Carved in Bone

me as if I were an unusual zoological specimen. “Tennessee,” said Raiford, after he’d completed his examination. “Well how in the world’d you end up out here in Miccosukee County? Musta pissed somebody off pretty bad.” He laughed at his joke, then turned his head and shot a stream of brown tobacco juice a few feet to his right. “Y’all’s football program’s been having some troubles the last few years.”
    “Tell me about it,” I said, fervently hoping he wouldn’t.
    Luckily, Stevenson intervened. “I printed out some aerials and a topo map of the site. If you want, we can spread ’em out on the hood of the car.”
    “Trunk’d be cooler,” pointed out Vickery. Stevenson nodded and laid a folder of printouts on the back of the cruiser. The topmost image was a satellite photo off Google, zoomed in close enough to show the entry road and the turnaround loop where we were parked. The four vine-clad chimneys were reduced to a pair of small specks in the photo, but they cast long, parallel shadows across the dirt and scrubby grass.
    Next were two aerials taken in the 1960s, according to Stevenson. One aerial showed a small but tidy complex of a half-dozen buildings in a large, mostly open lawn. I recognized the four chimneys, which were divided between two main buildings: a dormitory, which held beds for a hundred boys, and a multipurpose building, which Stevenson said housed the classrooms, dining hall, kitchen, and administrative. The four remaining buildings, he said, were an infirmary, a chapel, and two equipment sheds.
    Underneath this first aerial was a second aerial showing three buildings that appeared to be crammed into a small clearing in the woods. “What’re those?” asked Vickery.
    “Ah, those,” said Stevenson. “Very interesting. Those were the colored buildings, for the Negro boys. This was a segregated institution. The Florida legislature required the facilities to be a quarter-mile apart.”
    “Wow,” Angie said sarcastically, “so much progress in the century since the Civil War.”
    Stevenson pulled out additional pictures of the segregated facilities–the phrase “black- and-white photos” took on an added shade of meaning–and spread them on the trunk. The two main buildings and the chapel for the white boys were simple but appeared well-constructed, neat, and carefully maintained. Their many-paned windows were large and occupied much of the walls; the interiors would have been flooded with light, and I imagined the windows offering the boys pleasant views of oaks, pines, and magnolias. The buildings for the black boys, by contrast, looked flimsy, unkempt, and virtually without windows–rickety barns, essentially, for human animals.
    “Jesus,” she marveled, “widely separate and hugely unequal. Even the cages had a double standard.”
    “Yeah, the colored buildings were an afterthought,” Stevenson commented, unnecessarily. “The main part was originally built as a CCC camp–Civilian Conservation Corps–in the 1930s. During World War II, it housed conscientious objectors–mostly Quakers who didn’t believe in war. They dug ditches and paved roads and fought forest fires; some of them worked in the state mental hospital over in Chattahoochee. Some served as guinea pigs for medical experiments– that’s a weird parallel with the Nazis, huh? After the war, when the conscientious objectors left, that’s when it became the North Florida Boys’ Reformatory.”
    “So it was a reform school from the mid 1940s,” I said, “until when?”
    “Burned to the ground in August of 1967,” he said. Looking at his youthful face, I suspected that the fire had occurred least a decade before either he or the sheriff’s deputy was born. “Terrible fire. Undetermined cause. Nine boys died, and one of the guards.”
    “Good heavens,” said Angie. “Nine boys died? That’s nearly ten percent. Must’ve been a really fast-spreading fire.”
    “Apparently,” Stevenson answered. “Not surprising–look at those old buildings. Firetraps. Late August, the days hot as hell, the wooden siding and cedar shakes like tinder waiting for a match. When I buy firewood, I pay extra for fatwood lighter that looks a lot like those shakes. Lightning strikes, a guard drops a cigarette butt in the pine straw, whatever, and whoomph. Anyhow, after the fire, the rest of the boys were transferred to other correctional facilities.”
    “Was everybody accounted for,” I asked,