Glimpses of Heroism Amidst Horrific, Historic Tragedy: Rosewood

In 1923, the small town of Rosewood, Florida was shaken by festering hatreds in the neighboring town of Sumner reaching a boiling point. The residents of that town were familiar with the hatreds—Rosewood was a town where African Americans owned their own land and lived a decent life, while Sumner was poor and predominantly white—but as the tensions were building they did not know what to expect from their neighbors. They would learn, soon enough.

The story begins with the local sheriff getting word of a Black escapee from a chain gang. “If you see him,” Sheriff Ellis Walker (Michael Rooker) explains to the white citizenry, “don’t shoot him. Bring him to me.” Jesse Hunter is never seen in the film, but his name is thrown around often enough to invoke him like some kind of devil.

Into the situation comes a man on horseback. Mann (Ving Rhames) is dudded up like a cowboy, and he is a mythic figure all right. A decorated veteran of the first World War, he arrives on New Year’s Eve with a horse in need of new shoes. Because of the holiday and his late arrival, he must wait for the next day, and that nighttime visit shows him a sense of caring community possibly worth settling down into. Through him, we get a sense of the large cast of townsfolk, including the piano playing family man Sylvester Carrier (Don Cheadle), the well-known Aunt Sarah (Esther Rolle), the spirited Scrappie (Elise Neal), the little kid who needs a hero to worship Arnett (James Edward Coleman II), and plenty more. There’s one white family in the town, the Wrights whose patriarch John (Jon Voight) owns a shop there and who has made a fair living supplying the locals with their general needs. He’s also having an affair on his second wife Mary (Kathryn Meisle) with his 17-year-old clerk. Though Mann’s travels, his interactions, and his observations, we also get a sense of the time and the place. Rosewood is pretty swell, but the world is not—just last year, and Black man got set on fire for “looking” at a white woman in one of the nearby towns. The inescapable eventuality of suffering slithers through every Eden, after all.

Rosewood’s fate is sealed with Sumner resident Fanny Taylor (Catherine Kellner) chooses the wrong Lover (Robert Patrick) to have an affair with, suffers a terrible beating at his hands, and tries to hide her adultery from jealous husband James (Loren Dean) by claiming a Black man broke into her house and beat her. The story spreads fast, attaining embellishment as it does—before too long the Black man beat and raped a white woman, the second item of which Fanny denies. However, the real incident was witness by Aunt Sarah and another cleaning woman, but they are unable to say a thing for fear of getting lynched.

All that hate spills through Sumner and into the surrounding towns, and before too long a mob assembles to avenge their woman/protect their other women. Assumptions are that Jesse Hunter is responsible, but he’s nowhere to be found. Fanny’s lover is long gone, as well. Drunk on liquor and power, the mob begins to detain, torture, and murder suspected accomplices. When the Rosewood residents have the gall to fight back, war descends upon Rosewood and decimates the town.

Wright finds himself in the role of a Schindler, hiding Blacks from the drunken, bloodthirsty army. Mann finds himself in charge of a group of women and children, escaping into the swamps and doggedly pursued. The town will be razed, and a handful of the population will survive to tell the tale, but who? And what horrors will they witness on their journey? These are the questions at play, when historic tragedy serves as the cloth upon which a tale of courage and terror is woven in director John Singleton’s epic Rosewood (1997).

History is overflowing with tragedy, massacres, slaughters, holocausts. Americans like myself prefer to think of our country as offering a fair shake to everyone and freedom from the kinds of horrific events that happened in other corners of the globe, but that just ain’t the case. Americans have been responsible for killing Americans en masse since the earliest days. We need to be reminded that not everyone gets a fair shake, that some folks are forced into terrible situations. A movie like Rosewood serves as a powerful reminder. The actual Rosewood incident was covered up, glossed over, whitewashed for decades. It took an investigative reporter in 1982 to shine a light on the actual incident, revealing the falsehood in the official report documenting 2 whites and 6 Blacks fatalities. Actual numbers vary between 40 and over 200 killed, overwhelmingly African American. This is historical horror stuff on its own.

John Singleton’s film does not look away from the horrific elements of the incident. The screen story credited to Gregory Poirier takes dramatic license with history by adding in a Black cowboy, blending in the mythic elements of the filmic western genre, but it manages to do so without stealing the awfulness of the actual history. Instead, it does what fiction by folks like Tim Powers does, finding the little undocumented cracks in history where secret histories, a bit of heroic fantasy say, can be injected. Rosewood never slips completely into the realm of magical fantasy, but it does have a highly capable hero in the form of Mann (whose name is a play on Everyman from those old cautionary, liturgical, medieval dramas). This is not Everyman, of course, he’s more akin to the heroes of Robert E. Howard, breaking free from a noose at one point and delivering two-gun justice to awful people before ultimately struggling to get his innocent charges loaded on a train that is speeding toward safety.

