Gertrude’s yard, near the trailers of relatives.<\/p>\n
BEAUFORT IS A QUAINT TOWN,\u00a0lined with coastal cottages and Colonial homes. When I arrived, last fall, I drove 20 miles to Silver Dollar Road, where Melvin and Licurtis\u2019 family lives in dozens of trailers and wood-panelled houses, scattered under pine and gum trees.<\/p>\n
Melvin and Licurtis\u2019 mother, Gertrude, greeted me at her house and led me into her living room, where porcelain angels lined one wall. Gertrude is tough and quiet, her high voice muffled by tobacco that she packs into her cheek. People call her Mrs. Big Shit. \u201cIt\u2019s because I didn\u2019t pay them no mind,\u201d she told me. The last of Mitchell Reels\u2019 children to remain on the property, she is the family matriarch. Grandchildren, nieces and nephews let themselves into her house to pick up mail or take out her trash. Around dinnertime on the day I was there, the trickle of visitors turned into a crowd. Gertrude went into the kitchen, coated fish fillets with cornmeal and fried them for everyone.<\/p>\n
Her daughter Mamie told me that Melvin and Licurtis had revelled in the land as kids, playing among the inky eels and conch shells. In the evenings, the brothers would sit on the porch with their cousins, a rag burning to keep the mosquitoes away. On weekends, a pastor strode down the dirt street, robed in white, his congregants singing \u201cWade in the Water.\u201d Licurtis was a shy, humble kid who liked working in the cornfields. Melvin was his opposite. \u201cWhen the school bus showed up, when he come home, the crowd would come with him and stay all night,\u201d Gertrude said. When Melvin was 9, he built a boat from pine planks and began tugging it along the shore. A neighbor offered to teach him how to shrimp, and, in the summer, Melvin dropped nets off the man\u2019s trawler. He left school in the 10th grade; his catch was bringing in around a thousand dollars a week. He developed a taste for sleek cars, big jewelry and women, and started buying his siblings Chuck Taylors and Timberlands.<\/p>\n
Gertrude was the administrator of the estate. She\u2019d left school in the eighth grade and wasn\u2019t accustomed to navigating the judicial system, but after Mitchell\u2019s death she secured a court ruling declaring that the land belonged to his heirs. The judgment read, \u201cThe surviving eleven (11) children or descendants of children of Mitchell Reels are the owners of the lands exclusive of any other claim of any one.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gertrude in her living room overlooking the shoreline.<\/p>\n
In 1978, Gertrude\u2019s uncle Shedrick Reels tried to carve out for himself the most valuable slice of land, on the river. He used a legal doctrine called adverse possession, which required him to prove that he had occupied the waterfront for years, continuously and publicly, against the owners\u2019 wishes. Shedrick, who went by Shade and worked as a tire salesman in New Jersey, hadn\u2019t lived on Silver Dollar Road in 27 years. But he claimed that \u201ctenants\u201d had stood in for him \u2014 he had built a house on the waterfront in 1950, and relatives had rented it or run it as a club at various times since. Some figured that it was Shade\u2019s land. He also produced a deed that his father, Elijah, had given him in 1950, even though Mitchell, another of Elijah\u2019s sons, had owned the land at the time.<\/p>\n
Shade made his argument through an obscure law called the Torrens Act. Under Torrens, Shade didn\u2019t have to abide by the formal rules of a court. Instead, he could simply prove adverse possession to a lawyer, whom the court appointed, and whom he paid. The Torrens Act has long had a bad reputation, especially in Carteret. \u201cIt\u2019s a legal way to steal land,\u201d Theodore Barnes, a land broker there, told me. The law was intended to help clear up muddled titles, but, in 1932, a law professor at the University of North Carolina found that it had been co-opted by big business. One lawyer said that people saw it as a scheme \u201cwhereby rich men could seize the lands of the poor.\u201d Even Shade\u2019s lawyer, Nelson Taylor, acknowledged that it was abused; he told me that his own grandfather had lost a 50-acre plot to Torrens. \u201cFirst time he knew anything about it was when somebody told him that he didn\u2019t own it anymore,\u201d Taylor said. \u201cThat was happening more often than it ever should have.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitchell\u2019s kids and grandkids were puzzled that Shade\u2019s maneuver was legal\u2014they had Mitchell\u2019s deed and a court order declaring that the land was theirs. And they had all grown up on that waterfront. \u201cHow can they take this land from us and we on it?\u201d Melvin said. \u201cWe been there all our days.\u201d Gertrude\u2019s brother Calvin, who handled legal matters for the family, hired Claud Wheatly III, the son of one of the most powerful lawyers in town, to represent the siblings at a Torrens hearing about the claim. Gertrude, Melvin and his cousin Ralphele Reels, the only surviving heirs who attended the hearing, said that they left confident that the waterfront hadn\u2019t gone to Shade. \u201cNo one in the family thought at the end of the day that it was his land and we were going to walk away from it forever,\u201d Ralphele told me.<\/p>\n
