NEW YORK CITY, 1996
HIS WORLD IS THE BASEMENT of a brownstone on 132nd Street west of Lenox Avenue, a shaft of light streaking through the burglar bars on a single window.47 Outside, there is Harlem—Tupac on boom boxes, street preachers on soap crates. Crack addicts scrounging for change. There are middle-aged volunteers planting beds of impatiens in a footprint of earth in the concrete, German tourists pressed against bus windows to see the Apollo Theater and the Abyssinian Baptist Church.
He has lived here so long that not much of this fazes him anymore. He is a widower now. He walks lean and upright, and he towers over you as he leads you to the one room he keeps for himself out of the whole brownstone he owns. It is the product of all the hustling and saving he had to do when he arrived here a country boy from the South. His apartment is a cluttered storeroom, really, with a single bed, a couple of chairs, a dresser with a picture of his grandmother, Annie the root doctor, on it, and half-open boxes of his accumulated highs and regrets.
The knees that used to climb suckling tree limbs to pick grapefruit back in Florida and worked the train aisles up and down the East Coast all those years are giving way to arthritis now. He takes a seat by the bed and talks in a monotone without taking a breath, there is so very much to say. He has catalogued in his mind every character who ever passed his way, can mimic their toothless drawl with wicked precision, recall every good and bad thing he has ever done or that has ever been done to him, every laughable contrivance of Jim Crow, every grievance and kind turn, all the people who made a way out of no way in that world growing up.
George Swanson Starling came from the featureless way station of citrus groves and one-star motels between the Georgia border and Orlando, Florida, a place of cocksure southern sheriffs, overworked pickers, root doctors, pool hustlers, bootleggers, jackleg preachers, barely a soul you could trust, and a color line as hard as Mississippi’s. It comes back to him, one image after another, how Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege. George Starling left all he knew because he would have died if he had stayed.
His face is long and creaseless. He was handsome in his day, a basketball player in high school, good with numbers, a ladies’ man. He holds out a crate of Florida oranges like the ones he used to pick and offers you one, says, even after all that picking and all that it cost him, they’re better than the ones from California. A smile lifts his face at the absurdities of the world he left, and which, in some ridiculous way, he still loves. Then his eyes well up over all that they have seen.
EUSTIS, FLORIDA, 1931
BEHIND THE ST. JAMES A.M.E. Church over at Prescott and MacDonald was an old orange tree that turned out oranges with dimpled skin as green as saw grass on the outside but inside sweet as sugarcane by September. To look at it, no one would know the fruit was ripe unless they climbed up and tried one, which George Starling and some other boys did once they made the discovery.
The tree was taller than a telephone pole, and it was hard for the boys to pass it by knowing what they did about those oranges. They waited for nightfall, when church would start and the deacons would light the kerosene lamps by the pews.
The boys climbed the twenty-foot tree and picked the oranges by the sanctuary light as the church people sang about Jesus. They steadied themselves in the crook of a limb and stuffed their shirts and trouser pockets until the buttons gaped. Then they turned back home, peeling and slurping, a trail of orange hulls following them all the way down MacDonald Avenue.
The church people tried to wait for the fruit to turn orange. But George and the other boys picked the tree clean before the church people could get to it. And so it went, George Starling and others in his impatient generation outwitting the old folks they saw as too content in their spirituals and their place in that world.
Here they were in Eustis, Florida, in the interior Citrus Belt of the state, hemmed into the colored part of town called Egypt. It was the haphazard cluster of dirt yards and clapboard bungalows, juke joints and corner churches where the colored people lived and conducted their affairs. It was unofficially policed by a man named Henry McClendon, a steward at another church in town. He lived across the street from St. James and saw George and his friends Sam Gaskin and Ernest Sallet sneak around the side of the church as he sat on his front porch one night.
When the boys got up into the tree, he started probing the limbs with a flashlight.
“Come down outta that tree in the name of the law!” he said.
The boys froze and hoped he would go away.
“I’m gonna come and tell your daddies. Y’all ’round here stealing these oranges, and y’all ’bout the same ones been stealing the wood from on the back porch.”
“Man, we don’t eat no wood. We been getting these oranges from around here for years. Ain’t nobody want no wood.”
“Oh yeah, y’all ’bout stole the wood. I’m coming out there, and I’m a tell your daddy.”
The boys scrambled out of the tree and got on their knees because the worst thing that could happen to a colored child in the South was for a parent to hear that a child was acting up. There would be no appeals, the punishment swift and physical. The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system, which is why parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was preparation for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.
For a young colored boy in the South, “the caste barrier is an ever-present, solid fact,” John Dollard, an anthropologist studying the region’s caste system, wrote at the time.48 “His education is incomplete until he has learned to make some adjustment to it.… The Negro must haul down his social expectations and resign himself to a relative immobility.”
Indeed, breaking from protocol could get people like George killed. Under Jim Crow, only white people could sit in judgment of a colored person on trial. White hearsay had more weight than a colored eyewitness. Colored people had to put on a show of cheerful subservience and unquestioning obedience in the presence of white people or face the consequences of being out of line. If children didn’t learn their place, they could get on the wrong side of a white person, and the parents could do nothing to save them.
“The question of the child’s future is a serious dilemma for Negro parents,” wrote J.49 W. Johnson around the time George and his friends got caught picking those oranges. “Awaiting each colored boy and girl are cramping limitations …; and this dilemma approaches suffering in proportion to the parents’ knowledge of and the child’s innocence of those conditions.”
There was no time for childish ideals of fair play and equality. Oh, you calling them grown folks a lie? George remembered parents saying. Them grown folks wouldn’t a said it if they didn’t see you doing it.
