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

few hours earlier. Except for a few tears and an occasional sniffle, she “looked to be in a pretty calm condition for her husband to be lying down dead beside the road.”
    The two sat inside the restaurant for fifteen minutes or so, with Norma waiting patiently until Burtoft had finished his breakfast before she asked him to help find her husband. Burtoft detected no urgency in her voice, and as he rode his bike to his parents’ house to get their car, it struck him how strange it all was: Norma Lee so calmly relating how her husband might be lying dead at the side of the road to Groveland.
    When he returned to the restaurant in the family car, he and Norma Lee drove south, back toward Groveland. Burtoft’s reluctance to pry was vying with his curiosity. His heart raced as he began to register the reality of what the girl had told him.
    “Do you think you would recognize them?” he asked.
    “No,” she said. She didn’t think she could, as it was too dark, although she did note that one was extremely dark and one was “high yellow.”
    A few miles down the road, Norma asked Burtoft to pull over. He followed the girl into the high grass alongside the road, any moment expecting to stumble over the body of her husband. But they found nothing. Norma admitted that she did not know exactly where to look, but they did drive farther on. When it became apparent to Norma Lee that they had now driven too far, Burtoft turned the car around and headed back to Okahumpka. Having convinced Norma Lee that they should report the incident to the police in Leesburg, five miles to the north, Burtoft had driven about a mile or so when they came upon another car at the roadside. Two men emerged from the parked car and flagged them down. Burtoft stopped; he recognized one man, Curtis Howard, a classmate from Leesburg High School, and he had seen the other one, short and lean, more than once on the dance floor, but not with Norma. Willie Padgett came over to his wife; they didn’t speak a single word to each other.
    Strangely calm, Burtoft thought. Only minutes before, Norma Lee had been half expecting to find her husband dead. And Willie Padgett couldn’t have been certain his wife was alive, either. Burtoft had anticipated a more emotional reunion, but Norma simply got into the other car while Willie thanked Burtoft for his time and trouble.
    “You’re quite welcome,” Burtoft said, still dazed as he watched the two men drive off with the girl.
    S HERIFF WILLIS MCCALL was on his way back from an Elks Club convention in Cleveland, Ohio, with a deputy, a prisoner, and some friends when he stopped his sturdy Oldsmobile 88 in Citra, a small Florida town, home to the pineapple orange, about an hour and a half north of Groveland. Standing outside the Olds in his tall, white Stetson hat, the lumbering forty-year-old sheriff savored a long swig from a Coca-Cola bottle; he’d been driving for hours. The trip had been a getaway from the never-ending job of maintaining “lawanorder” in Lake County, but he had managed to conduct a little business in Ohio, picking up a prisoner in Columbus to face break-in and assault charges in Lake County court. McCall had been away from Florida for only a few days, but he couldn’t resist the urge to check in on his domain. He reached down and powered on the police radio.
    “We’re probably too far away to get anything from Tavares on this thing,” he said as he started up the car and bucked his six-foot, three-inch frame behind the wheel. As he drove south into citrus country, the radio cackled beneath the lull of the heavy engine until McCall thought he could make out the voice of his deputy, James Yates, in distress. Something about a shooting in Lake County. McCall stiffened behind the wheel, then reached for the radio and managed to get Reuben Hatcher, the county jailer, on the other end.
    “What’s the trouble?” McCall asked after identifying himself.
    Hatcher was breathing hard and trying to compose himself. “Boy, I’ve never been so happy to hear anyone’s voice,” he told McCall, adding that “there’s a lot of trouble fixin’ to start . . . some of the people down there are making all kinds of threats.”
    McCall tried to make sense of Hatcher’s panic but he could barely make out the jailer’s voice on the radio. He wanted to know exactly what had happened in Groveland. Only his radio had gone silent. It was a long couple of minutes till it cackled again. Then