1954 Ebony Magazine - Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation

The Strange Case of Ruby McCollum
by William Bradford Huie
Startling inside story behind love slaying of prominent Florida
state senator by rich Negro woman who mothered his baby
revealed by noted author, who helped win her a new trial.
Dr. Clifford Adams
As Published in
EBONY MAGAZINE,
November 1954
Ruby McCollum
BASED ON
"Ruby McCollum, Woman
in the Suwannee Jail"
By William Bradford Huie
Most American Negros, I suppose, are aware of the Ruby McCollum case.
The Negro press, despite cruel handicaps, has tried to report it. It is the most
interesting sexual murder case now pending in the nation’s courts. It involves
the murder of the most prominent white man ever slain by a colored woman in a
Southern community It will one day be recognized as a landmark in interracial
sexual relations in the South. Yet, strangely, the case has been all but ignored by
the white press. I am the only white reporter who has evidenced enough interest
to dig into it; and my interest is due entirely to my friend, the Negro writer, Zora
Neale Hurston.
In 1953, while I was still conducting television programs in New York, Miss
Hurston wrote me that there was truth that needed telling in Suwannee County,
Florida and that I, as a conservative white Southerner of many generations, might
be able to break down the walls and tell it.
So on January 9, 1954, after I had completed the book, The Execution of Private
Slovik, I drove from my home in Alabama to Live Oak, Florida, and began
tearing at the walls. I have now devoted six months, thousands of miles of travel,
and many dollars to the case. I have been threatened, shot at, and accused by the
Ku Klux of being married to a wife who is “part nigger.” I have engaged in a
bitter, expensive, and as yet unsuccessful court battle just to win the right to
talk with Ruby McCollum: no reporter has ever been allowed to see her. I have
helped win for her a second trial; and a few weeks after this trial is over, I will
publish a book on the case.
Meanwhile, especially for EBONY, here is a portion of the story.
Rear entrance of Dr. Adams office was where Negro
patients came and where Ruby watched for chance to
enter and empty the gun at the doctor who fathered
her child, Loretta, and her expectant child.
The story begins with four pistol shots on a humid Sunday morning in Live Oak, Suwannee County,
Florida. Sunday, August 3, 1952. 11:34 a.m.
Of themselves, pistol shots are not unusual in Suwannee County. What made these particular shots unusual
were the time, place and characters involved.
These four shorts were fired on a Sunday morning, a time when most everybody in the county is expected
to be in a Baptist or Methodist church.
They were fired in tobacco season, the one time of year when most everybody has some money and therefore
might be expected to feel less frustrated, less inclined toward mutilation.
They were fired in a doctor’s office….a place where pain generally is relieved, not inflicted; where death is
fended off, not imposed.
These shots were fired into the fat, pot-bellied, six-foot two inch, 270 pound body of the busiest doctor in
the county: Dr. Clifford LeRoy Adams, Jr.
The doctor was “the biggest man in the county,” powerful, a grandson of wealth and power. He had just been
elected to the state senate by a landslide; he had just returned from the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago, he was “gonna be governor, sure.”
Most pistol shots are fired by men in Suwannee County; these were fired by a woman. A Negro woman.
But not by a young, hot-tempered, alluring girl, maddened by jealousy, avarice, or outrage. They were fired
by a 37-year-old, mature, black, educated, not particularly attractive, rich housewife, Ruby McCollum. Ruby
was the wife of Sam McCollum, the quiet, respected, cunning, and rich gambler, farmer, and businessman.
The shots were fired in the doctor’s office directly across the street from the Suwannee County courthouse
and jail. They were fired within eighty yards of the white Methodist Church and the first shot came at the
instant the Methodists begun taking communion.
In short, the richest and most sober Negro housewife in the county was murdering the biggest, most humane,
and most ambitious white doctor-politician, on a Sunday morning, in tobacco season, in the shadow of the
courthouse, the jail, and the church: and she was killing him while three other Negro women waited in his
office for his ministrations.
Moreover, these pistol shots were not fired pow-pow-pow-pow in quick succession. The first two came fast,
followed by a three-minute interval, then the third shot, another interval, and finally, the fourth shot. This
last bullet had to be dug out of the floor. Entering the back, it had passed through the thick chest, indicating
that for the coup de grace Ruby had been poised directly over the body which was sprawled, face down, on
the floor of the colored waiting room.
