Zora Neale Hurston's Final Decade

5. Death on the Suwannee: Live Oak, 1952–1953

115 5 deAth on the suwAnnee Live Oak, 1952–1953 The dumbest thing a woman can do is to refuse to fade out of the picture when the man is through with her. . . . She was a woman terribly in love, and with us females, that makes strange and terrible creatures of us. The facts surrounding the McCollum trial had all the elements of a best-selling novel: forbidden love, deep betrayal, insatiable greed, political corruption, bizarre revelations, and bloody murder. Hurston accepted the Pittsburgh Courier’s offer out of a need for cash, but she was also drawn by a genuine fascination with the “dramatics of the case and the varied play of human emotions.”1 The defendant, Ruby McCollum, was a 37-year-old mother of four who was married to “Bolita Sam” McCollum, the wealthiest black man in town. Sam and Ruby had made a fortune running a wildly popular and profitable (albeit illegal) numbers game called bolita (Spanish for “little ball”), a forerunner of today’s lotto. The game had been popular since 1942, when it had found its way to the United States from Cuba. By 1950, it had become a statewide obsession and a powerful source of wealth for those associated with its operation. The murder victim, 44-year-old Dr. Clifford Leroy Adams, was a husband and father, a shrewd politician, a state legislator-elect, and by all accounts the most popular physician in Suwannee County. The tall pot-bellied physician, whom Hurston described as “a broad-shouldered six-footer with magnificence of body,” had been Ruby’s lover for six years and had fathered her one-year-old daughter Loretta.2 Ruby 116 … Zora Neale Hurston’s Final Decade also claimed to be pregnant with their second child at the time of the murder. Ultimately, due largely to Hurston’s insight and perseverance, Dr. Adams was exposed as an incompetent physician who was himself capable of murder as well as profound cruelty and greed. Ruby McCollum shot Dr. Adams on August 3, 1952, a quiet Sunday morning. After making his hospital rounds, Adams went to his office across the street from the Suwannee County Courthouse to see a few waiting patients. Shortly afterward, Ruby pulled her blue two-tone Chevy into the alley near the colored entrance behind his office. With her two young children, Loretta and Sonya, in the back seat, nineteen $100 bills in her purse, and a nickel-plated .32 caliber Smith and Wesson pistol in her brown shoulder bag, she paced outside his office , waiting to catch the doctor alone. After a few hours, unwilling to wait any longer, Ruby entered his office and burst into an examination room to confront him.3 According to witnesses, Ruby gave Dr. Adams a $100 bill, demanded a receipt, and bitterly complained that she was tired of paying him money that she didn’t owe. In response, Adams insisted that she owed him more than $100 and said that he was damn well going to get what was coming to him. With his last words still hanging in the air, Adams turned away from Ruby and walked toward the waiting room, where three women were waiting to be seen. As soon as the doctor’s back was turned, Ruby assured him that he was in fact going to get what was coming to him. With the wrath of a woman scorned, she removed the gun from her purse and shot Adams three times as he fell to the floor and once more when he hit it.4 When the shots were fired, the three horrified women in the waiting room bolted into the alley screaming for help. With the gun still smoking in her hand and the $100 bill still clutched in his, Ruby stepped over her former lover, got into her car, and drove home. With zombie-like motions she changed her dress, fed her baby, and calmly waited for the sheriff and his deputies to arrive.5 White resident Laura Helventon, who was in her early teens at the time, was with her family in the Methodist church next door to Dr. Adams’s office when the murder took place. “After the shots rang out, Death on the Suwannee: Live Oak, 1952–1953 … 117 everyone was shocked and scared. The Reverend Philpot refused to allow anyone to leave the church until the source of the gunfire was determined...