So the boys pleaded with Mr. McClendon that night. “We make a promise. You don’t tell our daddies. We won’t come back here to get no more fruit. We won’t bother the oranges no more.”
George didn’t actually believe this as he said it. He knew they were wrong, but he didn’t like how the grown people wouldn’t believe him no matter what he said, and he didn’t see the punishment as fitting the crime. He was getting to be a teenager now. He was learning that you didn’t have a right to stand up for yourself if you were in his position, and he wasn’t liking it.
George Starling was a fairly new boy in town. He had spent most of his short life circling north-central Florida as his parents hunted for work. He was born on a tobacco farm out by the scrub oaks and wire grass near Alachua, Florida, halfway between Jacksonville and the Gulf of Mexico, on June 1, 1918. Lil George and his father—called Big George to distinguish him from the son—his mother, Napolean, and his half brother, William, all lived with a cast of uncles, aunts, and cousins headed by a hard-bitten curmudgeon of a grandfather, a man named John Starling.
John Starling was a sharecropper who smoked a corncob pipe and had few good words for anybody. Once he kicked the cat into the fire when it tried to rub his leg. He was from the Carolinas, where the plantation owner he worked for used to come down to the field and flog the workers with a horsewhip if they weren’t going fast enough, as a rider might snap a whip at his mule. One day, the owner came down with the horsewhip, and the sharecroppers killed him. They swam across the river and never went back. That’s all the grandfather would say.
It was before the turn of the twentieth century, and instead of going north, where there would have been no place for a colored farmer like him, John Starling went south to the warm, rich land of the Florida interior. There, Big George and the rest of that generation were born, and the family acquired its surname. Originally, they were Stallings. But nobody could pronounce it right. When they first joined their little country church, the preacher welcomed the newcomers every Sunday with a different mispronunciation.
“And we’re glad to have the Stallions here with us today,” the preacher announced during service.
“Stallings! Stallings!” John protested.
He eventually settled on Starling, which was a close enough compromise to suit him and the people around them.
By the time little George was born, John was working for a planter by the name of Reshard. He was living a hard enough life as it was and had other grandchildren in his care for whom he had little patience. He liked to put cotton between their toes and light it to wake them up in the morning. But the grandfather and his second wife, Lena, took a liking to little George. He was the only child of John’s firstborn (George’s half brother, William, had a different father), and Lena used to grab him close.
“Come up here, boy, give your grandma some sugar.”
He could see a bulge in her cheeks from the snuff in her mouth and snuff juice dripping down her chin. George tightened his face and twisted his head, but that didn’t stop her from planting a snuff-scented wet one right on the lips.
They were farming tobacco and cotton, among other things, and the grandfather liked to take little George out to the field with him and out to the boiler when he went to fire up the tobacco. He would let George sleep on top of the boiler shed when he got tired. He’d have George right by him and seemed to make a show of it, which only made life tougher for little George, propped up as he was distinct from his cousins.
“My cousins would be out there with their fists shaking at me,” he remembered.
There were aunts and uncles all around. One of the younger aunts, called Sing, was married to a short-tempered man named Sambo. Sing attracted the attention of men without trying, and Sambo could never get used to it. As it was, colored men had little say over their wives since the days when slave masters could take their women whenever they pleased and colored men could do nothing about it. Planters were known to take the same liberties the slave masters had, and the contradictions were not lost on colored men: white men could do to colored women what colored men could be burned alive for doing to white women. In this sexual testing of wills, Sambo was overcautious toward his wife. He told her if she kept it up with what he saw as flirting, he was going to kill her one day. She just laughed. He was always talking like that. Big George told his sister not to make light of her husband. But she didn’t pay it any mind.
One day, Sambo went to John’s house and told Big George he was going rabbit hunting and needed some shells. Big George went and got the shells for Sambo. A few minutes later, he heard a shot from the woods.
“I guess Sambo done got him a rabbit,” Big George said.
Sambo had just killed Big George’s little sister.
These became some of Lil George’s earliest memories. Each year, he saw his grandfather return from the planter’s house after another dispiriting settlement and recount to the family what had transpired.
At the end of every harvest, the planter would call John Starling up to the big house. John would knock on the back door, the only door colored people were permitted to enter, according to southern protocol. He and the planter met in the planter’s kitchen.
“Come on in, John,” the planter said. “Come here, boy. Come here. Have a seat. Sit down here.”
The planter pulled out his books. “Well, John,” the planter began. “Boy, we had a good year, John.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Reshard. I’m sure glad to hear that.”
“We broke even. You don’t owe me nothing. And I don’t owe you nothing.”
The grandfather had nothing to show for a year’s hard toiling in the field.
“This is all he ends up, ‘We broke even,’ ” George would say years later. “He has no money, no nothing for his family. And now he’s ready to start a new year in the master’s debt. He’ll start all over again. Next year, they went through the same thing—‘We broke even.’ ”
The following year, the grandfather went to the big house and got the same news from Reshard.
“Well, by God, John, we did it again. We had another good year. We broke even. I don’t owe you nothin, and you don’t owe me nothin.”
George’s grandfather got up from the table. “Mr. Reshard, I’m sho’ glad to hear that. ’Cause now I can go and take that bale of cotton I hid behind the barn and take it into town and get some money to buy my kids some clothes and some shoes.”
The planter jumped up. “Ah, hell, John. Now you see what, now I got to go all over these books again.”
“And when he go over these books again,” George said long afterward, “he’ll find out where he owed that bale. He gonna take that bale of cotton away from him, too.”
