Author Gilbert King
comes to Orlando in support of his newest book, “Beneath a Ruthless Sun.”
Two fearless women propel “Beneath a Ruthless Sun,” Gilbert King’s detailed book about a bizarre but true injustice in Lake County.
Mabel Norris Reese was the newspaperwoman fighting for Jesse Daniels, a white, mentally impaired 19-year-old wrongly accused of raping a socialite in 1957. In a New York Times review, Jeffrey Toobin calls the book “superb” and predicts: “Watch for a Streep vs. McDormand brawl for the part.”
Then there is Pearl Daniels, Jesse’s determined mother. “Pearl went out investigating this case on her own, then she’d write to [FBI Director] J. Edgar Hoover constantly urging him to open up this case about Jesse,” King said. “She’s such a nuisance that Hoover caves in and orders a civil rights investigation, which started the whole process.”
Jesse Daniels was railroaded to the state mental hospital at Chattahoochee, a wrong that sprawled over 14 years, even though the victim said she had been raped by a black man. Jesse Daniels now lives in Daytona Beach.
King will discuss the book Monday in two Orlando appearances. The book is a sequel of sorts to “Devil in the Grove,” for which King won the Pulitzer Prize in 2013. Willis McCall, then the sheriff of Lake County, is the formidable villain in both books, and he repeatedly lashed out at Reese.
“She was determined to report on his civil rights violations,” King said. “I love the fact that she refused to back down from him.”
The clash resonated for King as he wrote the book in 2016 and watched the country during the election.
“When I saw the facts basically falling by the wayside, things we didn’t like being labeled fake news, it reminded me of what Sheriff Willis McCall was doing to Mabel Norris Reese,” the author said.
But why was Jesse Daniels railroaded?
“That’s the million-dollar question, the one Mabel was onto,” King said. “She knows Jesse Daniels is not guilty, but doesn’t know why they’d frame him.” She begins to suspect it would have been more acceptable in society if the victim, Blanche Knowles, had been raped by a white man instead of a black man, he added.
“That’s not the kind of story you see reported in an interracial rape,” King said. “It’s usually accusations against the black man, and the black man is railroaded. This one is so perverse.”
Knowles was very resistant to testifying against Jesse Daniels, King said. “The reason they never went to trial with this and hid Jesse away at Chattahoochee was because they wouldn’t have to put her on the stand,” he said. Chattahoochee was a good way to dispose of a thorny legal case, King added.
Any film of “Beneath a Ruthless Sun” will depend on what Amazon Studios does with “Devil in the Grove,” because the two books share characters, King said.
The new book could supply some hope about the world today.
“My thinking is the stuff that happened in the ’40s and ’50s is so awful, it would not be tolerated today,” King said. “The justice system is better, there’s more protections now. We still have a lot of injustices out there. If you think innocent people aren’t being framed, it’s naïve. You need to pay attention to the stories.”