________
The Scent
Perhaps only nine or ten white men were present in the first response to Fannie Taylor’s alarm, as they gathered in the Taylors’ back yard. When word reached James Taylor at the sawmill, most of the whites there, being supervisory personnel, would have had to stay at their posts. Lee Carrier, a black worker from Rosewood (1983), barely noticed that whites in the lumberyard seemed to be disappearing gradually throughout the day, as rumors grew about the exciting manhunt unfolding over in Rosewood. Carrier himself, being black, was not told what was going on.
Law enforcement in Levy County used a system of deputy sheriffs housed in outlying towns like Sumner, overlaid on a district constable network serving the misdemeanor courts of local justices of the peace.
In Sumner this arrangement had been disrupted prior to 1923 by the recent firing of the town’s live-in deputy, D. P. “Poly” Wilkerson. The reasons were not publicly announced and were variously described by gossip, but perhaps related to Sumner’s jook, its dance hall for African American workers, amid discreet bootlegging exemptions. A local deputy assigned to a timber corporation’s company town automatically had a dual job, also becoming the company’s quarters boss, with jook regulation being a main duty. The banished Wilkerson, who had come to own two automobiles, had lost a lucrative connection.
The new Sumner deputy as 1923 arrived was short, wiry, hard-boiled Clarence Williams, who wore a broad-brimmed Stetson and khakis and was characterized as a taciturn Jimmy Cagney type. Eventually moving to another county as sheriff there, Williams would reportedly be caught helping unload a boatload of bootleg Cuban rum on the Suwannee, with uncertain results. However in the events of January 1, 1923, the poker-faced new deputy would be one of the unlikely heroes, facing off against the first stirrings of a mob.
When word came of the Monday morning crisis, Williams had resort to the company town’s few black-candlestick telephones, one of them in the company hotel, one in the mill’s pay office. An East Florida Telephone party line connected these phones to a house-bound switchboard operator nine miles away at Cedar Key. The operator could be told simply: “Give me the sheriff in Bronson,” meaning the “high sheriff” in the county seat twenty miles from Sumner. On a party line every phone subscriber could listen to the conversations of every other, so the call to Williams’ boss may have been terse.
Levy County Sheriff Elias Robert Walker, known to everyone as Bob Walker (almost as if it were one word, "Bobwalker"), was rather short and wiry himself, but with the political burdens of an elected county official. At age 52, he had been successfully re-elected for two decades, dating back to storied derring-do in his youth. Now known as a low-key peacemaker, he nonetheless wore a cross-draw holster useful at keeping one’s firearm secure in a brawl. His Model-T soon pulled out of Bronson for a looping, twenty-mile run on dirt ruts to the Sumner turnoff.
The men in the Taylors' back yard, despite feelings that every minute of delay would aid the fugitive they wanted, apparently waited obediently for the sheriff to arrive. The proceedings were to be official and the sheriff was the head. Far away in time, in a new millennium, a trend in hurried Rosewood retrospectives would find it alluring to portray James Taylor, Fannie Taylor’s aggrieved husband, as the alleged leader of a mob at this beginning, while also promoting him imaginatively to being a foreman at the Sumner sawmill, thus completing a cartoon image of snarling authority. But Taylor was a carpenter or millwright at the sawmill, not a boss, and he waited like the others for the sheriff to take command.
The first tracking of the fugitive was apparently done with a single dog, though by late afternoon the exercise was repeated with two special bloodhounds on a martingale harness, brought by train from a road camp near Raiford State Prison. Excitement and gossip left few firm details to show how the tracking began—that is, how the dog was scented, or whether it ever caught a false scent (as alleged by an informant who was five years old at the time and recalled other details that were false).
At any rate, everyone seemed to agree that soon the dog confidently caught a scent, which led it to the nearby railroad and then northeast along the tracks.
One story had the dog’s nose moving atop a rail, but periodically darting aside a bit, then darting back onto the rail again. This was said to mean that the tricky fugitive was trying to lift his scent off the ground by balancing along the rail, only to periodically lose his footing and stumble aside. No one in the houses along the tracks seemed to have actually spied such an acrobat, or to have seen any hurrying pedestrian at all.
Over a mile and a half into this railroad tracking, at the near edge of Rosewood, the old Goins home, left from bygone success in pine-sap distilling, faced the tracks from the south, just across from a small derelict structure, the former pay office of M. Goins & Bros. Naval Stores. The house was still occupied by Perry and Hattie Goins and their children, the last on-site heirs of what had once been a bustling enterprise. Perry Goins was now resigned to walking to Sumner each day to stack lumber.
On the day of the manhunt, little Bea Goins (age eight, interviewed in 1982) watched a man in a cowboy hat come to the door and ask her mother if anything strange had been seen lately. Her mother said no, nothing, and the man was gone. The story was the same up and down the tracks. The owner of the strong scent had been remarkably invisible.
In just over another mile and a half—making now a total of over three miles traveled by the straining dog and the rushing men—the tumult met another future witness. Minnie Lee Mitchell, age nine (1983, 1993, 1994) was standing with her grandmother by their front gate. By her description the manhunt had now grown, including men on horseback as word spread. One of the horsemen was apparently a turpentine woods rider named Jack Cason, an ambivalent type like Deputy Williams—and soon to figure with Williams in a moment of heroics.
But as to any lone pedestrian preceding the searchers, Minnie (Mitchell) Langley later said, she had seen no one. Nor, she said, had her grandmother, tall, soft-spoken Emma Carrier. Minnie would recall that at her grandmother’s house that crowded morning there had instead been a more puzzling kind of excitement—a medical emergency.
As the searchers passed, she said, they did not know that upstairs in her grandmother’s weathered frame house (one of at least five two-story homes of African Americans in Rosewood), a man was sick in bed.
The upstairs patient was Minnie’s young uncle, Aaron Carrier, whose house could be seen in the middle distance, just up the tracks. Minnie said that Aaron was periodically incapacitated by sudden attacks, known to Minnie as “heart trouble.” This was combated with "heart medicine” that was kept for Aaron at the home of his mother Emma Carrier. Minnie was vague on whether the latest attack had come on Sunday night or Monday morning. Either way, it had removed the sufferer from his home just as a posse was about to call.
The puzzle pieces here would remain inscrutable: Excitement in white culture, which focused on the firmness of the scent trail found by the dog, would take no interest in how an unexplained medical condition en route might, or might not, improbably relate to the lack of a locatable owner of the scent. Within a week those knowing the details at Minnie’s house would be far too terrorized and scattered for consultation.
Though Minnie apparently did not know it, this was not the first time that Aaron Carrier’s health had been entangled confusingly with law enforcement issues.
The searchers quickly passed by Minnie's position. She watched them dwindling up the tracks to the northeast, toward the nearby eastern edge of Rosewood. Then suddenly the men behind the dog changed direction.
Just beyond a low trestle the dog went off the rails to the right, plowing through grass on the railroad's 60-foot easement. In no time the taut leash had led the men onto the front porch of the next house up the line, Aaron Carrier’s front porch, where no one was home.
Minnie could not see clearly at that distance, but tales among whites about the moment would be legion.
Especially, the stories were enthralled with the way the dog behaved inside Aaron Carrier’s house, once the door was thrown open. In bloodhound lore generally, a favorite theme is the way that a good nose can minutely trace a quarry’s every move, down to the objects he touches, as if dancing with an absent partner.
Inside the house, the list of objects that the scent owner was said to have touched varied a bit by teller, but all painted a picture of flight. Some said the eager nose darted to a pair of shoes under a bed (Would these shoes hide my scent?); to an old shotgun in a corner (Should I stop and fight it out?); and finally, in all the tales, to a bucket of drinking water on a cooling shelf at the back door (This flight is thirsty work).
The precision made it all the more dramatic when, just after the trail went through the house and out the back door, the dog stopped short. The scent seemed to vanish. Whether there was an actual track from a wagon or simply a suspicious-looking sand lane winding behind the house and into the depths of the Great Gulf Hammock, the implication left few doubts. In similar situations, some fugitives of the era were able to break their scent trail simply by climbing onto a horse or mule, riding double behind an accomplice. Scent-hiding was scarcely an exact science. At Aaron Carrier’s back door the verdict was a wagon.
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By the time Lee Carrier had walked home from work in Sumner on January 1, 1923, it was after 5:30 p.m., dark as he reached Wright’s store in Rosewood.
In what had once been Rosewood’s center, Lee could look around and dimly make out the vacant spaces where familiar buildings had once stood, before the settlement’s slow decline.
The foundation blocks of the old Rosewood cedar sawmill were still present (closed in 1911). The vanished shops once run by Buddy Williams, Allen Smith and John Blocker were now slight variations in the weeds (with the cedar mill gone, unpaid debts had stricken other concerns). The old frontier emporium of Bacchus Hall, with its undertaker’s parlor upstairs, had closed well before the vacant remnant of that store burned down in an accidental fire, around 1918. The smaller stores of Ransom Edwards and John Coleman were also just memories, gone with the clear-cutting of the swamp cedar groves, as the timber economy had moved on.
The old Rosewood boarding house for the cedar mill was still standing as Lee sat down on Wright’s store porch, but was vacant. For a time after its closing, the boarding house had been adapted as the private home of irascible Frank Burns, but now the mean old man was dead and. his long-suffering widow Mary had departed. Nearby was the old Ford’s Hotel, opposite Lee’s position at Wright’s store, just across the tracks. But it, too, was now a makeshift private residence, housing George Bradley and kin.
You had to go more than a mile down the tracks, through more spaces and shadows, to see the similar remains of what had once been the community’s other nerve center, M. Goins & Bros. Naval Stores. The last of its founding Goins brothers, Ed Goins, was now dead, the equipment sold in 1916, the old foundations peeking from moss and trumpet vines.