It was a crime of fury: deliberate, pre-mediated murder: what the police call the M.O. – the mode of
operation – or a scorned woman. A crime to terrorize a bi-racial community of four thousand white and
colored souls. When, at 11:48, the Reverend E. Nash Philpot announced to the Methodist communicants:
“A member of this church, Dr. LeRoy Adams, has just been assassinated by a Negress.” the reaction was a
stunned, one-voiced, congregational “Noooooo!”
McCollum Home Second Finest in County
THE HOME of Sam and Ruby McCollum is said to be the second
finest in Suwannee County. A two-story, yellow stucco, it stands
a block off Highway 90 on the western edge of Live Oak…about
three blocks from the modest, buff-brick bungalow of Doctor
Adams. On two sides the McCollum home is surrounded by a
high bamboo hedge, and on the street side, there is a three-foot
brick wall.
On that Sunday morning, “Bolita Sam” McCollum, 47, went to the
Colored Baptist Church with his oldest daughter, Kay 11. The only
son, Sam Jr., was away, attending the University of California at Los
Angeles.
The nine room, yellow stucco house of Ruby and Sam McCollum
was a showplace of Negro residential section. Immediately after
the shooting the house was completely vacated because of
bombing threats by whites in town.
Sam’s distinguishing feature was his gray eyes. Gray eyes are so rare
among Negros they are startling, and Sam’s eyes, set in a dark brown
face, made him look like what he was: a quiet peaceful, but unusually keen man. He and Ruby had been born
in the farm community of Zuber, near Ocala, Florida. They had spent some years around New York, had
come to Live Oak in 1937 with $700 and an old car. Now they were rich: Sam was the bolita and Cuban
king in several counties; he had one of the largest tobacco acreage allotments in Florida; he was a director
of the Central Life Insurance Company in Tampa.
Sam McCollum knew how to play “the good nigger” with white men: he knew which ones to trust, which
ones to avoid, which ones to pay off.
After Sam had left for church, Ruby put on a neat, brown dress and tan shoes. She was nervous. Ruby is a
little woman – five one – but she was taking on weight: she was four months pregnant. Twice during the past
six months, she had been in a Jacksonville hospital for psychiatric treatment: depression and hypochondria.
During the night she had decided to kill the doctor.
She selected a tan, leather shoulder bag and put the pistol in it: a nickeled, .32 Smith & Wesson. In the
bag, also, were nineteen $100 bills.
A problem for Ruby was her two younger children, Sonja, 7, and the baby, Loretta, 10 months. There was
no one to stay with them. So Ruby dressed them, and carrying one and leading the other, she put them in
the back seat of the car – a blue, two-toned Chrysler sedan. Then she drove to the doctor’s office and parked
in the alley, from which the colored entrance led into the colored waiting room. The white entrance and
white waiting room were on the street; in addition to the two waiting rooms, the office contained the usual
five or six treatment rooms for both white and colored.
Once she had parked in the alley, Ruby’s movements were observed by a colored youth who was sitting in
a truck in which he had brought two injured patients to the doctor.
Ruby got out of the car almost immediately and began a series of trips to the screen door at the colored
entrance. She was hoping to catch the doctor alone. A dozen times in forty minutes, she walked the fifty
feet from the car to the screen door, peered inside, counted the waiting patients, her head bobbing up and
down as she counted, then back to the car where she stood at the side, checked on the two children, examined
the contents of the bag, then to the door to count again. Finally, through there were still three women in
the waiting room, she went in.
The doctor was visible to her, standing alone, whistling,
in a treatment room, the sleeves of his white shirt
rolled up. Ruby walked to him, and there was a brief,
bitter exchange.
Ruby snapped that she was tired of paying money that
she didn’t owe. The doctor replied that, by God, he
was going to get his, even if he had to go to the judge.
“Yeah, you’re gonna get yours, all right”, Ruby said.
The home of Dr. Adams was simple, part of his attempt to play the role of
“common man.”
She opened the bag, demanded a receipt, and handed him a $100 bill.
“I don’t write no receipts,” he said. Then: “Woman, I’m god-damned tired of you!” He turned his back and
stepped toward the door leading into the colored waiting room. That was his mistake.
Ruby dug into the bag again and fired twice. The doctor’s towering body fell full length through the door
and partially into the waiting room. The three patients stampeded into the alley, screaming for the police.
Deliberately, Ruby came closer. She pumped another bullet into him. She came directly over him and
pulled the trigger several times. The gun fired once more, then began snapping: it had held only four shells.
