LANCASTER, OHIO

FEBRUARY 1954

The plan hatched over three whole weeks of whispered conversations in the dugout of the neighborhood baseball field, cemented by a secret handshake.

They would run away to Oberlin College. It was only a short bus ride from Lorain, and though Sam had wasted plenty on candy and the ten-cent cinema, he’d made enough money with his battery business to pay for one-way tickets for all three of them. From there: freedom. No more teachers, no more books.

In the spring of 1953, the three boys entered the Greyhound station in Lorain, hands in pockets, shifting their eyeballs like amateurs. They bought the tickets without question, Sam already being nearly the size of a fifteen-year-old. The air-conditioning in the bus raised goose bumps on their arms, the boys’ toes tapping the floorboards with anticipation.

Their first glimpse of the college dazzled them. The buildings looked like stone castles they’d only ever imagined somewhere in Europe, with arched doorways, spires reaching toward the clouds. White coeds peppered the rolling lawns, laughing and flirting, lying on blankets.

Did people live like this? People for whom their mothers had worked as house cleaners, maybe. People for whom they could one day hope to wash dishes.

In front of one of the castles was a row of bicycles, manufactured with the steel forged by their own fathers and grandfathers not a hundred miles north. The bicycles looked like a shiny row of Porsches, candy colored, with sleek lines and fat, whitewall tires.

Coveting, they called it in church. Sam went once in a blue moon, even though he mostly blew off Sundays at Lorain Gospel Tabernacle and went with his cousins Jimmy, Johnny, Joe, and Joe Dale to spend their dimes for the collection plates to see westerns. In the larger-than-life world on the screen, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and John Wayne would head toward a western horizon, fight for what they believed, kill without a twitch of the eye, get the girl in the end, sure, but not because they needed the girl. Sam was a cowboy like that.

“Which one do you want?” asked Sam as the boys surveyed the bicycles.

He wanted to hop on and pedal until the tip of the wheel met the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Sam had spent enough time facing the back of the room and staring at a uniform blotch of true blue, meant to represent water on the map. He would see the real thing one day, if his lungs burst from pedaling.

The three boys exchanged looks. Jimmy wordlessly picked a black number with red racing stripes. Sam picked a sparkling green Schwinn with streamers hanging from the handlebars. Billy picked a solid red. They adjusted the seats and handlebars, and in a shot, they were off. The wind dried the rivulets of sweat running down their temples before they could even reach their cheeks.

These bicycles were shiny things, prized possessions. The surge of fear Sam experienced when stealing his was followed by a lingering feeling of power, of ownership, of being above the rules. He didn’t so much ride as fly the twelve blocks they managed to travel before the strange sight of two ragtag Black boys and one white boy, riding bicycles too big for them, prompted a gas station attendant to call the local police, who apprehended the burgeoning criminals within ten minutes.

When the sirens began to wail and the lights spun on top of the black-and-white behind them, Sam’s eyes scanned the road ahead for avenues of escape. It wasn’t a western movie set after all. It was a flat, midwestern suburb. There was nowhere to go.

Sam wouldn’t see his home on Thirty-Third Street for almost two years.

Parents used the Boys’ Industrial School, or BIS, as a threat.

Keep sassing me like that, you’ll wind up at BIS.

In 1857, the Ohio government established the Ohio Reform School, predecessor to the BIS. The Ohio Reform School was a reformatory for boys between eight and eighteen years of age. Located approximately five miles south of Lancaster, in Fairfield County, Ohio, the institution accepted its first inmate in 1858. Thirty-five miles southeast of Columbus, the BIS was located on 1,210 acres of land. By the time Sam was driven through its stately gates on February 8, 1954, the original log cabins had long been replaced by handsome brick Victorian buildings, accented by white columns and built by the residents themselves with hand-hewn bricks. The sprawling campus housed gazebos and gardens and chapels and even mansions, reserved for the administration. It didn’t look half-bad at first glance.

Sam was herded into what looked to him like a castle, arranged on the floor next to his fellow students, and given a warm welcome by the superintendent.

He had to keep pinching his own thigh to keep himself awake during the lecture that followed. He kept himself occupied by staring at the superintendent’s wife. Kind of plain, but a lovely slim neck on that one.

The superintendent was on about the history. BIS was founded around the concept of the “open system.” The boys lived in dormitory-style cottages rather than cells. The cottages were named after rivers in Ohio. BIS was a “family model,” open, semi-military, almost entirely self-sufficient farm school. They grew and cooked their own food, made their own clothes. There was even an electric light and power station.

