A Killing in Carter County
by
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10:15 a.m. Sunday, August 17, 1952. Coretta Daniels pushed open the rusty screen door and paused momentarily on the weathered front porch steps, acclimating herself to the assault of the August summer. The morning sun had barely cleared the tops of the moss-draped live oak trees but the heat was already unbearable. The heavy, humid air enveloped the entire community of Cedar Creek like some kind of invisible shroud and the nearby pine forests reverberated with the multipitched drone of a million insects. It was a typical day for this time of year in rural North Florida. There was a faint hope borne in the distant wisps of high clouds for a predicted afternoon thunder shower to cool things off a bit, but this would at best bring only a brief respite before the muddy puddles quickly evaporated into clouds of steam and the debilitating heat and humidity returned with a vengeance. As Coretta held the screen door ajar with her left hand, her right tightly clutched the strap of the leather bag which hung from her shoulder. It was a bit heavier than usual and she tried not to think about what lay hidden among her few personal belongings, or why she had placed it there. This morning she had told herself that it was best to try and not think at all. If she did she would be forced to face up to the secret she carried inside her, and she just was not up to that, certainly not today. She wore her best cotton dress, the light peach sleeveless one, the one with the dainty white collar and the row of round white plastic buttons up the front. It had been freshly starched and pressed the night before in anticipation of today’s walk into town. Coretta was only twenty-six but in some ways she appeared much older. The worry lines in her forehead and the deep circles under her eyes were clearly visible, even in her dark ebony skin. She was still a very attractive woman, with fine features that traced her African heritage and a firm, slender body that had changed little since she was a teenager growing up in Cedar Creek’s "colored town," but something weighed mightily on her this morning and she was straining under the weight of it. "Rachel, Ruthie, y’all come on now," she called, a bit too impatiently. The sound of her voice betrayed her. It had a timbre of nervousness in it. She had wanted to make everything appear like any other Sunday morning, but it was very difficult. Hesitantly, she reached her free hand into the bag and quickly took out her lace, hand-embroidered handkerchief, a wedding present from Grandma Jackson. She dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her upper lip, and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. She’d awakened sick to her stomach, but she was over that now. Just nerves, she supposed. She held the door open wider, as the two little girls emerged from the house. Six-year-old Rachel was struggling to carry her eight-month-old sister, a beat-up Sunshine Happy Baby doll, and a dog-eared copy of Young People’s Life of Christ. Coretta smiled and stooped to assist her. "Thank you, sugar, but you better let me take your sister. She’s just about too big for you to handle. You get the door for mama." The little girl obeyed and Coretta took the baby in her arms. She grimaced as a sharp pain radiated through her left shoulder. The premature bursitis was chronic now, another gift from Grandma Jackson. Various ailments of the bones and joints ran through her mother’s side of the family, as did arterial disease, high blood pressure and stroke. A heart attack took Coretta’s grandmother in her mid-fifties, and, if her mother hadn’t died prematurely from a dissolute lifestyle and uremic poisoning, the same thing probably would have happened to her. Because of that Coretta often felt like she was living on borrowed time. Given the various hereditary options facing her, however, she was content to cope with the bursitis, no matter how painful it was at times. "What’s the matter, mama?" Rachel asked, noticing her mother’s reaction. "It’s nothin’, sugar. Mama’s just a little tired this mornin’," Coretta replied, trying to shrug it off. Rachel was already the spitting image of her mother, displaying the same shiny, dark skin and the classic African features. Little Ruthie, on the other hand, was much lighter in complexion and would most likely grow up to be one of those "high yeller gals" about whom the white cracker men whispered salaciously in the taverns and the juke joints. Conversely, maybe she would be white enough to "pass," an option that had never presented itself to anyone else in Coretta’s family. Both little girls were meticulously groomed. They wore matching starched and pressed pink and white dresses. Rachel had a pink satin ribbon lovingly placed in her carefully braided hair, while Ruthie was wearing a tiny lace-trimmed sun bonnet that was very similar to the white organdy bonnet on the Sunshine Happy Baby doll. It was the way they dressed every Sunday when they attended Sunday School and morning worship services at the Bethel Baptist Church. Coretta adjusted Ruthie to her left hip as she moved down the porch steps. Rachel closed the screen door and followed, the doll in one hand and the book in the other. They crossed the freshly-raked dirt yard, passed the fragrant honeysuckle vines, the rows of pink azaleas, the bright yellow day lilies, and the white, red and vermilion rose bushes, upon which Coretta lavished such love and care, and stepped out onto the unpaved road that led to the main highway into town. "Mornin’, Coretta," called Mildred Sims from the front porch of the dilapidated shotgun house across the way. As always, she sat in her white oak rocker and cooled herself with the wicker fan she bought years ago on a trip to Money Bayou. Her bloated right foot was propped up on an old milking stool and wrapped in a filthy towel. "Mornin’, Miz Sims," Coretta responded. "You got them little gals lookin’ mighty purty this mornin’." "Thank you." "Reckon you’re all goin’ to church." "Yes’m." "I would, too, you know, but my gout’s been actin’ up so. Once I get set down I cain’t hardly move for th’ rest of th’ day." "Yes’m, I know. I’m sorry to hear it ain’t no better." "Me, too. You ought to come take a look at how it’s swole up." "I’d like to, Miz Sims, but if we don’t hurry we gonna be late." "Well, Lord bless you anyway." "Thank you. Same to you." Coretta kept pushing the girls on toward the highway. She knew if she gave Mildred half a chance the old woman would talk her ear off, and this morning she just didn’t have the time or the patience. Only a few blocks away, across the black steel tracks of the Florida East Coast Rail Road, there were neighborhoods of elegant ante-bellum homes, with carefully manicured lawns, luxuriously stretched out along the shady canopied streets. Dwelling within were members of old line Cedar Creek families who had for generations adopted life styles that attempted (with
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About the Book
Rural North Florida. August, 1952. In the stillness of a summer Sunday morning, a quiet, reticent young black woman named Coretta Daniels enters the offices of a prominent white physician and inexplicably shoots him to death. She is immediately arrested and hastily put on trial, with the State of Florida demanding nothing less than her execution in the electric chair. In an odd series of circumstances, Coretta’s fate comes to rest in the hands of Jack Hunter, a white former county solicitor, and Randall McNeil, a black Harvard-educated defense attorney. Though different in every conceivable way, these two men must somehow find the means to overcome lifetimes of suspicion and prejudice before it is too late if they are to have even the remotest chance of saving Coretta from a racist judge, a State’s Attorney out for blood vengeance, and the Southern Jim Crow justice system. Suggested by a true story.
About the Author
Jim Lawrence is a native Southerner. He grew up in the East Coast town of New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and received much of his higher education in the Piedmont of North Carolina and at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He spent a number of years in Los Angeles, Calif., where he produced religious and educational films, wrote two-hour movies for network television, and taught classes in screenwriting and television production. He currently lives and writes in Asheville, North Carolina. He teaches television production and screenwriting, practices Tai Chi Chuan, and directs an occasional local theatre production. He also shares in the parenting of two rather precocious Cairn terriers.