John had no choice but to tell Reshard about that extra bale of cotton. In the sharecropping system, it was the planter who took the crops to market or the cotton to the gin. The sharecropper had to take the planter’s word that the planter was crediting the sharecropper with what he was due. By the time the planter subtracted the “furnish”—that is, the seed, the fertilizer, the clothes and food—from what the sharecropper had earned from his share of the harvest, there was usually nothing coming to the sharecropper at settlement. There would have been no way for George’s grandfather to sell that one extra bale without the planter knowing it in that constricted world of theirs. In some parts of the South, a black tenant farmer could be whipped or killed for trying to sell crops on his own without the planter’s permission.50
Even though John wouldn’t be able to keep the extra bale, Reshard was considered “a good share, a good boss, a good master,” in George’s words, “ ’cause he let us break even.”
Most other sharecroppers ended deeper in debt than before. “They could never leave as long as they owed the master,” George said. “That made the planter as much master as any master during slavery, because the sharecropper was bound to him, belonged to him, almost like a slave.”
The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, studying the sharecropping system back in the 1930s, estimated that only a quarter to a third of sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money.51 “The Negro farm hand,” a colored minister wrote in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, “gets for his compensation hardly more than the mule he plows, that is, his board and shelter.52 Some mules fare better than Negroes.”
There was nothing to keep a planter from cheating his sharecropper. “One reason for preferring Negro to white labor on plantations,” Powdermaker, a white northerner, observed, “is the inability of the Negro to make or enforce demands for a just statement or any statement at all.53 He may hope for protection, justice, honesty from his landlord, but he cannot demand them. There is no force to back up a demand, neither the law, the vote nor public opinion.… Even the most fair and most just of the Whites are prone to accept the dishonest landlord as part of the system.”
That did not keep some sharecroppers from trying to get what they were due after a hard year’s labor. During the lull before harvest time, one of George’s uncles, Budross, went to the little schoolhouse down in the field and learned to read and count. When it came time to settle up over the tobacco George’s grandmother Lena had raised, the uncle stood by while the planter went over the books with her. When they got through, George’s uncle spoke up.
“Ma, Mr. Reshard cheatin’ you. He ain’t addin’ them figures right.”
The planter jumped up. “Now you see there, Lena, I told you not to send that boy to school! Now he done learn how to count and now done jumped up and called my wife a lie, ’cause my wife figured up these books.”
The planter’s men came and pistol-whipped the uncle right then and there.
The family had to get him out that night. “To call a white woman a lie,” George said, “they came looking for him that night. They came, fifteen or twenty of them on horseback, wagon.”
George’s grandparents knew to expect it. “We got to get you away from here ’cause you done call Mr. Reshard a lie. And you know they ain’t gon’ like that.”
George was too young to understand what was happening but heard the grown people talk about it in whispers. It was the middle of the 1920s, and George never knew exactly where the uncle went. The particulars were never spoken.
“They hid him out” was all George would say. “He left from out of there.”
Lil George and his parents didn’t stay in Alachua much longer after that. They fled to St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Mexico, where they would no longer be under a field boss or overseer. They could work in the big high-rise hotels going up, and with all the tourists from up north and the building boom in the beach towns on the coast, they could be free of the farm and find plenty of work.
They were living in a row house off Fifth Avenue in the colored district. The father found work in construction, and things were good. But by the late 1920s, when the Great Depression descended on the country, things weren’t so good. Big George took to drinking and would lie in wait on the porch for Lil George’s mother to get back from church on Sunday. Once, instead of coming straight back, she stopped a few doors down to chat with a neighbor. Big George saw her dawdling, and that set him off.
“You making plans to meet some other man,” Big George said.
He jumped on her and started hitting her. Lil George and his half brother, William, were sitting on the porch and could see it.
It wasn’t the first time. Lil George cried over it. He was torn between the two of them. Sometimes William, who had a different father and was two years older than Lil George, would throw rocks at Big George to make him stop. Lil George hated it when William did that. He adored his parents. This time, Lil George got mad. The two boys went and got a brick from under a wash pot in the kitchen and hit Big George with it. Then they ran down the street to get away. Big George was hurt more by the pain he had caused his son than by the brick itself and went calling after his namesake. Son, come back, here. I’m not gonna bother you.
The marriage gave out after that, and the family split up. The mother kept William on the Gulf Coast with her. And Big George headed east to the town of Eustis, where he said he would send for Lil George after he got established. For the time being, Lil George was sent to live with his mother’s mother in Ocala, a town in the scrublands midway between Alachua and Eustis.
The grandmother was a root doctor named Annie Taylor who was a big-boned woman as tall as a man. She lived on a corner lot and grew pole beans alongside the fence. She was already raising one daughter’s two boys, and here came another one from another daughter, Napolean, now that she had quit her husband.
Annie set George to work right away. She took him and his cousins out to the woods and showed them which twigs and roots to dig up: sassafras, sulfur, and goldenrod. They would tramp behind her through the scrub and wire grass back to the house—George and his cousins James and Joseph, whom they called Brother. She would stir the roots into foul-smelling potions that people bought to thin their blood, cut a fever, shush a hacking cough. She knew all the roots and could identify them, and she knew what they were good for.
The boys were her nearest patients, and every season brought a new torture. Sulfur and cream of tartar at the first sign of spring to thin the blood for the summer. Castor oil to clean your system out in the winter. Balls of asafetida hung around the neck to ward off flu and tuberculosis, the asafetida resin rolled up like flour dough and smelling only slightly worse than cow dung. She put the asafetida paste into little sacks and made necklaces for the boys to wear (which they took off and put in their pockets as soon as they got from around her). In between, she plied them with goldenrod for fever, asafetida with whiskey for a bad cold, and any number of bitter-tasting concoctions that made the boys hate to get sick.
