Several Florida newspapers have kept the school in the headlines during the past half century. The Miami News ran scathing articles in 1958 and 1969, including a detailed description of the leather-strap beatings. “The belt falls between eight and 100 times,” the paper reported, quoting a letter from a former school employee. “After about the tenth stroke, the seams of the sturdiest blue jeans begin to separate and numerous times the boys’ skin is broken to the extent that stitches are required.” The St. Petersburg Times carried a long, searing article titled “Hell’s 1400 acres” in 1968. In 2008, the Miami Herald broke the story of the White House Boys and shared their accounts of brutal abuse. And in 2009, the St. Petersburg Times took another hard look at the school; the paper’s two-part series—“For Their Own Good” (www.tampabay.com/specials/2009/reports/marianna)—became a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in local reporting.
Corporal punishment at Florida state institutions was banned more than forty years ago, but another grim reality—the death of fourteen-year-old Martin Lee Anderson, who was suffocated by guards just two hours after he arrived at a “boot camp” in 2006—suggests that banning physical abuse of juveniles isn’t necessarily the same as ending physical abuse of juveniles. And if the past is any guide to the future, there’s a century of data to suggest that the recurring pattern—the vicious cycle—is this: scandal and bad publicity, followed by expressions of outrage and pledges of reform . . . followed, months or years later, by another round of scandal and outrage.
“Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it,” said British statesman Edmund Burke. He also said, “All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.” Burke said those things more than two hundred years ago, and “civilized” societies continue to prove him right. If this book can do anything to raise awareness or vigilance—can do anything to help keep vulnerable boys from being abused by the very people and institutions entrusted with their care—we’ll have done good work. “Light a candle but keep cursing the darkness,” urges an idealistic character in this story. Amen, and pass the matches.
Finally, less grimly, a note on the blurry boundary between anthropological fact and fiction in this story. At the low-tech end of the spectrum, dowsing or “witching”—seeking hidden graves with coat hanger wires or forked sticks—remains a technique that is occasionally used, is roundly dismissed by many scientists, but is ardently defended by some advocates. At the high-tech end of the spectrum, ground-penetrating radar likewise has both devoted fans and dubious detractors.
And then there’s earthmoving machinery. Half a century ago, as the rising waters of new reservoirs along the Missouri River were on the verge of inundating the sites of long-abandoned Arikara Indian villages, an up-and-coming young physical anthropologist named Bill Bass pioneered the use of road scrapers to uncover graves—thus allowing Bass and his teams of students to find and excavate ten times as many graves ina summer as they’d been able to do when digging only by hand.
Native American remains are no longer considered artifacts for museum collections, so the days of using earthmoving machines to uncover Indian graves with speed and efficiency are over.
Except, perhaps, in the parallel universe of fiction.
Acknowledgments
As with Dr. Brockton, so with us: this book represents our first fictional foray into Florida’s Panhandle. Amid the live-oak forests and cottonmouth creeks, we’ve found a generous and informative group of local informants. First of all, sincere thanks to Michael Peltier, the journalist friend who planted the seed for this novel. Thanks also to Mark Russell and Teddy Tollett for sharing insights about the Dozier School for Boys and about Florida’s juvenile justice system.