Silencing Ruby McCollum

Above image copyright 2004 by C. Arthur Ellis, Jr., Ph.D.

Zora Hurston was the first to write that Ruby McCollum's story was veiled in silence, with townspeople either ashamed or afraid to tell what they knew about the relationship between Dr. Adams and Ruby McCollum. When asked about the murder, townspeople recited a predictable litany of "she shot him over her doctor bill." Even on the witness stand, McCollum could not freely testify through the objections of the prosecuting attorney, so her statements regarding Dr. Adams' abuse of her and his forcing her to have his child could not be explored to the extent that they would be in today's courtroom to establish self-defense.

Tammy Evans, as part of her doctoral research, published The Silencing of Ruby McCollum, which analyzes the texts surrounding the affair to suggest that an imposed code of silence demands not only the construction of an official story but also the transformation of a community’s citizens into agents who will reproduce and perpetuate this version of events, improbable and unlikely though they may be. (Dr. Evans' book may be purchased through Amazon).

On the issue of Hurston's observation of the curtain of silence surrounding Ruby McCollum's involvement with Dr. Adams, the following is from my manuscript, Zora Hurston And The Strange Case Of Ruby McCollum (material copyrighted 2008 by C. Arthur Ellis, Jr., Ph.D.)

Afterword

After the Suwannee Democrat’s building and archives were burned to the ground by an arsonist on October 19, 1995, the October 25 edition, published from a remote facility, proudly proclaimed, “Down—But Not Out!” with the slug line “History burns with half a block of Live Oak.”

History Burns. Those words reverberated in my brain until I realized why they bothered me: history cannot burn. Over the millennia, many people have believed that history can be destroyed in one way or another. In China, the “First Emperor” eradicated all references to his predecessors. In the Nile Valley, pharaohs had the names of earlier rulers chiseled away from their statues and tombs. Often entire groups of people, finding it too painful to face past injustices, find it easier to sweep them under the rug. Thus, we hear Turks denying the Armenian genocide, Japanese minimizing and euphemizing the Nanjing massacre, and people in America today denying the Nazi Holocaust—as if negating those gruesome chapters of history might make them disappear.

In Suwannee County, people take a different tack: they hope to destroy history not by doing or saying anything, but by starving it with silence. Some things, you understand, are simply not the subject of polite conversation. Some things could hurt people’s feelings, embarrass the community. Silence, it seems, will make things better, and eventually the unpleasant parts will go away.

I am reminded of my grandmother, who used to give us kids a nickel to sit quietly during the lightning storms that moved across north Florida each summer. Talking, she maintained, attracted the lightning, which could burn down the house.

While most folks in Suwannee County no longer believe that silence makes the lightning go away, they still cling to the notion that it can make history disappear—or at least make it more palatable.

But history is resilient. Embedded in myth and legend, folklore and song, it has survived ethnic purges and holocausts, wars, epidemics, and famine, passing down through the generations what is too important to be forgotten.

And a small part of that history, which we forget only at our peril, is the strange case of Ruby McCollum.