If she detected a cold in the chest, she unscrewed the top of the kerosene lamp, tipped it over a spoonful of sugar, and let four or five drops of kerosene saturate the sugar. Then she stuck the spoon into their tight faces for them to swallow. There was no point in trying to run and hide. “You better not be talking about no run-and-hide,” George said years later. “She didn’t play that. ‘Now you gonna get a whippin’ on top of it.’ ”
The three little boys were left in Annie Taylor’s care because there was a great churning among the young people of working age like her daughters. Her oldest girl, George’s mother, was off on the Gulf Coast. And her two youngest girls, Annie (whom they called Baby) and Lavata (who actually was the baby but whom they called Date), were up in New York. Baby couldn’t keep little James and Brother in New York with her, so she left them with her mother to raise, like a lot of migrants did when they went up north.
Young people like them weren’t tied to a place like their slave grandparents had been forced to, and they weren’t content to move from plantation to plantation like their parents. Ever since World War I had broken out and all those jobs had opened up in the North, there had been an agitation for something better, some fast, new kind of life where they could almost imagine themselves equal to the white people. And so they had gone off to wherever the money seemed to be raining down—to the Gulf Coast rising up in a construction boom or the orange groves at picking season or the turpentine camps if they couldn’t manage anything else; or, if they had nerve in the early days of the Migration, they’d hop a train to the edge of the world, straight up the coast, past Georgia and both Carolinas and straight through Virginia and up to New York, where people said you could get rich just mopping floors.
To the old folks who stayed, the young people looked to be going in circles, chasing a wish. Some went crossways to someplace in Alabama or Georgia, where they heard things were better, only to find the South to be the South wherever they went. Some went north, high and mighty, and came back south, low and broke. Some people’s pride wouldn’t let them come back at all. So they shoehorned themselves into tenements and made like they were rich or just plain made do and dazzled the folks back home with all the money they wired back.
Some people back home came to depend on that money, to half expect it, and they got agitated when it didn’t come. They figured the people who left were making all that money up north and just about owed it to them, especially if they left children behind. Baby and Date kept up fairly regular payments to their mother to cover Baby’s two little boys. George’s father sent money for George, too. At first. But after a while, it got to the place where he wouldn’t send any money, and the grandmother had to stretch what her daughters sent for two into enough to take care of all three of them.
Sometimes George heard his grandmother fretting about how she was running out of money and hadn’t heard from Big George. It was the Depression, and sometimes even the daughters got slow sending money for the two which had stretched to three, and the grandmother had a problem on her hands. The daughters had gotten themselves out in that big world way up north—who knew what kind of fix they were in?—and here she was left with the little ones.
When the money got low, Annie Taylor got in her rocking chair on the porch and rocked back and forth. She hummed and sang as she rocked. Guide me o’er, thou Great Jehovah, pilgrim to this barren land. I am weak, but thou art mighty. Guide me with thy loving hand.
George and James and Brother heard her humming.
“Grandma humming that song again,” George told James. “Somethin’ gonna happen soon.”
The palm of her hand started to itch, or so she said. And before long, a Western Union man came rolling up the street, announcing a telegram for Miss Annie Taylor.
“Somebody would be done wired us some money,” George would say years later. “Yes, sirree.”
The waiting and hoping went on for two years, and then it was decided that it was best for George to be with his father, and he joined his father in Eustis.
Big George worked at the loading dock of a packinghouse and ran a one-room convenience store over on Bates Avenue. He sold baked goods and castor oil to the fruit pickers and day workers and the children on their lunch break from the colored high school across the street in a citrus farming town in the underdeveloped midsection of a still-isolated state.
Lake County and the rest of central Florida were far from the lights of Miami and the palm-tree version of paradise that tourists came for. This was the Florida that had entered the Union as a slave state, where a Florida slaveholder could report without apology, in 1839, that he worked his slaves “in a hurrying time till 11 or 12 o’clock at night, and have them up by four in the morning.”54 Florida went farther than some other slave states in the creativity of its repression: Slaves could not gather together to pray.55 They couldn’t leave their plantations, even for a walk, without written permission from their owner. If they were accused of wrongdoing, “their hands were burned with a heated iron, their ears nailed to posts,” or their backs stripped raw with seventy-five lashes from a buckskin whip. The few free blacks in the state had to register with the nearest probate court or could be automatically enslaved by any white person who stepped forward to claim possession.
As the country neared the point of collapse over the issue of a state’s right to slavery, Florida, in the early winter of 1861, became one of the first to secede from the Union in the months leading up to the Civil War.56 Florida broke away on January 10, 1861, three weeks after the first rebel state of South Carolina, and a day after Mississippi. Florida heartily joined a new country whose cornerstone, according to the Confederacy’s vice president, Alexander Hamilton Stephens, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”57 This new government, Stephens declared, “is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Thus began the bloodiest war on American soil, after four years of which the Confederates fell in the spring of 1865. Immediately, Florida, Mississippi, and Texas took steps to begin imposing a formal caste system, becoming the first in the South to do so. They hastened to pass laws restricting the newly freed people barely before the cannons had cooled. Florida’s 1865 law set forth, among other things, that “if any negro, mulatto or other person of color shall intrude himself into any railroad car or other public vehicle set apart for the exclusive accommodation of white people,” he would be sentenced to “stand in pillory for one hour, or be whipped, not exceeding thirty-nine stripes, or both, at the discretion of the jury.”58
Florida was shut off from the rest of the world by its cypress woods and turpentine camps. It was another country, with its own laws and constitution. And all through the 1920s, when George was a toddler and then in grade school, the grown people hung their heads over the violence that descended over them and passed the stories among themselves and to the children when they got old enough to understand.
