The Reformatory

Gracetown, Florida, 1950. Robert Stephens Jr is twelve years old when he kicks the son of the local white landowner for putting hands on his sister Gloria, and for that he is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys. His mother is dead and his father has fled north after trying to organise labour at the mill, so there is nobody with standing to intervene. The Reformatory has its own arrangements: the sweatbox, the whipping shed out back, a warden who keeps boys past their release dates, and a system of trusties and work details that no inspection has ever troubled. Robert can see haints, the ghosts of boys who did not leave, and they want something from him. Above ground, Gloria works every avenue available to a Black teenage girl in the Jim Crow South, which is to say the NAACP, a lawyer, a great-aunt, and a great deal of dangerous negotiation with people who could destroy her for asking. Due based the school on the Dozier reformatory, where her own great-uncle died, and the novel's horror is doubled: the ghosts are frightening, but everything that made them is documented history.