Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

answer any questions. Examination had indicated “gurgling” and “sucking” sounds emanating from two bullet wounds to his upper body and another to his neck. Doctors had removed a “lead pistol ball” from his right shoulder. They had noted that, aside from “extreme shock from hemorrhage,” Irvin’s mental status was normal, and within hours he’d become “oriented as to time, person and place and willing and apparently able to answer questions readily.”
    The next morning at the hospital, McCall and Yates, though able, were not willing to take any questions from the press. Speaking on behalf of the sheriff, Judge Hall addressed the reporters who had gathered at Waterman Memorial, and as if he were confirming the results of his own coroner’s inquest—he reported that he himself had seen “a batch of the sheriff’s hair” in Irvin’s hand—he delivered essentially the same statement he’d worked out with McCall the night before in the sheriff’s hospital room. Some in the press corps were beginning to wonder how a county official acting as the sheriff’s spokesman in regard to the shooting was also going to be able to conduct an impartial inquest into the shooting victim’s death.
    McCall was willing to pose for a press photograph in his hospital bed. He was wearing dark, polka-dotted pajamas; behind him stood his wife, Doris, and son Malcolm while his younger son, Donnie, sat on the bed. “I’m just happy to be here with my arm around this boy,” McCall told the photographer from the Orlando Morning Sentinel . As the newspapermen were shuffling out of the room, the sheriff, no doubt anticipating the news items he’d be obsessively clipping over the next few days, halted them with some parting words. “I expect I’ll get a lot of criticism for this,” McCall said, “but I’d rather be criticized than dead.”
    Walter Irvin’s family tried to visit him that morning as well. Desperate to see their son before he slipped into a coma or died like his friend Samuel Shepherd from gunshot wounds, Cleve and Dellia Irvin had arrived early at Waterman Memorial only to be denied visitation rights by Deputy James Yates at the door to Walter’s room. They had no recourse, it seemed, especially since the NAACP lawyers had left the hospital to meet Thurgood Marshall at the airport, and Cleve Irvin was scared and confused, subject to rules and procedures he had long given up trying to understand. Rights were what white people told him to do; he knew no law beyond that. So he would not even think to question the authority of Deputy Yates. Instead, with his wife he turned and walked away.
    He was spotted in the corridor by the British reporter Terence McCarthy, who had covered the rioting in Groveland for the New Leader in 1949. The two men spoke, and Cleve, his anxiety reducing his voice to a whisper, for he did not want Dellia to hear, implored, “Please give me a truthful answer. . . . If my boy has to appear to give evidence against Mr. McCall, do you think they will kill us? Will they kill my other children? Should I take them away from here? You know, we didn’t move like Mr. Shepherd [Samuel’s father, Henry] did—because they didn’t tell me, like they told him, that we weren’t to come back to live here [after the rioting]. Do you think it’s safe for us here now?” As much as McCarthy wanted to assure Cleve Irvin that he and his family would be safe, especially now that Thurgood Marshall was coming, the reporter remained silent. “To Mr. Irvin’s questions,” he knew, “there could be no truthful answer.”
    One man did manage to visit with Walter Irvin that morning. He was feeling the weight of his years; his health wasn’t good, and it would soon take a turn for the worse. He hadn’t much stomach for what he had witnessed on the dark road near Umatilla not twelve hours before. “Visibly shaken,” he had watched the performance of Lake County’s sheriff: McCall stumbling around his car, feigning concern for Irvin, telling everyone how blessed he was to survive. Till then, either the sheriff hadn’t known Irvin was alive or, worse, he’d known and hadn’t wanted anyone there to attend to the injured man before he died. One thing was certain, something wasn’t right.
    Doubt and suspicion had followed the old man home, and he’d telephoned his friend Mabel Norris Reese. “Guess what. McCall’s shot those niggers,” he’d said, and Reese, aghast, unable to speak,