We Carry Their Bones

Erin Kimmerle

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063030268
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia afroamericana

"With We Carry Their Bones, Erin Kimmerle continues to unearth the true story of the Dozier School, a tale more frightening than any fiction. In a corrupt world, herunflinching revelations are as close as we'll come to justice." –Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer-Prize Winning author of The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad

Forensic anthropologist Erin Kimmerle investigates of the notorious Dozier Boys School—the true story behind the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Nickel Boys —and the contentious process to exhume the graves of the boys buried there in order to reunite them with their families.

The Arthur G. Dozier Boys School was a well-guarded secret in Florida for over a century, until reports of cruelty, abuse, and "mysterious" deaths shut the institution down in 2011. Established in 1900, the juvenile reform school accepted children as young as six years of age for crimes as harmless as truancy or trespassing. The boys sent there, many of whom were Black, were subject to brutal abuse, routinely hired out to local farmers by the school's management as indentured labor, and died either at the school or attempting to escape its brutal conditions.

In the wake of the school's shutdown, Erin Kimmerle, a leading forensic anthropologist, stepped in to locate the school's graveyard to determine the number of graves and who was buried there, thus beginning the process of reuniting the boys with their families through forensic and DNA testing. The school's poorly kept accounting suggested some thirty-one boys were buried in unmarked graves in a remote field on the school's property. The real number was at least twice that. Kimmerle's work did not go unnoticed; residents and local law enforcement threatened and harassed her team in their eagerness to control the truth she was uncovering—one she continues to investigate to this day.

We Carry Their Bones is a detailed account of Jim Crow America and an indictment of the reform school system as we know it. It's also a fascinating dive into the science of forensic anthropology and an important retelling of the extraordinary efforts taken to bring these lost children home to their families—an endeavor that created a political firestorm and a dramatic reckoning with racism and shame in the legacy of America.

Chapter 1

Opening the Earth

Before the lawsuits and protests, before the ground-penetrating radar and DNA testing, before we were stalked and before the citizens of Jackson County tried to have me arrested, before we ever stuck a shovel in the red dirt of North Florida to exhume bodies, I stood in the women’s restroom as the news media gathered in the large room outside and began setting up their cameras and checking their microphones and waiting for me to step before them and tell them what I had learned about the dead boys.

I did not want to do this.

I had spoken at a single press conference prior, years before, near a crime scene where I had been helping the local sheriff excavate the remains of a woman missing for ten years. The sheriff’s office wanted me to give the press briefing, to deflect questions about the open homicide investigation toward the science of forensic anthropology. To tell the public what we were doing without saying anything about what we were doing. I can steel myself against unimaginable horrors, given my job, but reporters mean putting it all out there. I prefer to fly under the radar.

I’m a forensic anthropologist, a scientist, an academic. I’m not a showman. I strive for accuracy, and sometimes forensic science takes a lot of explaining. I don’t think in sound bites. A peer-reviewed and long-winded scientific explanation is not what the television news reporters want, though. They want short, chippy, quotable sentences with strong verbs and hard nouns. They want the coach jogging off the field at halftime, summarizing the play so far and the strategy for the second half.

Here, now, I struggled with how to reduce a year of scientific investigation into a few punchy paragraphs to lead the nightly newscasts. They wanted me to address the mounting controversy around the clandestine cemetery on the property of the Dozier School for Boys, Florida’s oldest state-run reform school, in the rural panhandle town of Marianna, where we had been searching for the truth. That meant I’d spend the next day answering tough questions and trying to soothe hurt feelings. Not from reporters, though. From politicians, Marianna residents, university administrators, fellow academics, and lawyers. Facing the press, as scary as it was, would be the easy part.

I looked at myself in the mirror.

I paced.

I twirled my fingers on both hands two at a time in small circles, an old high school theater trick to help me focus. Thumbs first. Then forefingers. Then the middles, rings, pinkies.

Over and over.

Ten times each.

I thought about how clean and gorgeous this bathroom was, with its granite walls extended to the ceilings. The bathroom cost more than our forensic anthropology lab’s entire operating budget, and its beauty stood in such contrast to how I spent most of the past year, covered in mud and dirt.

The door swung open, and Lara Wade, the University of South Florida’s director of media relations, entered. She asked me if I was hiding and laughed. I just smiled and then reached out and put the palms of my hands on the granite wall. It felt so cold.