Lee was living on in these remains, at home with the ghost of a place he had known since birth in 1900. He boarded with his widowed uncle Wesley Bradley back north of Wright’s, sharing a room with Wesley’s son Bishop. All three worked for Cummer Lumber three miles west in Sumner, the only paycheck still available in the area, unless you wanted to walk a mile in the other direction to Wylly, and accept dollar-a-day kid’s work dipping turpentine.
Of course, there was also tie-cutting, as Lee’s cousins Sylvester and Aaron did, but Lee avoided it. His two cousins would push out into unclaimed land in Gulf Hammock to fell trees, then hewed the logs square for sale as railroad crossties. Passing section foremen bought the ties for replacement work, as the weight of the trains slowly turned the old ties to splinters. Tie-cutting was notoriously low-paid work, and notoriously hard—quite a sacrifice for its lone perk: not having a boss.
The two main tie-cutters who were left in Rosewood by 1923, Sylvester Carrier and Aaron Carrier, both had prickly histories that militated toward this sort of last resort. Sylvester had once prospered as a teamster when the cedar mill was running, but as the community faded after 1911, lives as well as buildings went down. In a way, Sylvester seemed cursed by his gifts. People said he was the best man at hauling logs, and at hunting in the woods, and even at singing in church—but he tended to let mere mortals know about this superiority. He was known for “cracking” or boasting, in the same frontier tradition as Mike Fink or a laughing character out of Mark Twain, though in Sylvester’s case the frontier was “Cracker” Florida, with an added distinction for this frontiersman’s race.
By 1916, Sylvester’s team of oxen for pulling logs had been sold, his wife was gone (desertion, he told the judge in divorce court), and he had remarried, this time to a young descendant of the lost Goins prosperity. In 1918 the extroverted woodsman, along with his father Haywood, was convicted of livestock theft, ostensibly from an African American neighbor. This brought a year of hard labor in outlaw swamps beyond the Suwannee, as both convicts, father and son, were leased to a camp in Taylor County.
By 1920 Sylvester (though apparently not his father) had rebounded into employment at Cummer Lumber, as a sweat-soaked fireman stoking the Suwannee log train. But his woods boss there was notorious for abuse. A quarrel broke out and suddenly the job was gone. Sylvester and his second wife Gert lost their company housing in Sumner and had to retreat to the fading remains of Rosewood. There they moved into a room built onto the back of Sylvester’s mother’s house, with few options left but the hard freedom of tie-cutting.
Apparently both Sylvester and his cousin Aaron had tie-cutting camps deep in the green mazes of Gulf Hammock, with palm-thatch shelters and barrels of provisions.. But Aaron had come to tie-cutting by a route different from Sylvester's. Aaron Carrier was not confidently assertive like Sylvester, but was shy and reticent, and was saddled with a disconcerting mental problem.
People took it in stride. Some said that this problem was why Aaron had been bumped from the army after being drafted in World War I. His service record said only: “Disabled,” to a degree of “12½ percent.” Rosewood referred to the problem by an easier name. People said the young tie-cutter was “scary,” or easily panicked.
For reasons no one cared to pursue, Aaron Carrier seemed to have what’s called an exaggerated startle response, throwing him into fits of debilitating fear in moments of stress. This bracketed the Monday crisis in an oddly symmetrical way, reminding of panic issues raised by reclusive Fannie Taylor, three miles down the tracks. The excitement was flanked by a naggingly neat coincidence: At the same time that Fannie was suffering an attack (of whatever kind), Aaron, too, was allegedly undergoing an “attack” of his own, with a three-mile scent trail stretched between them. Any such mystical-sounding sidelights were apparently not troubling the manhunters, who knew so little of the background that they didn’t even know whose house they had come to.
Minnie, however, knew her uncle’s pattern. She laughed gently about the time Aaron was out courting, before he married in 1917. In his best suit he was walking home through moonlit shadows—when suddenly he saw them!
Everyone knew about the ghosts from the Civil War, perhaps left by the Battle of Number Four Bridge only eight miles down the rails but six decades in the past, occurring on February 13, 1865. But not everyone who believed in the ghosts reacted as Aaron did. It took all of Mama’s skill with needle and thread, Minnie said, to repair his Sunday suit, after his terror had sent him flying into a hogwire fence.
Behind the annexed room occupied by Aaron’s cousin Sylvester, just down the tracks from Aaron’s own house, was a wide patch of hard ground before reaching the shadows of Gulf Hammock. That open ground was Rosewood’s baseball field. Community baseball had been a national mania since Casey at the bat, in both races. Close kinship ties in Rosewood continued fielding a team in spite of economics, and outfielder Lee Carrier had plenty of chance to observe his cousin Aaron at second base.
It just didn’t seem to fit Aaron, Lee mused, when he heard what the manhunters had found that Monday. It wasn’t that Lee doubted their conclusions—for the evidence seemed open and shut. Lee was an avid hunter and knew dogs; this one seemed clearly to be saying that a runner had gone to Aaron’s house and was helped by Aaron to hide his scent in somebody’s wagon. But the part that didn’t make sense was Aaron’s temperament. Aaron was too scary and nervous, Lee thought, for some kind of cloak and dagger plot with a fleeing thug.
The story put together by the manhunters, though alleging various proofs, had Aaron aiding the escape by running clear across the community, more than a mile, to roust out the alleged bringer of the wagon. And that alleged wagon driver wasn’t even an accustomed associate of Aaron. They lived at opposite ends of Rosewood in what amounted to different worlds. For Aaron Carrier to pull that wagon trick, Lee puzzled, it would be like somebody else in Aaron’s shoes, like that thug had hypnotized Aaron or something (And as to the possibility of the thug being some kind of secret white boyfriend, that story, never heard by Lee in Rosewood, would have sounded stranger to him than Civil War ghosts).
As Minnie watched from a distance and the men with the dog burst through Aaron’s front door, their subsequent disappointment in the back yard soon brought a sequel. Minnie saw one of the men growing larger as he came back down the tracks toward where she stood with her grandmother, nervously watching from their front gate. The approaching man, apparently knowing nothing of Rosewood, reached Emma Carrier and asked if she knew who lived in that house up there, the one the posse had found. Emma told him her son.
And here, in Minnie’s painful memory, Emma’s responses begin to disintegrate, for the man asks where Aaron is right now. Soon Emma is sobbing, pleading. Please don’t hurt my son! He didn’t do anything! The ailing suspect is brought down from upstairs. The man, holding Aaron by the arm, begins shouting to others, “Bring a rope!”
Minnie could scarcely have guessed that this was not for a lynching, per se, but for a locally favored interrogation technique, by asphyxiational torture.
Whoever the man was, he was not Sheriff Walker, for the sheriff knew Rosewood in some detail and would have known whose house it was. The exhausting run with the dog was beginning to be taken over by hard-luck woodsmen, some with rap sheets and moonshining links, some embopldened by interwoven kinship.
As Aaron’s identity began to circulate, the woods farmers recalled lost hogs, especially one lost by white neighbor John Kirkland, of the interwoven families. That hog was found butchered in Gulf Hammock with a trail allegedly leading back to Aaron Carrier’s tie-cutting camp. Not bothering with the law in that case, long memories claimed, the hog trackers had located a provision barrel in the camp and laced it with strychnine, the active ingredient in rat poison. A woodland informant telling the tale laughed vengefully, saying Aaron Carrier had got mighty sick.
No notice was taken of another unanswered question, related to lingering damage and Aaron’s “attacks.” It may be only coincidental, but an exaggerated startle response is one of the possible side effects of strychnine poisoning.
Sheriff Walker, not up for an hours-long run at age 52, had followed the manhunt in his Model-T. Now at least two cars were pulling up near a liveoak at Aaron’s house, along with horsemen and milling pedestrians, as somebody found a rope.
However, the second car, as well as one of the horses, carried the beginnings of a surprise. What was about to happen might sound better suited to gee-whiz juvenile fiction abour the Hardy Boys or Tom Swift, but the events did not stop for a story editor. Tales would identify the second car as a Buick, but apparently that was only a supposition because a big Buick existed in Sumner that was well known, belonging to top mill boss Walter Pillsbury. The closest testimony, while agreeing that the second car was indeed Pillsbury’s, placed it as being his other car, a smaller Ford, which he kept to amuse his children, the customary driver being his oldest son Edward, age seventeen.
Minnie, horrified at a distance, was soon receiving fill-in information from adults. She said the car had two occupants, the Pillsbury boy “and somebody.” This day, New Year’s, was not a work day for the full run of Sumner’s population. Edward Pillsbury had welcomed a visit by train from a chum in Jacksonville, Bert Philips, whose influential family name labeled the city’s Philips Highway. Bert expected only a hunting holiday in mysterious jungles, 120 miles from home. But as they drove out toward Gulf Hammock in search of a wild turkey or two, the manhunt caught Edward’s attention.
The cliché notion of a risk junkie or adrenaline addict was seen by Edward’s family as being more than a myth, for it was embodied in the mill boss’s troublesome son. Once Edward’s father was forced into anxious search mode on the log train after Edward had marched off to explore roadless Suwannee Hammock, then disappeared. Another time, on the road out to Cedar Key, the impulsive risk-lover had jumped from a car to plant his boot triumphantly on an alligator he had spied lying in the sun, only to require adult rescue when the trophy whirled.
Now at the oak, the crowd was dividing into factions. The woodsmen with the rope knew how a real man gets the truth out of pesky racial resistance. But less loud and obvious were those who were wondering how to stop the game. Not very numerous, the dissenting faction consisted of the sheriff, his deputy Williams, the woods rider Jack Cason, and two Hardy boys in a car. There may also have been a few others not eager to be known.
The idea of using the rope for torture was to haul up the interrogated subject by the neck—not breaking his neck as in executional hanging, but suffocating him, choking the truth out of him. It sounded a bit like the waterboarding asphyxiation technique known to interrogators of a later age.
The questioners wanted to know whose wagon it was, and where it had gone. Typically in such exercises, the problem that any given interrogation subject might not know the information being sought was not a major concern. The philosophy was simpler. This was a racial interrogation and the target was guilty by association, so why not?
