The reformatory, p.55
The Reformatory, page 55
Until the train began moving, they thought it never would. Every white person they saw on the train platform seemed to be looking at them even when they weren’t. Every sound was a gunshot. Please just let us get to Papa, Gloria thought, and the train car lurched forward at last.
It was perhaps an hour later, when Robbie was sleeping against her, still holding tight, that Gloria noticed how filthy the Negro train car was. The smell broke through her fugue state first: the car smelled like a spittoon. None of the other half dozen Negro passengers were chewing tobacco or looked like they would, but a quick glance at the empty seats across from theirs revealed horrible stains. It’s not from the passengers; it’s from spiteful white train workers, her mind whispered to her. She was afraid to look at her own seat, which she was sure had stained the back of Miz Lottie’s pretty pink dress and Robbie’s new suit by now. The train was Jim Crow on wheels.
But in the morning the windows unveiled a wonderland passing at terrific speed, the trees and landscape a revelation. The red soil she had known her whole life was gone. The route map at the depot said this train’s two-day journey would hurtle them through Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee, then up to Missouri and Illinois. As excited as she was to find Papa, Gloria felt like she was being swallowed inside the endless world.
Robbie reluctantly had agreed to allow Gloria to take hold of the satchel he’d carried with him through the swamp, which he had miraculously kept dry. But you can’t look inside, he’d told her. As much as Gloria’s fingers itched to unwrap the string and open the large envelope he had stolen from the warden, the look in Robbie’s eyes had convinced her that whatever was inside might prevent her from ever sleeping again. Once she gave it to Papa, he would give it to the NAACP—perhaps John Dorsey himself—and maybe no other child in Florida would have to suffer as Robbie had. But she also knew the way of things: everyone would try to say that only the warden left mauled in the creek had created the unholy suffering at that place, when the whole town had had a hand.
Robbie slept for most of the first day on the train. Gloria noticed that he was holding a tattered piece of paper and leaned over for a better look at the wrinkled sketch of a pleasant-looking boy’s grinning face. Gloria did not recognize the boy.
A giggle from Robbie surprised her, but he was still asleep. Somewhere in his dreams, he was at play. She didn’t know how she knew that he was visiting his dead friend.
But she did.
* * *
The sandwiches and pound cake Miz Lottie had packed for them lasted the first day, but their stomachs were growling as suppertime approached on the second. Liberation and hope were the only joys of the journey; everything else was hateful, from the stench to the heat to the poor bathroom facilities. At every stop, white passengers glared as they passed their windows like Negroes were a zoo display. Gloria did not dare try to leave the train at any of the stops. What would be the point? They would not have time to find food that would be served to Negroes, and she did not want to be left behind. Not when they were so close.
NOW ENTERING ILLINOIS, a sign beside the train tracks proclaimed, and her heart sang with a revelation. She thought about Papa’s story of seeing Mama eating ice cream on Main Street in Gracetown. But they weren’t in Gracetown anymore. They weren’t even in the South.
Gloria patted down her hair and tried to straighten the creases in her dress. She spit on her palm and dabbed at dried flecks of mud on Robbie’s face. They both must still look a fright, but she couldn’t fix that now. She clutched the oversized pocketbook Miz Lottie had given her, which held both her money and the warden’s envelope.
“You hungry?” she said.
Robbie nodded. He had barely said a word since the Reformatory, seeming younger than he had been before, not as old as his haunted eyes. He needed more time, that was all.
Gloria stood up and held out her hand for him. “Come on, then.”
They swayed with the train cars as Gloria led Robbie away from the stench of the Negro car to the gangway outside. The air was already so different, cooler and lighter across their faces. Robbie’s hand tightened around hers when they entered the train car with white passengers.
“Don’t pay them any mind,” Gloria said, and they kept their eyes fixed ahead.
Gloria had never ridden on a train before now, but she’d seen plenty in picture shows. This one looked exactly as she’d imagined, with white passengers sleeping or hidden behind their newspaper pages, riding free from bad smells.
“Are we gonna get in trouble?” Robbie whispered as they walked.
Gloria couldn’t be sure, in truth, but she promised him they would be fine.
Finally, they reached a car unlike the rest—with crowded tables instead of just seats. They met a din of clinking silverware and conversations that dipped only slightly when they appeared through the doors, eyes rising to look at them. Gloria took her own advice and ignored the staring eyes, instead slipping into the first empty booth she saw. Instead of sitting across from her in the waiting space, Robbie squeezed in beside her.
The table had a white linen cloth over it like a church picnic and a basket of bread rolls. Plates, silverware, and glasses were already arranged. Robbie’s hand hovered over the basket of bread, waiting for her permission. Gloria nodded, and Robbie stuffed a roll into his cheeks practically whole, glancing around nervously, expecting someone to object.
A stout Negro man in a white uniform and chef’s cap came to their table and put down a menu. Robbie looked up at him with wide-eyed trepidation, as if he reminded him of someone he wanted to forget. “Y’all can afford these prices?” the man said gently, and Robbie relaxed at the kindness in his voice.
