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

drove off in the Pontiac. Charles would never see his friend again.
    At nightfall, beside a tomato shed near the station platform, with his suitcase for a pillow, Charles did manage to sleep for a few hours. Sometime after midnight he awakened to the buzz and bites of mosquitoes. Tucking the revolver in his belt, he headed across the street to L. Day Edge’s gas station. There he filled his soda bottle with water at a drinking fountain, and there the flashlights of two Edge Mercantile night watchmen spotted him.
    “Is there anywhere a fellow can get something to eat?” Charles asked the watchmen.
    “Hold still a minute, boy,” one said, drawing his gun. Charles instinctively raised his hands in the air.
    They marched Charles across the street, back to the depot, where they rifled through his suitcase. They examined his Social Security card and driver’s license. They questioned him about the gun, which, as it turned out, wasn’t loaded. Because he didn’t want to involve Ernest in the inquiry, Charles said the gun belonged to his father up in Santa Fe, Florida, north of Gainesville. They were about to release him when another man from the filling station appeared.
    “What road camp you break out?” the man asked. Charles patiently explained where he had come from, but the man was cautious. “You don’t know what that boy done done,” he told the watchmen. “You better hold him till morning.”
    One of the men stepped into a phone booth, and not long after, at about 3 a.m. George Mays, Groveland’s chief of police, arrived. He decided it was best to put Charles in for the night. The two night watchmen brought to the jail more cookies and another bottle of water for him; they also told him they’d like to “work out something with the gun” if he was interested in selling it. So Charles hadn’t worried. The men were treating him well, and they would soon enough discover he hadn’t done anything wrong. Charles had figured he’d be out of jail by morning.
    But he wasn’t. The next morning, deputies James Yates and Leroy Campbell arrived at the jail, both of them in a foul mood.
    “Stand up, nigger,” Campbell had said as they’d entered the cell, and immediately they’d begun peppering the teenager with questions: “Where are the boys you were with last night?” “Where’s the car?” “Was it an old Buick or a new Buick?”
    Charles was confused. “I wasn’t in any car,” he replied, adding that he hadn’t been with any boys last night, either. The deputies made the boy drop his pants, as Yates was looking for “anything to indicate he was connected with the rape.” When he failed to find anything, dissatisfied, he walked away in a huff.
    “You’re lying,” Yates growled.
    Soon after, Charles became aware that a crowd of men was gathering around the jail. He’d heard a few remarks from outside about “what they would do and what they would not do if they got ahold of this boy Greenlee.” Then he heard footsteps approaching.
    Chief Mays led a young white couple over to Charles’s cell. Standing there shirtless, Charles lowered his eyes to the floor as Willie and Norma Padgett looked him up and down.
    “He’s not one of the boys,” Willie said.
    Norma turned to Mays. “He looks like one of the boys,” she said.
    Willie took another look. “He is not one of the boys,” he said again, then left with Norma.
    Returning a few minutes later, Willie quietly asked Charles if he’d been with any boys the night before. Charles replied that he didn’t know what boys Willie was talking about. “The boys what took me out of the ditch last night,” Willie said.
    “No, sir,” Charles answered. “I wasn’t one of them.” Willie described them in more detail and again asked if Charles had seen them. Charles responded that he hadn’t seen anyone last night “but the men who had put me in jail.”
    Willie Padgett appeared satisfied and left the jail, but others arrived to question Charles further about some boys in a car the night before. He had no idea why until finally Chief Mays told him: “Boy, if you don’t know it, you in trouble. Some boys raped a white woman last night and robbed a man. If I don’t hurry up and get you away from here they gonna take you out and kill you.”
    With the clamor outside the jail growing, Charles begged Mays to “hurry up and take me away.” The police chief told him that some cars were on the way.
    At about the same moment, Elma Lee