It was a strange tableau, not only because of the unlikely boss’s son, but another exotic presence. Woods rider Cason was known as a gunman, feared for his volcanic temper. Rosewood resident Stephen Hall had once borrowed a horse from Cason’s ranch down the tracks, then damaged it and fled the community, so strong was the fear of Cason’s wrath. Or so it was said. Hall’s flight also broke him free from his struggling family. Unseen by tellers of the tales about Jack Cason, a houseful of children at his ranch would remember him fondly. Apparently the volcano had a tender side.
According to stories about the oak tree encounter, Cason stepped from behind the tree and confronted the would-be interrogators, who knew his reputation. Under this cover his allies, perhaps including Williams the deputy, grabbed the interrogation subject away from the prospective torturers. Distant Minnie Mitchell could gather only that “[Sheriff] Bob Walker dodge him ‘round.” Aaron Carrier was somehow snatched and thrust into the Pillsbury car, whereupon it roared away. The sheriff was left behind to placate the losers. He reportedly deceived the coalescing mob, telling them that their quarry was being taken only to the little cracker-box jail in Sumner, which they knew they could easily overpower later if they wanted to resume the interrogation. This was the cover story..
Edward’s younger sister Martha (1994, 1995) would remember Edward giving his father fits that day at their Sumner bungalow, for the Ford stopped there with Aaron Carrier hidden on the back floorboard, as excited blueblood Bert rode shotgun on the front seat. Soon, Martha Pillsbury said, Edward insisted on driving leisurely around Sumner for a thrill, tempting discovery and reveling in the danger of his cargo, apparently heedless of how it felt to Aaron. Whether or not this storied detour grew a bit in the telling, it seems that the car did eventually take the limerock highway as agreed, driving not just to the county jail in Bronson but 45 miles into the next county, to Gainesville and the Alachua County Jail. Aaron Carrier was placed in protective custody there, so secretively that for weeks Minnie and the rest of his family feared he had been killed.
He would have a legacy in myth. Internet requiems in a future age would indignantly feature Aaron Carrier being carried off in a different way, not inside the speeding car but allegedly dragged behind it. In these modern fantasies (claiming special inside knowledge that never seems to quite materialize), the attention-getting notion of Aaron Carrier’s planned torture is not narrowly prevented, but is horribly carried out, and is pictured in imagined detail as being material fact. Apparently the ambivalent reality—rescue by the boss’s thrill-seeking son—did not provide enough sensational demons for the fantasies to hate.
Here, too, my own initial confusion among the Rosewood legends is partially to blame. In my first article on the 1923 events, written in 1982, I saw no alternative but to give equal time to a claimed eyewitness to the Aaron Carrier capture. At that time I had not yet found the real eyewitness, Minnie (Mitchell) Langley, but was limited to the same informant who claimed to have counted nineteen dead white men on a porch, among other miracles, including the secret white boyfriend. The dragging story was part of the boyfriend narrative. Though eventually adopted by others, it seems to trace back to only the one source named earlier, who for whatever reason reported seeing things that weren’t there.
By now, unlike in 1982, it’s clear that all the authentic witnesses on Aaron Carrier agree that there was no dragging. Minnie Mitchell was watching as they drove off, and Aaron was inside the car.
This is scant compensation to offer to the fantasizers, against the tempting thrill of demonization in the dragging story. A Web scenario somehow manages to quote conversation from the demonic tormenters in the car, who allegedly kicked and cursed their captured victim. Perhaps more significant is the surrounding acquiescence of a public information culture that finds such fantasies to be noble, or at least unchallengeable.
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The Monday memories from Minnie (Mitchell) Langley, telling of the posse coming and seizing her uncle Aaron, leave out a striking question: Where was Aaron’s wife, Mahulda Brown Carrier?
The omission is striking because in some of the tales about Aaron’s rescue at the oak tree, when woods rider Jack Cason stepped out and made the interrogators back off, Cason is said to have growled at them: “If you want to get to the woman, you’ll have to go through me.” If true, this implies that not just one person was being terrorized and then rescued at the oak tree, but two.
Minnie Langley’s testimony shows how this kind of question can make living witnesses more useful than documents. You can’t go back to a document when you find it has left something out, and say, “Yes, but what about…?” Unfortunately, however, my interviews with Minnie had many such details to get straight, and it was hard to get around to all of them. I didn’t fully grasp the omission of Aaron’s wife, as Minnie concentrated on describing that Monday from the perspective of her immediate family. She did say, however, that Mahulda Carrier was her teacher in the Rosewood school.
A one-room schoolhouse for African American children had been operating in Rosewood since the nineteenth century, financed by Levy County. Memories recalled about 25 children there in Rosewood's early years, when students like Wade Carrier (Aaron's older brother, born Feb. 5, 1903) had gone through all eight grades, but with no black high school for further schooling anywhere around. A 1911 superintendent's report showed:
“...1373 white children enrolled [countywide] and 801 blacks. The average salary for the male teacher was $59.34, for female white teachers, $44.84, and for black teachers $30,75.”
Mahulda Carrier, the teacher at the Rosewood school when violence struck in 1923, was uncomfortably accustomed to a long unsalaried period each year while the school was not in session. Worse were the community's frontier feuds and internal tensions. The school was burned down at least once, apparently around 1917, with no one seeming to accuse a white mob. There is also evidence supporting residents who cited a second arson, perhaps around 1920. Minnie Mitchell (born July 4, 1913), would have started school around 1918-1919, and recalled a substitute building “when our school got burned down.” It had just been built back, she said, when worse arson struck in 1923. This isolated community of hard-working but hardened frontiersmen was hardly the angelic paradise confabulated dreamily by the 1997 ”history” movie Rosewood.
Aaron Carrier and Mahulda Brown were married on December 20, 1917, months after the groom signed his World War I draft card, but before he was inducted and then sent back home from a reserve labor battalion, honorably discharged, but found to be “12½…per cent” disabled.
Minnie would sometimes walk up the railroad from her grandmother’s house and visit the young couple. Their small home contained her uncle’s wartime souvenirs: an olive-drab forage cap and leggings. At least four Rosewood residents saw service during World War I. One of them, Rob Ingram, was white; and one, the pariah of the church shooting, George Goins, went overseas. When Sylvester Carrier also disappeared from Rosewood for a year around that time, children were apparently told that he too was in the army. In reality he was serving time in a convict camp for stealing a hog from African American neighbor John McCoy.
Mahulda Brown had reportedly received her teaching certificate from an academy in larger Alachua County next door. She had grown up in a farming town named Archer, thirty miles up the railroad from Rosewood. There her father had laboriously taught himself to read and write after emancipation, using a Knowles and Maxim Hand Penmanship workbook, carefully preserved by the family.
In 1983 I interviewed Mahulda’s younger sister Theresa Brown Robinson (born July 30, 1902), who witnessed Mahulda’s traumatized return to Archer after the Monday manhunt. That 1983 testimony is doubly fortunate now because radically different and apparently fantasized stories about what Mahulda and Theresa were supposed to have said after 1923 have been posted in a new millennium, coming, as with Philomena Doctor, after an informant's death has prevented objections.
This post-millennial rise in discussion of Mahulda Carrier flows into a gap in Rosewood testimony. Mahulda was seldom mentioned by informants from within Rosewood, perhaps partly out of discretion. Delving too closely into her movements on the fateful day might have rebounded onto her husband, further incriminating Aaron Carrier in the getaway story.
The core question is: What really happened at the home of Aaron and Mahulda Carrier on the morning of January 1, 1923, just before a tracking dog led a posse there?
Minnie’s recollection of Aaron’s “attack” that morning seems to directly contradict what Mahulda told her family, as subsequently told by Theresa to me. And different from all of this are more recent sensational stories about Mahulda’s alleged experience that day.
All seem to agree, however, that Sheriff Bob Walker effected Mahulda’s rescue from extra-legal interrogators, around the same time as Aaron’s rescue. There seems also to be consensus that the two rescuees were spirited away separately, though the clues point to a common destination, with both going into protective custody in Gainesville.
Though Gainesville was no racial exemplar in 1923 (its daily newspaper used language like “chocolate-colored inhabitants” in its sports and police pages), still the small college town could seem light years ahead of the nearby swamps in its rule of law. Aaron Carrier may have remained in protective custody in Gainessville for months. Apparently Mahulda was held only overnight. Her sister said that for a time both Mahulda and Aaron thought the other must have been killed.
Below is the story told to me in 1983 by Theresa Brown Robinson, age 20 at the time of the events:
It is about sunset in Archer, Florida, between Rosewood and Gainesville. The Brown family is at home when they hear an arriving car. The head of the household, Charles Brown, is away working in Ft. Myers, but present are his wife (Mahulda’s mother), their daughter Theresa (the informant for the story), and their youngest son. They see that the car is the local Model-T taxi driven by Julius Jackson, a vehicle often seen parked at Archer’s Seaboard depot, hoping for a fare off the passenger train. This evening it got one.
The Browns are surprised to see that the fare is Mahulda, after evidently arriving in Archer by train. At the front door she collapses into her mother’s arms, barely whispering words that Theresa would render as: “Mama you don’t know. They had me out all night. They just did me all kinda way.”
Mahulda’s sister saw no signs of physical injury or torn clothing, but some form of questioning had apparently been severe, amounting to psychological torture. Mahulda stressed to her mother that a police matron had been kept on hand against sexual improprieties, again suggesting Gainesville as the backdrop, there being few police matrons in the Levy County swamps. However other details imply an intermediate location, something about being kept out on a railroad track all night, leaving the detainee with a traumatized sensitivity to guns. Theresa felt that a gun might have been held to Mahulda’s head, noting that for years afterward she would break down at even the sight of a toy gun held by a child. Neither the questions in the interrogation session nor their answers were recounted.
