How had the former Ruby Jackson gotten into such a fix? My God, her mother and father, brothers and sisters would die of shame if they dreamed of it. And Sam, the community of Live Oak would explode like gasoline. Please God, help her! For, she didn’t see how she could help herself.

  Ruby felt uncomfortable at times about the community; Dr. Adams was at her home so often. But who would dare to accuse her to Sam McCollum? Not a soul. But did Sam himself suspect . . . or know? From the way he acted she could never be sure.

  * * *

  THEN CAME the day when she knew she was pregnant, and she knew that it could not possibly be the child of her husband. Very nervous, and very diffident, she went to the office of Dr. Adams for an examination. He made it very briefly.

  The seven months that followed were alternately Heaven and Hell to Ruby McCollum.

  But alone, Ruby was worried. What would Sam say or do? What about her own family? What about the Negroes of Live Oak? She was heavy in spirit as the weeks dragged on nearer and nearer to her period of confinement.

  (Continued next week.)

  APRIL 11, 1953

  The Life Story of Mrs. Ruby J. McCollum!

  LIVE OAK, Fla.—Our scene changes rapidly, and, now Ruby Jackson McCollum is the tragic star of a world-shaking drama. In a blindingly brutal light, America has discovered that the separation of the races is a fiction. The pretensions have met the realities of that courtroom at Live Oak, Fla. Many things had happened between that pregnancy and this day.

  Now, a Southern white lawyer, born within twelve miles of the Suwannee County Courthouse, fights brilliantly and ruthlessly to save the life of a Negro woman who has shot to death a prominent and popular white man.

  This white attorney is flanked by and ably assisted by a Negro lawyer not appointed by any special group.

  In close and amiable association, Col. Frank T. Cannon and Rutgers-educated Releford McGriff, the latter a Negro, fight shoulder-to-shoulder for the life of Ruby McCollum. The battle rages up and down and across all the lines once held too sacred to even put into words. For the first time, too, Suwannee County, Fla., had Negroes on a jury panel. Yes, it is a world-shaking drama.

  But time is long by the courthouse clock. Ruby McCollum is a little woman by some standards. She sits in the large armchair with her small feet crossed and often swinging clear of the floor. For hours she sits almost motionless as the battle between defending and prosecuting counsel rages on and on.

  She loses the thread of the conflict for her life and goes back into her drama. Ruby McCollum has lived so many lives and died so many deaths since that unforgotten afternoon nearly seven years [ago].

  “O memories that bless and burn!”9

  * * *

  AS RUBY sits there with her head resting on her right hand, she lives those years again and tries vainly to shut out the truth from her heart.

  Ruby McCollum, sitting in the courtroom in peril of her very life, had memories that blessed and burned. Perhaps she would die a repugnant death, but . . . she had lived!

  And, materially, Ruby McCollum had lived. She had seen the day laborer she had married twenty years before rise to a place of wealth and a certain kind of power. She had sought for a go-getter when she chose Sam McCollum, and she had not been disappointed in that way.

  “I picked you from the very top,” she would say. “I was married to the top Negro of Suwannee County, and Dr. Adams was the top white man. When I tie up with a man, I have influence with him. Men love me when they get to know me.”

  * * *

  AND SAM McCOLLUM, too, was bound. Live Oak knew all about his philandering, but it was axiomatic that Ruby ruled the roost. Even in the very act of his misdeeds, he bragged about his wife—to the intense irritation of numerous females.

  He could not even bear to let her go when she bore a child which he knew could not possibly be his own. Nor did Sam McCollum denounce his wife about town. He quietly moved into a separate bedroom and, after a while, began to complain of pains about his heart.

  Live Oak might speculate about the light-skin baby that Ruby rode about town in the flashy car that Sam had bought her, but Sam gave nobody the satisfaction of hearing him talk about his wife.

  * * *

  GRADUALLY people found out that Sam’s doctor had warned him that he had heart disease. He must slack off and take things easy. But this he could not do. He had fought and gotten for his Ruby what she wanted, wealth and the power that goes with it.

