Devil in the Grove

by Gilbert King

  Just as he had led Willie Padgett through his testimony, Jesse Hunter prompted Norma. Evidently he had coached her, too. When he asked Norma to “rise and point out” her rapists, she seemed first to take a few seconds to compose herself for the task as she directed her gaze toward the defendants. She glanced steadily at each of them in turn before she stood and straightened her dress. She eyeballed the Groveland Boys, then, as Williams recalled, Norma slowly raised an arm and extended her index finger, which, again in turn, she pointed at each of the defendants as unhurriedly she drawled: “The nigger Shepherd . . . the nigger Irvin . . . the nigger Greenlee.”

  Williams declared it “probably the most dramatic moment in the trial,” and he, like everyone else in the courtroom, had been riveted by her every gesture. “Christ,” he later recalled, “you could have cut the air with a knife.” What Mabel Norris Reese saw in Williams’s eyes as he followed Norma’s testimony, and indeed throughout the trial, was bitter resentment and hatred. In her articles on the trial, Reese described Williams as being “resentful-eyed” and having eyes “that were so filled with hate as he sat in that courtroom that you could see it, you could feel it.”

  Akerman and Williams had agreed that the cross-examination of Norma Padgett should be restricted to an attempt to raise reasonable doubt in regard to the identification of the defendants rather than to pursue the possibility that no rape had occurred—a futile tack in light of the admissible evidence. Akerman questioned both the accuracy of the time line in the prosecution’s case—she couldn’t be accurate, Norma told him, as she “wasn’t wearing a watch”—and Norma’s apparently absolute certainty as to the identity of her attackers. Norma Padgett proved to be unflappable, however. She left the witness box as confidently as she’d taken it. Whatever Mabel Norris Reese may have read in Williams’s eyes, in his mind he knew that Norma Padgett had just sent the Groveland Boys to the electric chair. That delicate white finger of hers had as good as flicked the switch itself.

  If Norma Padgett had sent the Groveland Boys to their deaths, the state’s next witness was ready to bury their bodies. Deputy James Yates testified that the tire tracks on James Shepherd’s car exactly matched those that were found in the roadbed outside of Okahumpka, at the very spot where Norma Padgett claimed she’d been raped. Using FBI procedures as a guide, Yates had made “plaster Paris casts” to determine the match. He had also made casts of footprints found at the roadside where Willie Padgett claimed to have been beaten and robbed; the footprints proved to be an exact match to Walter Irvin’s shoes. In cross-examination, Akerman questioned Yates’s qualifications as an expert in tire-track and footprint analysis, but the deputy remained confident in his abilities. Yates noted that he must be doing it right because “the sheriff has kept me for 4 years.” It was all the jury needed to hear.

  The sun had set on Tavares, and Judge Futch, who had whittled through the first day of the trial, declared a recess. The jury exited the courtroom with the bailiff, who would, as the judge had instructed, “feed you and sleep you.” Ted Poston rushed to find a phone so that he could call in a story on the day’s proceedings to the news desk at the New York Post. In the stairwell he had to run a gauntlet of deputies and other Lake County men armed and ready to provide security. Before he got to a phone, without any warning or cause he got “jostled by a couple of hoodlums,” as he put it, and one of them “accidentally” stepped on his eyeglasses. Poston hadn’t brought a second pair.

  The trial resumed at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 3, and Jesse Hunter had some cleaning up to do. He first called Groveland bootlegger and bolita dealer Henry Singleton to the stand. On the night of July 15, Singleton claimed, a young man whom he recognized to be Charles Greenlee showed up at his house, supposedly to buy some numbers for a Cuba game. Singleton was suspicious, he told Hunter. Nearly certain that Greenlee was casing his home in order to come back and rob him, Singleton chased the boy off, and shortly thereafter he himself went out for a drive. That’s when he had by chance run into Samuel Shepherd, and Walter Irvin was with him. So it was that Henry Singleton had, in rather a bland narrative, put all three defendants in Groveland in the early evening of July 15. He had also put himself, and the sheriff, back in control of the county’s bolita business. It was Hunter’s next witness who put the now-deceased Ernest Thomas in Groveland on the fifteenth. His mother, Ethel Thomas, who had been in the lockup during the days preceding the trial and had no doubt had time to contemplate the future of her business, the Blue Flame, had decided to cooperate with the sheriff and state attorney. She testified that her son had gone to a party in town that evening.