Theresa Robinson’s description of her sister’s homecoming had the matter-of-fact sound of genuine observation, not seeming to reach into imagination or excited histrionics to impress her hearer. She said that Mahulda repeatedly praised Sheriff Walker as being her savior, though the specific things he did were not clear. Also the timing—“the sun was going down” on the railroad depot taxi—suggests overnight custody in Gainesville, since there was only one passenger train through Archer in the afternoon or evening, and it ran out to the Gulf, coming from Gainesville.
At many points, the Rosewood events remind of a shadow world behind everyday events. Regionally, Jim Crow accommodation to racial segregation and lynching produced an underground hive of lawmen scurrying to avert, divert, or outwit murderous mobs, much of this scurrying being unknown to the public. Some local sheriffs did aid lynchers, but many risked their lives for what they saw as thgeir obligation, to protect the rule of law.
At this point, however, Theresa Robinson’s story has not yet reached the core question: What did Mahulda say had happened inside her house on that Monday morning? This is the moment of truth. Who was the fugitive? What was the fugitive? Was there any fugitive at all?
And on this rock, the story told by the trembling teacher breaks. For she says—at least as told by her sister—that yes, there was a man, a real fugitive, who came into her house that morning—but then she says that she and her husband Aaron never got a glimpse of that man, because they were still in bed, she says, with the bedroom door closed, so they only heard an unseen presence coming through the house, as they lay there terrified.
This would seem to fit Aaron Carrier's “scary” temperament. But was the fugitive secretly white? Or was he black? The story doesn’t have to say. The scoundrel keeps disappearing.
A scenario could be squeezed together whereby the man bursts into the house, sees no one, never tries the bedroom door, and then keeps going—while Aaron Carrier in the bedroom goes into one of his panic attacks, whereupon (the squeezed-together scenario might continue) he is helped by his wife Mahulda to stagger up the railroad tracks and is put to bed at his mother’s house, all in the space of time before whites burst onto the scene with the dog. But that is a lot of squeezing.
And how, at the back door, does the scent trail disappear? Could it be that some wagon driver just happened to be passing on the lane behind the house, and was hurriedly hailed, and said okay, get in?
Also very unlikely. Traffic into the bogs of Gulf Hammock was not heavy.
The multiple omissions or avoidances in all the versions of the Aaron Carrier progression boil down finally to the major hole in the story: How did the posse (soon growing into a mob) come up with the name of the man who supposedly drove the crucial getaway wagon? That name would soon pop up, but seemingly out of nowhere. Suddenly the pursuers were convinced. It had to be him.
Rosewood had varying theories on this, too. Lee Carrier concluded that it was Aaron who gave them a name to pin onto the wagon driver. Sam Hall, agreeing that a wagon really did pass behind the house but saying it was just by coincidence, figured that the name of the wagon driver came from Aaron’s wife.
______
Seated on Wright’s store porch in the growing darkness of Monday evening, January 1, 1923, Lee Carrier proceeded with his established routine.
Each night after walking the three miles home from work at the Sumner sawmill (the short days of winter placed the end of the walk after sunset), Lee would go into Wright’s, buy some cheese and crackers, and then sit on the porch and enjoy his supper. Since he bunked with his uncle Wesley Bradley, and Wesley’s wife Virginia had died in the birth of their seventh child, eating arrangements for Lee at Wesley’s were sparse. At age 20 he was a stoic, unexcitable athlete and avid hunter, and he didn’t tend to complain.
The quiet former center of old Rosewood at Wright’s was more than a mile southeast of the commotion that day at Aaron Carrier’s house, which stood at Rosewood’s eastern edge. And at any rate by nightfall Aaron’s empty house was barely an anti-climax, marking the place where the manhunt had fallen apart.
Lee watched as five or six whites from there trickled down to Wright’s, not knowing what to do with themselves, now that the trail was dead and a dog’s nose was no help. As Lee had approached the porch, one of the whites seemed to find new purpose.
“Well, we gonna get us a nigger,” he announced, glaring into Lee’s eyes. Suddenly Lee was trapped: damned if he fought back, and damned if he didn’t.
But then a second white reached forward and pulled back the first, counseling (as Lee’s memory had it): “Oh, no, we don’t want any nigger. We don’t want the wrong man. We want the right one.”
Apparently the initial selective targeting phase of a deadly ethnic riot was still in place, three nights prior to Thursday night’s eruption into rampage and random targeting.
The store porch encounter would prove to teach another lesson as well, showing how different observers can report differently on the same scene. In the 1983 taping for 60 Minutes at the site of Rosewood, Lee Carrier and Sam Hall were brought together for the first time in decades. Concerning the Monday night sequence, each seemed to describe a moment at Wright’s store porch coming just after the confrontation described above. They agreed on the general mood and meaning of that scene, but two different minds seemed to fix on differing elements of the scene to express that meaning.
As Lee walks into the store, he sees behind the counter the familiar figure of storekeeper John Wright, age 50. Though white, Wright has made his peace with living in the fading embers of what has become a mostly black community. A classic frontier diplomat, with some past tragedies that seemed to soften his heart, Wright is well liked and influential on both sides of the color line. His property will not be touched by white rioters later in the week, though he will use that property to protect black women and children fleeing the violence. He is the man in the middle, balancing on a tightrope, managing potentially explosive situations with a low-key drawl.
The two memory lenses, Lee Carrier’s and Sam Hall’s, will both seem to package this world of subtleties in a single scene, but they use differing stage business, symbolizing the message in different remembered objects, actions, and words.
Lee recalls the whites outside the store growing restless. They call out to Wright. Come and join our manhunt. You need to be part of our chase.
In Lee Carrier’s memory, Wright never directly says no. He doesn’t snap at them angrily, or retort that his sympathies are with the peace-making sheriff—and with mill boss Pillsbury and Cason—and anybody else who has sense. The whites of substance here, the local managerial class, seem to view the attempt to torture Aaron Carrier as a child’s repulsive game of torment-the-cat. But Wright makes no speeches. Lee hears him fend off the invitation by using an excuse. Wright says, “Naw, Mama’s sick. She’s at home.”
Wright is protesting that his ailing wife Mary would not be able to run the store in his absence. Lee Carrier does not seem to know how deeply his memory probes in retaining Wright’s customary use of “Mama” for his wife—because their only two children, John Jr. and Norman Wright, died in infancy within a year of one another in 1900-1901. A third child, left from widowed Mary’s first marriage, was then pampered sentimentally, and black children at the store could depend on Wright giving them candy for the walk home.
But now the second observer kicks in. Sam Hall is five years younger than Lee Carrier and has just started working at the Cummer mill. It’s a hard world at age fifteen, and already Hall has been injured slightly when a plank was flipped by an older man. On the night of the manhunt, Hall, too, has walked home, though he and his young friend and co-worker Raymond Jones don’t mingle much with the mostly older workers on their sunset walk.
At first Hall remembers, he bypasses Wright’s and goes to what should be the center of kibitzing and hanging-out at this hour: the Rosewood train depot. It’s only an open-fronted shed, nearly or completely devoid of furniture, but the evening passenger train is scheduled to come in, and people gather at the depot for the excitement. Yet on this night Hall finds the depot deserted. He won’t recall being afraid, or thinking about a mob. As a default he drifts back to check for any post-sundown activity at Wright’s store.
There, he finds some whites in the yard, calling out to the storekeeper to join their hunt. Wright goes out onto the store porch to deal with them, and never directly says no. But in Hall’s memory this evasion is driven home by a material object. Wright uses it to appease the manhunters.
The storekeeper rummages under the counter for an item customarily kept handy by such merchants. He brings up a shiny little .32-caliber pistol, a “storekeeper’s gun.” In Hall’s memory, Wright offers the gleaming object to the insistent manhunters—as a loan, his gesture of support for the crusade.
Hall’s recollection has a more dramatic acting-out but the same core message: I won’t go out and kill innocents myself, but I can’t risk seeming too resistant. I have to show I’m not the enemy.
The fifteen-year-old lumber stacker fixes on gem-like physical details: the shiny nickel plating, the creamy pearl handle of the little breakback gun.
The two memories retain variations on a theme: The influential white man shuns the growing mob appetite, but fears it. Later in the week when Wright protects women and children, he will not go so far as to draw a gun, much as the maneuvering sheriff stops short of that. As if in differing personal languages, the two memory-scenes imply cold realization: Rampage will not be prevented, the law will bend, there is no refuge.
Lee Carrier’s memories of that evening at Wright’s will continue through one more event. The store grows quiet. He doesn’t seem to directly notice that the straggling manhunters have disappeared, but the next tableau confirms that they are no longer present. Lee is not in a position to know that at about this moment, curiosity-seeking white men and boys from far and wide are leaving their customary haunts and converging on a new node of excitement, a mile and a half to the southwest, though still at the outer edge of Rosewood.
In the quiet of the store, Lee Carrier remembers, his cousin Sylvester comes in, looking grim. The way that Henry Sylvester Carrier came to be pulled into the Rosewood violence would be covered in excited gossip and post-traumatic revisions, creating one more mystery. Lee and some neighbors grew convinced that Sylvester had clashed with some of the manhunters, as almost happened with Lee. The most dramatized stories had Sylvester receiving a sundown ultimatum, the kind in the old western movies: Be out of town by sundown, or else...
But the context also gave a racial meaning to the phrase, as in that era’s “sundown signs” posted at the outskirts of countless towns along the northward route of the Great Migration during World War I: “...Don’t let the sun set on you here”—meaning that wayfarers of color had better not linger in the town in question.
Whatever the truth about Sylvester Carrier on Monday, his cousin’s memory presented a sequel at Wright’s. Lee said he watched Sylvester walk in and buy a box of shotgun shells, whose scatter pattern was suited to crowds. Lee said Syl stopped a moment to explain, saying to his cousin: “I'm not gon’ use the Winchester rifle. I’ve got too many chances to miss with that.”
_________
Rosewood resident Samuel S. Carter, born in June 1874, was at the dawn of 1923 living alone in a small house, multiple memories would agree.