Ruby then walked out, slammed the back door so that the spring lock engaged, started her car and drove
rapidly home. She left the doctor dead, that $100 bill clutched fiercely in his left hand.
At home Ruby heated milk for the baby, changed her dress, and waited for the law to arrive:
representatives of the city police, the sheriff’s office and the highway patrol. These perplexed gentlemen
all knew Ruby; they treated her with courtesy. She conferred privately with one of them in an upstairs
bathroom, and from the window, pointed to the bamboo hedge where she had thrown the pistol. Some
of these men had “had dealings” with Sam, and were fearful of the turn of events.
When Ruby, ready to leave, pointed out that there still was no one to stay with the children, one cop
stood by until Sam returned. The others loaded Ruby into a police car and drove her to the state
penitentiary at Raiford, fifty miles away. (Somewhere between the bathroom conference and the prison,
Ruby’s other eighteen $100 bills disappeared.)
Events then followed with the swiftness of Greek tragedy. Sam hurried home from church, where he
had gotten the news. Hastily, he gathered such of his goods as he could reach under the circumstances:
$85,000 in cash, stuffed in a suitcase. With his money, and the three daughters he drove to Ruby’s
mother’s home near Ocala; and there, next day, 28 hours after Ruby had pistoled the doctor, “Bolita
Sam” died of his bad heart. His funeral, in country churchyard, was a tremendous occasion; for Sam had
been a “damn good fellow”, and like all smart numbers men, he at one time or other , must have delivered
a Christmas gift to every Negro grandmother in North Florida.
During Sunday afternoon, crowds gathered in the streets of Live Oak to
whisper…and hate….and feel fear…and to view the pool of blood. The doctor
had been a pig fancier: he had bled like one of his prize Hampshire boars.
The doctor’s funeral, according to the Suwannee Democrat, was “the largest
in the history of the county.” Throngs of “pore folks”, both white and
colored, came to mourn their benefactor…the great and good man…shot in the
back by an infuriated woman while he was trying to relieve pain. As active
pallbearers, members of the state highway patrol added military atmosphere.
“Doctor Adams was the only doctor this county ever had that a pore man
could send word to and then know that the doctor was coming.”
“He pulled me through pneumonia…came to see me five times in one night…
and I could never pay him nothing.”
“When that woman killed him, she robbed pore folks, whites and niggers
both, of the best friend they’ll ever have.”
The courthouse in Live Oak is across the street from
Dr. Adams’ office. It’s where Ruby was tried and given
the death sentence for killing the father of her child.
The Democrat’s editorial portrayed the doctor as a combination of Jesus Christ, Hippocrates, and
Franklin Roosevelt. Only 44, he had been cut down just when he was reaching the peak of his career,
both medically and politically.
In prison Ruby’s nervous system almost collapsed under the falling wreckage. She was alone, friendless.
The hand of every white person was against her, as well as the hand of most every colored person. No
representative of any Negro organization came to see her. And why should they? How could her crime
be defended? Hers was no case, at least to that point, of cruel, racial injustice. Ruthless, bullet-in-theback murder!
Sam’s only brother, Buck McCollum, an invalid but even richer than Sam, drove from Fort Myers and
began the effort to obtain counsel.
(Buck, too, was to die in November, 1953). No lawyer near
Suwannee County would touch the case; only a few “city lawyers” from Jacksonville. Finally, Ruby had
a lawyer, but today he is under federal sentence for using the mails to defraud. The second was disbarred
during the course of the trial. Her fourth and present lawyer, Frank Cannon, of Jacksonville, is able
and honest, but he came into the case while the trial was under way. To date, $36,000 has been paid out
for counsel.
At the trial the lawyers felt helpless. They tried only to disprove pre-medication in the hope of escaping the death
penalty. They maintained that Ruby “had no idea of killing the doctor when she went to the office.” Ruby was the
only defense witness, and she was a poor one. She sat listlessly, forlornly, in the witness chair, a broken little woman
whose feet wouldn’t touch the floor.
She was allowed to state that “more than a doctor-patient relationship” existed between her and Doctor Adams; that
they had had sexual relations at her home and in his office for several years; that her youngest child, Loretta, was
his; that she had been pregnant by him at the time of the murder. The defense was not allowed to present the child
to the court.
There was small chance that the all-white jury would believe this, or indeed regard it as a mitigating circumstances.