They talked about the white mob that burned down the colored section of Ocoee, over by Orlando, when a colored man tried to vote back in 1920, how the man was hanged from a tree and other colored people were burned to death and the remaining colored people packed up and never returned. They whispered about the time the white people burned and leveled Rosewood, a colored settlement by the Gulf of Mexico, halfway between St. Petersburg and Tallahassee, because a white woman said a colored man had attacked her. It was where, a survivor said, “anything that was black or looked black was killed.”59 That was in 1923.
And then, in the fall of 1934, when George was a teenager and old enough to take note of such things, perhaps the single worst act of torture and execution in twentieth-century America occurred in the panhandle town of Marianna, Florida, a farm settlement halfway between Pensacola and Tallahassee.60
That October, a twenty-three-year-old colored farmhand named Claude Neal was accused of the rape and murder of a twenty-year-old white woman named Lola Cannidy. Neal had grown up across the road from Lola Cannidy’s family. He was arrested and signed a written confession that historians have since called into question. But at the time, passions ran so high that a band of more than three hundred men armed with guns, knives, torches, and dynamite went searching for Neal in every jail within a seventy-five-mile radius of Marianna.
The manhunt forced the authorities to move Neal across the panhandle, from Marianna to Panama City by car, to Camp Walton by boat, to Pensacola by car again, with the mob on their trail at every turn. Finally, the Escambia County sheriff, fearing that his jail in Pensacola was too dilapidated to withstand attack, decided to take Neal out of state altogether, to the tiny town of Brewton, Alabama, fifty-five miles north of Pensacola. Someone leaked Neal’s whereabouts, and a lynching party of some one hundred men drove several hours on Highway 231 in a thirty-car caravan from Florida to Alabama. There the men managed to divert the local sheriff and overtake the deputy. They stormed the jail and took Neal, his limbs bound with a plow rope, back to Marianna.
It was the early morning hours of October 26, a Friday.61 Neal’s chief abductors, a self-described “committee of six,” an oddly officious term commonly used by the leaders of southern lynch mobs, set the lynching for 8 P.M., when most everyone would be off work. The advance notice allowed word to spread by radio, teletype, and afternoon papers to the western time zones.
Well before the appointed hour, several thousand people had gathered at the lynching site. The crowd grew so large and unruly—people having been given sufficient forewarning to come in from other states—that the committee of six, fearing a riot, took Neal to the woods by the Chipola River to wait out the crowds and torture him before the execution.62
There his captors took knives and castrated him in the woods. Then they made him eat the severed body parts “and say he liked it,” a witness said.
“One man threw up at the sight,” wrote the historian James R. McGovern.
Around Neal’s neck, they tied a rope and pulled it over a limb to the point of his choking before lowering him to take up the torture again. “Every now and then somebody would cut off a finger or toe,” the witness said. Then the men used hot irons to burn him all over his body in a ritual that went on for several hours.
“It is almost impossible to believe that a human being could stand such unspeakable torture for such a long period,” wrote the white undercover investigator retained by the NAACP.
The crowd waiting in town never got to see Neal die. The committee of six decided finally to just kill him in the woods. His nude body was then tied to the back of a car and dragged to the Cannidy house, where men, women, and children stabbed the corpse with sticks and knives. The dead girl’s father was angry that Neal was killed before he could get to him. “They done me wrong about the killing,” the father said. “They promised me they would bring him up to my house before they killed him and let me have the first shot. That’s what I wanted.”
The committee hanged the body “from an oak tree on the courthouse lawn.” People reportedly displayed Neal’s fingers and toes as souvenirs. Postcards of his dismembered body went for fifty cents each. When the sheriff cut down the body the next morning, a mob of as many as two thousand people demanded that it be rehanged. When the sheriff refused to return it to the tree, the mob attacked the courthouse and rampaged through Marianna, attacking any colored person they ran into. Well-to-do whites hid their maids or sent cars to bring their workers to safety. “We needed these people,” said a white man who sat on his porch protecting his interests with a loaded Winchester. Florida Governor David Sholtz had to call in the National Guard to quell the mob.
Across the country, thousands of outraged Americans wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanding a federal investigation. The NAACP compiled a sixteen-page report and more files on the Neal case than any other lynching in American history. But Neal had the additional misfortune of having been lynched just before the 1934 national midterm elections, which were being seen as a referendum on the New Deal itself. Roosevelt chose not to risk alienating the South with a Democratic majority in Congress at stake. He did not intervene in the case. No one was ever charged in Neal’s death or spent a day in jail for it. The Jackson County grand jury, in the common language of such inquests, reported that the execution had occurred “at the hands of persons unknown to us.”
Soon afterward, it was learned that Neal and the dead girl, who had known each other all their lives, had been lovers and that people in her family who discovered the liaison may have been involved in her death for the shame it had brought to the family.63 Indeed, the summer after Neal was lynched, the girl’s father was convicted of assault with intent to kill his niece because he suspected that that side of the family had had a hand in his daughter’s death.
In sentencing the father to five years in prison for attacking the relative, the judge said, “I hate to pass this sentence on an old man such as you, but I must do it. To be perfectly fair with you, I don’t believe you have any too many brains.”
The father replied, “Yes, judge. I am plumb crazy.”
