By Elizabeth Leland
eleland@charlotteobserver.com

“It will be a cold day in hell if they think they are going to put something on my granddaddy’s land that we know is ours,” says Billy Reels, photographed on the land with his mother, Gertrude. “All we ask is one thing: that we be heard by a jury.” Some friends have urged the Reels to accept their loss and move on, but they say they can’t. Photo by Mark Courtney.

BEAUFORT, N.C. -- Two brothers have been locked in jail for more than six months in this coastal town for defying a judge's order and refusing to abandon waterfront property their family lived on for 100 years.

The land lies at the end of a country road 20 miles from Beaufort, so remote that many days the loudest sounds are the sighing of the wind through the pines and the lapping of waves against the shore. It overlooks a scenic stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Pamlico Sound.

For 40 years, members of the Mitchell Reels family have been embroiled in a feud, first with a relative, then with businessmen who bought the 13.25 acres as an investment. The courts repeatedly have ruled against the family. In March, a judge ordered the two brothers held in contempt of court until they demolish or move their houses and agree never to return.

Unlike criminal contempt, which is designed to punish somebody for wrongdoing, civil contempt is designed to coerce the person into doing what a court has ordered. It is most commonly used in child support cases, and usually the person gives in.

The two brothers have refused.

"It's my land," Melvin Davis, 64, said in an interview in jail. "It's my business. My mother was born there, and my grandfather told me, 'Never give up the land.' "

Anita Earls, a former Charlotte attorney who once represented the family and now directs the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, said the dispute should serve as a cautionary tale for other African-American families. The coalition estimates that land owned by African-American farmers nationwide dropped from 19 million acres in 1910 to 1.5 million in 1997. In many cases, like this one, families lost their ancestral property in part because it was passed from generation to generation without a will, and the heirs could not prove they owned it.

Although members of the Reels family no longer hold legal title to the tract in Carteret County, Earls said that morally she believes they should. She believes they were wronged by their relative, then by several attorneys who failed to properly represent them and by the courts, which denied their appeals.

"What this land means to them," she said, "is life itself."

Except for an occasional fisherman, the property has remained empty since the brothers went to jail in March. Hurricane Irene flooded their abandoned houses in August and ripped apart the docks where they tied their boats.

Dean Brown of Garner, 76, one of the investors, said he has no immediate plans to sell or develop the land. He regrets buying it 25 years ago, but said that because of threats from members of the Reels family, "I made up my mind, I will die and burn in hell before I walk away from this thing."

"It's ours," he said, "but we can't occupy it. I've been called a racist. It's been said that I engaged in fraud. ... But 14 judges so far have ruled against them, and more judges in federal court. We have spent more on legal fees and taxes than we did on land."

Their ancestral land

A short drive inland on Silver Dollar Road is a small wooden church, Reels Chapel AME Zion. Behind the church is a gravestone with a photograph of a dapper-looking man dressed in a suit and tie and bowler hat. The story of the land begins with the man buried in that grave, Elijah Reels, who was born in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended.

In the years following the war, African-Americans bought up millions of acres, and Reels became part of that move toward economic independence. In 1911, he bought 65 acres in Carteret County, a low-lying, mosquito-infested piece of backwoods property that a poor black farmer could afford.

Elijah Reels farmed his land for 33 years, then lost it in January 1944 to back taxes.

One of his sons, Mitchell, bought the property the next month by paying off the taxes. Mitchell, who had 11 children, acquired more land until he owned 110 acres.

An unusual legal strategy

The family's legal problems began after Mitchell Reels died in 1970 without a will.

His brother Shedrick came down from New Jersey and claimed the waterfront portion as his own. He produced a deed dated 20 years earlier in which their father, Elijah, gave him the property. But the property was not Elijah's to give in 1950. Mitchell owned it then.

Mitchell's heirs claim the deed was fraudulent. Scott Reels, 40, who lives in Concord, questions how his great-uncle Shedrick knew enough about the intricacies of the law to claim title to the land. Reels believes someone who stood to gain financially was behind what happened next.

In 1978, Shedrick used an antiquated legal process called the Torrens Law to get at the land. Not many people, not even many registers of deed, know about the law, said Charles Szypszak, a professor of public law and government at UNC Chapel Hill.

Under the law, a person can petition a court for ownership. If he proves his case, any challenge must be filed within 12 months. After that, the law guarantees ownership against all future claims.