  Proceeding toward the close of the prosecution’s case, Hunter introduced the state’s last piece of evidence: a July 1949 almanac, by which he showed the jury that the moon had risen at 10:36 p.m. on the fifteenth day of the month and argued that, therefore, the sky was bright enough for Willie and Norma Padgett to easily identify their attackers. Akerman objected on the grounds that the evidence was irrelevant, since the almanac indicated only that the moon rose at 10:36 p.m. in St. Louis, Missouri. The defense might have enjoyed the moment if the judge, whittling at a cedar stick, had not responded, “Objection is overruled.”

  So confident of his case was Hunter by this point that he abstained from calling his remaining witnesses. “I see no purpose in introducing them,” he said. “Therefore, the State rests.” Futch called a recess until 1:30 p.m. that afternoon, and Williams and Akerman decided they’d try to clear their heads and review their strategy in the Florida air.

  Just outside the courtroom, the defense attorneys, exhausted by work and nerves, encountered an overly friendly clerk, who asked, “Well, Mr. Williams, how do you like the way the trial is going?” The ill-timed question received an unconsidered reply. “It’s the worst framed-up case I have ever seen in my years of practice!” Williams snapped.

  Williams later elaborated on the frame. “It was like a story,” he said. “Like a Hollywood story. They had it down pat. They had Irvin’s shoe prints. Imagine making a cast at the scene of the crime. That only happens in movies. You know, of course [they] could make a cast. They had taken his shoes when they arrested him. They had the handkerchief that belonged to either Irvin or Shepherd which they claimed they had tied over their license plate to hide their license plate. Come on. That is too pat. They had the tire mark. Of course, they had the tire mark. They had the car. They made the tire mark and they made it so you have this country jury impressed by all of this high falutin’ FBI type evidence. . . . So, we were up against what appeared to be a firm case . . . that I knew or suspected had been totally manufactured. . . . What were you going to do?”

  They were going to put the Groveland Boys on the stand. They had no other choice.

  Williams and Akerman took their seats at the defense table. The iron gate behind Judge Futch’s desk clanged, the door swung open, and their clients, escorted by deputies, shuffled in. Samuel Shepherd seated himself next to Williams; his brother James and his mother were sitting, attentive, in the balcony. Williams recalled the father, the snakebites on Henry Shepherd’s legs, and the sweat, the toil, he dedicated to draining that swampland in Bay Lake so he could plant fields all his own and build a life for himself and his family away from the citrus groves; his son Samuel had gone off to war, come back, found some trouble, and now the father had lost his house and farm, and his boy was looking at the electric chair and . . . Williams was looking into Samuel Shepherd’s eyes, telling him that Mr. Akerman was going to call him to the box, ask him some questions, and that Samuel should tell the court plain what happened that night.

  When Williams had finished with his instructions, Shepherd turned to him and earnestly offered an instruction of his own. “Mr. Williams,” he said, “when the trial is over, be careful.”

  More words followed, most of them lost by the dazed attorney after he’d heard Shepherd say that someone was “going to get that nigger lawyer.”

  Where did he hear t
hat? Williams needed to know.

  “Willis McCall,” Shepherd told him. “Said he was going to get that nigger lawyer.”

  Williams spotted McCall across the court, and he saw the monster in the man who, behind the badge of sheriff, had “murdered blacks” in Lake County. Williams had heard the stories, like that of the bolita dealer’s widow who’d collected a sum of money on her husband’s insurance policies—money that McCall claimed was owed to him. He went so far as to have the woman arrested, and when she still refused to pay McCall the alleged debt, she fell to her death from the fourth-floor window of the county jail. Williams himself had seen evidence of the beatings on the bodies of his clients, had seen the bloodstained sheets and the blood on the floor in the cells. By the sheriff’s doings as much as anyone’s in the state attorney’s case, in a matter of hours three black men would be convicted by the court and almost surely sentenced to death.

