WE CARRY THEIR BONES

Gripping investigation into a corrupt, dangerous Florida reform school, the institution featured in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys.

Beginning in 1900, the Dozier School for Boys housed thousands of young men sentenced for presumed crimes, mostly minor infractions, who were at the mercy of their jailers and a Jim Crow system of injustice. Many died there, buried in forgotten graves. Forensic anthropologist Kimmerle arrived with years of experience under her belt, including examining the killing fields of the Balkans, and set to work trying to identify the remains of young men whose bones lay intermingled in a sort of potter’s field. Inevitably, her work expanded not just to embrace the bones she and a legion of volunteers uncovered, but also to comprehend “a historical justice question”: finding the identities of the dead and the causes of their deaths. Along the way, Kimmerle unveils a corrupt, racially structured system that swept up young men, mostly Black, hired out to work for local plantations and factories in “a vicious cycle designed to keep the wheel of cheap labor turning.” Many of the deaths resulted from savage beatings by guards and fellow inmates goaded by their captors in a kind of fight-club scenario that enabled killing by proxy. The bones told stories: “a lot of boys between twelve and fourteen. One who was twenty-one and died while paroled to a farm, presumably to work for his bus fare home.” The Florida system has been dismantled—sort of, anyway, as “but one institution within a system structured to define people by color and class” that endures—but Kimmerle speaks eloquently to official crimes that have yet to be fully accounted for, giving a closely observed account of forensic investigation along the way.

A horrific story of true crime, unjust punishment, and the quest for justice for the victims of a cruel state.