Szypszak said the law has been mostly used by timber companies that are purchasing large tracts of land and want to be sure of the boundaries.

Fight over ownership

From this point on, the story of the land gets complicated.

Mitchell Reels' heirs hired attorney C.R. Wheatly III to represent them in 1978 against Shedrick. Wheatly said in an interview that he was contacted by Mitchell's son Calvin, who told him he represented all the heirs.

During a hearing before a title examiner, Shedrick testified that he built a house on the waterfront in 1950 and lived there a year before moving to New Jersey. He said tenants occupied the house for the next 27 years.

Based on that testimony, Wheatly said, Shedrick could claim "adverse possession" of the property. So Wheatly, now Carteret County attorney, said he negotiated a deal that allowed Mitchell's heirs to keep several hundred feet of waterfront at the far end of the property to access the water. He said that Calvin, now deceased, agreed to the terms.

Wheatly filed a certification in Superior Court declaring that the heirs had no objection to Shedrick being named owner of the disputed acres.

"We didn't give him permission to file that certification," said Gertrude Reels, who is 83 and one of only two of Mitchell's children now living. "If we had wanted to give away the land, why have we fought so long to keep it? Why are my sons in jail?"

A judge declared Shedrick the owner and ordered Mitchell Reels' heirs not to trespass.

In retrospect, Wheatly said, "I wish they had all signed the paper. ... It's been a first-rate mess. It's become a racial issue where the greedy white developer is taking their family land. But this was a fight between Reels when it started."

A messy legal battle

Despite the ruling, grandsons Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels continued to live on the land. Davis built a club called Fantasy Island and began building a home. He tied his shrimp boat to the dock, and stored a bulldozer, dump truck and other equipment on the property.

Twice, he was jailed briefly for contempt of court. In 1985, he got out by signing a statement saying Shedrick was the owner and he would not trespass. But as soon as he was released, Davis drove back to Silver Dollar Road.

Shedrick Reels sold the land that same year for $55,000, and the buyers sold it in 1986 for $75,000 to Adams Creek Associates. Twenty-five years later, what was once an undesirable swampy piece of property in the boondocks is now valued at $457,783.

In those 25 years, claims and counterclaims dragged through the courts. One lawyer for the family lost his license and missed a crucial deadline for filing an appeal. The court refused to let the family file late, and Earls said she believes that is the biggest injustice.

"For them never to get their day in court," she said, "is most wrong."

As the years passed, tensions escalated. Melvin Davis was accused in 2006 of threatening to kill a potential buyer and a soil scientist who tried to go on the property. The next year, an explosion rocked Davis' 63-foot shrimp trawler, the Nancy J, before dawn one day and the boat sank. The house he was building caught fire in 2008.

'You hold on'

By the end of last year, the family had run out of appeals.

On March 17, Superior Court Judge Jack Jenkins ordered Davis and his brother Licurtis, 54, jailed for contempt until they removed four buildings, an ice house and construction equipment from the land.

"What the law says is that the person who is in contempt has the keys to the jail," said Michael Crowell at UNC Chapel Hill's School of Government. "They are in charge of their own fate. If they want to comply with the order, they can get out tomorrow."

By early September, the two brothers were weary of being locked up and vented their frustration to visiting family members. Their sister Evelyn Wallace put her hand up against a glass partition, and Davis put his hand up on the other side.

"You hold on," she told him. "Hold on. You haven't committed a crime. You haven't done anything wrong. But you must hold on."

The family has hired another attorney, Terry Richardson of Wilmington, in hopes that he can do what countless attorneys have failed at: Find a way for them to keep the land. Richardson declined to discuss his strategy.

A daughter's mission

Gertrude Reels lives next to the disputed tract. One morning last month, she walked down Silver Dollar Road to the water's edge. A stiff wind whipped up white caps and clouds scurried across the sky.

"My family's homestead was between those two trees," she said. "My daddy had 50 cows, 200 head of hogs and about 100 head of chickens. The last thing he told me, he said I was the onliest one he could depend on - that no matter what I did, don't let nobody have his land."

That is why, she said, they have fought so long and will continue to fight even though many people tell them they no longer stand a chance. It is why, after 199 days, her sons remain locked up in jail.

Staff Researcher Maria David contributed.
Leland: 704-358-5074

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