Thereafter, Florida continued to live up to its position as the southernmost state with among the most heinous acts of terrorism committed anywhere in the South. Violence had become such an accepted fact of life that, in 1950, the Florida governor’s special investigator, Jefferson Elliott, observed that there had been so many mob executions in one county that it “never had a negro live long enough to go to trial.”64
The grown people’s whispers of unspeakable things seeped into George’s subconscious like a nursery rhyme, even though he was too young to know the particulars or understand the meaning of it all. Surrounded as he was by the arbitrary violence of the ruling caste, it would be nearly impossible for George or any other colored boy in that era to grow up without the fear of being lynched, the dread that, in the words of the historian James R. McGovern, “he might be accused of something and suddenly find himself in a circle of tormentors with no one to help him.”65
By the time Lil George was old enough to notice, it seemed as if the whole world was crazy, not because of any single event but because of the slow discovery of just how circumscribed his life was turning out to be. All this stepping off the sidewalk, not looking even in the direction of a white woman, the sirring and ma’aming and waiting until all the white people had been served before buying your ice cream cone, with violence and even death awaiting any misstep. Each generation had to learn the rules without understanding why, because there was no understanding why, and each one either accepted or rebelled in that moment of realization and paid a price whichever they chose.
No one sat George down and told him the rules. His father was quiet and kept his wounds to himself. George’s teachers were fear and instinct. The caste system trained him to see absurdity as normal.
Like the time George went for an ice cream cone at the pharmacy in downtown Eustis. He wouldn’t be able to sit at the counter, he knew that going in. Anytime a white customer walked up, he had to step back and wait for him or her to be served first. George had learned this, too, by now. The pharmacist had a dog, a little terrier. And when George walked up to the counter, three or four white men who were standing around looked at one another and then at the pharmacist. The owner called out to the dog. And the dog jumped up onto the counter.
When the pharmacist had everyone’s attention, he turned to the dog.
“What would you rather do?” the pharmacist asked the dog. “Be a nigger or die?”
The dog rolled over on cue. It flipped onto its back, folded its legs, shut its eyes, and froze. The grown people at the counter and up front near George shook with laughter.
George was a teenager and outnumbered. He was the only one of his kind in this place. All he could do was stand there and take it. Any other response would require an explanation. What’s the matter with you, boy? You don’t like it? he could hear them saying.
All kinds of thoughts went through his mind. “A whole lot of things,” he said. “How you’d like to kill all of ’em, for one thing.”
On its face, it looked to be a black-and-white world, but George learned soon enough that the caste system was a complicated thing that had a way of bringing out the worst in just about all concerned. Sometimes it seemed that loyalty didn’t stand a chance against suspicion and self-preservation. Even on the lowest rung, some people would squeeze what little they could even when nobody had anything.
Reverend J. W. Brinson was a jackleg preacher who ran the colored grocery store on MacDonald in Egypt town. The store had a slot machine that took customers’ nickels and dimes but gave hardly any back. People went in and played the dime machine for an hour or two, and everybody could see that the machine was ready to deliver. That’s when Reverend Brinson would step in and close up shop. “He figure that machine is getting hot and is gonna start paying off,” George recalled. “And he run everybody out the store.”
George and his friends walked out as told. Then they watched old man Brinson take the slot machine to his house next door. “We would tip up on the porch,” George said, “and we could hear him in there in the bedroom and hear that slot machine just ringing. And he just be burning it up trying to get that jackpot for himself.”
On top of that, the merchandise in the grocery store was unjustly high, to hear George tell it, and he and his friends resented it. They found a way to get back what they figured they had overpaid.
They noticed that Reverend Brinson went into town the same time every day, leaving the store in the care of his wife, Mary, who was a sweet woman but couldn’t count. One day the boys sat under a big old oak tree and waited for Reverend Brinson to pull away. Then they went in and played nice to Miss Brinson.
“Hi, Miss Brinson.”
“Hello, boys. How y’all?”
“We wanna get something, Miss Brinson.”
“Yeah, alright. What y’all want?”
“We want ten cent worth of bologna.”
The Brinsons had a scale in the back of the store where the icebox was, which required Miss Brinson to go back in the icebox, get the roll of bologna, and bring it to the butcher block near the counter. She carved enough slices until it looked about right, cutting less than she needed so as not to waste slices the customer didn’t want. Then she went back to the scales to weigh the bologna as the boys watched.
“Oh, Miss Brinson, you ain’t quite got ten cent worth up there yet. You got to get some more.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” she said, admitting the discrepancy.
She hauled the loaf of bologna back to slice some more, leaving the slices she had already cut on the counter, two or three of which the boys slipped into their mouths. She came huffing back with the extra slices, only to learn it still wasn’t enough.
“Oh, you ain’t got it yet, Miss Brinson.”
Back and forth she went, the loaf shrinking and the scale not budging, until the boys were full from the extra slices they’d eaten.
“Aw, that’s alright, Miss Brinson. That’s close enough. Just wrap it up.”
Come summer, the Brinsons set watermelons out on the bare floor in front of the counter. George and the other boys saw them there and decided to go in one day. They lined up along the counter and started looking around. One pointed to a jar of pickles on the very top shelf.
“Miss Brinson, how much is that jar of pickles up there?”
“Well. Let me see now. Which one?”
Miss Brinson went to get the ladder and climbed up to check. And as she stretched herself to reach the last jar, one of the boys took his foot and started a watermelon rolling. He kicked it to the next boy, who kicked it to the next boy, until the melon had rolled and creaked down the wood plank floor toward the front screen. The last boy was positioned to kick it outside, none of them for a second taking his eyes off Miss Brinson, still reaching for the jar of pickles. They would get two or three watermelons that way.
Poor Reverend Brinson must have suspected that they stole from him, and he kept his prices high, which only encouraged more pilfering. It was George’s and the other boys’ way of getting justice in an unjust world. And so it went in Egypt town, the poor at odds with the broke.