This small chance was destroyed by Ruby herself when she testified that she had shot the doctor because he tried to
“force” her to have sexual relations; in his office he had ordered her and then tried to throw her on a surgical table
for intercourse. This testimony completely at variance with the account given by the three colored women in the
waiting room and illogical from every point of view, had the effect of impeaching her entire story.
The verdict was foregone: the chair.
Ruby McCollum was just a woman who had gotten mad at the size of a bill for medical services; and in her unjustified
wrath she had killed the great and good doctor. That was to be the end of the story. The Democrat, only paper
published in the country, never mentioned an “sex testimony” out of respect for the doctor’s widow.
Leaving the courthouse after the death sentence was pronounced, Ruby McCollum is led through a live Oak street by Deputy Elwood Howard (left).
Town square in Live Oak, Florida is typical of the South. Ruby’s first lawyers were from Jacksonville because no local lawyer would take the case.
Fear Grips Suwannee County
WHEN I ARRIVED in Live Oak, Ruby had been in the Suwannee jail l8 months; her case had been appealed. I
probably would have stayed two days, talked with a few people, then driven on to other stories except for the
strange reaction to my presence. First was the pitiful unreasoning fear that came to so many faces, both white and
colored, when I mentioned the case. I have never seen such tear outside the iron curtain. On the second day the
sheriff came to my motel to investigate and see if there was some way he could drive me out of town. The doctor’s
mother telephoned her hysterical threats. And, strangest of all, when I went to the jail to see Ruby, I was denied
the right to talk with her during visiting hours.
This had never happened to me before; and as far as my attorneys can determine, it is unprecedented in American
history. The sheriff told me I had to see Circuit Judge Hal W. Adams, who had presided at the trial. (No relation
to the doctor). To meet Judge Adams is a startling experience, even for a Southerner. Startling because you
had assumed that he had been dead for forty years. The big black hat, tobacco juice, string tie, black suit, long
underwear, high-topped shoes-and the racial attitudes of Reconstruction.
In the name of not “embarrassing this community,” Judge Adams is devoting himself to sending Ruby Mc Collum
to the chair without ever allowing a writer to talk with her! (Judge Adams was an honorary pallbearer at Doctor
Adams’ funeral,)
I had no choice but to accept this challenge; meanwhile, I had become fascinated with the characters of the three
principals in the case: Sam, Ruby and LeRoy Adams.
Here I can deal only with the “sex story” of these complex people.
Sam, sexually, at least, was the simplest of the three. He had the least formal education. He was a good man. He
worked hard. He was devoted to his family and to his Baptist church. He loved his home. He trusted Ruby; he
was proud of her. He valued her judgment. Far more than most men, he consulted her on business matters.
But Sam was “human,” No southern gentleman with a white skin was ever more devoted to the double standard of
morality. He was no man to concede that what is proper for the gander may also be proper for the goose.
Sam was a gambler…he had to mix with people. So by the time Ruby was 35, Sam was an experienced grazer
in fresher pastures. He was discriminating…but active.
To understand Sam’s mode of operation, I talked with a white man who had run the filling station where
Sam, for many years, sent his farm trucks and other automobiles for service. This white man had befriended
Sam’s father, and Sam never forgot it.
“Sam McCollum was the finest nigger who ever lived,” this man told me. “He was as good as his word. Of
course he never did much business with banks-all cash. Every month or so Sam would stop by and pass the
time of day and ask how much he owed. I’d tell him….maybe it would be $153.80. He wouldn’t pay me; he
never looked at tickets, he’d just jot down the figure. Next day Ruby’d drive up and say: “You got them
tickets, Mr. Smith?’ I’d get them for her, and she’d hand me the money: she had it all counted out.
“But Ruby only paid for the regular tickets. Sam had another woman – a sharp-looking one, too. When this
gal’d come in, I’d put whatever she bought on a special ticket and just mark a cross on it. Then I’d hold these
tickets in a cigar box, and Sam would pay for them personally.
“I’d laugh at old Sam. Every time he paid this gal’s tickets, he’d complain about how much she was spending.
‘Mr. Smith’, he’d say, ‘see if you can’t make this gal cut down! She drives that car more’n any woman I ever
saw! One day she came in and wanted a set of tires. I let her have them, and when old Sam yelled about it,
I told him I would have protected him but that she got the tires from my assistant while I was away from
the station.”
