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

testimony with questions.
    When Charles’s narrative brought him to the Groveland jail, with him still not knowing that the Bay Lake men had suspected him of being one of Norma Padgett’s rapists, he recalled (as the trial transcripts record):
    I said to myself, “What’s coming off here?” And then the man what put me in jail, he came and went in the office, there. I guess it was an office. It was a door. And men kept going in the office and coming out. Kept going in and coming out. Kept going in and coming out. Directly an old fellow come in there. I don’t know who he was. He about the size of Mr. Hunter, and looked like him but I don’t think it was. I don’t think he was as old as Mr. Hunter. He say, “Nigger, you sitting up here and telling a lie like that,” say, “I ought to go get my shotgun and put you through this hole and shoot you.” I say, “What about, Mister?” He say, “You know what I’m talking about.” Well, he walked on off. Because, I said to myself, “Something must be wrong around here, somewhere.” I know I hadn’t done nothing.
    Greenlee testified that he’d never before known or seen his codefendants Shepherd and Irvin until he met them in jail. Furthermore, he said, he had not seen the inside of any car that night, which he had spent at the train depot getting bitten by mosquitoes while waiting for Ernest Thomas to come back for him. Instead, the police had thrown him in jail for loitering and possession of a gun. It was the next morning that he began to be afraid, because more and more men were gathering outside the jail and he heard someone say the men outside were going to kill him. He begged one of his jailers to “hurry up and take me away from here somewhere, I don’t care where,” and he was told that some police would soon come to move him to a safer jail.
    So I was sitting up there waiting for the cars, and soon a 48 black Chevrolet pulled up in front of the cell and mens started crowding back around in there. One fellow say, “If you’ll lay the keys down, I’ll go in there and get him.” Another fellow say, “If you’ll just tell me that I can have him if I get him.” And people kept talking, questioning and telling what they would do if they had me. One fellow drug a big knife in there about this long. Said to me, “Stand up to the door.” I told him, say, “Mister, I ain’t done nothing and me standing up to the door wouldn’t make sense if you want to joog me with that big old knife.” So he said, “All right.” But say, “You’ll get it first and last anyhow, you little black so-and-so.” So I sat back down on the bed. Well, I was about to cry, because I didn’t know what was happening, all of these people around there going to kill me, and I didn’t have no money and Santa Fe was a hundred miles from there and that’s a long ways of walking and I didn’t have no money.
    “Would you have been hanging around down there in Groveland if you had done something like that, Charlie?” Akerman asked.
    “Me? If I’d even thought something like that had happened, I would have been on my way back to Santa Fe or somewhere.”
    The defense rested.
    Once again, the prosecution chose not to cross-examine. Akerman and Hunter discussed a short break to prepare for closing arguments and Judge Futch called a recess until 4 p.m. Outside the courtroom, Williams bumped into “the white lady with the bebop glasses,” Mabel Norris Reese, again. The trial wasn’t over yet, but Reese couldn’t resist commenting on the sixteen-year-old’s performance in the witness box.
    “Charlie Greenlee’s such a good actor,” she called out. Williams was stunned. Here was a boy on trial for his life. He’d just told a packed courtroom that a train had killed his baby sister and his mother cried so much he had to leave home. Deputies had nearly beaten him to death a few weeks ago and he’d been in jail ever since. And now his aged father, “eyes filled with grief,” was forced to sit by his son each day in court and watch him being led away in handcuffs.
    “When are you going to put him on Broadway, Franklin?”
    It was always “Franklin” with Mabel. Never “Mr. Williams.” The lawyer had had enough.
    “You know what your problem is,” Williams sneered. “You’ve got a business here, and you’re trying to out-cracker the crackers.”
    Mabel was taken aback by yet another unpleasant exchange with the New York lawyer. That night she would drive