Sam learned he’d spend half of the day in school and the other half on the farm or in one of the vocational education buildings. The school offered training in blacksmithing, tailoring, baking, carpentry, stenography, brick making, butchering, shoemaking, horticulture, cattle raising, farming, carpentry, chair caning, and brush making, among numerous other professions.

They also boasted a forty-two-member band and mandatory military training. They marched everywhere.

“You’ll learn what it means to have a sense of pride. You’ll learn to respect yourselves and others,” said the superintendent.

“You just missed the Christmas lights but you’ll love Chestnut Day,” said his wife, standing a pace behind him. “And French Toast Sundays. We’re a family here. We don’t have guards or wardens. We have house parents. Elder brothers. Trustees. People who can help get you back on God’s right path in life. You can even turn out like one of the BIS boys we’re very proud of: Mr. Bob Hope!”

The boys ate a quick supper, were separated by race, and walked through a processing center, where each was handed a uniform and card with a certain number of demerits, based on the severity of their crime. The cards hung around their necks. For good behavior, students lost demerits. Once they reached zero demerits, they’d be freed and returned to their families.

Demerits were also added for bad behavior.

In 1954, BIS was at its height, with eight hundred boys between eight and sixteen years of age. The first four dormitories housed the white boys, and the last four—Herrick, Hawking, Harris, and Patterson—housed the Black ones. Sam was placed in Herrick House.

The Black boys were assigned a trustee who led them to the back cabins.

“Might as well start your sorry asses marching now,” said the trustee when they were out of sight of the main house.

A small group of white boys marched by them, stiff as nutcrackers.

“That ain’t how we do it, case you’re wondering. How we do it, Wilbert? Step up in front here. You back so soon?”

The boy directly behind Sam clicked his heels together, turned his hat at a jaunty angle, and sauntered to the front of the line.

“We do it like this, sir,” shouted Wilbert, breaking into a cool kind of shuffle as the trustee called out, “To the left. To the left. To the left, right, left.”

Upon reaching their new home, the boys broke formation. Sam caught up to Wilbert. He noted a sign for the cemetery.

“Boot Hill,” said Wilbert. “You’ll want to stay away from there. Stay away from shoveling coal too. Try to go pick beans on the farm. Name’s Wilbert Taylor.”

“Sam McDowell.”

When the boys reached the doorway of Herrick House, the forest beyond the grounds swallowed the last of the sun. As each boy entered, a trustee handed him a long white shift. They were led to a dormitory-style room and told to choose their bunks.

“You stronger than me,” Wilbert said to Sam. He was soft spoken, with limpid brown eyes and long lashes like a girl. “I don’t mind taking the top bunk if you want the bottom.”

“How’d you wind up back here anyway?”

“I’m incorrigible.”

“Not sure I know what that means,” said Sam as he unfolded the stiff linen garment, unevenly sewn in the residents’ tailor shop. Looked like his mama’s nightgown. Not good.

Wilbert dropped his eyes and, as if psychic, said, “Not good at all.”

Sam soon learned the meaning of incorrigible. He talked back, hustled, fought, shucked, and jived. He had so many demerits they had to give him a new card and then another after that. When they realized he responded to neither incentives nor consequences, they began giving him the strop. When that didn’t work, they stood him in the lunch room facing the wall, along with the other tough cases who held thirty-pound iron balls, chained and shackled to their ankles. The rule was if you dropped the ball, your time started over. The trustees walked down the line of boys, smacking the backs of their heads at random, causing them to pitch forward into the wall and drop their ball.

Each day, the boys marched and worked, marched and worked.

Each night, the younger boys kept their eyes shut tight and prayed, listening to the footsteps of the trustees. They knew the next sound would be screams from the coatroom. If on some nights, the screams sounded suspiciously like Sam’s, almost as if coming out of his own mouth, he knew it was never him. Some other child was being hurt, having his ass stretched, over and over. If it was you, you never admitted it. It was never him.

Wilbert got a bad deal, being so pretty, but he was no little thing, and both Sam and Wilbert shared a love of the fights.

Wilbert and Sam began to bob and weave between the trees, shadowboxing, getting stronger, learning to fight back. Be the punisher rather than the punished.

Based on the demerit system, the average stay at BIS was twelve months. Samuel McDowell entered the gates of BIS at age thirteen, on February 8, 1954. He walked out again at fifteen years of age, nineteen months later. His file read “especially incorrigible.” Even the superintendent was glad to be rid of the headache.

No one picked him up at the gate. The precept put him on a bus with a pat on the back and a sack lunch.