WORRIED ABOUT PROTECTING HEIRS\u2019 PROPERTY OWNERS?<\/h3>\n
We made\u00a0a list of ways<\/a>\u00a0that families can protect themselves and describe legislative reforms that experts have proposed.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Wheatly told me a different story. In his memory, the Torrens hearing was chaotic, but the heirs agreed to give Shade, who has since died, the waterfront. When I pressed Wheatly, he conceded that not all the heirs liked the outcome, but he said that Calvin had consented. \u201cI would have been upset if Calvin had not notified them, because I generally don\u2019t get involved in those things without having a family representative in charge,\u201d he told me. He said that he never had a written agreement with Calvin \u2014 just a conversation. (Calvin died shortly after the hearing.) The lawyer examining Shade\u2019s case granted him the waterfront, and Wheatly signed off on the decision. The Reels family, though it didn\u2019t yet know it, had lost the rights to the land on the shoreline.<\/p>\n Licurtis had set up a trailer near the river a couple of years earlier, in 1977. He was working as a brick mason and often hosted men from the neighborhood for Budweiser and beans in the evenings. Melvin had become the center of a local economy on the shore. He taught the men how to work the water, and he paid the women to prepare his catch, pressing the soft crevice above the shrimps\u2019 eyes and popping off their heads. He had a son, Little Melvin, and in the summers his nephews and cousins came to the beach, too. One morning, he took eight of them out on the water and then announced that he\u2019d made a mistake: only four were allowed on the boat. He threw them overboard one by one. \u201cWe\u2019re thinking, We\u2019re gonna drown,\u201d one cousin told me. \u201cAnd he jumps off the boat with us and teaches us how to swim.\u201d<\/p>\n In 1982, Melvin and Gertrude received a trespassing notice from Shade. They took it to a lawyer, who informed them that Shade now legally owned a little more than 13 acres of the 65-acre plot. The family was stunned, and suspicious of the claim\u2019s validity. Many of the tenants listed to prove Shade\u2019s continuous possession were vague or unrecognizable, like \u201cMitchell Reels\u2019 boy,\u201d or \u201cJulian Leonard,\u201d whom Gertrude had never heard of. (She had a sister named Julia and a brother named Leonard but no memory of either one living on the waterfront.) The lawyer who granted the land to Shade had also never reported the original court ruling that Gertrude had won, as he should have done.<\/p>\n Shade\u2019s ownership would be almost impossible to overturn. There\u2019s a one-year window to appeal a Torrens decision in North Carolina, and the family had missed it by two years. Soon afterward, Shade sold the land to developers.<\/p>\n Melvin\u2019s club, Fantasy Island, still stands on the 13-acre plot that the Reels lost.<\/p>\n THE REELSES KNEW\u00a0that if condos or a marina were built on the waterfront the remaining 50 acres of Silver Dollar Road could be taxed not as small homes on swampy fields but as a high-end resort. If they fell behind on the higher taxes, the county could auction off their property. \u201cIt would break our family right up,\u201d Melvin told me. \u201cYou leave here, you got no more freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n This kind of tax sale has a long history in the dispossession of heirs\u2019 property owners. In 1992, the NAACP accused local officials of intentionally inflating taxes to push out black families on Daufuskie, a South Carolina sea island that has become one of the hottest real-estate markets on the Atlantic coast. Property taxes had gone up as much as 700% in a single decade. \u201cIt is clear that the county has pursued a pattern of conduct that disproportionately displaces or evicts African-Americans from Daufuskie, thereby segregating the island and the county as a whole,\u201d the NAACP wrote to county officials. Nearby Hilton Head, which as recently as two decades ago comprised several thousand acres of heirs\u2019 property, now, by one estimate, has a mere 200 such acres left. Investors fly into the county each October to bid on tax-delinquent properties in a local gymnasium.