Is it real or already legendary? Will it pass to posterity for what it did, the ignominy that it helped reveal, or rather for the fiction that this story inspired, now installed in the pinnacle of the contemporary American novel. When we met anthropologist Erin Kimmerle in Seattle in February, she was there to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Scientific Freedom and Accountability Award. On the occasion of its annual congress, the most important learned society in the country wished to reward its discovery, a few years earlier, of dozens of anonymous and undeclared graves at the Dozier School for Boys, a correctional house in the State of Florida.
Monday, May 4, however, it was in the fiction category that "the school" hit the headlines. African-American author Colson Whitehead honored with Pulitzer Prize for literature The Nickel Boys (ed. Doubleday, soon to be published in French), a story freely inspired by the terrifying history of this establishment for lost boys. The scientist makes an appearance there, in the prologue, in the guise of Professor Carmine. But it was indeed his various reports, full of details, and the stubborn work accomplished over several years with his students at the University of South Florida (USF) who provided the novelist with the raw material for his story.
In the mass graves of the Balkans
Let's face it, we gave in to the cliché. And pained to detect behind the smiling blonde woman with azure eyes and destroyed jeans, seated in a large hotel in Seattle, Dozier's "pit bull", the one who for seven years did not give up in the face of particularly recalcitrant administrations. No doubt her opponents also underestimated the fighter and her thin voice. From her "mouth", or rather from the earth and the past that she has never stopped digging, came out nothing less than fifty-five corpses. Fifty-five young boys, mostly black, to whom she has given, if not a name, at least a body.
Erin Kimmerle's dead bodies had already been the subject of his life. A young graduate, she left for the Balkans. In Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, she exhumed mass graves, already opposing local authorities and clan reflexes. Back in the United States, the daughter of Minnesota, of northern descent – "A Lebanese grandmother, anyway" -, lands at the USF. Police, prosecutors or forensic experts call on his talents, especially when a cold case revives their interest. "It’s incredible the number of unsolved homicides in this country, she explains. And, in some cases, science can be invaluable in solving them, even forty years later. "
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