Lake County Sheriff’s Department was indiscriminately rounding up young black men, and that, once again, violence would come of it. “A restlessness began to run through the quarters,” Mabel wrote, “and it mounted steadily.”

  Meanwhile, over at the county courthouse in Tavares, deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell were interrogating an endless stream of suspects. Ethel Cope, a fifty-three-year-old maid from Okahumpka, showed up for work that Wednesday morning after a sleepless, uneasy night, worried that her nephew, eighteen-year-old Sam Wiley Odom, was one of them. She described to her employers how all night long deputies had ransacked black homes, busting in and throwing furniture around in the name of the law. One of the young men they’d picked up in the initial sweep was Sam.

  Ethel Cope had good reason to worry about her nephew. The victim was not just any white woman. She was Joe Knowles’s thirty-one-year-old wife, Blanche Bosanquet Knowles—mother of three young children. Later on Wednesday, Deputy Yates began eliminating some of the suspects who’d been hauled off to jail for questioning. Sam Wiley Odom was not among them. Yates hadn’t liked some of the Odom boy’s answers, and he’d cast a hard eye on the teenager sitting so calmly behind bars. He persuaded McCall to engage the services of Lieutenant William Donaldson, a polygraph examiner from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Department in Tampa, to aid in the interrogations. Meantime, Sam Wiley Odom wouldn’t be talking to any lawyers or receiving any family visitors. The boy was going to have to be more cooperative. He was going to have to start telling Yates the truth.

  The Knowles family, December 1957

  CHAPTER TWO

  Real Sunshine

  IN THE MINUTES after her attacker fled the scene, Blanche Knowles, alone in the house with her children—her husband, Joe, was out of town—sprang into action. Still in her nightgown, still trembling in terror, she rushed into the bedroom where her two boys, eight-year-old David and six-year-old Steve, were sleeping. Trying to remain calm, she roused them from their beds and hurried them back to her bedroom, where one-year-old Mary still lay sleeping in a crib. Blanche bolted the door, then picked up the phone. She dialed Joe’s brother, Tim. No one answered. Shakily, she tried the family attorney, W. F. (“Red”) Robinson. A few rings brought him to the phone. When she told him what had happened, he instructed her not to do a thing and said that he’d be there straightaway. It was Robinson, not Blanche, who called the police.

  Blanche huddled with her children in the dark. With the flashlight on the bedside table she read the time on the clock: It was 1:25 a.m. Less than half an hour later, Robinson arrived in Deputy James Yates’s car; they were followed by other deputies from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department. Blanche carried Mary down the stairs and out onto the front porch, the two boys, still in their pajamas, trailing after her. The wail of the police cruisers’ sirens pierced the night and the glow from their flashing red lights danced across a canopy of Spanish moss. Yates pulled Blanche aside to take her statement, with Robinson standing by. Without hesitation, she provided him with an account of the incident and a description of her attacker. She told him she had been “raped by a Negro”—a young Negro, “with bushy hair.” After leaving her bedroom, she said, the man had taken a tumble down the staircase and busted out of the house through the back screen door.

  Immediately Yates ra
dioed McCall, who in turn put out the call to his deputies to sweep the Quarters. On McCall’s orders, too, Yates assumed the lead in the investigation. In light of the information taken from the victim, he headed to the rear of the Knowles home. There, flashlight in hand, squatting in the sandy soil, he located diamond-shaped heel prints that he followed to a set of tire tracks in the clay on the north side of County Road 470. Already confident that the tracks had been laid by the perpetrator’s getaway car, Yates was eager to have them cast in plaster. The piece of evidence that most drew Yates’s attention, though, was discovered by his longtime partner, Deputy Leroy Campbell: A pair of “soiled” men’s undershorts, size 34, lay to the south of the front door. The scent on the undershorts excited the hounds at the scene, and they pulled deputies in the direction of the Quarters. As more deputies appeared on the scene, Yates dispatched them to the Quarters as well.

  Red Robinson arranged to have Blanche and the Knowles children driven in a police car to his house in the Palmora Park section of Leesburg, to spend the night. Once they arrived, Robinson summoned the Knowles family physician, Dr. Durham Young. Upon observing that Blanche was “highly nervous and quite upset,” he gave her a “tablet to settle her nerves.” Then he accompanied her to the local hospital in Leesburg, where, at around 2:45 a.m., he performed an examination that revealed evidence of “sexual intercourse within a twenty-four-hour period preceding” the exam. He also observed “no bruising or other physical injury and none was complained of,” and went on to note that Blanche “was a rather stoic type of person and was not hysterical and was quite herself and very well composed under the circumstances.” His examination complete, Young gave Blanche a shot of sedative, and Robinson drove her back to his home in Palmora Park. Efforts were being made to locate her husband, the attorney assured her. With that solace and the sedative, Blanche was finally able to fall into a deep sleep.