Gloria glanced at the menu’s dinner offerings of pot roast, swordfish, and stewed chicken. She had never heard of spending so much for a meal, but she counted out five dollars and laid it on the table. The man smiled at her, impressed and bemused.
“Where y’all from?” the man said.
“Florida,” Gloria said.
“Me too. Marianna.” He tipped his chef’s hat. “Welcome home.”
* * *
Union Station in Chicago was a city unto itself. As soon as Gloria and Robbie climbed down the steps, they were lost in waves of people rushing with casual urgency so different than in Gracetown: a sea of men in stylish hats and women wrapped in long, thin coats—even in summer! The night air nipped at their earlobes and fingertips. Whites and Negroes blended, matching each other’s strides, crossing each other’s paths without threats and epithets. Someone was playing a saxophone whose sultry song flew up across the ceiling nearly as high as the sky.
Gloria had memorized the address where Papa’s letters were mailed, so they only needed to discover how to get to him. Would it be by taxi? A city train? Miz Lottie had had no knowledge of Chicago, so she had told them to find the information desk. Miz Lottie had also promised to try to find someone to meet them at the station, but she told Gloria that she might have to navigate Chicago on her own, at least at first.
For a bare instant, Gloria wanted to turn back and return to the train. At least the train was something she knew, and every new sight in Chicago paralyzed her with the realization that she alone was responsible for Robbie now. She felt sick to her stomach at the thought of heaping yet more suffering and uncertainty on her brother. Robbie was pulling close to her again, clinging as he had as soon as they climbed out of hiding in Miz Lottie’s truck.
Gloria spotted the bright block letters at a booth in the center of the giant station: INFORMATION. White men and women in company uniforms waited at the counter, cheerfully answering questions and pointing out the way in the maze. Gloria hated the part of herself that hesitated to go to them, bracing for sneers or curses even if they were not in the South. Papa had told them that most white people in Chicago didn’t like Negroes either; they were just more quiet about it and didn’t post it on signs. Even after her first meal on an integrated train car, the memory of Mama eating ice cream without a care could not move her forward.
“What now?” Robbie whispered to her.
A knot of soldiers parted in front of the information desk, and Gloria was relieved to see the dark brown skin on the nape of a well-dressed man’s neck standing a few feet in front of them. His back was facing them, but Gloria could see how self-assured he was as he scanned the crowd, standing at his full height with his hat canted to one side, his coat folded across his arm; a city Negro who might have been John Dorsey if he had been taller. He did not cast his eyes down from passing white men, and white women passing close to him did not shy away in fear.
“I’ll ask that man there,” Gloria said, pointing, and Robbie nodded with relief.
The man whirled around as if they had called his name.
Before he had fully turned, they recognized his chin. His profile. Gloria was afraid to trust her eyes, which were mirrored in the eyes of the man who turned to face them. His mouth fell open with the same surprise and wonder.
Robbie pulled his hand free from hers. “Papa!”
Robbie’s shriek turned heads. But even strangers smiled at the reunion of this father and his children, how he lifted the boy up from the ground and swung him with deep laughter. And how he and his daughter hugged and swayed, openly weeping like a photograph from Life magazine of a soldier returning from war.
“You did it,” he said to Gloria. “I don’t know how, but you did it, girl.”
“We did it,” Gloria corrected him, hugging Robbie close. “Robbie got his own self free. Miz Lottie and I were just there to drive him away.”
That wasn’t the whole story. At the train station, Robbie didn’t tell his father about the living friend he had lost and the dead friends he had made. Those would be stories for another day. Gloria did not yet tell him about the evidence of atrocities she had hidden away. But just as she had once seen the ribbon into Ruby McCollum’s future, for once she saw her own.
They would be a family in Chicago. It would not be easy, but it would be easier.
One day she would walk on a college campus just like Mama had wanted for her. In years to come, she, Papa, and Robbie would sing freedom songs like the one that had come to her lips when she was afraid for their lives in the swamp.
When Robbie stared across the expanse of the train station with his father holding one hand and Gloria holding the other, a woman in a white dress shimmered in a bright shaft of light that shone from the ceiling like the roadway to heaven itself. Mama.
He didn’t see her anymore after he blinked, but no sadness dampened this reunion day. He had learned that the dead walked beside the living.
Sometimes the dead could help you fly.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although I had a true-life relative named Robert Stephens who died at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, in the 1930s, The Reformatory is a work of fiction. None of the characters, even young Robert Stephens himself, depict the lives and histories of real people. Gracetown is fictitious.
I wrote this novel to honor the memory of Robert Stephens, so I depicted Redbone’s stabbing as an homage to Robert’s purported stabbing death in 1937 while he was imprisoned at Dozier. Robert’s earache reflects what University of South Florida forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle revealed to me about his remains, which were unearthed in 2015: he had an ear infection so severe that she could see evidence of it nearly eighty years later.
I interviewed family members and survivors of the Dozier School, but no one I interviewed actually knew Robert Stephens or his parents because he died so long ago. His story in this novel is entirely fiction, including the persecution of his father, Robert Stephens, Sr.