The house was on the western edge of Rosewood, almost into the edge of Sumner, and well away from the old-time Rosewood center around Wright’s store. But it was closer to the ruins of the vanished Goins turpentine operation. Carter’s house faced a rock road, Highway 13, in a stretch of the road now covered by Florida Highway 24.
His name, Carter, is not a misreading of “Carrier.” The Carter and Carrier families of Rosewood were not related, though the names sometimes confused outsiders. Among whites knowing neither family firsthand, wildfire rumors in the excitement of January 1-7, 1923, tended to slur the two similar surnames together, creating a kind of catch-all suspect category, muttered uncertainly as “Carey” or “Kearn” or “Kurny.” Such mental associations and recombinations, fueled by excitement, repeatedly ran through a week of illusions, as if the gossip picture of Rosewood was rearranging elements in a mass dream.
Carter had been leading a solitary life for some time. In 1895 he had married Ida Williams, but she disappeared from the records after about 1910, apparently deceased. One of their three grown children, daughter Pearlee, was said to sometimes come and cook for Sam. The other two offspring, sons, were more controversial.
The family owned an 80-acre parcel in Section 30 that was homesteaded by Sam Carter’s father, Nebuchadnezzar Carter—apparently the only plot in Rosewood acquired by the frontier bootstrap method of staking a homestead claim. The claim was filed in 1897, amid the roller-coaster booms and busts of a fragile frontier, but was not registered until 1916.
Sam’s father Nebuchadnezzar, a cooper or barrel maker, apparently worked for turpentine operations like the Goins firm, which arrived in Rosewood around 1895. Nebuchadnezzar had died by 1923, but his widow Cornelia, Sam Carter’s mother, continued living on the 80 acres, in a two-story frame house flanked by fruit trees. Like other aging householders in the shrinking community, Cornelia Carter cared for live-in grandchildren. She was fond of listening to the scratchy music of hymns on a wax-cylinder Victrola, and would indulgently present a peach or two to visiting neighbor children. Stories about her son Sam were less melodic.
Sam Carter was “mean,” all of Rosewood seemed to agree, but “mean” in the frontier sense, not necessarily cruel but volatile, tough, ready for a fight, not to be trifled with. On August 11, 1900, five years after marriage, Carter had shot it out with his brother-in-law Richard Williams, for reasons unstated in the spotty records. Williams, according to testimony, had threatened to kill Carter’s sister Hattie as well as Sam himself, and Sam said he did get nicked. But it was Carter, not Williams, who then went into a convict lease camp for a year as Prisoner 5011, convicted of attempted murder. However unjust this might or might not have been, the impressive family rap sheet could not all be false accusation.
On April 3, 1916, Sam Carter’s son George was sentenced to six months for breaking and entering. And this was tame compared to a story that woodsmen would be talking about for decades, saying that George Carter chased down a yearling cow belonging to Jesse Ford, then killed it with his bare hands. The natural assumption, that this story had to be hot air, is challenged by a yellowed docket entry: October 8, 1919, George Carter convicted of having “maliciously killed animal by beating, bruising…”
Sam Carter himself had been attacked once before by a mob, apparently around 1920, in a murky incident involving allegations that he had helped a fugitive, leaving Carter with a reputation as (to quote posse member Jason McElveen) a “getaway artist, pimp kinda”—in the old meaning of “pimp” as a general helper of criminals.
However one-sided, this was not the sort of family profile one would want to have during a frustrated 1923 manhunt.
Further isolating Sam Carter was a conundrum. Was he white? Or was he black? Or was he “Indian”?
Unlike the similarly light-complexioned Goins family, the earlier-arriving Carters were not from North Carolina or its tri-ethnic streams like that of the Melungeons, but were from across the state line in South Carolina, where a main tri-ethnicity was the Lumbee group (though with no substatiated link to the Carters). Their family did have a reported connection by marriage to Rosewood's nearby McCoys, who had the community's largest African American-owned farm, of 114 acres. There was also was a claim of kinship to the Halls on the other side of Rosewood, though they were dark-complexioned old settlers.
Eloise King Davis (1982, age 8 in 1923) was an African American who on January 1, 1923, lived less than a half mile from Sam Carter. She had a blunt opinion: “Sam Carter was a white man, I heard my daddy say, and a nasty one at that. He didn’t care too much for colored people.”
Yet white woodsman Charlie Hudson (1982) dismissed Carter with a stinging epithet, as a “big ole tall yaller nigger.”
Johnny Screen, an African American (1982), said of Carter: “(An) Indian got peculiar ways.” More specific was Pompey Glover (1982), also an African American and a former lumberjack: “He looked more like an Indian man… He wasn’t a black man…looked more like a red Indian…Just like them big Cherokee Indians….old long crooked nose.” Carter’s mother Cornelia, later a survivor of the great Florida hurricane of 1926, had long braided hair.
The mechanical skills of Cornelia’s late husband Nebuchadnezzar, the barrel maker, apparently passed down. By 1923, the solitary man living beside Highway 13 was established as a general handyman. With a small hand-cranked bellows in a shed beside his house he was said to fix the occasional wagon wheel, and to be branching out into automobile repair.
In 1982 I made the mistake of glowingly mentioning Carter’s shade-tree operation as a “blacksmith shop.” By the time a new millennium had finished with this it had become one of the alleged “businesses” in an envisioned “Black Mecca…like Atlanta is today.”
More confirmed was Sam Carter’s towing of hapless Model-T’s that broke down on Highway 13. For this he used an implement from his other job. During two censuses, 1910 and 1920, Carter was apparently absent from Rosewood in the town of Ellzey eight miles away, where there was not much life besides a turpentine still. His puzzling movements between Rosewood and Ellzey could have been partially explained by the turpentine season, March to November. He had long worked in turpentine, though not always as a mechanic. He was a hauler of turpentine barrels.
He had a wagon.
As night deepened on January 1 and the whites who had been at Wright’s store seemed to disappear, word was spreading that the manhunt was now no longer frustrated. The new focus was way over in Section 30—where they had caught the wagon driver!
Possibly nearly every adult white male for miles around now hastened to this new drama, ostensibly near Sam Carter’s small house.
The stories about how he was captured would be so vague and contradictory that none sounds very solid. Was he coming home in the wagon? Sitting down to dinner? Did they use a ruse and tell him a car needed towing by his wagon?
Now that it was dark, the woodsmen taking over the posse were not going to be cheated of an interrogation subject a second time. The stories converge on a gunpoint ultimatum given to Sheriff Walker, saying that Walker was ordered to leave the scene where Sam Carter had just been captured. The prelude period when the rule of law could use tricks and bluffs to outwit the mob had ended. Outnumbered and outgunned in the darkness, Walker apparently withdrew.
As the number of watching whites grew, consensus seems to have been unanimous that Carter was the getaway wagon driver, and could be made to tell where he had let the fugitive out of the wagon. Thus the dogs could be put back on the scent.
Why they felt so sure that Carter could give them any help on this is unclear. Rumors began saying that dogs had led the posse straight to Carter in the first place, which was not true. Perhaps the crowd was persuaded by ironclad evidence now lost. Or perhaps not. The only narration now comes from within the crowd itself, where no one had a very good view in flickering lantern light or illumination from the headlights of Model T’s.
Everyone agreed that Carter denied any getaway. The rope was placed on his neck and looped over a low-hanging limb. When he was hauled up it was not abruptly as in formal hanging, which kills by breaking the neck, but gradually, with his feet barely off the ground, so that the only injury was the closing of his windpipe. Suffocating, he was said to gasp and struggle wildly, then cried: “I’ll tell you!”
According to the consensus story he then led the posse to a spot in Gulf Hammock, saying it was where the fugitive had left his wagon. Whether he was stalling out of desperation, not having seen any fugitive at all, or was trying to cover a real trail, the dogs could get no scent. So the ritual was repeated. He was said to be hauled up at least twice, at differing locations, each time crying something like “I’ll tell you,” but then leading them to a spot with no scent.
There are holes in this story for several reasons. If the fugitive entered Carter’s wagon behind Aaron Carrier’s house, then the torture interrogation, looking for the new scent trail, should have begun at Carrier’s, not Carter’s. The stories picture a short hike from the interrogation spot to where Carter said he let the man out, but just from Carter’s house to Aaron Carrier’s house was a long trudge of nearly two miles, and presumably the wagon trail led on from there, for a great distance. This was only one aspect of the story that didn’t seem to make sense, yet agreement was general that this was how things went. Mob excitement seemed to be squeezing story elements into a desired simplicity, with no hint as to where mere imagination might have taken over the show.
Through the day on Monday, Sumner’s young commissary clerk, Ernest Parham, had remained fretfully stuck in the company store, while his supervisor, commissary manager Albert Johnson, had rushed out to join the excitement. Parham was supposed to hold the fort until closing, but he upped the closing hour from 8:00 p.m. to around 6:00, he would recall.
Then walking across the darkening street he saw a familiar vehicle parked at the company hotel. It was a Model-T, a cramped little two-seat roadster, belonging to Sumner’s new deputy sheriff, Clarence Williams. Parham had become something of an admiring sidekick to the tough guy with the badge, both of them living at the hotel. The clerk deduced that Williams had run off behind the dog and lacked a ride to get back home—a rationalization for Parham to then take the car to his idol. Security was loose and car keys were customarily found hanging in the ignition (the days of crank starts were just past). Ernest knew the deputy wouldn’t mind.
Accompanied by another youth, he drove out onto the rocky ruts of Highway 13. Soon they saw the shadowy forms of cars parked beside the road in the weeds. Far up beyond the cars in a mass of trees he could hear some kind of commotion, a tumult of shouts like at a ballgame.
The cars seemed deserted except for two lonely figures, seated on a running board, talking quietly. One was Deputy Williams, now exiled from the rebellious crowd. In the dark Parham thought the other man must be the sheriff. He leaned out to Williams and said something obvious, like “I brought your car.” Then he and the other youth began fumbling through the woods on foot, following the sounds of the commotion.
