Kushner - The Bones of Marianna

For my father, Gil, who chaired theUniversity of South Florida anthropology department for many yearsand encouraged me to write.

It didnt take much to get sent to theWhite House. Smoking. Cussing. Taking an extra pat of butter atlunch. Or, as Jerry Cooper learned late one spring night in 1961,refusing to play football.

The White House was a small building near the cafeteria at theFlorida School for Boys, where 15-year-old Cooper had arrivedearlier that year. The school was the oldest reformatory inFlorida, spread across 1,400 acres of rolling farmland in Marianna,a town of 7,150, an hour from the state capital in Tallahassee.Like most schools in the South, it treated football like religion.But the reform schools Yellow Jackets had languished of late, andacting superintendent David Walterswho took such pride in the teamthat he kept its few trophies in his officewanted Cooper to leadthem to victory again.

Cooper was tall, lean, and amiable, the star quarterback at hishigh school in suburban Orlando before his life veered off course.When Walters, a stocky, crew-cut middle-aged man, summoned Cooperto his office a few months after his arrival, he didnt ask if hedplay quarterback for the Yellow Jackets. He told him to.

But Cooper didnt want to suit up. With his good behavior anddutiful work as a teachers aide, he had earned an early releasefrom the school and would be going home in a few months. He didntwant a commitment to the football team to keep him around throughthe fall. He obligingly attended practices with the other boys,struggling through the Florida heat in thick, ratty pads everyafternoon, but he refused to sign up for the coming season.

Then, one night, he was awakened by a hand gripping his neck.Two guardsone larger than him, one smallerdragged him barefootfrom his cottage. They wouldnt say where they were taking him asthey threw him into the back of an old blue Ford. They drove alongthe rocky dirt roads across campus until they reached a littlewhite building. Cooper had never been sent to the White Housebefore, but he had heard the stories of kids being taken there tobe whippedor worse.

As the guards shoved Cooper through the door, the stench ofbodily fluids overwhelmed him. A lightbulb hung from the ceiling ofthe bare concrete room, illuminating three husky men: Walters,school disciplinarian R. W. Hatton, and a supervisor, Troy Tidwell,whom the boys nicknamed the One-Armed Bandit. As a child, Tidwellhad leaned on the muzzle of a shotgun and blown off his left arm.His remaining arm possessed a fearsome strength, and he was knownto the boys as the strongest whipmaster of the White House.

What do you know about a runner? Walters asked Cooper,referring to a boy who had run away from the school earlier thatnight.

I dont have a fucking clue, Cooper replied.

Walters lunged for him, and Coopers football instincts tookover. The boy jammed his shoulder into the superintendent, takingTidwell down with him. But the men recovered, and Tidwells handclosed around Coopers neck, hurling him against the wall. Tidwellsmashed his heel down on Cooper, shattering the ball of his foot. When Cooper grabbed his foot in agony, he caught a fist to themouth, which knocked loose his front teeth.

The men threw Cooper facedown on an army cot and tied his legsdown. Cooper heard Tidwells

whip snap against the ceiling and an instant later felt it searhis skin. One burning lash followed another, and Cooper, who neverconsidered himself a coward, begged for mercy. Jesus, God helpme! he cried. Mother! Then he passed out from the pain.

That night in his cottage, Cooper nursed his broken foot. Thewounds from the whip were still so raw that the blood soakedthrough the back of his nightshirt. A boy who had been waiting histurn in the White House during Coopers beating later told him hehad counted 135 licks in all. The supervisors had told Cooper hewas being punished for not helping them find the runaway, butCooper surmised the real reason for the whipping: They wanted himon the football team, even if they had to beat him into compliance(though they probably hadnt planned on breaking his foot). Now, onaccount of his alleged insubordination, he wouldnt be releasedfrom the school anytime sooncertainly not before the end of thefootball season.

Lying on his bed, Cooper wondered how he would survive themonths that stretched before him. The White House had changed him.He vowed to bring the men who had broken him to justice, no matterhow long it took.

But first he had to play ball.

On a crisp, sunny morning in March 2013,a maintenance worker struggled to open a rusty padlock on the doorto a grimy whitewashed building. It sat in the middle of a patch ofdying grass littered with pinecones, on the grounds of the ArthurG. Dozier School for Boys, as the Florida School for Boys had beenrenamed in 1967, in honor of a former superintendent. The schoolhad closed for budgetary reasons two years before. The old cottageswere boarded up now, the once prized football field gone to seed,and a high barbed-wire fence circled the property. Guards had oncepatrolled the perimeter to stop runaways; now they were there tokeep out the curious, including what one called the paranormals,clairvoyants whod been found on campus trying to communicate withdead boys.

When the worker finally forced the lock open, Erin Kimmerlestepped past him into the cottage that generations of Dozier boyshad known as the White House. A self-assured but soft-spoken40-year-old with long blond hair, she wore aviator sunglasses, ablack coat, and blue jeans. By the light of an iPhone, she peereddown a hallway lined with tiny cells, a narrow slit for a window inthe back wall of each. Names and dates from half a century ago werescrawled over a doorway. The wall of one room was spattered withsomething red, and marked with a red handprint. We tested it, arepresentative from the Florida Department of Juvenile Justiceassured her. Its just paint.

One of the countrys leading forensic anthropologists, Kimmerlehad unearthed mass graves in Bosnia, Nigeria, and Peru. But theWhite House struck her as uniquely haunting. It just feelssad,she said. The scene was a far cry from the image the Dozier schoolhad presented to the world when it first opened, in 1900, as anational model for the rehabilitation of troubled youths. Thegrounds were immaculate, recalls U.S. senator Bill Nelson, aFlorida Democrat, who as a boy in the 1950s often visited family inthe area. Locals in Marianna still speak fondly of Dozier. Until itclosed down in 2011, the school was known for a Christmas lightshow that attracted visitors from around the state. An earlypublicity brochure showed clean-cut boys playing bugles under thecampuss cedars and billed the school as A Place in the Sun.

But for nearly as long, the school had been dogged by a darkerhistory. In 1903, after hearing complaints about the institution, acommittee from the state legislature investigated and found thatschool administrators were beating boys, feeding them poorly, andhiring them out for labor. Children as young as five, the committeefound, had been shackled and chained in small cells. Five moreinvestigations followed over the next decade; one of them, in 1911,reported that the beatings had continued and likened theAfrican-American side of the then segregated campus to a convictcamp. In 1914, a fire broke out in a dormitory, killing eightboysas well as two adult staff memberswho had been locked inside.The superintendent and other staff members had been in town at thetime, on what a grand jury, convened the next year, called apleasure bent.

After the same grand jury determined that the punishments theadministrators had meted out to the boys at the Florida School forBoys were cruel and inhuman, the state installed new management.But little changed. In 1958, a psychologist who had worked at thereformatory testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee that theschools students were brutalized on cots in a small building oncampus where they are told to hold the head rail and not yell outnor to move. Corporal punishment was banned at state-runinstitutions in 1968, but hair-raising reports about conditions atDozier continued until at least 2007, when surveillance camerascaught guards choking a teenager and beating him unconscious on aconcrete floor. And yet a centurys worth of investigations had allpetered out without serious consequence.