George was a boy interested in the things boys are interested in and not particularly wanting to live the life the preachers set out at Gethsemane Baptist Church. Not then, anyway. There wasn’t much to do around Eustis when school was out. Sure, they could fish and swim awhile in one of the lakes. But there weren’t any jobs, and so they got into the things that boys get into, like picking green oranges while the church people sang about Jesus.
He was friends with a bootlegger’s brother who lived behind the poolroom. Grown men roosted on the benches out front like crows on a fence, and there were big trees all around. The boys shot pool when the grown men let them and then made off with a pint of the bootlegger’s moonshine. They poured water in place of the liquor and put the bottle back where they found it. They figured they weren’t hurting anybody. The bootlegger was breaking the law anyway. They figured it was like taking something that wasn’t supposed to exist in the first place.
George was growing taller and bigger and was in high school now. He grew to over six feet and started playing basketball at Curtright. He was walking taller and straighter. One day he went up to Ocala to see his grandmother the root doctor. He liked to surprise her, so he didn’t let her know that he was coming. But she knew anyway. “You think you slipped up on me,” she said once. “I knew you was coming ’cause my nose was itching. I just told somebody, ‘Somebody’s coming to see me.’ ”
She saw the change in him, how he was wearing grown folks’ clothes, walking taller, straighter, suddenly aware of how he looked in a mirror. It always happened that the young people got to a certain age and thought they were the best thing that ever walked the earth. “I see George got you in long pants now,” she said. “You must be smelling yourself.”
It’s true that George got into his share of devilment, but, fortunately for him, it turned out that he had a thing for numbers and words. He could remember just about anything that was set in front of him, and school came easy to him. He devoured books even though they were the white schools’ leftovers and had pages missing. He started to think about how he could escape this place, maybe even go to college.
The kids noticed and looked to George to help them with their lesson. But they seemed to wish they didn’t have to ask. They would turn around and tease him for doing what they should have been doing.
“So what you doing tonight, George?”
“Getting my lesson.”
“Yeah, you go on and get your lesson, and we’ll get the girls.”
George couldn’t abide the teasing and didn’t believe they were doing all they said they were anyway. He would finish his homework and tip over to the house of whatever girl they said they were having their fun with. He would sweet-talk the girl, and since he was tall and not, as they say, hard on the eyes, he managed to do quite well, in his estimation.
The next day in school, the boasting would commence.
“They brag about how they were with this girl last night,” George said years later. “I say to myself, ‘I know you lying.’ But I couldn’t tell them. I used to walk the back roads. Nobody would see me.”
George was always observing the developments around him, and here was a lesson in the underhanded nature of some human relations. “I know they would be telling lies on the girls,” he said years later, “ ’cause I be setting up there with that same girl in her house. That’s how I found out how the boys lie on girls.”
He didn’t want them knowing his business. He indulged them instead.
“What’d you do last night, Lil George?”
“Man, I had so much work. I was getting my lesson.”
By the time they got old enough to work, most of the kids had dropped out of school altogether. By graduation day, there were only six seniors in the Class of 1936 at Curtright Vocational Training School, and George Swanson Starling was valedictorian. He got accepted to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical State College in Tallahassee. His father did not really understand why he would want to go when he could be making a little money picking in the groves. But he sent him anyway.
George came home with better than decent grades. But a year passed and then another whole six months with other people working and George just reading books. His father didn’t see the point of it. In the middle of George’s sophomore year, his father told him he had gotten enough schooling and it was time for him to work. Maybe he could pick it up later.
Big George didn’t see where it made much difference anyway, hardly anybody they knew went to college. The father had only gone to fifth grade, and he was doing alright, running the store and packing fruit at the Eichelberger Packing Company.
“With two years of college, you should be able to be president of the United States,” his father figured.
“But I’m taking a four-year course number, and you dropping me in the middle of the stream. I’m not prepared to do anything because I’m only halfway there.”
George had made valedictorian at Curtwright and, just as significant to him, was the only one from his high school to finish the first year of college without failing any subject. He thought he deserved better.
But his father had made up his mind. Lil George was his namesake, but he wasn’t his only concern. Big George had remarried since coming to Eustis. He had a wife now and two stepsons to think about. He had that little store to keep up and dreams of a little orange grove of his own for his old age. He wasn’t willing to spend what money he had to send George back to school to study Socrates and polynomials. It was an outrageous indulgence when everybody else was working the groves every day.
A few days later, George was looking for some papers. Rummaging through a dresser drawer, he found some postal receipts for deposits his father had made in a savings account at the post office.
“He had a drawer full of them where he was saving in the post office,” George said years later. “But he was telling me he didn’t have any money. And that made me angry, and I couldn’t sense it into him that I needed to go on and get the other two years. So I just got angry and evil, and I decided I would do something to hurt him.”
George had gotten around with the girls, but he always seemed to come back to one in particular. Inez Cunningham was a girl from the backwoods with full cheeks and a narrow waist who had endured an even more unsettled childhood than he had. Her parents had died young and left her in the care of a Pentecostal aunt who trotted her to late-night church meetings with holy rollers talking in tongues. She spent so much of her girlhood in the quaking pews of the Pentecostal church that she swore she would never join a church again if she got free. She kept her word and never did.
She wore plaits and plain dresses and didn’t have the pomaded hair some other girls had or the stockings and jewelry that made certain girls look more refined. But she had a way of smiling and tilting her head to the side and some kind of simpatico, outsider way of looking at the world that appealed to a young man like George who felt life had never cut him a fair deal.
She had graduated from high school and was doing the common and necessary job of cleaning white people’s homes. But with George up in Tallahassee around those well-turned-out coeds training to be teachers, she fixated on her deficiencies. She imagined her competition in high heels and straight hair, their dignified talk turning George’s head. She convinced herself he would choose one of them over her and told him as much.
