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

uninjured. The sheriff figured the shooting at the Thomas place had at least blown some steam off the mob. He monitored the area for a while, but apparently the Bay Lake rabble had headed home to sleep things off. The rest of the night was mostly quiet around Groveland.
    B OY,” LEROY CAMPBELL said, stepping toward Charles, “I believe you lying. That gun what you got came from Groveland.”
    Not long after Campbell had escorted Coy Tyson and Willie Padgett out of the courthouse, the stocky, forty-year-old part-time truck driver and deputy returned to the fourth floor; it made Charles Greenlee nervous that the deputy was eyeing him again. The mob may have left the precincts of the courthouse, but the boy did not feel that the danger had passed. Not with this deputy, who’d barked “nigger” at him that morning in Groveland, standing outside the bullpen, glaring in at him. He’d come and go, Charles noticed, and he’d murmured words that Charles could barely make out: something about the gun; Charles thought he’d heard Ernest Thomas’s name. Sitting on the floor, his bare back against the wall, Charles tried to snatch some sleep as the hours blurred, and every set of bootsteps he’d hear on the cement floors of the Tavares jail caused his heart to race. But the stocky deputy, Leroy Campbell, had come to pay him another visit, still focused on the gun.
    Charles could make out other men in the shadows, including Reuben Hatcher, the fifty-three-year-old jailer with a big ring of cell keys, but still he was shocked when they grabbed his arms and dragged him down to the basement. The room was clammy, with exposed water pipes and a dirt floor. One of the men handcuffed him to an overhead pipe so that his feet just barely touched the ground. Charles, still shirtless, hung from the pipe as Deputy Campbell loosened the sixteen-year-old’s pants and pulled them, along with his undershorts, to the floor.
    Charles looked Deputy Campbell in the eyes, and he knew how and where the two men in the bullpen had been beaten swollen and bloody. Campbell picked up what looked to be a piece of rubber hose about a foot and a half long; he inserted his meaty hand through a cord on one end so that it wouldn’t slip from his grasp. Without saying a word, the deputy started whipping the boy hard across the chest. After three or four blows, Campbell asked again if Charles was lying. “Were you one of the boys?” he snarled.
    “No,” Charles answered, just as Deputy James Yates stepped out from behind Campbell and reared back with another piece of leaded hose. He slashed across the boy’s pelvis. Then twice; and again. Charles could see that Yates was “trying to hit me in my privates,” and he’d tried to keep his legs crossed, but when Campbell set to whipping the hose across his arms and face, the boy, stunned, let his legs drop, giving Yates some clean shots to his groin.
    “Are you one of the boys that raped the woman?” Campbell asked repeatedly, each time punctuating the question with another swing of the hose.
    “No!” Charles screamed.
    Blood began to pour from Charles’s nose and mouth. He felt his eye swelling shut. He felt something sharp stinging the soles of his feet; Yates had smashed a Coca-Cola bottle and scattered the broken glass in the dirt beneath the boy’s bare feet. The stocky deputy was doing most of the questioning, except for a few interjections from Yates when Campbell paused between blows, catching his breath. Behind the two deputies stood a third man, Charles noticed; he seemed to be “directing the traffic.”
    The interrogation of Charles Greenlee continued for about forty-five minutes, with the teen slipping in and out of consciousness. Campbell, his voice rising as the force of his blows increased, was unrelenting. “Did you rape that woman?” he snapped at the beaten boy yet again.
    There was only one way to stop it: “Yeah,” Charles answered.
    The men behind him stirred and mumbled. Deputy Campbell let his arms drop slowly to his sides. Without blows, he asked a few more questions: Was he with those other boys? Did they rob that man? Did they pull a gun on the girl?
    “Yes,” Charles said. To all of it.
    Campbell let the hose fall to the floor. He stared a long minute at the boy, then pulled the gun from his holster and pointed it at Charles’s belly. “Better start saying your prayers,” he advised.
    The jailer, Reuben Hatcher, wanted Campbell to show some mercy. “Shoot