The Price of 'Freedomland'

In the new film "Freedomland," novelist/screenwriter Richard Price explores "why [Susan Smith] had blamed this phantom black guy. People bought into it across the country." (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

It was the fall of 1994. He saw the flickers on a TV screen. Susan Smith, a white woman in South Carolina, was staring, teary-eyed, into TV cameras. Some deranged soul -- a black man -- had taken her kids, vanished, she wanted them back, Jesus.

The search played out on national TV. Like any parent, Price hugged his two young daughters, Genevieve and Anne, that much closer. He couldn't take his eyes off Susan Smith and the horror of it all. "Willard Scott was so upset once he couldn't even deliver the weather," remembers Price.

The town was Union, S.C. Price had never heard of the place. Oddly, he felt like bolting.

That night he tossed and turned in bed. "I spent all night Hamleting about it: To go, or not to go."

Next morning he grabbed some legal pads and pens, kissed his wife and daughters, and got himself out to La Guardia.

He's not a journalist in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He didn't have plans to immediately write about the unfolding drama. "I went to South Carolina without any portfolio," he says.

Upon arrival, he realized he had no feel for the South -- for sweet potato pie and folks helloing him out of the clear blue. A couple of journalists realized he was the dude who wrote "Clockers" and Price made friends quick. He went to the news conferences, asked questions and poked his head into buildings. "Everything in South Carolina seemed amazing to me," Price says. "Even the sides you could get at McDonald's. I was agog getting off the airplane. Susan Smith's whole story was right out of Dreiser."

He was there during the manhunt. The pain in the air fascinated him, how it seemed to bruise everything. He took a motel room out on a highway. At night he scribbled away on his legal pad.

Then the truth heaved up from the throat of Susan Smith: She had lied. There was no black guy. She put her two little boys -- one 3 years old, the other 14 months -- in her car and let the car roll into a lake, where they drowned. She would give her reasons -- she was depressed, her lover had abandoned her -- and a nation had to swallow hard.

But for many blacks, it was another case blazing up from the embers of history. A boogeyman with black skin.

It was the terror of it all that fascinated Price. How the drop of blood -- black guy, black guy, black guy! -- had contaminated the whole pool of water.

Price -- who returned to South Carolina for Smith's trial, in which she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison -- saw Smith as standing in the eye of a storm where sex and race converge. "You say a black guy did it, and it comes out so fast," says Price. "You don't even know you said it. What are you gonna say? A Bangladeshi guy did it?"