“Florida. June 1950. Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory, for kicking the son of the largest landowner in town in defense of his older sister, Gloria. So begins Robbie’s journey further into the terrors of the Jim Crow South and the very real horror of the school they call The Reformatory. Robbie has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things. Through his friends Redbone and Blue, Robbie is learning not just the rules, but how to survive. Meanwhile, Gloria is rallying every family member and connection in Florida to find a way to get Robbie out before it’s too late.”
Channeling real-life history of blacks fight for their humanity under the dark boot of racism, the Jim Crow era and horrors of everyday existence, Tananarive Due’s gives us a maddening, breakneck tale of one 12 year-old boy who must survive a viscous six-months “imprisonment” in hell on Earth Florida reformatory. Here, the sins of the father, a sadistic Superintendent named Fenton J. Haddock, and past collide. But young Robert has a talent –he can see the ghosts of those who died at the Gracetown School for Boys. And there are only two things that scare Haddock, someone finding the pictures he has in desk drawer, and the haints that haunt the reformatory. Because if anyone finds out what a horrible man Haddock truly is, his way of life, the dark desires he has, then they will undue all power he so loves.
While I’ve never read a book by her, every time I saw the book on the shelves or online, it kept calling to me. Now, I’ve not read much of the Jim Crow era in detail, but know enough of its history that tears me apart about a time, soothe of Mason/Dixon line, where blacks were imprisoned, lynched, murdered and hunted like dogs for the most minor infraction. The one thing that still today rings through my head was how this was still happening only some 70 odd years ago and continues today, in 2025. How did the supposedly Greatest Nation on the Planet allow this happen?
I suppose, for us whites, the only real way to get us to read about this terror is through novels like The Reformatory or Lovecraft Country, is to clothe it a tale about ghosts. But it’s an emotional read, as the characters, vividly brought life in three dimensions by Due, along with the black community itself, have overcome so much injustices, have to deal daily with so many travesties, that they never seem to end.
It’s a stunning book, a heartbreaking, devastating, and horrifying, a historical fiction wrapped up as ghost story.
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Much like The Magdalene Laundries in Ireland and the Catholic boarding schools run in Canada by nuns for Indigenous children which were aimed at assimilating Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture, the straight line through all of them is how many children lost their lives and were buried in unmarked graves, to be lost to time and God.
Gracetown School for Boys is based on the real-life Florida School for Boys, also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. It was reform school operated by the state of Florida in the panhandle town of Marianna from January 1, 1900, to June 30, 2011. For a time, it was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States.
According to Wikipedia, “Throughout its 111-year history, the school gained a reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by staff. Despite periodic investigations, changes of leadership, and promises to improve, the cruelty and abuse continued. After the school failed a state inspection in 2009, the governor ordered a full investigation. Many of the historic and recent allegations of abuse and violence were confirmed by separate investigations by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 2010, and by the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in 2011. State authorities closed the school permanently in June 2011. At the time of its closure, it was a part of the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice.
“Because of questions about the number of deaths at the school and a high number of unmarked graves, the state granted permission for a forensic anthropology survey by the University of South Florida in 2012. The team identified 55 burials on the grounds, most outside the cemetery, and documented nearly 100 deaths at the school. In January 2016, USF issued its final report, having made seven DNA matches and 14 presumptive identifications of remains. Three times as many black as white students died and were buried at Dozier. USF's report noted that excluding a 1914 event in which an estimated six to ten white children were killed in a fire, the racial balance of deaths was consistent with the school's overall population demographics.
“After passage of resolutions by both houses of the legislature, on April 26, 2017, the state held a formal ceremony to apologize personally to two dozen survivors of the school and to families of other victims. In 2018, bills were being considered to provide some compensation to victims and their descendants, possibly as scholarships for children. In 2019, during preliminary survey work for a pollution clean-up, a further 27 suspected graves were identified by ground-penetrating radar. In 2024, a bill to compensate the victims of The Dozier School for Boys carried by Representative Michelle Salzman and Senator Darryl Rouson was approved by the state legislature and signed into law.”
The book is dedicated to her great-uncle Robert Stephens, who died at the Dozier School for Boys in 1937 at the age of fifteen, her late mother, Patricia Gloria Stephens Due and her father, John Dorsey Due, Freedom Lawyer.
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