The shouts grew suddenly louder and Parham lurched in surprise. He had stumbled into a clearing full of lights and noise, and now was staring, he would recall, directly into the face of a man hanging from a tree. The shouts were urging the light-skinned black man to talk. Parham recalled that he then took horrified action.
“How you expect him to talk when you’re choking him like that,” he recalled saying indignantly to a man holding the rope. Despite the ardor of the crowd and Parham’s young age, in this recollection the impassioned mob member is so impressed by the young newcomer’s logic that he immediately drops the hanging man to the ground.
It may be grossly unfair to compare this dramatic rescue memory to that of Elizabeth Smith and the pistol rescue of baby Addis Taylor earlier that same morning—perhaps unfair to both rememberers. For both rescues may very well have happened just as described. However, no one else in the Monday night crowd seemed to recall a dramatic vignette when a young clerk stepped out and stopped the show.
Ernest Parham had arguably the sharpest and most encyclopedic memory of any 1923 informant when it came to recalling the daily life of Sumner. But on the specific Rosewood events he made it clear when he came forward to testify in 1993 that his aim was to aid the Rosewood claims case. News articles, also cheering for the case, marveled admiringly at the way Parham’s reminiscences seemed again and again to provide just the anecdote or extenuating detail that the case needed.
The torture of Sam Carter by repeated suffocations was a fact corroborated by multiple witnesses—but beyond this generality, the enticing details that might make a spicy true-crime story grow vanishingly soft, lost in questions about the vulnerability of memory.
The climax of the story, however, is not in doubt. At some desolate spot in the woods Carter was pulled up for the last time. And once again the dogs got no scent. By this point there were at least two additional bloodhounds rented from a convict camp and brought in by train. They and perhaps the original dog were there, straining on their harness at the spot Carter indicated, but they were stumped.
Crowd members who were simply onlookers had begun to notice cursing and shouts coming from a specific source, a woodsman known for chronic alcoholism. Bryant Hudson, age 27, was beginning to irritate the crowd by incessantly yelling at the prisoner. As Carter was walked to the site of his last hope, Hudson may have been holding him by the rope around his neck. Or he may have simply held a shotgun on him.
A description of Hudson is officially recorded because he enlisted in the army in World War I: blue eyes, ruddy complexion, light brown hair, five feet eight inches tall. His two hitches in the service, with glowing commendations such as “Character: Excellent,” were not matched by his return to civilian life, where in 1921 he was arrested for attacking a deputy sheriff with a knife, and in 1931 his death would come in a brawl. By 1923 he was known by many, including his kin, as an aimless drunk who perhaps ran a few hogs in the woods, or did a little moonshining.
Sumner’s young barber, Marshall Cannon, recalled standing in the Monday night crowd with storekeeper Ed Dorsett, and feeling after the latest false start that a little more torture might still elicit a lead from the prisoner. Then Cannon was stunned by an explosion. Hudson’s finger had twitched on the trigger, and Sam Carter was on the ground dead.
The tales all agreed on this point, for there was no way to miss what had happened. “Hudson killed him,” said Fred Kirkland, a kinsman. “My cousin killed the nigger. Bryant Hudson told me that,” said logger Perry Hudson. The next day in the barbershop, Marshall Cannon would remember men coming in and complaining bitterly about how “that meat head,” Bryant Hudson, had “killed the evidence” and ruined the interrogation.
The next day an official inquest was held into the death of Sam Carter, conducted by Justice of the Peace L. L. Johns. The venue was as usual, at Drew Pearson’s drug store in Sumner. Bryant Hudson’s name was apparently not mentioned, though the killing may have been witnessed by many of those who were present in the drugstore courtroom.
Bryant Hudson was one of the lowest-status members of local white society, engendering little or no personal affection, let alone respect, yet racial custom protected him. The verdict was death by unknown hands.
Seven decades later in the Rosewood claims case, Bryant Hudson would be protected again, though for opposite reasons. In an effort to aid the reparations claim by keeping blame focused on society as a whole, the evidence for an identified lone shooter of Sam Carter was treated as being oddly inconvenient, and was effectively suppressed. The push was to say that a mob had killed Carter, all together, as if with a thousand-triggered gun. Certainly the many watchers did help to make the shooter feel virtuous and condoned, thus arguably inciting him. But still, the absent face of Bryant Hudson in the claims case, despite its shouting about seeking justice, speaks volumes about the difficulties of race and truth.
___________
The Florida newspapers of 1923 did little legwork at crime scenes. A few main details could be gleaned by phoning a sheriff or police chief for the official story. But this still left a challenge on the front end: how to get tipped off that a new story had broken out in the first place, so that law enforcement could then be phoned and asked about it.
The lawmen themselves might not want to be such tipsters, but another party in the loop could sometimes be more obliging—a party who was logically placed to hear the first signs of an alarm. This was the local telephone operator.
The East Florida Telephone operator serving the Rosewood area during its crisis sat at a particularly antiquated switchboard, boasting not only the familiar maze of plug-in wires but a clunky latch-drop device from the nineteenth century. The location of the switchboard was in Cedar Key, the fast-fading shallow-water fishing port that was once the most important city in remote Levy County. At this node, nine miles down the Seaboard tracks from Rosewood, calls were routed on a cozy party line along the tracks, running up toward the county line.
In Cedar Key, the blinking board was tucked away in the gulfside home of its operator, who reportedly kept an eye on her family as she plugged in the calls—though neither documents nor memories have seemed to retain any indication of who this operator was. Like a stagehand behind the sets in a grand opera, she was not supposed to be part of the show.
In the Rosewood week, each time a drawling lawman updated a colleague by phone, the Cedar Key operator was in the middle of things, in a position to hear (“Would you get me the sheriff’s office in Bronson, please, Maebelle?”—or whatever her name was). If moved by civic virtue, or by other incentives, such an operator was superbly placed to give a heads-up to otherwise clueless newspapers. They might then hazard a confirmation call of their own to the sheriff, not needing many facts. A nugget or two from a tight-lipped lawman could always be “expanded” by the reporter, using logical-sounding assumptions to fill out the column-inches. Only occasionally would the press give hints about the unsung player, as in: “According to the local telephone operator...”
By some such means, the electrifying news of the Fannie Taylor assault seems to have made its way through a wire above the Seaboard tracks to Cedar Key, then to the operator, and then back out again along the same tracks to the outside world. Word soon reached 214, which was the entire phone number of an upstairs office overlooking Main Street in Gainesville, 59 miles from the attack.
This was the office of the nearest daily newspaper, the Gainesville Daily Sun.
Using a less public wire, a telegraph line leased by the Sun from the Associated Press, the Sun would then become a sender. As it sent out AP bulletins on Rosewood, it incredibly (and anonymously) became the power behind the story nationwide, shaping opinions about a mysterious week of racial upheaval in the Florida swamps.
Though not acknowledged publicly, nearly all 1923 news coverage of Rosewood, in papers ranging from New York to Los Angeles and Miami to Seattle, traced back to the hometown tub-thumping and race-baiting of the local AP paper in Gainesville. A few independent phone calls may also have been made by the nearest regional papers, like those in Jacksonville more than 120 miles from the Sumner alarm, but otherwise nearly all interested media seemed to simply lift or parrot Sun-origin bulletins off the AP wire, snipping and pasting as desired, and then obscuring the origins, or saying “By the Associated Press.”
On Tuesday morning, January 2, the news media thus walked onto the Rosewood stage. The Gainesville Sun’s first story about an enigma in distant hinterlands was apparently typed up when the big angle was the Aaron Carrier capture, and word had not yet trickled out about the killing of Sam Carter later that night. The first story that resulted makes a classic case study in how racial excitement could get squeezed through a media hall of mirrors.
The reader is invited to try and puzzle out which elements in the story below were referring to which elements in the real world (with the real-world part verified beyond much question by profusely agreeing testimony decades later).
At the outset, the reader first sees with a jolt that the story as I’ve presented it in previous pages here now looks like pitiful understatement—for we learn from the Sun, in solemn headlines, that the attack on Fannie Taylor seems to have been a gang affair.
TWO NEGROES HELD FOR
ASSAULT OF WOMAN AT
SUMNER EARLY MONDAY
Two negro suspects were being
held at Sumner last night in concec-
tion with the assault early Monday
morning of a young white woman at
her home near that place. Sheriff
Walker of Levy county, with blood-
hounds obtained from Columbia coun-
ty authorities, was still scouring the
country last night about which the
crime took place. Feeling was said
to be running high in that section
of the county although no violence
was feared during the night. The
negroes are lodged in jail in Sum-
ner.
p>
The labyrinth of obfuscation and misdirection here is not exactly as later generations of activists might expect. The distortions do not suggest a grand conspiracy but almost laughable squeezings.
The anonymous reporter wants a punchy headline and summons up the largest number of Negroes that would have been mentioned over the phone: two. These two are then presented as being fearsome suspects in a joint assault.
In 1993, when the Rosewood claims case hurriedly produced a “university team” to verify the 1923 events, a team member phoned me in confusion, asking who in the world the “two suspects” found in a newspaper clipping might be. Wasn't the only suspect the lone fugitive, still uncaught?
The nature of the Rosewood mystery, with its lack of law enforcement documents requiring painstaking comparison of informant testimony, meant that a quick “verification” for political purposes was bound to run into deep holes like the “two suspects.”.
I asked the professor to look more closely at a name he had encountered elsewhere: Aaron Carrier. Hadn’t Aaron been taken into custody and whisked away? And even if no one at the scene was accusing him of participating in the Fannie Taylor assault, couldn’t he somehow be shoe-horned into the category of “suspect”? Aren’t people who are in custody always “suspects”?
To follow the thinking of a small-town Florida reporter in 1923 is to volubly “expand” one’s idea of the possible.
But now who is the second “suspect,” this big bruiser that the newspaper is telling us is accused of jointly attacking Fannie Taylor? One can practically hear a muttered word or two from the sheriff or deputy on the phone, informing the Sun that they have also taken a second person into custody. The sheriff’s department, perhaps wishing to look efficient at catching fiends, is not required to belabor the fact that the second “suspect” is a woman, Aaron Carrier’s wife.