<\/p>\n In the upscale town of Summerville, South Carolina, I met Wendy Reed, who, in 2012, was late paying $83.81 in taxes on the lot she had lived on for nearly four decades. A former state politician named Thomas Limehouse, who owned a luxury hotel nearby, bought Reed\u2019s property at a tax sale for $2,000, about an eighth of its value. Reed had a year to redeem her property, but, when she tried to pay her debt, officials told her that she couldn\u2019t get the land back, because she wasn\u2019t officially listed as her grandmother\u2019s heir; she\u2019d have to go through probate court. Here she faced another obstacle: heirs in South Carolina have 10 years to probate an estate after the death of the owner, and Reed\u2019s grandmother had died 30 years before. Tax clerks in the county estimate that each year they send about a quarter of the people who try to redeem delinquent property to probate court because they aren\u2019t listed on the deed or named by the court as an heir. Limehouse told me, \u201cTo not probate the estate and not pay the taxes shouldn\u2019t be a reason for special dispensation. When you let things go, you can\u2019t blame the county.\u201d Reed has been fighting the case in court since 2014. \u201cI\u2019m still not leaving,\u201d she told me. \u201cYou\u2019ll have to pack my stuff and put me off.\u201d<\/p>\n FOR YEARS,\u00a0the conflict on Silver Dollar Road was dormant, and Melvin continued expanding his businesses. Each week, Gertrude packed two-pound bags of shrimp to sell at the farmers\u2019 market, along with petunias and gardenias from her yard. Melvin was also remodelling a night club, Fantasy Island, on the shore. He\u2019d decked it out with disco lights and painted it white, he said, so that \u201con the water it would shine like gold.\u201d<\/p>\n The majority of the property remained in the family, including the land on which Gertrude\u2019s house stood. But Licurtis had been building a home in place of his trailer on the contested waterfront. \u201cIt was the most pretty spot,\u201d he told me. \u201cI\u2019d walk to the water, and look at my yard, and see how beautiful it was.\u201d He\u2019d collected the signatures of other heirs to prove that he had permission, and registered a deed.<\/p>\n The Reels family began to believe that there was a conspiracy against them. They watched Jet Skis crawl slowly past in the river and shiny SUVs drive down Silver Dollar Road; they suspected that people were scouting the property. Melvin said that he received phone calls from mysterious men issuing threats. \u201cI thought people were out to get me,\u201d he said. Gertrude remembers that, one day at the farmers\u2019 market, a white customer sneered that she was the only thing standing in the way of development.<\/p>\n In 1986, Billie Dean Brown, a partner at a real-estate investment company called Adams Creek Associates, had bought Shade\u2019s waterfront plot sight unseen to divide and sell. Brown was attracted to the strength of the Torrens title, which he knew was effectively incontrovertible. When he discovered that Melvin and Licurtis lived on the property, he wasn\u2019t troubled. Brown was known among colleagues as Little Caesar \u2014 a small man who finished any job he started. In the early 2000s, he hired a lawyer: Claud Wheatly III. The man once tasked with protecting the Reels family\u2019s land was now being paid to evict them from it. Melvin and Licurtis saw Wheatly\u2019s involvement as a clear conflict of interest. Their lawyers tried to disqualify Wheatly, arguing that he was breaching confidentiality and switching sides, but the judge denied the motions.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, I met Wheatly in his office, a few blocks from the county courthouse. Tall and imposing, he has a ruddy face and a teal-blue stare. We sat under the head of a stuffed warthog, and he chewed tobacco as we spoke. He told me that he had no confidential information about the Reelses, and that he\u2019d never represented Melvin and Licurtis; he\u2019d represented their mother and her siblings. \u201cMelvin won\u2019t own one square inch until his mother dies,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 2004, Wheatly got a court order prohibiting the brothers from going on the waterfront property. The Reels family began a series of appeals and filings asking for the decree to be set aside, but judge after judge ruled that the family had waited too long to contest the Torrens decision.<\/p>\n Licurtis didn\u2019t talk about the case, and tried to hide his stress. But, Mamie told me, \u201cyou could see him wearing it.\u201d Occasionally, she would catch a glimpse of him pacing the road early in the morning. When he first understood that he could face time in jail for remaining in his house, he tried removing the supports underneath it, thinking that he could hire someone to wrench the foundation from the mud and move it elsewhere. Gertrude wouldn\u2019t allow him to go through with it. \u201cYou\u2019re not going with the house nowhere,\u201d she told him. \u201cThat\u2019s yours.