A Pulitzer Prize-winning author documents the mid-20th-century case of a gentle, developmentally challenged youth who was falsely accused of raping a wealthy woman, in an account that traces the efforts of a crusading journalist to uncover the virulent racism and class corruption that led to his incarceration without a trial. (United States history). Simultaneous.
Documents the mid-twentieth-century case of a gentle, developmentally challenged youth who was falsely accused of raping a wealthy woman, and traces the efforts of a crusading journalist to uncover the racism and class corruption that led to his incarceration without a trial.
From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller DEVIL IN THE GROVE, a gripping story of sex, race, class, corruption, and the arc of justice twisted and bent straight again in the Florida citrus groves.
In December 1957, which brings a rare killing freeze to Florida's orange groves, Blanche Bosanquet Knowles, the wealthy young wife of a citrus baron, is raped in her home while her husband is away. She says a "husky Negro" did it, and Lake County's infamously racist sheriff, Willis McCall, has no hesitation in rounding up a herd of suspects matching that description. But within days all are released without explanation, and just as inexplicably, McCall turns his sights on Jesse Daniels, a gentle white nineteen-year-old with the mental capacity of a ten-year-old. Jesse's parents insist he was asleep with his teddy bear on the night in question, yet their every attempt to exonerate him fails and he is railroaded up north to the Florida State Hospital for the Insane. Facts are stubborn things, though, especially in the hands of crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese. While Jesse languishes at Chattahoochee, Mabel frets over the case and its baffling outcome. Who is protecting whom, or what? She recruits to the cause an inexperienced young lawyer named Richard Graham. Together they pursue the case, winning unlikely allies and chasing down leads until at long last they begin to unravel the unspeakable truths behind a racial conspiracy that shocked a community into silence.
Yet it is only now, half a century on, that Gilbert King has been able to coax the last long-guarded secrets out of proud, private families and to bring the whole shameful story to light. Powerful, page-turning, and rippling with the tensions that still fracture our own times, Beneath a Ruthless Sun will be devoured by Gilbert King's many fans and win him many, many more.
