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)

"I wanted to bring back with me why she had blamed this phantom black guy. People bought into it across the country."

The novelist had his tale.

And while he didn't know rural Southern towns, he did know the urban North.

"What happens if some white lady says, 'My kid got jacked in the projects?' What happens during the four to five days before she confesses?"

The novelist had his "Freedomland."

He created a detective, Lorenzo Council, who wears a porkpie hat, who knows the housing projects, who digs Al Green, who gets a call about a carjacking.

And he created Brenda Martin -- willowy, pale, spooky. But the novelist gave her something else: heart, layers, a thirst for love. She listens to soul singer Ann Peebles, who had a hit, "I Can't Stand the Rain." Back in the '70s.

Always the Outsider

---

Price spent nearly three years on the novel.

He is one of the few white novelists who write fully and energetically about black life. "Northern white writers sometimes see black people as another species," he says. "I think the white writer sometimes says, 'No, no, that's a hornet's nest.' Maybe even thinking it's cultural piracy. Whereas the white Southern writer says, 'I know blacks. I grew up with blacks. We were friends.' "

While working on "Freedomland," he hung out with homicide detectives in Jersey City. "You do what Damon Runyon did, hang out. I believe in hang time."

"He does his homework," says Detective Calvin Hart, whom Price befriended a decade ago while researching "Clockers" and chatted up while working on "Freedomland."

Hart recalls the day his superiors told him a writer was coming over to the Curries Woods housing projects of Jersey City to talk with him. "I said, 'Oh my, somebody I'm going to have to take out to lunch.' It was Richard, this little Jewish white guy. I said, when I first saw him, 'Damn, he looks like one of the guys I have to be chasing around the projects.' "