Tananarive Due

A gripping, page-turning novel set in Jim Crow Florida that follows Robert Stephen Jones as he’s sent to a segregated reform school that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead. Gracetown, Florida, summer 1950. Robert Stephen Jones Jr. is sent to Gracetown School for Boys for kicking a white boy’s leg. But the Gracetown School for Boys isn’t just any reform school. As Robert finds, it’s a segregated school that is haunted from the boys who have died there. The Reformatory is an eerie, frightening novel that explores the horrors of our history.

The Reformatory

Lindsay

Florida soil is soaked with so much blood, it's a wonder the droplets don't seep between your toes with every step.

"I don't believe in evil in most ways," Ms. Lottie said. "I believe in the devil, alright, but man don't need no hope from Satan to do what folks call evil. Man do evil every day, and call it 'doing their job'. Slave drivers was 'doing their job', beating the skin off folks. Slave catchers, setting dogs to rip out eyes and limbs."

Telling the truth always broke the peace.

"Segregation isn't unique to the South," Lowman said, thinking of how often he'd seen Colored children chased from his Lower East Side library, "just, more flamboyant."

Maybe there was no way for a Negro with fixed ideas to avoid being sent to jail.

The Reformatory quotes

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