King - Beneath a ruthless sun: a true story of violence, race, and justice lost and found

I N O KAHUMPKA he was known as the boy on the bike. Most any afternoon, as soon as he heard the Atlantic Coast Line train blow its whistle on its approach to the depot a few miles south of Leesburg, he would be pedaling his way to pick up the afternoon post. At Fate Merritts grocery, Mayo Carlton might grab hold of the store fiddle and play Mary Had a Little Lamb for him while postmaster Sallie Reeves sorted the mail in the next room. Buster Beach would be there, too, well before the West Coast Champion arrived, to share the days gossip or to tell the boy a corn-fed tale. The men of Okahumpka spoke kindly to him. Theyd offer him a wedge of tangerine and tousle his uncombed hair with their meaty, sunbaked hands. They were sure to ask about his daddy.

Some days the boy would linger at the grocery, a nickel in his palm, his eyes on the penny treats, until Mr. Merritt would hand him his favorite Black Cow candy and patiently narrate the financial transaction. The boy would smile and say thank you, but the arithmetic lesson would be lost on him by the time he reached the door.

Other boys and girls his age had finished high school, but Jesse Delbert Daniels had fallen behind early. It had taken him four years to pass the third grade, and by the age of sixteen he had advanced only two more. He was not educable, the fifth-grade teacher at Leesburg Elementary School told his mother, and although hed been granted a social promotion, it came with the condolatory recommendation that he be withdrawn from further schooling.

The mail pocketed in his baggy trousers, and the trousers tucked into his socks so theyd not catch in the bikes greasy chain, the boy would pedal back toward home. The way took him by the fishing hole where he often passed his days. Often Jesse would dawdle, mail in pocket, with no notice of the hours passing, until he found himself caught in a summer downpour. The torrential afternoon rain soaking his hair and clothes, he would stand up on the pedals and lean into the blustery wind while the clay kicking up from the tires spattered his pants and shirt. His mother, Pearl, would rush him inside their humble wooden house, take the wet mail, and dry him briskly with a towel. Shed remind him to pedal home fast when the sky over Sumterville began to darken, and Jesse would say, Sorry, Mama. But hed be no more mindful the next time he saw cascades of black and gray clouds billowing in the west, and hed hear no alarm in the volleys of distant thunder.

Jesses rides almost always took him past the fifty-four-acre Knowles estate off Bugg Spring Road. The imposing two-story Georgian frame house with two white columns on its front porch stood grandly among oaks and palm trees and a small grove of Florida pines that towered over the surrounding fields and scrub. Joe Knowles sometimes hired Jesse for seasonal work there. In summer it was watermelons. The fifty-pound Garrisons and Tom Watsons demanded more strength to pick, load, and pack without bruising than a scrawny boy could offer, however. While some Lake County farmers hired white football players from Leesburg High, who took the opportunity to bulk up their muscles pitchin melons, Jesse usually worked with black laborers, trailing behind the cutters. Alongside pint-sized Negro boys, brush in one hand and in the other a jar of thick copper sulfate paste, hed paint the freshly cut stems to reduce the threat of parasitic fungi. Or hed glue labels on melons before they were stacked in the railcars. When spring came around, Jesse got hired on to drop seeds for a new crop and to fertilize the young vines for eighty-five cents an hour.

The money was needed. Jesses father, Charles, was an illiterate sixty-nine-year-old veteran of World War I with a long history of arthritis as well as a debilitating heart condition that, for the past decade, had rendered him unemployable. His meager monthly welfare benefits and Army pension could not keep pace with the familys rent increases, and almost yearly, theyd had to relocate from Okahumpka to ever smaller houses in ever more remote corners of Lake CountyYalaha, Howey-in-the-Hillsuntil theyd settled, once again, in rural Okahumpka.

Jesses mother, Pearl, was twenty-six years younger than her husband, but likewise debilitated by a weak heart. She had had four miscarriages before Jesse was born in 1938, and would go on to suffer two more. During her pregnancy with Jesse shed been stricken with malaria, which devastated large swaths of the American South in the 1930s, as a growing number of poor people built shacks in swampland. Doctors had therefore advised Pearl to wean the newborn quickly, but Jesses health was precarious, too. In infancy he contracted whooping cough, and in childhood he suffered three bouts of rheumatic fever. The second attack, at age ten, left him slow to think, as Pearl put it, and the last, at sixteen, left him with a stammer and perhaps damage to his heart valves.