Some will see the Mann character as utterly unrealistic if not super heroic. However, he’s a clear inheritor of the cowboy archetype made famous by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, the good man who is capable of courageous deeds. Some will see such an addition to a historical tragedy as offensive to the families of those slain or even to the survivors. I for one love a well composed secret history type tale, and that is exactly what this is. It is not a documentary; this is fiction written atop a foundation of fact, which tries to get to the core truth of the past while exposing uncomfortable truths about the present in which it was made. In fact, this is a tradition that existed long before films wrangled their way through historic events.

In fact, the structure is downright Shakespearian, falling into five rough acts, and Singleton’s film plays like one of The Bard’s histories. The opening act introduces its large cast of characters. Trouble appears when Mann tries to buy land and reaches a breaking point when Fanny makes her accusation. Tensions continue to rise through the third act, kicking off with some local blacksmiths and then culminate with a siege at the Carrier House. The fourth act finds war arriving to lay the town to waste, while the fifth act finds refugees in a desperate escape.

Rosewood is a complex flick, all right, and a sprawling one running almost two-and-a-half hours long. However, the pacing and controlled direction lend the picture a power and resonance that are profound. The time just rolls right on by.

By the end, I was shaken to the core. The emotional honesty and the horrors the bastards from Sumner wrought (made all the more chilling when we learn that many of the mob’s members knew Fanny to be lying in the first place) are soul numbing. The infusion of little acts of courage and heroism amidst all that tragedy keeps us from getting too depressed, though we cannot help but wonder if anyone will escape. Trista thought Mann was dead meat at a couple of different points, and our spirits were buoyed when he managed to slip out of trouble (never unscathed, however). There is no escape from low spirits, of course. This is not a happy movie. Even if some of the characters involved escape with their lives, the ending is not a happy one. It’s a somber and sober meditation upon hatred, human evil, the proliferation of cruel ideas from parent to child, and the sad fact that events like these occurred, continue to occur, and will occur again in the future if we continue to stay our present course.

From a cinephile perspective, there is much to appreciate in the construction of scenes. The cinematography from Johnny E. Jensen is magnificent. It takes full advantage of the wide screen, paints in the corners, offers an abundance of details and information that add to the emotional core of each scene. The romantic opening is idyllic, beautiful, inviting. The horrific violence is all the more so. Of course, music plays no small part in this, and the score from John Williams is as emotionally charged as ever. The editing from Bruce Cannon is terrific, adding extra gut wrench to scenes of violence.

The real treat of the movie (if such a term can be used for a downer of a flick like this) is the cast, of course. There are some real powerhouses all across the thing. Love me some Don Cheadle, and here he gets to share some terrific scenes with veterans like Esther Rolle. Jon Voight and Michael Rooker bring layers to their characters, inviting us to understand their decision-making processes even when we wholeheartedly disagree with their actions, words, and behavior. Bruce McGill chews the scenery as an unrepentant fiend, who is as emotionally cruel to his own son (for his own good) as he is physically cruel to the Blacks in Rosewood (to remind them of their place). Some of the characters are less fleshed out than others, but with a cast this big and a running time this small, we have to expect sketches for some folks. Special shout out for Ken Sagoes (Kincaid of 1987’s A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors) for his brief but charming (and ultimately heartbreaking) appearance as the mentally handicapped character Big Baby.

John Singleton’s directorial debut was just as literate and powerful. However, 1991’s Boyz in the Hood did not show a filmmaker in such complete control of a large cast, period detail, and these kinds of epic cinematic tools. It’s clear step forward in the director’s craft. I wish it had gotten a better push at the time, but according to Roger Ebert’s review it seems the film suffered from idiotic marketing—who was the audience for a movie like this? How could it be sold in a commercial/trailer? It did not fare well at the box office, and it’s inability to find an audience must’ve been an albatross at the time, since it took him three years to get another project greenlit. Singleton made some straight up actioners after it, including 2000’s Shaft and 2003’s 2 Fast 2 Furious, and eventually made his way into more television work than directing features.

Rosewood is a gut punch of a movie that manages to find moments where little acts of courage can lead to sweeping heroism even in the bleakest times. It’s obvious that John Singleton aimed for Schindler’s List (1993) in terms of artistic and emotional achievement when he made this one. He might not have succeeded fully, but the film is a powerful reminder of an ugly period of history, as well as a kick in the butt not to let this kind of history repeat itself.

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Rosewood is available on DVD and streaming editions.

We caught it as a part of Criterion Channel’s survey of Black Westerns, and that context adds new layers and dimensions to the flick. Sadly, that curated series has run its course. As well, our far briefer survey of films in that series has also run its course.

Words for “Glimpses of Heroism Amidst Horrific, Historic Tragedy: Rosewood” is copyright © 2021 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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