Movie Tells Tale Through Right E

Sit with me in a screening of the new motion picture “Rosewood.” Across the aisle, a white man brushes at his eyes as the movie unfolds, its story drawn from this awful history:

On the first day of 1923, a bloody, bruised white woman staggered from her home in Sumner, Fla., claiming assault by a Negro man. White men gathered bloodhounds, guns and liquor and went after him.

Not surprisingly, things got out of hand.

By the time it was over, at least seven people were dead, unknown dozens of blacks had been driven from their homes into the neighboring swamps, and a thriving black town called Rosewood had been burned to the ground, erased from the map.

No black assailant was ever found. Some say he never existed except as a convenient scapegoat to cover injuries inflicted upon the woman by her white lover.

That “Rosewood” spins these events into a movie of massive power seems in some ways beside the point. What’s more noteworthy is that “Rosewood” tells a black story from a black point of view and expects that somebody besides a black will give a damn. “Rosewood” says, see this as I do - a brash demand in post-O.J. America and something movies have never done when dealing with black historical material.

Faced with the horror of white oppression, moviemakers instinctively flinch. Somehow the struggle and woe of black people become a backdrop for the self-absorbed drama of white ones. It happened in “Ghosts of Mississippi,” which turned Myrlie Evers’ 30-year crusade to bring her husband’s killer to justice into the tale of a white lawyer’s racial awakening. Happened in the brilliant “Glory,” whose central character was not one of the heroic black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, but the white man who led them. Happened in “Mississippi Burning,” which cast the black-hating FBI as heroes of the civil rights movement.

With few exceptions, black people’s stories become white ones. So “Rosewood” is a revelation simply because it offers white audiences no safe surrogate through which to absorb the story, no sheltered distance from which to experience a black American tale.

Director John Singleton says the film was born when he met with Rosewood survivors “and felt their pain at what happened to them when they were children, living in a black town where their families owned their own land and their own homes and were real prosperous and … that was all taken from them within the course of a couple of nights. They saw their families murdered in front of them.”

Sit with me in a stunned theater in the aftermath of the crime. Credits rolling, movie receding, breath coming as if from a great distance. Sit with me, waiting for sound, for the shuffling of feet, the clearing of throats, anything that belongs to this moment in life and not that one on-screen.

Because that one on-screen was drawn from the awful once-upon-a-time when white men posed with the corpses of black men like fishermen pose with prized fish. The once-upon-a-time when a newspaper’s headline read, A Good Time Is Had By All As Negro Is Put To Death. The once-upon-a-time when a woman dangled from a tree, the fetus a white man had carved from her womb lying stomped to death in the dirt below.

The once-upon-a-time of pain that we have largely chosen not to know.

But ignorance has been purchased at the cost of a fractured America - an America experienced differently by blacks and whites. Our perspectives are as divergent as that of the man who crushed the baby and those who gathered its body. As unalike as that of the men who burned Rosewood and the people who fled it in terror.

Sit with me in the screening room and watch a white man who dabbed at his eyes to restore his street face to step back into the world. Sit with me and realize that our challenge at the edge of the millennium is to resolve the divergence.

To know the same things in the same way.

To accept the pain that comes and cry, finally, together.

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