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

machine. Marshall stood by Irvin’s side. J. J. Elliott had his notebook and pen ready. Greenberg, Perkins, and Akerman had heard the rumors, too, but they knew no more than anyone else what specifics might make their client’s story “entirely different.” Also, as Reese would report, “This was the first time Marshall saw Irvin, so there could be no coaching.”
    “No one’s going to hurt you,” Alex Akerman said softly to Irvin before he began the questioning. From the outset it was evident that despite the trauma Irvin had suffered, he was sustaining no memory loss. His voice was breathy, strained, but his responses were crisp, and he delivered his answers without mental hesitation. He described being taken out of Raiford at night; he recalled being handcuffed and told to sit in the front seat. He remembered that Sheriff McCall had let Yates out of the car at Weirsdale and had then followed the deputy, now in his own car, down a clay road while talking to him on the radio. Up to that point Irvin’s account of the prison transfer mirrored McCall’s, but after Yates had driven out of sight, when the sheriff was rattling the wheel and claiming something was wrong with the tire, Irvin’s version diverged. McCall had gotten out of the car to check the tire, but, in Irvin’s account, McCall hadn’t then radioed Yates about contacting the Gulf service station as the sheriff had stated.
    Instead, in Irvin’s telling, the sheriff had leaned in at the open door and yelled at the two prisoners, “You sons of bitches, get out and get this tire fixed.” The problem was, Irvin “did not see any tires in the back, but we had to obey, because he was the Sheriff, and so we went to get out, and [Shepherd] he taken his foot and put it out of the car, and was getting out, and I can’t say just how quick it was, but he shot him, and it was quick enough, and he turned, the Sheriff did, and he had a pistol and shot him right quick and then right quick he shot me, shot me right here [indicating right upper chest] and he come on and when he shot me, he grabbed me somewhere by my clothes, and snatched me . . . he snatched both of us and that threw both of us on the ground, and then I did not say anything.”
    “Were you still in the car when he shot you?” Akerman asked.
    “I was just getting out,” Irvin said, “but the bullet knocked me into the car, and then he snatched me out.”
    Irvin paused. The silence in the hospital room hung heavy. You could hear the scribbling of pens on notebook paper. The stenograph clicked, stopped. Without prompting Irvin continued.
    “I didn’t say nothing, so . . . after he snatched me, he shot me again, in the shoulder, and still I didn’t say anything all the time, and I knew that I was not dead.”
    Irvin recounted that McCall had run around the car to get to the radio. He’d called the deputy sheriff. “I heard him say ‘I got rid of them, killed the sons of bitches’ but I still did not say anything. . . . I heard him say ‘Pull around here right quick . . . these sons of bitches tried to jump on me and I have done a damn good job of it.’ I wondered what he meant by that, because we hadn’t done that . . . and then in about five or ten minutes Deputy Yates was there.”
    Irvin—twice wounded but still conscious, though unable to move in any case because he was cuffed to Shepherd—had no other choice: he lay quiet and pretended to be dead. Samuel’s hand was pressed next to his, the two Groveland boys linked together . . . only Sammy was gone. McCall’s first shot had put a hole in Shepherd’s chest; the shot that followed right after, lodged now in the frontal lobe of his brain, had severed his spinal column. McCall’s next two bullets had torn through Irvin’s chest and side. McCall had then returned to Shepherd, lying on the ground, and shot a .38-caliber round straight through his heart.
    Irvin lay quiet. He saw the headlights come from the direction of Umatilla. They lit the rear end of the sheriff’s Olds before they dimmed. Deputy Yates got out of the car. He and the sheriff exchanged a few words. The deputy had a flashlight; he shone it down on the two prisoners lying in the ditch. Irvin closed his eyes, but he could sense the spot of light crossing his face, back and forth, from eye to eye, light, then dark, then light only, for a long moment, hurting his eye. He could feel the blood seeping from his nose, his mouth, in the light; he