Outraged that old family detritus had been stirred into view like leaf rot from the bottom of a well, the Collins family had broken its half century of silence. Furthermore—having chastised him and set him straight—Ellen Collins had volunteered to correct his misperceptions. He rang up at once to accept her kind offer and to apologize.
She heard him out. “You say your name is Collins, Professor? Is that true?”
The sharp-voiced question took him aback, and he felt a start of panic, terrified he might lose this precious chance. Stalling, he said, “Yes, well, you see—”
“What was your father’s name?” the voice persisted. Clearly the newspaper distortions had made his kinswoman exceptionally suspicious. He would have to establish himself more firmly before confiding who he really was. And so he blurted, “R. B. Collins,” sensing even as he spoke that he might be making a calamitous mistake.
The anticipated outcry—Cousin Arbie?—was not forthcoming, only a brief, ominous pause. “R. B. Collins, you say?” If R. B. was a Collins, he was a very distant one indeed, her tone made clear. “I don’t suppose you mean R. B. Watson, whose mother was a Collins?”
“Rob Watson’s mother was a Collins? Really? Do you know her name?”
“Well, I used to.” Ellen Collins said she’d been shown the gravestone as a child. Robert Watson’s mother had been a second cousin. She was not in their Collins cemetery at Tustenuggee, she was buried in New Bethel churchyard—not the old Bethel Cemetery, mind, where the gravestones had been bulldozed down by Yankee developers. “Those Yankees have walked all over us for a hundred years!”
Asked about the family in the Fort White area, Ellen Collins said, sardonic, “Oh, there’s still a few of ’em down there. Hettie lives in the old Centerville schoolhouse, on the last piece of the original Collins land grant. She hunts up old neighbors and collects old scraps. Knows more about our family than we do ourselves, and she’s only an in-law!”
When Lucius suggested he might call on Hettie, she drew back. “I don’t know about that. Probably I have talked too much already,” she added brusquely. But in a while she rang back to say that Cousin Hettie would receive him the next morning on the condition that her dear brother-in-law in Lake City and Cousin Ed Watson in Fort Myers would not be told about it. “I’ll be there, too,” Ellen Collins warned him. And she gave directions to New Bethel Cemetery, in case he should care to stop there on his way. “You come across any ‘R. B. Collins’ in that place, you let us know,” she added tartly.
Back at the pool hall R. B. Collins, told the exciting news that Lucius had claimed him as his father, was not amused and in fact refused to go with Lucius to Fort White, claiming he had better things to do.
“These are your relatives!” Lucius exclaimed.
“I know who they are.” Arbie broke the rack with a furious shot which left him hopelessly behind the eight ball. “Now look what you went and done,” he said, walking around the table to inspect the catastrophe from another angle. “Story of my life,” he said, chalking his cue.
In Lucius’s absence, Sally had done important research at the Columbia County Courthouse, having talked her way into a storeroom of old archives. Ransacking the musty stacks, she had found cracked leather volumes of court dockets for May 1, 1906, to June 1, 1908, with each case written out in a spidery hand upon the leaf-brown pages.
County Judge W. M. Ives had presided over the circuit court on June 12, 1907, a few weeks after Samuel Tolen’s murder. On that date, the state of Florida had indicted a Frank Reese for the murder of Samuel Tolen on the basis of an affidavit from D. M. Tolen. Lucius found this astonishing. Considering the well-known family feud referred to in the Jacksonville Times-union , why had Mike Tolen accused Reese and not Cox or Watson? If Reese was such a desperate character, capable of murdering a white man, why was he so utterly ignored in the Watson legend? Neither the Herlong clipping nor Grover Kinard had so much as mentioned the one man to be indicted in both Tolen murders. Were black men in those Jim Crow days so bereft of status that even black assassins were discounted?
The defendant having pled not guilty, and the state unable to prove his guilt, it is ordered that Frank Reese be discharged from custody. That court order was peculiar, too. In those days, a black man charged with murder by a well-established white would be very lucky to live long enough to be indicted, let alone have his case dismissed for want of evidence. Had this man served as a scapegoat, a decoy, until Mike Tolen was ready to act against Cox and Watson?