Big George didn’t want Inez around his son either. She was from the backwoods and, in the pecking order that emerged even on the lowest rung—people with house notes versus people who paid rent, factory workers versus servants—Big George saw Inez as lower than the Starlings.
During spring break of his sophomore year, the subject of school came up again. George asked his father if he would send him back, and again the answer was no. George was incensed and decided to do something about it. It was April 19, 1939. He took his father’s car and drove up to the house where Inez lived.
“Come on, let’s take a ride,” he said.
“What you doing?”
“Come on, let’s ride.”
“Well, where you going?”
“Oh, just a ride.”
She hopped in, and he drove south for five miles to Tavares, the county seat. He drove around to the back of the courthouse, where the jail was, and slowed to a stop.
“Where you going?” Inez asked, alarmed now.
He grabbed her hand. “Come on. I want to show you something.”
He led her upstairs and into the magistrate’s office.
“Well, what can I do for ya, boy?” the magistrate said.
“We come to get married,” George said.
Inez nearly fainted. She looked to George to explain himself.
“Well, you been pressuring me about gettin’ married. You’re telling me that I’m gonna end up marrying one of those college girls that’s getting a schoolteacher’s education. And you’re not gonna be good enough for me. And I keep telling you that that wouldn’t make any difference. But you can’t seem to believe that, and you don’t want to wait. I wanted to show you that you the only one that I wanted. So we just gonna get married now.”
Inez stood there with her mouth open. “I—I didn’t know” was all she could manage.
She was wearing whatever dress she happened to put on that morning, and he had on whatever he’d thrown on, too.
“Now, you know that’ll cost you a dollar fifty, boy,” the county judge, A. S. Herlong, said. “A dollar for the license. Fifty cent for a witness.”
“Yes, sir.”
The judge went through the vows and declared them man and wife. She was twenty-one. He was twenty and not legally old enough to marry.
“I told the man I was twenty-one,” George later said. “They didn’t care. If you black, they don’t care nothin’ about Negroes. They didn’t check it out. I would be twenty-one in a couple of months. But anyway, we got married.”
As they drove back to Eustis, George told Inez his plan.
“You gon’ have to continue to stay with your people. We got to keep this secret until I find out whether I’m going back to school or not.”
George left out a crucial bit of information in what he told Inez, although it wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. “I didn’t tell her my ulterior motive,” he said years later. Now, in all fairness, he said, “I was in love with her. But I didn’t have no intention of getting married, not at that stage, until I got mad with my daddy. He didn’t even want me to be courting this girl, much less talking about marrying her.
“So I figured that would fix him up good ’cause he won’t send me back to school,” he said. “I got in all that trouble for a dollar fifty cents.”
George hadn’t really thought his revenge scheme through to completion. He held out hope that his father would change his mind. George would spring the news about Inez on him only if his father didn’t come around. The two of them kept their secret through the spring and into the summer, when George went to New York like a lot of college students from the South to make spending money for school.
He worked at a dry cleaner’s in Flatbush and lived with the aunts who had sent money to his grandmother, the root doctor in Ocala. Toward the end of the summer, he wrote his father: I have my money for my books and everything. I bought what clothing I’ll need. Are you going to be able to pay my tuition?
Lil George didn’t know it, but the people back home had been grumbling in Big George’s ear. The father had already done more than he had to. Nobody else was spending all that money for school. None of them had gone off to college, and they had made out alright. Their kids were working in the groves and bringing in good money. What was Lil George doing? His father wrote him back: No, I just won’t be able to do it. You’ll have to work, this year, and we’ll see how things are next year.
The summer was almost over. The semester would be starting soon. George had run out of time. He realized his dream was over. He wrote his father again. He wanted to get back at him now: Well, that’s alright, don’t worry about it ’cause I’m married anyhow. I’m married to Inez.
George waited for the fireworks. But they never came. He caught the bus back home, and the old people who hadn’t seen him in months recognized him as he walked from the bus station. They called out to him from their front porches.
“Hey, ain’t that Lil George Starling?”
“Yes, ma’am, this is me.”
“Come here, boy. Lord have mercy, what is wrong with you? You done gone plumb fool. They tell me you done jumped up and married that Cunningham girl. And your daddy said, he was here gettin’ ready to send you back to school.”
George couldn’t speak. The old people went on.
“ ’Cause your daddy said he was gettin’ ready to send you back to school, and, before he know anything, you come writing him about you done got married.”
The word had spread all across Egypt town, and everybody knew about the ingrate son who had ruined his chance at college, marrying some girl from the wrong side of town.
Dog, the ole man done tricked me, George thought to himself. He knew how they talked. And in the old people’s sweet scolding, he could hear how the story got repackaged in the telling, people in town with nothing better to do, who never had the chance at college themselves, maybe never tried or even wanted to go, delighting in the confusion and goading Big George over it.
“George, where is that boy? Is he going to school?”
“No, you know what that devilish boy done? I’m here gettin’ ready to send him back to school, and here he come writing me the other day tellin’ me about he married.”
“Well, I declare! You mean to tell! Now, I know that boy ain’t done nothin’ like that! And hard as you workin’ trying to send him to school!”
And so it went. If the father had ever intended on sending him back, he now had a publicly acceptable excuse for not doing so, and he had come out the hero in the deal.
As for Lil George, no colleges near Eustis nor any state universities in Florida, for that matter, admitted colored students. The closest colored colleges were hours away. He had a wife to support now. So he would have to do precisely what his father had intended all along. It looked as if he might never make it back to school.
And he would have to live with vows made in anger for the rest of his life. It would not be happy because he knew and she knew how it had come to be. But they would both try to make the best of it now that the deed was done.