This was her idea, putting us in front of the television cameras. I’d invited two fellow faculty members to join our team, and they were gathering outside as well: Dr. Antoinette Jackson, a cultural anthropologist, and Dr. Christian Wells, an archaeologist. What was supposed to be two weeks of fieldwork for us and a few students had turned into a year of probing and research involving a growing group of experts across disciplines.

Lara knew the value. This would be a big boost in earned media exposure for my department and the university. She knew how important it was to keep the ball rolling. If we wanted to help the families, we had to be out front.

Lara had a calming effect; I trusted her. She started running through the details and rattling off a list of all the dignitaries gathered outside. She knew every reporter by name.

Then she stopped and looked at me in the mirror.

“You have five minutes,” she said. “You got this.”

I thought about what brought me to this moment, the rising tension from multiple sides. It all started simply enough: a friend had introduced me to a local reporter who’d been working on a series of stories about the reform school’s dark history, about brutal beatings and sadistic guards and mysterious deaths.

The stories raised questions about a purported cemetery on the school’s property, and the reporter had hit a dead end. He had found the families of boys who died in custody and were buried at the school, families that had never found peace, for they’d never been given the opportunity to properly mourn. No one could point to the location of the graves where their brothers and uncles were buried. No state official had stepped up to find those burials.

This was my life’s work. Not a lot of people have this particular skill set, to find and identify the dead. It was easy enough to secure permission to go take a look around. Back then, in early 2012, that was essentially the scope of the project. To learn what I could about the deaths at a reform school that had been in operation for more than a hundred years on the edge of a warm and friendly Southern town. How hard could it be?

The Florida Department of Environmental Protection controlled half of the fourteen-hundred-acre reform school property, the half that had been the “colored side” until racial integration in the late 1960s. That’s where the old burial ground was located. The DEP gave us permission to document and research the historic site.

Across the street was off-limits. On the side of the school known as Department No. 1 for white boys, the south side, the property was controlled by the Department of Juvenile Justice, a troubled state agency that had faced a number of scandals since its formation in the mid-1990s as a step away from a social services model of juvenile rehabilitation. That side of campus, surrounded by tall fences topped with razor wire, had been a functioning residential juvenile prison until it closed in the summer of 2011, another result of the newspaper stories.

We weren’t confident that the little cemetery on what had been the “colored side” of campus—a burial ground that locals and school records called Boot Hill—was the only burial yard, so we wanted to search the entire sprawling grounds. Officials from the Department of Juvenile Justice would not let us enter their side of the property. Even though the buildings were empty and abandoned, they maintained a tight vigilance, under lock and key.

We kept asking for permission, and the department kept denying. They said no, formally, in August 2012, citing the “pending sale of the property and other liability concerns.”

Pending sale? Now that the school was shuttered, local economic development officials wanted to put the land, with its estimated value of over $10 million, on the market. It was prime real estate for a warehouse or major distribution center, with easy access to Interstate 10 and just sixty-five miles west of Tallahassee. The state was preparing to sell about 220 acres of the boys’ school land, and the offers were already rolling in.

A sale would end our quest for the truth about the burials. If the property fell into private hands, some business could pave a parking lot on top of the graves of little boys, and we felt powerless to stop it.

Then I met a man named Glen Varnadoe.

Glen believed his uncle, Thomas, was buried somewhere on the school property. He told me his father, Hubert, and uncle had been sent to what was at the time called the Florida Industrial School for Boys in 1934 for trespassing. Family lore had it that his uncle died at the school under mysterious circumstances, and when his father came home, he never again spoke of what had happened there. From then on, he was deathly afraid of authority.

“They were poor,” Glen told me, explaining that his grandparents could do nothing when the state came to take the boys away. “But we ain’t poor anymore, and, by God, they are not selling that land with my uncle still buried on it.” Glen spent forty years as an executive with a chemical company in Polk County, in Central Florida. He was well-off, and well-spoken, and he had the phone numbers of state lawmakers who knew how to get things done.