\u201d<\/p>\n At 4 a.m. on a spring day in 2007, Melvin was asleep in his apartment above the club when he heard a boom, like a crash of thunder. He went to the shore and found that his trawler, named Nancy J., was sinking. Yellow plastic gloves, canned beans and wooden crab boxes floated in the water. There was a large hole in the hull, and Melvin realized that the boom had been an explosion. He filed a report with the sheriff\u2019s office, but it never confirmed whether an explosive was used or whether it was an accident, and no charges were filed. Melvin began to wake with a start at night, pull out his flashlight, and scan the fields for intruders.<\/p>\n By the time of the brothers\u2019 hearing in 2011, Melvin had lost so much weight that Licurtis joked that he could store water in the caverns by his collarbones. The family had come to accept that the dispute wasn\u2019t going away. If the brothers had to go to jail, they would. Even after the judge in the hearing found them guilty of civil contempt, Melvin said, \u201cI ain\u2019t backing down.\u201d Licurtis called home later that day. \u201cIt\u2019ll be all right,\u201d he told Gertrude. \u201cWe\u2019ll be home soon.\u201d<\/p>\n ONE OF THE MOST PERNICIOUS\u00a0legal mechanisms used to dispossess heirs\u2019 property owners is called a partition action. In the course of generations, heirs tend to disperse and lose any connection to the land. Speculators can buy off the interest of a single heir, and just one heir or speculator, no matter how minute his share, can force the sale of an entire plot through the courts. Andrew Kahrl, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, told me that even small financial incentives can have the effect of turning relatives against one another, and developers exploit these divisions. \u201cYou need to have some willing participation from black families \u2014 driven by the desire to profit off their land holdings,\u201d Kahrl said. \u201cBut it does boil down to greed and abuse of power and the way in which Americans\u2019 history of racial inequality can be used to the advantage of developers.\u201d As the Reels family grew over time, the threat of a partition sale mounted; if one heir decided to sell, the whole property would likely go to auction at a price that none of them could pay.<\/p>\n When courts originally gained the authority to order a partition sale, around the time of the Civil War, the Wisconsin Supreme Court called it \u201can extraordinary and dangerous power\u201d that should be used sparingly. In the past several decades, many courts have favored such sales, arguing that the value of a property in its entirety is greater than the value of it in pieces. But the sales are often speedy and poorly advertised, and tend to fetch below-market prices.<\/p>\n On the coast of North Carolina, I met Billy Freeman, who grew up working in the parking lot of his uncle\u2019s beachside dance hall, Monte Carlo by the Sea. His family, which once owned thousands of acres, ran the largest black beach in the state, with juke joints and crab shacks, an amusement park and a three-story hotel. But, over the decades, developers acquired interests from other heirs, and, in 2008, one firm petitioned the court for a sale of the whole property. Freeman attempted to fight the partition for years. \u201cI didn\u2019t want to lose the land, but I felt like everybody else had sold,\u201d he told me. In 2016, the beach, which covered 170 acres, was sold to the development firm for $1.4 million. On neighboring beaches, that sum could buy a tiny fraction of a parcel so large. Freeman got only $30,000.<\/p>\n Billy Freeman on a pier that remains in his family\u2019s possession.<\/p>\n The lost property isn\u2019t just money; it\u2019s also identity. In one case that I examined, the mining company PCS Phosphate forced the sale of a 40-acre plot, which contained a family cemetery, against the wishes of several heirs, whose ancestors had been enslaved on the property. (A spokesperson for the company told me that it is a \u201claw-abiding corporate citizen.\u201d)<\/p>\n Some speculators use questionable tactics to acquire property. When Jessica Wiggins\u2019 uncle called her to say that a man was trying to buy his interest in their family\u2019s land, she didn\u2019t believe him; he had dementia. Then, in 2015, she learned that a company called Aldonia Farms had purchased the interests of four heirs, including her uncle, and had filed a partition action. \u201cWhat got me was we had no knowledge of this person,\u201d Wiggins told me, of the man who ran Aldonia. (Jonathan S. Phillips, who now runs Aldonia Farms, told me that he wasn\u2019t there at the time of the purchase, and that he\u2019s confident no one would have taken advantage of the uncle\u2019s dementia.) Wiggins was devastated; the 18 acres of woods and farmland that held her great-grandmother\u2019s house was the place that she had felt safest as a child. The remaining heirs still owned 61% of the property, but there was little that they could do to prevent a sale. When I visited the land with Wiggins, her great-grandmother\u2019s house had been cleared, and Aldonia Farms had erected a gate. Phillips told me, \u201cOur intention was not to keep them out but to be good stewards of the property and keep it from being littered on and vandalized.