Meanwhile another agenda is also suggested by the story: a desire in the sheriff’s department not to further antagonize the Monday interrogators, and not rub their faces in their defeat when they were outwitted by the double rescue.
Ironically, such discretion causes the rescue itself—one of the few heroic moments in the Rosewood events—to disappear from the public picture of what happened. The rescuees become captured “suspects.” The authorities are not helping them or hiding them, the wording says, but are grimly keeping them from further mayhem.
Such dynamics will loom larger as the week proceeds toward full rampage, and a more extensive pattern of rescue and resistance by dissenting whites will be fearfully kept out of public view, never entering the chaotic picture of a lynching frenzy—because of the danger to the rescuers.
Meanwhile, the news story also has room for yet a third manipulation, and does it twice, even in the scant 91 words quoted above. It is in the sheriff’s coy insistence that the “two suspects” are in jail “in Sumner.” This was the ruse used on the coalescing mob, telling them that the rescuees were being whisked only to the shack-like jail in nearby Sumner, where mob efforts could easily get at them again if desired.
In fact, late Monday night, after Sam Carter was suddenly removed from interrogation by Bryant Hudson’s shotgun, a mob rush was remembered as going to the Sumner jail to finish with Aaron Carrier what the interrogators had started—but the only person they found at the Sumner holding cell, it was said, was a shrugging Deputy Clarence Williams, who told them he had no idea where Aaron Carrier had gone. The additional irony in the news story is that the “two suspects,” far from being in jail in Sumner, as the story keeps dutifully repeating, were actually only a couple of blocks around the corner from where the story was being typed. They were evidently in the Alachua County Jail in Gainesville, not far from the Sun’s upstairs office.
In further paragraphs of the story, beyond the 91 words quoted above, the Sun seemed so enamored of the gang rape idea that it began painting a word-picture: “The two negroes ran from the scene of the crime when the woman’s cries attracted neighbors.” No hint of a terrified female schoolteacher here, but a little rationalization mops up: The victim (Fannie Taylor is not named) “was said to have been unconscious until late Monday afternoon, which prevented identification of the two negroes held for complicity in the affair.”
Disconcertingly, there was also another page-one story in the Sun that day saying almost the same things. The second story, a short blurb summarizing the first, was headed “By Associated Press,” and was apparently the Sun’s boil-down to be sent out over the wire. Its AP cachet seemed to be loved so much that it got a second life in the Sun itself:
Bronson, Fla., Jan. 1—Two negroes
were in jail as suspects here tonight
and Sheriff Walker with bloodhounds
and numerous posses was scouring
the country for another negro in con-
nection with an attack on the wife
of a mill worker at Sumner early to-
day.
Here the gang rape grows. There are not only the two scoundrels in custody, but a third one, still on the loose, who was somehow in on the attack.
“Tonight” means that as early as Monday night a practiced hand is tapping out dots and dashes of Morse code on the Sun’s humble telegraph key (described by a Sun veteran as using a Prince Albert tobacco can as a resonator). There was enough lead time for the telegraphed bulletin to run in Tuesday’s Tampa Morning Tribune, simultaneous with the Sun’s own front-pager, but 130 miles away:
“Bronson, Fla., Jan. 1—Two negroes were in jail as suspects here tonight...”
The dateline “Bronson” does not mean that any reporter, from the Sun, the Tribune, or anywhere else, had done anything so time-consuming as going to Levy County to investigate. Perhaps the few phrases coming over the phone had originated at the Levy County sheriff’s office in Bronson, but even if the handy dateline “Bronson” had no justification at all in the reporting process, who would know?
On Monday and Tuesday the story, though sensational and salacious, was only of statewide interest, hardly a national item. Other states had their own racial mysteries to shout about. Not until Thursday night would new spectacles merit a sudden national spotlight, summoned by gun battle, rampage and community destruction.
But the Monday prelimaries could still be spiced up. The newspaper of record for northern Florida was the Florida Times Union in Jacksonville, with much wider influence than the folksy Gainesville Sun. The Times-Union, some 120 miles from Fannie Taylor, could have obtained its story either by wire out of the Sun or directly from Levy County by phone. Either way it added its own headline, finding that a “Black Brute” was facing off against “respectable... citizens.” It pulled back, however, from endorsing the Sun’s gang-rape insinuations.
As these newspapers thudded onto front porches across Florida on Tuesday morning, the Sam Carter killing on Monday night was already old news at the site itself, but would not make the papers until Wednesday.
“SUMNER NEGRO SHOT BY MEMBERS OF POSSE FOR ASSAULT MONDAY,” the Sun would headline on January 3. “MEMBERS OF POSSE” as a gloss for shooter Bryant Hudson roughly reprised the “unknown hands” verdict of the official inquest. Hudson seemed to remain as safe from consequences as if he had never existed. Not until 1931, when a drunken brawl sent him sprawling off a store porch, would his time come to meet mortal consequences.
The Sun now reported: “One negro is dead and two are being held for complicity in the assault upon a young white woman at Sumner early Monday morning.” The gang-rape angle seems to waver, though a line of lead type was apparently dropped in the printing process, adding a mystical note:
“...while posses, headed by Sheriff Walker [dropped type here?] is believed to have been the actual perpetrator of the crime.”
This accidental slip wound up ungrammatically accusing the “posses” of being “the actual perpetrator of the crime”—not so far off as a confession of mob hysteria.
“Sam Carter, 45, was shot and killed by members of a mob last Monday night.” The word “mob” has now crept in, replacing “posse.” But the key information is still to come. The killing occurred “after he had confessed to have driven one of the hunted men several miles in a horse and wagon, officers stated Tuesday morning.”
Suddenly the gang rape is back, and getting bigger—for “two are being held in complicity” while another was in Carter’s wagon, and that passenger was only “one of the hunted men.” So how many attackers are running around out there?
Carter’s confession, meanwhile, is presented as solid evidence. Gone is any public picture of torture.
The confusion grows deeper, and maddeningly inconsistent, though resultant rumors seemed to find no problem. The “officers” on Tuesday morning reveal a new link that incriminates Sam Carter:
“His son was seen leaving Sumner
shortly before the assault took place
in company with an escaped convict
from a nearby turpentine camp.
Members of the searching party are
of the opinion that one of them is
guilty of the crime.”
First, before dissecting Carter’s phantasmal son, there is the incidental problem that Levy County turpentine camps no longer leased convicts by 1923, though they had done so up till around 1910. So there was no turpentine stockade for the convict to have escaped from. Later in the week another dispatch would remedy this by putting the escape at a road camp, which was at least possible, since convicts were building the future Highway 24, working a stretch that took them behind the home of little Minnie Mitchell. The turpentine camp addition is an example of the contemporary journalistic ploy of “expanding” a news story by inserting what seem to be logical assumptions. If he was a convict, he must have been at a turpentine camp, right?
By the time this story came out, the searchers at the scene had already discarded a large part of its information. Sam Carter’s most notorious son, George Carter—the bare-handed cow killer—was verified as early as Monday afternoon as being on the shift list of a logging camp more than thirty miles from the Fannie Taylor attack, meaning he couldn’t have been in Sumner at the same time. The news story seems to assume that Sam Carter has only one son. Or does it mean his other one? This was a small question compared to the travels implied.
If his son was “seen leaving Sumner shortly before the assault took place,” then that son was not in Sumner to make the assault. And if both son and convict left Sumner together, then neither was present. And was the dog supposed to have been following the scent of both? And if they were “seen leaving Sumner,” how had the attacker left Sumner by way of the Taylors’ back gate—in the dark?
At the bottom of all this there may have been some real incrimination, and not just mob hysteria, but the confusion was so great that the news seemed to wind up exonerating Sam Carter, while it was trying to do the opposite.
The theorizing officers, however, had introduced a growing item of interest: the convict.
__________
In 1978 at the funeral of former Rosewood resident Ivory Morgan, Lillie Washington heard talk about the mysterious figure who some said had caused Rosewood’s doom: that nefarious secret white boyfriend. Washington had lived in Rosewood as a child and had been hearing this story for years, thouigh only from a select coterie of family believers.
At the funeral, Bishop Bradley, Ivory’s older brother, age 75, caused a stir when the story was brought up. Bradley scoffed pointedly at the believers, saying the boyfriend story was bunk.
Lillie Burns Washington was a thoughtful, reliable informant, speaking in 1982 only four years after the funeral; her report of Bishop Bradley’s remarks was probably a faithful rendering.
As she had listened, Washington recalled, Bishop said that the real attacker of Fannie Taylor was definitely a black man, an escaped convict. Bishop said he knew the escapee personally, and had run into him, still at large, after the Rosewood disaster. He said the convict was originally from Sumner. But the punch line of Bishop’s story was in how he said the attack on Fannie Taylor was motivated.
The escaped convict had done it, Bradley insisted, because he, the convict, was Fannie’s secret lover, rather than some unknown white man.
Oops. Now we have yet another phantom: the secret black boyfriend. In the world of belief, painfully shy Fannie Taylor seemed to find a swarm of secret lovers.
In the early 1970s, before I stumbled into the mix, the legend-filled fishing town of Cedar Key seethed with stories saying that Taylor had really, secretly been attacked by her father. Some African Americans in surrounding towns became convinced that the attacker was a white man, all right, but was someone who Fannie didn’t know, and he had blacked his face to fool her.
Lillie Washington heard Bishop Bradley explain of his candidate, the new black convict boyfriend: “They was gettin’ onto what she was doin’, see? So she was puttin’ it out rape.” (So how is this firmly asserted black boyfriend to be reconciled with Philomena Doctor's vehemently asserted white boyfriend? Did they come in shifts?)
