We Carry Their Bones by Erin Kimmerle

Author:Erin Kimmerle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-04-26T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

“Oftentimes, History Doesn’t Include the Good Parts”

Some townsfolk were not yet willing to come to terms with the fact that they had aided and abetted a system of cruelty. Reconciling those things—the light and the dark—came at an embarrassing cost. We tried to make ourselves at home in a place that seemed on the surface to be interested in welcoming outsiders, but we heard the whispers. They said we were in it for the money. We were in it for the publicity. We were striving for fame and media attention. We were ruining their town. We were killing tourism. We were decimating their economy. We were trying to make them look bad. We didn’t understand that the abuse happened in a bygone era. We were not from there and we didn’t know how things worked. The state representative from Jackson County wrote letters to the university president demanding that I stop my research. She sent the same letters to the Florida governor. Her constituents blamed us for the school closure and the loss of two hundred jobs, even though a fresh Department of Justice investigation had found deplorable conditions. They called me unethical. They accused us of trying to get African Americans riled up. They accused me of “secret communications” with reporters. They accused me of focusing on the negative examples and ignoring the thousands of boys who benefited from their stay at the school. They said the wards at Dozier had had it better than at home; at least at Dozier they got clothes and food.

All this angst festered in a place steeped in its own whitewashed version of history, a place where the church rolls had carried the same last names for two hundred years, where you could still find stately antebellum plantations lining quiet country roads like Confederate sentries. Every year they reenacted a small Civil War battle and revived old Rebel ghosts on graveyard tours. A tall obelisk in front of the courthouse honored the soldiers of the South—“We care not whence they came . . . their cause and country still the same—they died and wore the gray”—just a stone’s throw from where Claude Neal hung in 1934.

And, of course, race was entwined in everything. On a tour of an old plantation, one county official told me that Blacks only had it bad after the war.

“The Civil War?” I asked, astonished.

He corrected me: “The War of Northern Aggression.”

That was when it fell apart and they became impoverished, he said, without white caretakers. Before the war, they worked on the farms and had a place to live and were cared for, like one big family. He believed this. His was the same communal mentality that wanted to preserve a moral, decent image of Dozier.

THIS SENTIMENT WAS unexpected. I thought this was all behind us. Talking about racism could be difficult; it was ultimately about what people valued, and that required empathy. I felt like I had a lot of empathy for the feelings of the families and victims.

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