\u201d<\/p>\n Last fall, Wiggins and her relatives gathered for the auction of the property on the courthouse steps in the town of Windsor. A bronze statue of a Confederate soldier stood behind them. Wiggins\u2019 cousin Danita Pugh walked up to Aldonia Farms\u2019 lawyer and pulled her deed out of an envelope. \u201cYou\u2019re telling me that they\u2019re going to auction it off after showing you a deed?\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m going to come out and say it. The white man takes the land from the black.\u201d<\/p>\n Hundreds of partition actions are filed in North Carolina every year. Carteret County, which has a population of 70,000, has one of the highest per-capita rates in the state. I read through every Carteret partition case concerning heirs\u2019 property from the past decade, and found that 42% of the cases involved black families, despite the fact that only 6% of Carteret\u2019s population is black. Heirs not only regularly lose their land; they are also required to pay the legal fees of those who bring the partition cases. In 2008, Janice Dyer, a research associate at Auburn University, published a study of these actions in Macon County, Alabama. She told me that the lack of secure ownership locks black families out of the wealth in their property. \u201cThe Southeast has these amazing natural resources: timber, land, great fishing,\u201d she said. \u201cIf somebody could snap their fingers and clear up all these titles, how much richer would the region be?\u201d<\/p>\n Mansions on land once owned by Freeman\u2019s family.<\/p>\n Thomas W. Mitchell, a property-law professor at Texas A&M University School of Law, has drafted legislation aimed at reforming this system, which has now passed in 14 states. He told me that heirs\u2019 property owners, particularly those who are African-American, tend to be \u201cland rich and cash poor,\u201d making it difficult for them to keep the land in a sale. \u201cThey don\u2019t have the resources to make competitive bids, and they can\u2019t even use their heirs\u2019 property as collateral to get a loan to participate in the bidding more effectively,\u201d he said. His law, the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, gives family members the first option to buy, sends most sales to the open market, and mandates that courts, in their decisions to order sales, weigh non-economic factors, such as the consequences of eviction and whether the property has historic value. North Carolina is one of eight states in the South that has held out against these reforms. The state also hasn\u2019t repealed the Torrens Act. It is one of fewer than a dozen states where the law is still on the books.<\/p>\n Last year, Congress passed the Agricultural Improvement Act, which, among other things, allows heirs\u2019 property owners to apply for Department of Agriculture programs using nontraditional paperwork, such as a written agreement between heirs. \u201cThe alternative documentation is really, really important as a precedent,\u201d Lorette Picciano, the executive director of Rural Coalition, a group that advocated for the reform, told me. \u201cThe next thing we need to do is make sure this happens with FEMA, and flood insurance, and housing programs.\u201d The bill also includes a lending program for heirs\u2019 property owners, which will make it easier for them to clear titles and develop succession plans. But no federal funding has been allocated for these loans.<\/p>\n THE FIRST TIME I MET\u00a0Melvin and Licurtis in the Carteret jail, Melvin filled the entire frame of the visiting-room window. He is a forceful presence, and prone to exaggeration. His hair, neatly combed, was streaked with silver. He didn\u2019t blink as he spoke. Licurtis had been given a diagnosis of diabetes, and leaned against a stool for support. He still acted like a younger brother, never interrupting Melvin or challenging his memory. He told me that, at night, he dreamed of the shore, of storms blowing through his house. \u201cThe water rising,\u201d Licurtis said. \u201cAnd I couldn\u2019t do nothing about it.\u201d He was worried about his mother. \u201cIf they took this land from my mama at her age, and she\u2019d been farming it all her life, you know that would kill her,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n The brothers were seen as local heroes for resisting the court order. \u201cThey want to break your spirits,\u201d their niece Kim Duhon wrote to them. \u201cGod had you both picked out for this.\u201d Even strangers wrote. \u201cWhen I was a kid, it used to sadden me that white folks had Radio Island, Atlantic Beach, Sea Gate and other places to swim, but we didn\u2019t!\u201d one letter from a local woman read. She wrote that, when she was finally taken to Silver Dollar Road, \u201cI remember seeing nothing but my own kind (Blk Folks!).