But I wanted to give Robert Stephens a happier ending.
This character of Warden Fenton J. Haddock is also entirely fictitious. I created Haddock as an amalgam of a system of violence in children’s incarceration—but the truth is that no one person can explain away the reported events at the Dozier School, or the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children, or the Indigenous “schools” in Canada where so many children were buried. No one person can be blamed for our nation’s current nightmare of mass incarceration.
The Reformatory has a central villain, but the actual villain is a system of dehumanization. As my character Gloria herself notes in the final chapter, “everyone would try to say that only the warden left mauled in the creek had created the unholy suffering at that place, when the whole town had had a hand.”
I named Gloria after my late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due. Whenever I wondered what Gloria should do next to try to free her brother, I asked myself, “What would Mom have done?”
Likewise, Attorney John Dorsey is modeled loosely after my father, “Freedom Lawyer” John Dorsey Due, Jr., who is eighty-eight years old at this writing. Dad told me about his experiences negotiating with Jim Crow judges in the 1960s, and he helped me craft the scene at the Gracetown Courthouse with the judge. He also accompanied me on several meetings and research trips to the grounds of the former Dozier School in Marianna, Florida. This novel honors my parents, too.
Too many children are still behind bars. Too many families have been torn asunder. To learn more about the true-life horrors in juvenile incarceration, read the book Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison by Nell Bernstein. To learn more about how the Jim Crow depicted in this novel in the 1950s still lingers in our prison system today, read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander and watch the Netflix documentary 13th by Ava DuVernay.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
More than ten years have passed since I first heard about the Dozier School for Boys and my unfortunate family connection there. I will attempt to thank all of the people who helped me create this novel.
As always, my first thanks must go to my family: in particular my husband, Steven Barnes, who accompanied me to the start of the excavation at Boot Hill and pushed me to keep writing this very difficult book year after year; our son, Jason (now nineteen), who was so intrigued by the history that he helped researchers at the start of the dig in Marianna; my stepdaughter, Nicki Barnes, for her eternal glow and joy; my sisters Johnita Due and Lydia Greisz, for their perpetual love and friendship; my father, John Due, whose company and wisdom on this project helped both of us ease our grief after the 2012 death of my mother, Patricia Stephens Due; and Priscilla Stephens Kruize, my aunt, for her civil rights activism and for attending the official burial of Robert Stephens, who was her uncle.
Thanks to University of South Florida forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle for her tireless work to bring the story of the buried and the missing boys from the Dozier School to light. As mothers, we talked about our passion for this story and the desire to try to find justice for the families who lost children at Dozier. (You can read about Kimmerle’s involvement in her book We Carry Their Bones: The Search for Justice at the Dozier School for Boys.)
I first heard about Robert Stephens—and that he might be buried at Boot Hill at the Dozier School—from Nick Cox, a prosecutor in the Florida State Attorney’s office. He spoke to me and my father, John Due, at length in March of 2013 to explain Robert’s connection to the Dozier School and to let us know that his office had filed a petition with the state circuit court to allow the excavation project to unearth remains under Kimmerle’s guidance. I still remember his sensitivity and thoroughness in that call, and for that I am grateful.
I do not have words to thank the survivors and their family members who spoke to me as I researched this book, including my aunt, civil rights activist Priscilla Stephens Kruize (proprietor of the Black Heritage Museum), who attended the funeral service for Robert Stephens in 2015 after his remains were found and properly buried.
I also celebrate my late uncle, Horace Walter Stephens, Jr., who carried the spirit of our family’s history of community activism to his Boy Scout troop in Atlanta, the “Buffalo Soldiers.”
I also would like to thank my relative Robert Stephens, who learned about the existence of his namesake the same way I did. As with me, no one in his immediate family had mentioned the death of Robert Stephens at the Dozier School in the 1930s. His story was buried too.
A special thanks to the survivors who spoke to me while I was researching this novel, including Charles Stephens (no relation), Cocomo Rock, and the late Robert Straley.
Special thanks to Elmore Bryant, the first Black mayor of Marianna, Florida (1985), who walked me and my father through Marianna and Dozier School history on our research trips together. (His interviews were purely informational and did not focus on accusations of abuse detailed by survivors.)
Thanks to the journalists who helped bring this story to public awareness: Carol Marbin Miller, Ben Montgomery, Lizette Alvarez, Ed Lavandera, and so many others.
I also want to acknowledge the Florida Memory project of the State Library and Archives of Florida for its extensive photo library on the Dozier School, which was tremendously helpful in writing this novel. See the collection online at www.floridamemory.com.
To my editor, Joe Monti, who believed in this book long before it was finished and gave it a home.
Thanks to the team at SK Global and the Mazur Kaplan Company, who optioned this book long before it was published, which gave me tremendous confidence as we dreamed of how Robert’s story might look as a television series: Mitchell Kaplan (my former high school English teacher), Marcy Ross, Paula Mazur, and Kimesia Hartz.