Sam moved back in with Mama and Big ’Un, but the whole family had started looking at him sideways, cracking down harder on his mischief. They hadn’t come all this way, from the plantations of Georgia, to start acting like no accounts now. Sam always wondered why Fanny called his older brother Paul when it was time to whup him. He mentioned it to his cousins one Sunday afternoon, and Paul Jr. fell out laughing.

“You ain’t figured this out yet? Paul is your daddy, you idjit. Not your brother.”

No one seemed surprised. Had they all known the whole time? Mama confirmed the devastating revelation, and Sam exploded.

“Liars!”

Big ‘Un was on him in a flash. He grabbed the poker from the coal stove and swung it at his grandson, catching him on the temple. Sam caught him in a headlock.

Mama begged for Big ’Un’s life until Sam dropped to the floor and wrapped his arms around Mama’s knees.

“Don’t blame us. This badness in you, it ain’t us. It’s them Little niggers.”

Sam had no idea what she was talking about. Little niggers? He pictured a bunch of tiny Black people running around, and him gigantic, like that Gulliver movie.

He and Mama wept at the kitchen table as she told him the story that turned his world upside down and then just as quickly righted it again. He was free of all this guilt and obligation and trying to do the right thing by his family. Free to be who he truly was.

He lay his head on the pillow that night with an uncharacteristic sense of peace and a new sense of purpose. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He’d known since he left BIS, but at that time, his nuts hadn’t dropped yet. Now there would be no stopping him.

He had come from all that marching and bean picking even more convinced he loved the sparkly things in life. Like he had wanted the bicycle. He wanted things so powerfully it felt his whole body would fold in on itself like a dying star. He just hadn’t figured out how to get those things without getting caught yet.

He had only recently even figured out what to do with his teenage erections. Until a few months before, he’d gotten hard and wound up just sitting there staring at his dick, like it was some kind of puzzle.

On a whim, he’d started stealing pulp detective magazines from the drug store: True Detective, True Crime, Master Detective, Inside Detective… He’d shoved them down his pants, hid them under his mattress. Opening them was unwrapping the world’s best Christmas gift. He couldn’t believe what he was looking at.

The photos between the covers were real women, and they were really dead.

Women with chunks blown from the front of their skull, heads lolled over a bathtub, limbs twisted and broken on the concrete after having been pushed from a height, their glassy dead eyes staring at nothing.

It wasn’t until Gloria Ferry that his interest blossomed into true passion. Dare he say it, true love.

Gloria Ferry.

Gloria Ferry had been buried on page 38 of the March 1956 issue of Inside Detective.

Glorious Gloria, graceful Gloria, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He read the story and learned how she had left a bumfuck town in the Ozarks where they tied corn sacks to their feet for shoes and ran off with an old buzzard thirty years her senior when she was sixteen. When she had tried to leave him, he had strangled her and left her naked body in Brookside Park in Cleveland.

The headline read “If You Play House With a Fiend.”

Poor Gloria.

In the photograph, Gloria was a bottle blond with an unusually long, slender neck, around which she wore a black choker necklace. She reminded Sam of Barbara Stanwyck in that movie where she plays the lying bitch. Humphrey Bogart strangles her as she writhes on the bed, blond hair shimmering like a waterfall on the satin sheets. In Sam’s opinion, Gloria was even prettier than the Stanwyck woman. Maybe because movie stars belong to everyone, but Gloria was his secret. His alone.

If you looked at the very, very, very fine print, you would see the photograph of Gloria in the magazine was a postmortem reconstruction. No one had bothered to photograph Gloria when she was alive. Sam skimmed over that part.

In the reconstruction, her saucer eyes were laden with some elemental sadness. She had left her controlling, older lover, fled to Columbus, obtained a job in a laundromat. Her body had been found by a search party, her eyes shot through with petechial hemorrhaging, her hyoid bone cleanly cracked, her throat stained with a necklace of maroon bruises. Her boyfriend, Robert West, was arrested and convicted for the crime.

A young woman caught in a cycle of poverty had latched onto a jealous older boyfriend in a desperate bid to escape. For the sin of changing her mind, he squeezed the life out of her.

A commonplace story, but for Sam, it was the moment the needle hit the vein. He crept downstairs and grabbed a pair of sewing scissors and two thumbtacks, carefully clipped Gloria’s picture, and pinned it on the wall over his bed. He jerked off to it over and over, finally understanding what a dick was for, what pleasure felt like.

What was it about necks? Slender like wrists, but so much more vulnerable. A liminal body part, a bridge between body and mind. The gateway for oxygen, the passageway for sustenance, the place from which your voice emerged. Necks were everything.

Necks were his private world, but in the real world, he needed money.

There had been only one person left he was trying to front like a good boy for. It was his mama. But Mama had lied to him. There was nothing left to stop him.