\u201d<\/p>\n In North Carolina, civil contempt is most commonly used to force defendants to pay child support. When the ruling requires a defendant to pay money other than child support, a new hearing is held every 90 days. After the first 90 days had passed, Melvin asked a friend in jail to write a letter on his behalf. (Melvin couldn\u2019t read well, and he needed help writing.) \u201cI\u2019ve spent 91 days on a 90 day sentence and I don\u2019t understand why,\u201d the letter read. \u201cPlease explain this to me! So I can go home, back to work. Sincerely, Melvin Davis.\u201d The brothers learned that although Billie Dean Brown\u2019s lawyer had asked for 90 days, the court had decided that there would be no time restriction on their case, and that they could be jailed until they presented evidence that they had removed their homes. They continued to hold out. Brown wasn\u2019t demolishing their buildings while they were incarcerated, and so they believed that they still had a shot at convincing the courts that the land was theirs. That fall, Brown told the Charlotte\u00a0Observer<\/em>, \u201cI made up my mind, I will die and burn in hell before I walk away from this thing.\u201d When I reached Brown recently, he told me that he was in an impossible position. \u201cWe\u2019ve had several offers from buyers, but once they learned of the situation they withdrew,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A house that Melvin built, now wrecked, near the waterfront.<\/p>\n Three months turned into six, and a year turned into several. Jail began to take a toll on the brothers. The facility was designed for short stays, with no time outside, and nowhere to exercise. They couldn\u2019t be transferred to a prison, because they hadn\u2019t been convicted of a crime. Early on, Melvin mediated fights between inmates and persuaded them to sneak in hair ties for him. But over time he stopped taking care of his appearance and became withdrawn. He ranted about the stolen land, though he couldn\u2019t quite nail down who the enemy was: Shade or Wheatly or Brown, the sheriffs or the courts or the county. The brothers slept head to head in neighboring beds. \u201cMelvin would say crazy things,\u201d Licurtis told me. \u201cLay on down and go to sleep, wake up, and say the same thing again. It wore me down.\u201d Melvin is proud and guarded, but he told me that the case had broken him. \u201cI\u2019m not ashamed to own it,\u201d he said. \u201cThis has messed my mind up.\u201d<\/p>\n Without the brothers, Silver Dollar Road lost its pulse. Mamie kept her blinds down; she couldn\u2019t stand to see the deserted waterfront. At night, she studied her brothers\u2019 case, thumbing through the court files and printing out the definitions of words that she didn\u2019t understand, like \u201crescind\u201d and \u201ccontempt.\u201d She filled a binder with relatives\u2019 obituaries, so that once her brothers got out they would have a record of who had passed away. When Claud Wheatly\u2019s father died, she added his obituary. \u201cI kept him for history,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n Gertrude didn\u2019t have the spirit to farm. Most days, she sat in a tangerine armchair by her window, cracking peanuts or watching the shore like a guard. This winter, we looked out in silence as Brown\u2019s caretaker drove through the property. Melvin and Licurtis wouldn\u2019t allow Gertrude to visit them in jail. Licurtis said that \u201cit hurt so bad\u201d to see her leave.<\/p>\n Other members of the family \u2014 Melvin and Licurtis\u2019 brother Billy, their nephew Roderick and their cousin Shawn \u2014 kept trying to shrimp, but the river suddenly seemed barren. \u201cIt might sound crazy, but it was like the good Lord put a curse on this little creek, where ain\u2019t nobody gonna catch no shrimp until they\u2019re released,\u201d Roderick told me. Billy added, \u201cIt didn\u2019t feel right no more with Melvin and them not there, because we all looked out for one another. Some mornings, you didn\u2019t even want to go.\u201d<\/p>\n Debris on the beach.<\/p>\n Sheriff\u2019s deputies came to the property a few times a week, and they wouldn\u2019t allow the men to dock their boats on the pier. One by one, the men lost hope and sold their trawlers. Shawn took a job at Best Buy, cleaning the store for $11.50 an hour, and eventually moved to Newport, 30 miles southwest, where it was easier to make rent. Billy got paid to fix roofs but soon defaulted on the mortgage for his house on Silver Dollar Road. \u201cOne day you good, and the next day you can\u2019t believe it,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n Roderick kept being charged with trespassing, for walking on the waterfront, and he was racking up thousands of dollars in legal fees. He\u2019d recently renovated his boat \u2014 putting in an aluminum gas tank, large spotlights and West Marine speakers \u2014 but, without a place to dock, he saw no way to hold on to it. He found work cutting grass and posted his boat on Craigslist. A white man responded. They met at the shore, and, as the man paid, Roderick began to cry. He walked up Silver Dollar Road with his back to the river. He told me, \u201cI just didn\u2019t want to see my boat leave.