My name is L. Lamar Wilson, La Roy Lamar Wilson.

I was born in Mariana, Florida in Jackson County Hospital, specifically.

I'm Ben Montgomery.

I've spent 20 years as a newspaper reporter, most recently at the Tampa Bay Times.

So Mariana, of course, is a county seat and it is a picture postcard southern town.

If you drove down Lafayette Street, which is the main street, you would drive between

low-slung, well-kept, main street businesses.

But as soon as you escape the city limits, you're in the real south, you're in rural Florida,

you're driving through some marshland and driving through cotton fields.

You get to see the absolute, gorgeous natural beauty that people travel around the world

to get to.

You go to retreats to get to.

That was every day.

I could walk in my backyard and see nothing but green at night.

The stars, so many stars.

My idea of Florida all growing up in Oklahoma and going to school in Arkansas and living

for a bit in Texas and New York, the idea of Florida was the ideal of Florida.

It was like Disney World and Sugar Sand beaches and retirees and everyone's happy and pastel

colors and Hawaiian shirts.

I never really thought of Florida as like the south.

In the last century, one of the most infamous lynchings in America happened in my town,

Mariana, Florida.

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