  He now held important real estate; he held a sizeable block of stock in a thriving business, the Central Life Insurance Company; and he had nearly a hundred thousand dollars in cash hidden away in his house.

  But Ruby Jackson, the Ruby whom he had had to court for so long before she consented to marry him, was lost to him except in name only. So he was not so lively about town, not so full of wisecracks as he once had been. In quiet moments, the sides of his face looked limp and sagging, like wet-wash hung out to dry from his ears . . . “oh, barren gain . . . !”10

  * * *

  RUBY IS snatched back from her musings on her female mastery of men by the bitter, snarling voice of Edwards, the assistant state’s attorney. He gives her a vengeful look and points a scornful finger at her as she sits between her attorneys:

  “This Ruby McCollum is just as sane as I am. She knew what she was doing when she went to Dr. Adams’ office that Sunday morning to kill him. That, gentlemen of the jury, is a sly, calculating killer. Every movement she made that morning was a preparation for this day.

  “Look at her sitting there. You heard from her from the witness stand, so meek and mumbling with a little voice that the court had to order her to speak so that you could hear her. She was not like that when she pumped four bullets into the back of Dr. Adams.

  “I ask you gentlemen to bring in a first degree verdict against this brutal slayer and without a recommendation of mercy . . . this savage . . . as she sneaked back and forth from her car to the office door to see if anybody recognized her, to await her opportunity to get into the treating-room with that gun which she had carried there in that big, tan hand-bag slung across her shoulder . . .”

  * * *

  THE BITTER tirade, the scalding denunciation of her went on and on, and Ruby sank back once more into her reveries.

  Her children. Ruby had always loved children. Her ultra femininity gave her a very strong maternal instinct. Now her four children, three of them of tender years, were snatched away from her. She could not see them often, let alone give them her tender care. She had thoroughly dominated the lives of two able men, she had her memories that blessed, but she also had those which burned. A very barren gain. The folds of fate were closing in.

  APRIL 18, 1953

  The Life Story of Mrs. Ruby J. McCollum!

  LIVE OAK, Fla.—Mrs. Ruby McCollum does not feel that she is entirely at fault for what has happened.

  “I was between two guns that morning (the morning of the killing) . . . the gun of my husband and the gun of Dr. Adams.”

  She makes no explanation further. But, she does mention the terrible scene when Sam McCollum, her husband, found that she was again pregnant.

  * * *

  THEN THERE was that communication which Ruby cannot bring herself to talk about freely. The prosecution contends that it was a monthly bill for services rendered by Dr. Adams to the McCollum family, but Ruby’s reaction to it clearly indicates that there was something more in that envelope than merely the doctor’s monthly statement.

  Incidentally, that piece of paper has disappeared, although it could have been important evidence in the state’s case.

  One thing she did reveal, however, was that Dr. Adams was insisting that she move out to his farm.

  * * *

  OTHER HORRIBLE memories tore at her as she sat there and heard the violent denunciation of the prosecution. The fear-filled flight from Live Oak to the State Prison at Raiford that Sunday morning.

  Then the treatment that she had received at Raiford.

  “Oh, just the thought of being in such a place!”

  Did she have a miscarriage in prison?

  “The state knows all about that,” she murmured, and she could not say anything more. Her breath came in soft gasps. She thought of all the brutalities of mind and body that had been visited upon her when, as much as she regretted the deaths of Dr. Adams, and her husband, she had only acted instinctively, to—in a way—protect her own life.

  “I was between two guns.”

  Now both of the men were dead, and she was here fighting for her life . . . “Oh barren gain . . . and bitter loss!”11

  * * *

  ADMITTING THAT she had ceased to love Sam McCollum, Ruby still deeply regrets his death, resulting from shock.

  “Dr. Adams stole my love away from Sam. It would not have happened if Sam had not killed off my love years before I ever met the doctor, though. I was a good wife to Sam and a very loving mother to our children as everybody in Live Oak knows.”