GLEN HIRED A tenacious Tampa lawyer, and they filed an injunction to stop the sale of the land. I met Glen on the Dozier campus a short time later to show him our findings. Glen had been there before, sometime in the 1980s or early ’90s, on a random stop as he was passing through. He knew the story about his uncle, and he visited the campus to see his uncle’s grave. When he arrived, nobody could tell him with confidence where young Thomas Varnadoe was buried. Glen remembered that a man showed him two separate graveyards far enough apart that they had to drive from one to the other.

“He took me to a second place and said . . . ‘Your uncle could be buried here,’” Glen told a National Public Radio reporter.

I wanted to see if a trip to the school conjured any recollections for Glen, if he could remember both locations where the school official had pointed, but so much had changed that he had trouble orienting himself. The trees were taller, and there were pine forests where there should’ve been fields.

That October, as we waited for the court to make a ruling on Glen’s injunction, the newspapers reported that the Department of Juvenile Justice was reconsidering their position and would possibly allow us and the families onto what was once the “white side” in order to search for graves. Then we got word that Glen’s injunction worked: the state couldn’t sell any part of the property until we made certain there were no burials.

Until then, I had not issued so much as a press release nor made any public statements about the research. I tried to go unnoticed as I wrote the report of our findings. Tensions were mounting. Neither local politicians nor state officials wanted the sale delayed. They were aggravated by the injunction. We soon discovered that the school was something of a source of pride for the Marianna locals, who had staffed it for more than a century, who knew the men being accused of horrendous beatings, who talked about us like unwelcomed outsiders.

That fall, someone tipped off a CNN reporter named Ed Lavandera and he met me on campus for an interview. When his report aired, it was the first time that a national audience heard what we were learning.

“A mystery haunts the grounds of this now-defunct reform school for boys in the Florida panhandle town of Marianna, involving teenage boys sent here decades ago, some never seen again,” he said in a voice-over while images played of the decrepit buildings on campus and rolls of razor wire atop the fences. “Former students now in their twilight years have come forward with horrific stories of punishing abuse doled out by school leaders and of friends who vanished . . . They accuse leaders of beatings, sexual abuse, and even murder.”

He pointed out that state authorities said they knew how all of the boys died: “Some killed in a fire, others in a flu epidemic, nothing criminal.”

Over the past ten months, what our research was showing didn’t fit the state’s narrative. Reports from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) stated all the deaths and burials were accounted for and nothing suspicious or criminal had occurred.

We found others were buried at the school—possibly nineteen more boys than officially reported—with the possibility of a second cemetery.

There was more. As we dug into the dorm fire, we learned that the boys were chained and locked in rooms, unable to escape. The flu epidemic that wreaked havoc worldwide in 1918 left a gruesome scar in Florida when the state physician reported that Black boys at the school had been abandoned and found days later without food or clothing. The dead were stacking up.

“Not all the burials are accounted for.”

I was reading aloud what I had written the night before, sitting at the kitchen table after I put my two sons to bed—notes scribbled on a clean stack of printed-out pages. I checked on them again and again as I wrote. At three and seven, they still looked like babies when they slept. I could not imagine them in a place like this reform school. I wondered about the mothers of the boys at the school. How desperate they must have felt.

The Florida Department of Law Enforcement had investigated the burials at the school, and after combing through school records and interviewing a slew of locals, they determined there were thirty-one graves in the burial ground in the woods. That happened to match exactly the number of old pipe crosses somebody planted in neat rows on a hidden corner of campus sometime in the 1990s.

We knew there were more graves than the state’s top law enforcement agency could find.

“The historical records are incomplete,” I read aloud, “and often provide conflicting information.”

This we knew, and it was what made the whole thing suspect. School records might read, “runaway” or “died off campus,” but the death certificate for the same boy would read, “blunt trauma to the head” or “shot by person unknown.”

Seven boys died after running away from the school. Some records simply read: “Exposure.” Others were even more vague: “Unknown reason.” One document listed the cause of death as: “Hit by car.” Getting hit by a car wouldn’t be suspect, but the boy died in the 1930s, when few people in the county owned cars. Equivocal deaths, we call them, and they occur frequently. They’re inquiries that are open to interpretation. They may appear to be a homicide or accidental death, but for various reasons, the facts are missing or misleading.

“We pieced together school records that indicate that forty-five individuals are buried on school grounds. Thirty-one were shipped home to families or buried in other locations. And twenty-two remain unknown.”

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