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Q:
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How did you find out about the abuse at Marianna?
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A:
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In October of 2008 I saw a story about a press conference where five men who had been inmates there made their claims of abuse public for the first time. They had gotten the cooperation of a fairly high-ranking officer and staged the press conference at the school. It was the first time they had been back in decades. Fortunately, the AP and a couple of TV stations were there.
It was one of these weird Southern Gothic stories about a small town and institutions where horrible things happened. I figured that if these guys found each other, there were probably more.
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Q:
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Can you talk a little about the structure of the story? The opening is especially interesting.
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A:
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We cast a very broad net in the reporting. After this press conference, people started coming out of the woodwork. We decided to pull the clips that we had in our archives. And we learned pretty early on that the abuse stretched all the way back to the early 1900s. Kids locked in shackles—it wasn’t a reform school. It was a prison for youth.
We noticed that this abuse seemed to come into the public consciousness every ten or 15 years. It wasn’t limited to the 50s and 60s, which was the era these five guys had come forward to talk about. That made the story not just about this small window of abuse, but the idea that the citizens of Florida had known about this abuse for a long time. Every time it was reported, it almost made it seem like an isolated incident. It wasn’t.
How do you tell a narrative that spans a hundred years without people who can testify to the abuse there before, say, 1944? Waveney [Moore] and I started sketching the thing out on notepads. We followed traditional rules. Start close to the action. There were some elements to the story that would immediately get attention: kids beaten in the place they called the “White House.”
We looked for a character who would be almost a composite—a representative of most of the men we had talked to. We relied on Bill Haynes to be the backbone character that goes through the whole thing, and hopefully his story has an arc to it. At the same time, we felt that it was necessary to introduce a lot of other characters in quick fashion, to show that this wasn’t an isolated event. At the time the story was written, 280 men had signed on to the class action lawsuit.
It felt important to show that the abuse didn’t stay in the White House. It was a traumatic experience that affected these guys, some in tiny ways, some in big and significant ways. This messed up people’s lives. We intro character after character, many of whom are in prison, on death row, hit their wives, and to this day are going to anger management classes. One guy still carries a pebble in his pocket that he carried around in the White House.
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Q:
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Did you do the reporting then figure out the story construct, or did you have a structure in mind from the start?
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A:
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We spent a lot of time gathering string—about six months. And probably three weeks of that was the actual writing and two weeks was the outlining and hammering. We also had this gigantic cast of characters. People were coming out from all over, basically telling the same story. And we felt obligated to talk to as many of those people as possible. We wound up talking to around 30 victims alone, and that’s not including the folks with the state, the guards that ran the school, or former superintendents.
Edmund Fountain, the photographer who shot the still photos, did the video as well. We had the story structure outline and covering the walls of this office. And Edmund realized early on that the video couldn’t contain as many guys as are in the story. I think he only used four people. He used the most expressive guys, and the most trustworthy. A lot of the guys we talked with had criminal records.
It’s slow moving—that’s the beauty of Edmund’s work. Those photos. The faces were so damned expressive.
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Q:
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How do you keep the narrative from becoming a voyeuristic descent into horror? The “bad” guys are largely silent, and they appear so bad.
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A:
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We mention the graphic details of abuse in the first section, what I thought were the things that make your stomach turn a little bit—the blood on the walls, the bits of tongue and lip on the pillow. And then in section three where the boys are dragged one at a time to the White House. We covered the nightmarish stuff early on, and then we felt like hopefully readers got the message and wouldn’t need any more after that. So then you’re getting these powerful experiences, but without the blood—the part about Stu Kruger, who carries a pebble around in his pocket.
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Q:
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Was there anything that you wanted in there but didn’t get to keep?
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A:
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I turned in the first draft at almost 12,000 words and I think the thing ran at maybe 6,500 words—half of what we had in there originally. The beauty of what Kelley Benham, our editor, did for the story was stripping out so much redundancy and focusing the thing.
To pare it down like that, there were things that were left out. There were some entire characters that we had to drop completely because everybody had this violent experience inside the White House. At first I think we felt like everybody deserved a chance to talk about what happened in that room. But it would have made the story a bloody mess. It would have been voyeuristic if we focused so much on the nightmare of this place. So a good chunk of the cuts came from that type of material. We were just letting people recreate their experience in that room, but it was too much.
I do wish we could have gotten [to interview] Tidwell—we tried every way possible. We staked out his house—Edmund and I did. We went up there three times. Not including driving by and driving around the block. And we talked to neighbors around him.
I did the best sales job I’ve ever done on his granddaughter. She wasn’t going to talk to us. She was very hesitant. But she came around, I still don’t know why she did. We met at a public park. I asked, “Does your uncle or your mother know you’re here?” She said they’d asked her not to talk to us. I asked, “Are you sure?” She said yes. She’s a 29 year-old adult, so I talked to her.
It doesn’t make as good a story if you don’t have Tidwell flirting with the women at the perfume counter. And dancing the foxtrot. Minus just those details, he comes across as a monster. They help make a real character, as opposed to a sadistic abuser.
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