That was Bolita Sam. He was a devoted husband and father. But he earnestly believed that a time comes
in every good marriage when Mama ought to expend her energies in counting out most of the money, in
looking after the children, and working for the church. It’s Papa who travels
in the “outside world.”
But the roof was to fall on Sam. When Ruby’s last child, Loretta, “came
white”, Sam reacted like every cuckold since Cain, the groaned like he had
been kicked in the stomach.
One of Sam’s women, a smart widow, told me: “Sam was sure broken up. He
came here the next night to tell me about it. ‘I just can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘I
never thought Ruby’d do it to me!”
As for Ruby, her problem was described to me by several knowledgeable
colored women in the Suwannee dialect:
“Maybe Ruby just couldn’t help herself, the way Sam used to run the hog over
her with all them chippies. You look out the window a whole heap when you
live in a big house. You done got so you don’t love no more.
“That warmship her and the doctor had between ‘em brought on all this here
trouble. Her and him must’a took that day they started for a gleam-made day.
Loretta, the youngest of three daughters, “came white”
with a marked resemblance to Dr. Adams.
I reckon Ruby took to the doctor real tight and close and thought she was walkin’ along mingled up with
the beautiful riddles of the world.” Ruby was better educated than Sam, a graduate of Fessenden Academy
at Ocala. She thought she was better’n other folks, uppity, a little arrogant.
Most 35-year-old housewives find it unpleasant to be sexually neglected. But to be rich, arrogant, and also
neglected is unbearable for a Ruby McCollum. Moreover, Sam, on occasion, “took her down a peg.”
At intervals, Sam, good business man that he was, entertained his best “writers” in his fine home. Ruby didn’t
like this: uncouth “writers” getting drunk, messing up her house. The night came when one of them vomited
on her best rug; and Sam ordered Ruby to clean it up.
Ruby burned under the insult: rich, educated, proud, neglected, her husband bedding down with cotton patch
hussies! And now ordering her to clean up after drunken bums!
Ruby’s ego needed nourishment. Adams was a big shot, headed for the governor’s chair. When he extended
an “examination” in her upstairs bedroom, it is unlikely that Ruby’s resistance was more than token.
Adams Posed as ‘Pore Man’s Doctor’
THIS ADAMS was a strangely warped personality: Ruby could not have chosen a more lethal playmate. His
grandfather was Frank Adams, a skinflint who made a fortune out of Sea Island cotton, 12 per cent interest, and
political finagling. His father and mother was fatuous folk in Jasper, just north of Live Oak: they pretended
wealth, lorded it over simple people with big cars and diamonds, though, they bankrupted for $80,000.
The doctor came along in the depression, worked on WPA. After being defeated
for sheriff of Hamilton County in 1936, he wrangled a pharmacist’s certificate
and worked his way through medical school in Little Rock, Arkansas. He lived
hard; he forged his letters of recommendation to med school; he was last in his
class; he was fired from drug stores after cash register irregularities, his wife
helped run a rooming house to cut the rent. In 1945 he set up in Live Oak,
determined to “make a million dollars and be governor of Florida.”
He regarded the practice of medicine as a “hobby”…a means of his political and
financial ends. Therefore, the legend of his being the “pore man’s doctor” was
soundly based. Possessed of limitless energy, he could go all night; and those
patients who could never pay anyway, he airily excused with a clap on the back.
If they couldn’t pay, they could, at least, vote for him! (If only Huey Long had
been a doctor instead of a flour salesman!)
He had the “common touch”….the big, hearty, bejowled healer who could “talk
you into feeling good.” He craftily wore holes in his socks, sat down and ate in
the humblest shack. He was called the “shot doctor” who could treat 135 patients
a day.
Dr. Adams was a big man in physique as well as
politically in Suwannee County.
He didn’t need to examine you; he could look at you and divine your aliment, shoot you, and send you away
rejoicing.
He boasted that for every dollar he made practicing medicine, he made ten “on the outside”. How he made
these outside dollars is a story in itself. The psychiatrists have fancy words to describe him, meaning that
once the shades were drawn, he didn’t figure that any of the rules applied to him. (The government indicted
him in ’49 for submitting fraudulent bills to the Veterans Administration.)
The legend – and the doctor himself – said that he had tubfuls of money and that he didn’t give a damn about
money. And this being accepted as true, the average white person in Suwannee County could never believe
that the doctor would touch Ruby.
