After two hours of digging, I’d defined the skeleton’s edges and top surface, and I began digging down to finish revealing the skull, the spine, the rib cage, the legs. The body had been buried on its side, in a tucked position, much like an Arikara Indian warrior. The knees and hips were flexed to fit into the grave’s four-foot length, and the arms were folded across the chest.
As I exposed the face, I saw that this boy had not lived in the cedar-shake dormitory, the white-boy dormitory; this boy had lived in the separate, unequal building set apart for blacks. His skull, like the one with the shattered mastoid process, bore the distinctive angled teeth and jaws of a Negroid skull, as well as the broad nasal opening and nasal guttering underneath: evolution’s way of allowing Africans to breathe in greater volumes of air—hot, oxygen-poor air—than their Caucasoid cousins in the colder climate of Europe.
Unlike the other African American we’d found, however, this boy’s skull didn’t show obvious signs of physical trauma. Nor, as I pedestalled the remains, did his other bones. That didn’t mean he hadn’t died a violent death, of course; he might well have died of soft-tissue injuries—a ruptured spleen, a ruptured kidney, suffocation—whose telltale signs would have long since melted and slipped into the dark, silent earth.
Here and there, shards of rotted cotton—the thickest layers of fabric and stitching—remained draped over the emerging bones: the shredded waistband of the pants; the ragged collar of the shirt; the rolled hems of the trouser legs.
Using a large pair of tweezers, I began plucking the bits of shirt collar from around the cervical vertebrae. The fabric was denser than I’d expected—more bulk, and also more layers—and the weave seemed odd and complicated, with an odd, oblong lump of material on one side of the neck. Then a realization hit me, with such swiftness and force that I recoiled and lost my balance, falling backward against the wall of the grave.
Lying on this earthen altar was a black boy who had a rope knotted around his neck.
Had he taken his own life, I wondered, in a moment of despair? Or had it been taken from him?
I did not have to wonder long. The questions were answered when I looked closely at the bones of the arms and hands, and found more shreds of rope encircling his wrists.
Word of the find spread quickly across the site, and a spontaneous, solemn gathering took shape around the grave. People looked closely, said almost nothing, spoke only in whispers. Some of the whispers were hushed exchanges between people; others seemed to be prayers, and I saw Rodriguez make the sign of the cross as his lips moved silently. It was curious: every boy we’d found here had been murdered, yet people’s reaction to the previous five skeletons had been matter-of-fact—not blasé, exactly, but not particularly surprised or distressed. Now, as I scanned the assembled faces, I saw intense, unmasked emotions: shock, grief, fear, horror, anger.
Vickery motioned Angie and me aside. “There was a notorious lynching in Marianna, not far from here, back in 1934,” he said quietly. “A young black man was accused of raping and murdering a white woman. The schedule for the lynching was published in the newspaper ahead of time. He was tortured, castrated, and dragged behind a car before finally being hanged. When the sheriff eventually cut down the body, people protested—not because the man had been lynched, but because the sheriff wouldn’t leave the body hanging. When he refused to string it back up, a white mob went on a rampage, beating up hundreds of local black people, including women and kids. It took the National Guard to restore order.” He shook his head sadly. “You know, it’s possible that somebody who witnessed that 1934 lynching—maybe even somebody who participated in it—had a hand in this boy’s death. The distant past isn’t always as distant as we’d like to believe.”
For some reason—the reference to the atrocities of the past, perhaps, or the similarities between this boy, who’d been lynched decades before, and Martin Lee Anderson, who’d been suffocated in 2006 —I thought back to my lunch with Goldman, the FSU criminology and human rights professor. Over our lunch of oysters, I’d thought it odd and contradictory that Goldman could be so cynical about the justice system and, at the same time, so idealistic—so naive, even—about the possibility of creating a society without prisons. Now I was beginning to share his cynicism, and I wondered whether—and hoped that—I might find my way to at least some of the idealistic antidote to the cynical toxins.
Vickery’s phone whooped. He snatched it from his belt and glared at the display, as if the phone itself were guilty of unforgivable irreverence. “Vickery. What?” His eyes darted rapidly back and forth, as if the words he was hearing were ricocheting wildly. “What? . . . When? . . . Oh, hell. Does the M.E. know? . . . Well, call him. Maybe too late, but maybe worth a try . . . Check for video cameras, visitor logs, everything . . . Okay, keep me posted . . . Damn it.”