  Judge Futch brought the court to order. Akerman called Samuel Shepherd to the witness box, and Shepherd recounted less plainly than discursively what happened in the course of his night out with Walter Irvin: a narrative about a broken car, a stop for gas, drinking beers in Eatonville, the drive home to get some sleep. Hunter, confident of the state’s case, did not bother to cross-examine Shepherd, or Irvin, whose testimony corresponded with Shepherd’s, though he spared the court the side stories.

  Charles Greenlee was called last. Seated in the box, the look on his face suggesting perpetual shock, the “tall, gangly, overgrown country kid,” who to Williams seemed to be “just this side of illiterate,” adjusted his posture and, with a glance toward Akerman, waited for the questions to begin. As far as Williams could tell, the boy “did not know what the hell was happening to him,” but he’d barely begun his testimony when Williams found himself, literally, on the edge of his seat. In a naive, country-bumbling way, with a childlike attention to detail as amusing as it was engaging, Greenlee recounted the events of his first-ever weekend in Groveland. His “melodious Southern drawl” at once countered and heightened the suspense and danger as well as the gallows humor in his narrative, which frequently elicited appreciative laughter from the benches and the gallery. His guileless, animated delivery prompted Akerman to allow the boy simply to tell “the truth”—because, as Charles reminded his attorney, “if you just tell the good white folks the truth and make them understand, then everything will be all right”—rather than to lead him through his testimony with questions.

  When Charles’s narrative brought him to the Groveland jail, with him still not knowing that the Bay Lake men had suspected him of being one of Norma Padgett’s rapists, he recalled (as the trial transcripts record):

  I said to myself, “What’s coming off here?” And then the man what put me in jail, he came and went in the office, there. I guess it was an office. It was a door. And men kept going in the office and coming out. Kept going in and coming out. Kept going in and coming out. Directly an old fellow come in there. I don’t know who he was. He about the size of Mr. Hunter, and looked like him but I don’t think it was. I don’t think he was as old as Mr. Hunter. He say, “Nigger, you sitting up here and telling a lie like that,” say, “I ought to go get my shotgun and put you through this hole and shoot you.” I say, “What about, Mister?” He say, “You know what I’m talking about.” Well, he walked on off. Because, I said to myself, “Something must be wrong around here, somewhere.” I know I hadn’t done nothing.

  Greenlee testified that he’d never before known or seen his codefendants Shepherd and Irvin until he met them in jail. Furthermore, he said, he had not seen the inside of any car that night, which he had spent at the train depot getting bitten by mosquitoes while waiting for Ernest Thomas to come back for him. Instead, the police had thrown him in jail for loitering and possession of a gun. It was the next morning that he began to be afraid, because more and more men were gathering outside the jail and he heard someone say the men outside were going to kill him. He begged one of his jailers to “hurry up and take me away from here somewhere, I don’t care where,” and he was told that some police would soon come to move him to a safer jail.

  So I was sitting up there waiting for the cars, and soon a 48 black Chevrolet pulled up in front of the cell and mens started crowding back around in there. One fellow say, “If you’ll lay the keys down, I’ll go in there and get him.” Another fellow say, “If you’ll just tell me that I can have him if I get him.” And people kept talking, questioning and telling what they would do if they had me. One fellow drug a big knife in there about this long. Said to me, “Stand up to the door.” I told him, say, “Mister, I ain’t done nothing and me standing up to the door wouldn’t make sense if you want to joog me with that big old knife.” So he said, “All right.” But say, “You’ll get it first and last anyhow, you little black so-and-so.” So I sat back down on the bed. Well, I was about to cry, because I didn’t know what was happening, all of these people around there going to kill me, and I didn’t have no money and Santa Fe was a hundred miles from there and that’s a long ways of walking and I didn’t have no money.

  “Would you have been hanging around down there in Groveland if you had done something like that, Charlie?” Akerman asked.

  “Me? If I’d even thought something like that had happened, I would have been on my way back to Santa Fe or somewhere.”