But some of the legend about Adams is fading and some of his friends becoming disillusioned. One is
LeVergne Blue, owner of the Blue Lodge. Blue is 68; he came down from Illinois many years ago; he lives
alone back of his motel; he has no close relatives; he is worth in excess of $150,000. Dr. Adams was his
physician and friend; the doctor often ate at the lodge; Blue was one of the sorrowing honorary pallbearers
at the vast funeral.
But the roof was to fall on Blue. A few weeks after the funeral he learned that among the doctor’s papers was
Blue’s will, naming Dr. Adams as his sole heir. The will even gave Dr. Adams authority in the disposition
of Blue’s body. I obtained this will, circulated photostatic copies of it. Its effect – with all of its fiendish
implications – is shattering on simple, good people who have clung to the Adams legend. The doctor forged
this will: Blue’s “signature” is easily recognized both as a forgery and as Dr. Adams’ own handwriting.
Moreover, in order to simplify probation, the doctor took the calculated risk of telling at least three persons,
including his own lawyer, that he had the will – that he was Blue’s heir.
“This is a hard blow at my age.” Blue told me. “It’s the sort of disillusionment that really bowls you over.
Here I thought the doctor was my friend; I resented every attack on him; I gave him all respect and trust
you give your personal physician: I grieved at his grave. Yet he was a scoundrel, plotting my death. I owe
my life to Ruby McCollum. she’ll never go the chair if I can help it.”
But still why the love affair with Ruby? Without taking money into account, it just didn’t make sense!
Assuming that the doctor wanted a colored woman, why on earth would be select Ruby McCollum?
Ruby was a “little, fat, black, old housewife.” and the county was overrun with lithe, l8-year-old, high
yellows, all of them a cross between a mink and a muskrat!
Doc Adams and Ruby McCollum just didn’t figure. The explanation, of course, was
finance. Only those who knew who knew that the doctor would do anything for a
dollar could understand his affair with Ruby. He was a man who coveted a million
dollars and she was his richest patient.
The doctor knew of Sam’s bad heart; the doctor knew how Sam came to terms with
the political powers; so by possession Ruby the doctor could possess the little black
hen who laid the golden eggs.
Ruby discovered one other quirk in the doctor’s personality. She had thought that
she could play with him with no fear of pregnancy: he knew about diaphragms and
other contraceptive devices. But the doctor’s ego demanded that he sire colored
children as well as white ones. His grandfather had done it; why shouldn’t he?
Thus the bitter table was set for Ruby. The birth of the white child – the image of
Adams – created unbearable tensions for Ruby at home. She was no longer a wife.
This snapshot of Ruby was made in jail and
smuggled out by friends.
And, as a mistress, what satisfactions were left for her? What would happen to her
ego when she admitted that she had been “taken in” by a ruthless white man who despised her?
In the months following the birth of the white child, Ruby deteriorated as a human being. Her children
no longer looked so clean. Her house was not so well kept. Her church attendance lagged. When a
person spoke to her on the street, she, glassy-eyed, appeared not to notice. She fell into depression, and
hypochondria: too much concern with medicine and shots.
Only three paths were left for her. The first led to the “head doctor” and she traveled it. The second
lead to the Adams office on a Sunday morning with a Smith & Wesson in her shoulder bag. The third
path? It leads either to the electric chair or to the madhouse.
As one old Negro woman said to me: “The instant-minute she took up with the doctor, she should’a
knowed there was no salvation for her.”
For generations southern white men – and northern ones, too—have been able to enter the beds of
colored women with impunity. All pleasure and no pain; little cost and no risk. Ruby McCollum’s
pistol shots ended that happy era. Ruby put the boys on notice. From now on the pleasurers will still
be there, but pain will have to be risked. The colored woman, too, will assert her sovereign right to
neuroticism—and to try to relieve it with lead in the back.
There are still many puzzling questions about the Ruby McCollum case. The biggest revolves about
her unborn baby. Ruby was four months pregnant when she shot Doctor Adams. But in jail, before
the trial, there was either an abortion or a miscarriage. My information is that she suffered this ordeal
alone: that somebody figured she would die from it. Just how and why this abortion-or-miscarriage
came about remains one of the many unanswered questions.
•
Fifty years later, few people new the true story of Ruby
McCollum and Clifford Leroy Adams. The people of Live Oak do not
acknowledge the history, the court documents have all disappeared from
the Courthouse and no one welcomes questions on the subject.
Ruby rests in a simple grave in back of her Church while Dr. Adams is
buried about fifteen miles from her in Live Oaks Cemetery.