“Tell me about it,” I said, fervently hoping he wouldn’t.
Luckily, Stevenson intervened. “I printed out some aerials and a topo map of the site. If you want, we can spread ’em out on the hood of the car.”
“Trunk’d be cooler,” pointed out Vickery. Stevenson nodded and laid a folder of printouts on the back of the cruiser. The topmost image was a satellite photo off Google, zoomed in close enough to show the entry road and the turnaround loop where we were parked. The four vine-clad chimneys were reduced to pairs of small specks in the photo, but they cast long, parallel shadows across the dirt and scrubby grass.
Next were two aerials taken in the 1960s, according to Stevenson. One aerial showed a small but tidy complex of a half-dozen buildings in a large, mostly open lawn. I recognized the four chimneys, which were divided between two main buildings: a dormitory, which held beds for a hundred boys, and a multipurpose building, which Stevenson said housed the classrooms, dining hall, kitchen, and administrative offices. The four remaining buildings, he said, were an infirmary, a chapel, and two equipment sheds.
Underneath this first aerial was a second aerial showing three buildings crammed into a small clearing in the woods. “What’re those?” asked Vickery.
“Ah, those,” said Stevenson. “Very interesting. Those were the colored buildings, for the Negro boys. This was a segregated institution. The Florida legislature required the facilities to be a quarter mile apart.”
“Wow,” Angie said sarcastically, “so much progress in the century since the Civil War. Sad thing is, there are still folks around here who miss those days.”
Stevenson pulled out additional pictures of the segregated facilities—the phrase black-and-white photo took on an added shade of meaning—and spread them on the trunk. The two main buildings and the chapel for the white boys were simple but appeared well constructed, neat, and carefully maintained. Their many-paned windows were large and occupied much of the walls; the interiors would have been flooded with light, and I imagined the windows offering the boys pleasant views of oaks, pines, and magnolias. The buildings for the black boys, by contrast, looked flimsy, unkempt, and virtually without windows—rickety barns, essentially, for human animals.
“Jesus”—Angie marveled—“widely separate and hugely unequal. Even the cages had a double standard.”
“Yeah, the colored buildings were an afterthought,” Stevenson commented, unnecessarily. “The main part was originally built as a CCC camp—Civilian Conservation Corps—in the 1930s. During World War II, it housed conscientious objectors—mostly Quakers who didn’t believe in war. They dug ditches and paved roads and fought forest fires; some of them worked in the state mental hospital over in Chattahoochee. Some served as guinea pigs for medical experiments—that’s a weird parallel with the Nazis, huh? After the war, when the conscientious objectors left, that’s when it became the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.”
“So it was a reform school from the mid-1940s,” I said, “until when?”
“Burned to the ground in August of 1967,” he said. Looking at his youthful face, I suspected that the fire had occurred at least a decade before either he or the sheriff’s deputy was born. “Terrible fire. Undetermined cause. Nine boys died, and one of the guards.”
“Good heavens,” said Angie. “Nine boys died? That’s nearly ten percent. Must’ve been a really fast-spreading fire.”
“Apparently,” Stevenson answered. “Not surprising—look at those old buildings. Firetraps. Late August, the days hot as hell, the wooden siding and cedar shakes like tinder waiting for a match. When I buy firewood, I pay extra for fatwood lighter that looks a lot like those shakes. Lightning strikes, a guard drops a cigarette butt in the pine straw, whatever, and whoomph. Anyhow, after the fire, the rest of the boys were transferred to other correctional facilities.”
“Was everybody accounted for,” I asked, “or were some missing and presumed dead?”
“Don’t know,” he said. “We’ve got some people doing research on the history of the place. Looking for records, first-person accounts. If we’re lucky, we might find a sixty-year-old who was doing time there and lived to tell the tale.”
As we walked the site, I noticed rectangular depressions in the ground—low spots where I could see traces of foundations, barely discernible amid the bushes and vines that had been swallowing them for the past four decades.