  Ruby now is deeply pained over the suffering she has caused her mother and family. At times it almost drives her out of her mind, so that for hours everything seems to be in a mist.

  “I do not grasp that it is myself at times. I seem to be walking in somebody else’s dream, a bad dream, like a heavy fog around me. Sometimes I feel that I will wake up and find that it is nothing but a nightmare that I’ve had. I have died many deaths since that Sunday morning, but sooner or later I find that I am still alive and the bars are still around me.”

  Ruby feels—and, perhaps, justly so—that she has been the victim of a trap. Soon after she began seeing Dr. Adams, he began [to] prescribe medicines for her that had a queer effect upon her. She was sometimes very exalted and sometimes unnaturally depressed, but never her old, usual self.

  Sam McCollum had sensed the same thing about his wife, and perhaps that was why he was so patient with her. He went to several intimate friends and told them that he was worried about Ruby. She had become so strange.

  (Continued Next Week)

  APRIL 25, 1953

  The Life Story of Mrs. Ruby J. McCollum!

  LIVE OAK, Fla.—In the search for her old self and her efforts to free herself from the daze in which she lived, it is a matter of record that Ruby McCollum went from doctor to doctor all over her section of Florida. Therefore, it is highly probable that Mrs. McCollum is a victim, instead of the cold, ruthless killer that the state claims her to be.

  “I do not know why I killed Dr. Adams. I remember very little about what happened,” she says.

  Ruby says that Dr. Adams feared assassination from some other source for several weeks prior to Aug. 3, 1952. If he named the source of his fears to her, she is still keeping it a secret.

  * * *

  SHE IS TELLING the truth, because a hardware dealer states that Dr. Adams came to him to buy a gun about a week before he was killed. However, the hardware dealer disclosed, he had none in stock, but ordered one for Dr. Adams. It had not arrived at the time of his death.

  “I was not his enemy,” Ruby says significantly, “I loved him.”

  Rumor is rife in Live Oak that Ruby McCollum was the agent of some as yet secret person or persons in the slaying of Dr. Adams, and many express the hope that the name or names of whoever they may be will be bared soon.

  * * *

  NOBODY BELIEVES that she was induced to kill him for pay, but the general feeling is that her mind was so badly torn and twisted over a period of time that she would feel from what she was led to believe that to commit the act would be justified.

  And that is where that missing communication plays such an important role . . . what has become of it? . . . Ruby McCollum, herself, does not know. It disappeared along with the handbag of cash and other important papers in it.

  The secret of the slaying of Dr. C. LeRoy Adams may lie in that piece of paper! . . . what became of it? . . . and why was it destroyed?

  Ruby says that all she knows is that she seemed to come alive again as she drove into her driveway on that fatal Sunday morning with her two youngest children—and that gun—in the car with her.

  * * *

  VAGUE, TROUBLED dreams came to her. The report of a gun . . . had she killed anybody? The thought was repugnant to her, and she hurled the gun into the bamboo hedge and went inside her home to take care of her children.

  If her statement that she could not go with the arresting officers then because there was no one to take care of the children sounds stupid, it is because she had not as yet realized that she had killed a man.

  It took the terrifying drive to Raiford, the brutal blows of a State Trooper and repeated accusations of others to make her realize, or believe, that it was so. Ruby still wonders at times if it was really her own hand that fired the bullets into Dr. Adams. Did she really do it, or, was there somebody else there who did it, and then imposed upon her the sense of guilt during her dazed condition? She earnestly wishes she could be sure.

  * * *

  WHILE THE appeal from her conviction was being argued before Judge Hal Adams, Ruby, herself, argued the whole thing through in her own mind. But, she went further back than the actual killing of Dr. Adams.

  She says that she reviewed her entire life from conscious beginning to the hour of her conviction on Dec. 20, 1952. She had been trying to find the answer to her life ever since she had been brought back from Raiford to the county jail in Live Oak.

