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'Rosewood': A Massacre Transformed Into Myth

After making a gangster picture and then one that riffed on '30s romantic road comedies, John Singleton in his newest film turns the 1923 destruction of a black Florida town into a western featuring a sable Shane powerless to save more than a handful of women and children. The result, "Rosewood," is a stunning look at the madness of race and racism, and a moving re-creation of a shameful incident in U.S. history. But because the filmmakers stray from the facts, presumably in hopes of gaining a wider audience, there is a cheapness at the core of the film that comes perilously close to undermining it.

The Rosewood Massacre is a powerful story, one of those awful times in our history when God and his saints seemed, if not asleep, then to have been looking elsewhere. As author Michael D'Orso recounts in "Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood," the horror began New Year's Day 1923 when a white woman, Fannie Taylor, burst from her home, screaming that she had been attacked by a black man. She lived in Sumner -- near Florida's Gulf Coast, about 50 miles southwest of Gainesville -- a hardscrabble mill town whose main industry was harvesting cedar and cypress from the swamps. A mob quickly formed to search for a black convict reported to have escaped from a chain gang just a day earlier. Dogs led the men to nearby Rosewood.

For seven days, fueled by blood lust, alcohol and a repressed hatred of Rosewood's "uppity niggers," the mob raged through the town and the surrounding countryside. Men came from as far away as Gainesville and Jacksonville, some 200 miles away on the other side of the state, to join the killing spree. When their bloody work was done, at least six blacks -- other estimates range from 40 to more than 100 -- had been killed. Two whites had been shot by a black man defending his home. And Rosewood, a prosperous little town with three churches, a school, a fraternal lodge hall and its own baseball team that had often played the white Sumner team in defiance of the strictures of segregation, was destroyed by fire. The 150 or more blacks who had lived there never returned.

For the most part, the film preserves the historical framework of the story; inevitably, some people and their actions are conflated, and the actions of others omitted altogether. Other scenes are invented, as when the members of the Carrier family gather on what turns out to be the first night of the massacre to celebrate a child's birthday. In fact, Sylvester Carrier had, according to "Like Judgment Day," gathered his people purposely to try to protect them from the mob.

What actually happened seems dramatic enough, but we can understand the change -- it adds drama and pathos and shows the prosperity of the Carrier family. But another change, the insertion of a fictional character, Mann, played by Ving Rhames, almost fatally compromises the film.

A veteran of World War I, scarred psychologically in some way the film never quite reveals, Mann rides into Rosewood on the eve of the violence, astride a horse named -- incredibly! -- Booker T. Armed with two .45-caliber pistols and a carbine, carrying a secret treasure, he's the archetypal cowboy drifter -- the film doesn't have to tell us where he came from, what's in the leather bag he retrieves from a hiding place, or what horrors he saw in the war. We've seen him, or countless others like him, countless times, in countless other pictures.

This borrowing from movie cowboy mythology turns out to be at the heart of the picture. When Mann rides out of town at the start of the violence, we know he'll be back -- the genre demands it. Pursued in the woods by the killing mob, Mann vaults from his horse and comes up with pistols blazing. Late in the film Mann, having gotten a score of women and children on board the train that will take them to Gainesville and safety, holds off the mob pursuing on horseback and in cars. It's a moment we've seen time and time again in the movies. Except that this time the whooping savages pursuing the train are poor white trash, and the brave sharpshooter picking them off with his carbine is black.

It's not the only time "Rosewood" turns on their heads the conventions and stereotypes that have existed in the movies since "The Birth of a Nation." Like "Devil in a Blue Dress," "Once Upon a Time, When We Were Colored" and Mario Van Peebles' wretched, moronic "Posse," it's a post-integrationist fantasy, looking back to a mythic, idealized past. Once upon a time, when we were colored, it and its cinematic cousins seem to say, we might have been separate and unequal, but at least we had our own communities and our own institutions. And we made out pretty well, as long as the white folks left us alone.

Thus the black residents of this Rosewood embody cardinal virtues such as thrift, loyalty, diligence and self-control. They are hard-working, proper and upright: Sylvester Carrier (Don Cheadle) wears a tie and has a piano in his parlor. When two white men make sexual comments to his sisters, he warns them to respect the women or face the consequences.

White people, on the other hand, are victims of their own lusts, unable to control their appetites. We first see John Wright (Jon Voight, as one of the few whites who live in Rosewood) rutting with a black woman on a counter in his store. A few scenes later, millworker James Taylor tries to bed his wife, Fannie, not caring that their front door is open. Their maid, Aunt Sarah (played by Esther Rolle), passes by and looks in, disdain and disapproval plain on her face. Later, Fannie sports with her lover, oblivious to Sarah and her granddaughter working outside the house.

I suppose it could be argued that black people need movie heroes, too, and that what Singleton and screenwriter Gregory Poirier have done is no different from, say, Lawrence Kasdan's "Wyatt Earp," which ignores the reality that the real Earp worked both sides of the law, or Walter Hill's "The Long Riders," which reinvents the story of the James-Younger gang as a struggle between the male desire for intimacy vs. the craving for autonomy.

But it does matter. Some incidents are so horrible they demand more fidelity from those who seek to re-create them than is evident here, Then, too, it seems there were many small instances of heroism -- some Sumner whites, D'Orso claims, hid blacks in their homes, despite the risk to themselves -- instead of the one or two large acts depicted in the film.

It's all the more surprising because "Rosewood" is so tough-minded in other ways. Singleton and Poirier let no one off the hook, showing how good, decent people can turn into killers when they join a mob. But the truth is that the Rosewood Massacre occurred because of a singular failure of the imagination -- the whites who lived in Sumner were incapable of seeing the blacks with whom they lived, worked, played and, inevitably, made love, as human. It's a failure that has dogged our history ever since the first Africans encountered the first Europeans on our shores.

In its own way "Rosewood" is a failure, too, albeit a noble one, because its makers cannot imagine the horror outside the cliched Hollywood verites. To the extent that they cannot, they diminish what happened, rewriting history with lightning and giving us something very much like a "Birth of a Nation" for black Americans.

Rosewood is rated R for violence, profanity, racial animosity and sexual situations.