  The defense rested.

  Once again, the prosecution chose not to cross-examine. Akerman and Hunter discussed a short break to prepare for closing arguments and Judge Futch called a recess until 4 p.m. Outside the courtroom, Williams bumped into “the white lady with the bebop glasses,” Mabel Norris Reese, again. The trial wasn’t over yet, but Reese couldn’t resist commenting on the sixteen-year-old’s performance in the witness box.

  “Charlie Greenlee’s such a good actor,” she called out. Williams was stunned. Here was a boy on trial for his life. He’d just told a packed courtroom that a train had killed his baby sister and his mother cried so much he had to leave home. Deputies had nearly beaten him to death a few weeks ago and he’d been in jail ever since. And now his aged father, “eyes filled with grief,” was forced to sit by his son each day in court and watch him being led away in handcuffs.

  “When are you going to put him on Broadway, Franklin?”

  It was always “Franklin” with Mabel. Never “Mr. Williams.” The lawyer had had enough.

  “You know what your problem is,” Williams sneered. “You’ve got a business here, and you’re trying to out-cracker the crackers.”

  Mabel was taken aback by yet another unpleasant exchange with the New York lawyer. That night she would drive back to her office and begin typing her coverage of the trial, sarcastically comparing the NAACP’s defense to nothing more than fictitious theater. Under the headline “At Long Last, the Groveland Story Is Put into Production,” Mabel lauded “Star Greenlee” and noted that the boy “brought in the finale as would Negro singer Paul Robeson emphasize the crescendo of a song,” so much so that he “would have made a Broadway critic cut the rope of racial prejudice to give him a rave notice in his column.”

  Ted Poston followed Jesse Hunter out of the courtroom, and couldn’t get Norma Padgett out of his mind. “Except for the slender, petulant blonde’s own testimony,” Poston noted, “there was not one bit of evidence placed in the record of the three-day trial at Tavares to support her story that four Negroes raped her successively on the back seat of a 1946 Mercury car in the early morning hours of July 16.” Poston had heard she’d been examined by a doctor, yet no doctor was called to testify. Approaching Hunter, Poston asked why.

  “Not necessary,” Hunter snapped. “She said she was raped, didn’t she?”

  “Mr. Hunter didn’t want to embarrass Mrs. Padgett by bringing out all those details,” an assistant prosecutor added.

  Poston noted that the state did not produce any evidence of “possible stains, spots or any other evidence which must have accompanied a four-way rape in the same cor
ner of the car’s back seat.” One spectator even said so much to Poston while they were in the “Colored” men’s room on the courthouse floor.

  “If that white lady was raped like she said, then it was the cleanest rape in Lake County or the cleanest one anywhere.”

  Heading back into court, Poston spotted bolita dealer and witness for the prosecution Henry Singleton, “bowing and cringing behind a deputy sheriff—more frightened even then of the vengeance of his own people. . . .” He even overheard the deputy discussing Greenlee’s testimony in the corridor. “Too bad that Greenlee nigger got mixed up in this. You know, he’s the kind of nigger you like. It’s a shame Miss Padgett had already said he was there.”

  When court resumed, Jesse Hunter was eager to finish off the defendants. He told Judge Futch, “I won’t take very long, Your Honor,” then leaned into the jury box and assured the jurors that whatever questions they might have about who was where and at what time, they should remember that “a lot can happen with a good fast car and vicious men.” He informed the jury that “no human being ever went through such a terrible night as this girl did,” then reminded them that the defense did not call any witnesses to prove Shepherd and Irvin were in Orlando that night “because those two men were not in Orlando that terrible night—they were out on the road to Center Hill raping this woman!”

  Akerman rose to counter with a reasonable-doubt argument, claiming that the prosecution’s time line defied logic. Greenlee had been apprehended twenty miles away at the same time that Norma Padgett would have been attacked. Without Charles Greenlee on the scene, there was no gun. Akerman closed by telling the jury that in most cases he’d tried, criminals fled after a crime of this nature. Yet these three defendants did nothing of the sort after the alleged crime.