\u201d<\/p>\n THE REELS BROTHERS\u00a0were locked in a hopeless clash with the law. One judge who heard their case likened them to the Black Knight in \u201cMonty Python and the Holy Grail,\u201d who attempts to guard his forest against King Arthur. \u201cEven after King Arthur has cut off both of the Black Knight\u2019s arms and legs, he still insists that he will continue to fight and that no one may pass \u2014 although he cannot do anything,\u201d the judge wrote, in an appeals-court dissent.<\/p>\n In February, nearly eight years after Melvin and Licurtis went to jail, they stood before a judge in Carteret to request their release. They were now 72 and 61, but they remained defiant. Licurtis said that he would go back on the property \u201cjust as soon as I walk out of here.\u201d Melvin said, \u201cI believe that land is mine.\u201d They had hired a new lawyer, who argued that it would cost almost $50,000 to tear down the brothers\u2019 homes. Melvin had less than $4,000 in the bank; Licurtis had nothing. The judge announced that he was releasing them. He warned them, however, that if they returned to their homes they\u2019d \u201cbe right back in jail.\u201d He told them, \u201cThe jailhouse keys are in your pockets.\u201d<\/p>\n When Licurtis came out, he folded over, as if his breath had been pulled out of him. Mamie wrapped her arms around his neck, led him to her car, and drove him home. When they reached Silver Dollar Road, she honked the horn all the way down the street. \u201cBack on Silver Dollar Road,\u201d Licurtis said, pines flickering by his window. \u201cMm-mm-mm-mm-mm.\u201d<\/p>\n Melvin spent his first afternoon shopping for silk shirts and brown leather shoes and a cell phone that talked to him. Old acquaintances stopped him \u2014 a man who thanked him for his advice about hauling dirt, a DJ who used to spin at Fantasy Island. While in jail, Melvin had been keeping up with his girlfriends, and 11 women called looking for him.<\/p>\n Melvin told me that he\u2019d held on for his family, and for himself, too. But away from the others his weariness showed. He acknowledged that he was worried about what would happen, his voice almost a whisper. \u201cThey can\u2019t keep on doing this. There\u2019s got to be an ending somewhere,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A few days later, Gertrude threw her sons a party, and generations of relatives came. The family squeezed together on her armchairs, eating chili and biscuits and lemon pie. Mamie gave a speech. \u201cWe gotta get this water back,\u201d she said, stretching her arms wide. \u201cWe gotta unite. A chain\u2019s only as strong as the links in it.\u201d The room answered, \u201cThat\u2019s right.\u201d The brothers, who were staying with their mother, kept saying, \u201cOnce we get this land stuff sorted out . . .\u201d Relatives who had left talked about coming back, buying boats and go-karts for their kids. It was less a plan than a fantasy \u2014 an illusion that their sense of justice could overturn the decision of the law.<\/p>\n Pine trees by the shore.<\/p>\n The brothers hadn\u2019t stepped onto the waterfront since they\u2019d been back. The tract was 100 feet away but out of reach. Fantasy Island was a shell, the plot around it overgrown. Still, Melvin seemed convinced that he would restore it. \u201cPut me some palm trees in the sand and build some picnic tables,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n After the party wound down, I sat with Licurtis on his mother\u2019s porch as he gazed at his house, which was moldy and gutted, its frame just visible in the purple dusk. He reminisced about the house\u2019s wood-burning heater, the radio that he\u2019d always left playing. He said that he planned to build a second story and raise the house to protect it from floods. He wanted a wraparound deck and big windows. \u201cI\u2019ll pour them walls solid all the way around,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019ll bloom again. Ain\u2019t going to be long.\u201d<\/p>\n 8 Years In Jail: The Reels Brothers spent Eight years in Jail for refusing to leave their land that was Family bought and owned land, one generation after Slavery. IN THE SPRING OF 2011,\u00a0the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Some people Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12068,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3,133,5,1124,1],"tags":[1126,1125],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10784"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12048,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10784\/revisions\/12048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Claud Wheatly III at his office.<\/p>\n
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