Donarion “Bishop” Bradley died in New York in 1980, just before I came along in 1982. Because of his 1978 addition to the lore, we now have more than five different attack narratives, all contradicting. The secret white boyfriend is only one of the underground contenders, but was ultimately the fantasy with the most appeal in the political moment of the Rosewood claims case, and was anointed as fact, even by enthusiastic professors in the Florida University System.
Each of the other versions has also been confidently repeated with (baseless) assurances that it is proven fact. The importance goes beyond any one story and resides in the overall body of them.
No one of the stories can completely close the case, for even their extreme unlikelihood can never quite be proven to be flatly impossible. But the more different versions are revealed, with their disdain for inconvenient disproofs, the more obvious it becomes that the origin of all the boyfriend stories, and the face-blacking stories, and other creative explanations, is not material but psychological.
The stories are needed, so they arise. The attack victim was “peculiar,” and there are elements in her Monday morning trauma that can’t be easily explained. This is an invitation to the ingenuity of a wide range of narrative entrepreneurs retailing their personal expertise. Any one of the stories might contain a detail or two that could help make sense of the unanswered questions—but there is no way to know which purportedly secret details might be true, and which might have more mysteriously arisen.
The final verdict on Fannie Taylor, then, is not a triumphant announcement about what really happened on Monday morning, but is a frustrating review of veiled possibilities.
However, that still leaves the convict.
Whether or not he was Fannie Taylor’s lover, as Bishop Bradley bewilderingly claimed, and whether or not he was her attacker at all, there evidently was a real escaped convict on the loose in Levy County that day.
The Levy County Sheriff’s Department, prevented by mob dangers from revealing its efficiency in rescuing Aaron and Mahulda Carrier, and smarting from having lost control in the Sam Carter fiasco, was under continuing pressure by Tuesday to be showing some kind of manhunt progress. It was already pretty clear by Tuesday that in the real world the fugitive was not going to be found. The extra bloodhounds, for whose rental Levy County paid a handsome $50, were sent back to Columbia County. Whatever the strong, clear scent was that had linked Fannie Taylor’s house to Aaron Carrier’s house, it seemed to exist nowhere else in the world. Reportedly the dogs were even taken on a grand circuit around the far edges of Gulf Hammock to catch the trail coming out—and nothing.
The sheriff’s department tried to buy time. A reporter was apparently told by phone that at least an identity had been applied to the elusive runner. Wednesday’s Gainesville Sun announced that he was “a convict,” but without a name. Thursday supplied only the tidbit that his escape from a convict camp had occurred “a few days before” the attack—that is, in the Christmas-to-New Year’s hiatus when sawmill work was scaled back, and it might have been easier to blend into knots of pedestrians in Sumner’s black quarters.
If it sounds unlikely that any sort of fugitive might have lurked in company-owned housing patrolled by a nosy quarters boss, there is Zora Hurston to consult, in her 1930s anthropology research into Florida company towns much like Sumner:
The law is lax on these big saw-mill, turpentine and railroad ‘jobs,’….All of these places have plenty of men and women who are fugitives from justice. The management asks no questions. They need help and they can’t be bothered looking for a bug under every chip. In some places, the law is forbidden to come on the premises…The wheels of industry must move…
The back room in a sawmill town’s jook offered a card game called Georgia Skin, a kind of lethal blackjack, able to create a pauper or a prince at a stroke. The trains brought a stream of drifters and gamblers, whether riding a Jim Crow coach with a cardboard suitcase or in an open gondola in the rain. Such a drifter might get pinched for a misdemeanor and clapped into a county road gang without many locals taking notice. A wire-service story on the convict alleged at Sumner threw in another specific. He was said to have become a convict by a common route, being charged with carrying a concealed weapon. Peaceable (and valuable) laborers weren’t likely to be searched for the weapons carried by some of them—the little .32 in the overalls bib, the razor in the sock—but if a constable or deputy should want to convert a suspicious drifter into a thirty-day county ditch digger, a pat-down could often provide the rationale.
Not until Friday, January 5, would the key dispatch on the convict go out over the Associated Press telegraph wire, after the Rosewood story had exploded into national prominence by means of the battles of Thursday night. By then the wire was fairly sizzling with periodic Rosewood bulletins, as cryptic and confusing as before. The dispatch of midday on Friday was issued in time for pickup by evening papers, which aimed at put-your-feet-up-after-work readers, who had leisure to appreciate juicy details. Now an earlier misstatement, saying that the convict had escaped from a turpentine camp, was remedied without apology by announcing that he had escaped instead from a road camp, the more plausible scenario—though not very. The nearest road camp to Sumner was between Rosewood and Otter Creek (construction of what would be Highway 24) and if an escapee from there had chosen to come southwest toward Sumner and the Gulf he would be entering a dangerous cul-de-sac, bottling him up against the Gulf.
The dispatch carried other information that was demonstrably false, then, at last, gave the escaped convict’s name. He was: “Jesse Hunter, an escaped convict, who is believed to have committed the crime.”
In a rumor-mill atmosphere that was puréeing the names of black suspects like carrots in a blender, center-stage is now taken by this hunted predator, this Jesse James of Jim Crow, this hunter of helpless housewives, who, the newspaper now tells us, was named Jesse Hunter.
In the unapologetic metaphysics of an excited backwoods week, this can now go alongside Fannie Taylor with her Tale; Sam Carter with his Cart; and, soon, Sylvester Carrier, the Woodsman Carrying the Doom—not to mention the sub rosa poetry flashing in mental marquee lights above it all: “Rosewood.”
How the Levy County woods came up with this sort of clanging creativity in its names is not a puzzle that anyone was seeking to solve. If indeed there is any kind of solution in such depths, it might somehow relate to the basic mechanics in all the wildfire rumors that were squeezing and tweaking the events, to produce black-or-white phantom lovers, a wagon out of nowhere, and various non sequiturs not yet introduced—or in other words, here were the mechanics of verbal association and recombination, as if a dream were to be creating a horse-headed alligator simply because a common element, “animal,” was dreamily detected.
The obvious guess—that free association must have played some role in the newspaper debut of Jesse Hunter—is given some support by one factor. No such “Jesse Hunter” has ever surfaced in any known official record or census sheet, throughout surrounding Florida in the 1920s. Under the spelling given in the news, he seemed to have no officially registered existence at all. Even a convict should have appeared in the records; though a low-level county prisoner might have eluded the state prison register, local census takers routinely went to county camps and took names.
But—as elsewhere in the maze—there is still the back door into confirmation, offered not by documents but by the memories of living witnesses. And they do remember him.
Both Sam Hall and Lee Carrier, the two Rosewood survivor-informants best positioned for a view of Jesse Hunter’s world, said he was real. Both said they had seen him in passing in Sumner: tall, rough, a fringe figure in the local underworld. They said he moved back and forth between the area’s two underworld magnets: the jooks—that is, moving between the long, low cabin that was Sumner’s jook and the rambling old two-story that was the jook in Wylly—which would mean moving up and down the tracks through Rosewood.
“Jesse Hunter, big tall fella...gamble in Sumner and Wylly,” mused Sam Hall, seated on his porch in South Georgia sixty years later.
“He had been stayin’ in Sumner,” said Lee Carrier. “…I saw him a couple of times.”
As 1923 opened, Lee was bunking at Wesley Bradley’s house with Wesley’s son Bishop, who long years later would make the 1978 funeral revelation. Lee and Bishop walked to work together each day and had much to talk about, but Lee, unlike Bishop, claimed no personal dealings with the mysterious Jesse Hunter.
By Saturday, January 6, the news would provide further proof that some kind of Jesse Hunter was real. A law enforcement mission was announced to the town of Lakeland, 120 miles south of Sumner and Rosewood, to bring in the mystery man. The police chief in Lakeland had hauled a black hobo off a train for “other reasons,” but then concluded that his prisoner must surely be the man in all the news bulletins, the now-fabled Jesse Hunter. The chief was apparently so convincing (or Levy County was by then so desperate) that a delegation was sent on the 120-mile train trip to Lakeland. One news story said that two deputies and two “citizens” were sent to make sure of the identification. Another more modestly said only one deputy was sent.
And then they got there. And they looked at him through the bars. And they turned back to the Lakeland police. And they sighed:
Not him.
There is only a scrap of newsprint on this, but the arrangement of information is compelling. At least one deputy seemed to be dead sure it wasn’t him—sure to the point of being willing to embarrass his mission by coming home empty-handed. Such a deputy would have to have known Jesse Hunter (or whatever his real name was) by sight—meaning that there was a real individual behind the newspaper's erendering of the name.
Sam Hall painted a chilling portrait of Jesse Hunter: “crooked, kind of mean, carried a pistol. It was out that Jesse had broke gang.” However, Hall added, in his attack on Fannie Taylor, “all he was doin’ was gettin’ him somethin’ to eat. He smelled the fried chicken cookin’ for her husband. Took somethin’ to eat and knocked the woman down.”
All very nice, but a little early in the morning for fried chicken. Hall was a careful informant on things he personally witnessed and knew, but in this case he was necessarily repeating from rumor—and from the newspaper reports, which had the concealed weapon (carried a pistol) and the road gang escape (had broke gang). Where the fried chicken came from, perhaps only the rumor mill can tell.
“Hunter, who escaped from a road gang in Levy County, was accused in connection with the crime….Hunter was serving a prison term for carrying a concealed weapon.” This was how it looked on January 6 in the New York Times, using the wire story. When the Times then reworked the same phrase two days later, on January 8—again naming Jesse Hunter—a reader might easily think that now two separate reporters had confirmed Jesse Hunter, each of them eyeballing the crime scene—though in fact no reporters were out there at all, and it was all done by phone: “Jesse Hunter, wanted for alleged implication in an attack on a young white woman at Sumner Monday.”
The one wire-service mention that went out on January 5—perhaps the only original occurrence of the name “Jesse Hunter”—was also reworked on January 8 in the Chicago Evening Post: “Officers are still without a clue as to the whereabouts of Hunter.” ___________________________________________
[End Phase 2 of the Events: The Manhunt]