  She still did not have the answer when, in the deepening dusk of the evening when Judge Adams denied the appeal of her lawyers, she was told to stand and receive the sentence of death in the electric chair.

  * * *

  HIS VOICE husky with emotion, Judge Adams began hurriedly to pronounce the sentence of death upon Ruby McCollum, then catching himself, he interrupted to ask the formal question:

  “Have you anything to say why death should not be imposed upon you?”

  “I, I, I don’t know whether I was right, or wrong . . .”

  The prisoner at the bar, Ruby McCollum, said this with the hesitation of uncertainty, then stood calmly while the dread sentence was imposed upon her. Then she went calmly back to her seat, intertwined the fingers of her hands and looked up at the ceiling.

  * * *

  SHE HAD been—and still is—questioning the meanings of her life and what has happened to her . . . and why . . . and the answer has not been found.

  She does not know what turn, what attitude brought her to where she is—she who was ever quiet and gentle. She shares with the public which knew her in surprise at the killing of Dr. Adams.

  As she said, she does not know whether she did right or wrong, and neither does anyone else, including the sovereign State of Florida, in spite of the verdict. Nobody will ever know until something more is revealed of the mystery that surrounds the death of Dr. Adams.

  Ruby, bewildered and suffering in her cell at Live Oak, assured us that she strives at last to learn to kiss the cross. To submit to unfathomable Fate with courage and dignity.

  * * *

  WHATEVER HER final destiny may be, she has not come to the bar craven and whimpering. She has been sturdy and strong . . . a woman who ruled the lives and fate of two strong men, one white, the other colored. She had dared defy the proud tradition of the Old South openly and she awaits her fate with courage and dignity.

  * * *

  (Continued next week.)12

  MAY 2, 1953

  My Impressions of the Trial

  My comprehensive impression of the trial of Mrs. Ruby McCollum for the murder of Dr. C. LeRoy Adams was one of a smothering blanket of silence.1 I gained other vivid and momentary impacts, but they were subsidiary and grew out of the first. It was as if one listened to a debate in which everything which might lead to and justify the resolution had been waived. Under varied faces, one was confronted with the personality of silence. Some conformed by a murmuration of evasions, some by a frontal attack that this was something which it would not be decent to allow the outside world to know about, and others by wary wordlessness.

  It amounted to a mass delusion of mass illusion. A point of approach to the motive for the slaying of the popular medico and politician had been agreed upon, and however bizarre and unlikely it might appear to the outside public, it was going to be maintained and fought for. Anything which might tend to destroy this illusion must be done away with. Presto! It just did not exist.

  I found myself moving about in this foggy atmosphere even before the first sanity hearing. Fearing to be quoted, many in the Negro neighborhood of Live Oak avoided even the suspicion of having told anything to a newspaper representative by fleeing my very presence. Others loudly denounced Ruby McCollum for hav[ing] slain Dr. Adams to make sure that if “the White folks” [hear] anything that they said about the case at all, it would be pleasing to them.

  “Ruby (before August 3, they would not have dared to speak of her by her first name) had done killed the good-heartedest and the best White man in Suwannee County, if not the whole State of Florida. They won’t be doing her right unlessen they give her the chair.”

  “Ruby McCollum knowed better than to go messing around with that White man in the first place. She didn’t have no business with him. She knowed so well that she was a nigger. How come she couldn’t stay among her own race?”

  “I hope and pray that there ain’t no salvation for Ruby at all. Killing up that nice Dr. Adams. You could always go to him when you was in a tight for money and he sure would help you out. And if you didn’t have the change to pay him when he waited on you, he would scold at you and say, ‘Did I ask you for any money? I’m trying to get you well.’ And Ruby had to go and kill a nice man like that.”

  “No, Doc Adams never dunned nobody for money at all. You could pay him when you was able to do so. Never heard of him bearing down on nobody because they owed him money.”