This story originally appeared in the Village Voice in 1996, issue 41.

ASHES AND EMBERS

JOHN SINGLETON GOES TO THE SOUTH TO REBUILD--AND TORCH--A LOST BLACK TOWN

LAKE COUNTY, FLORIDA--A few miles away from the live-action entertainment complexes of Walt Disney World and Universal Studios Theme Park, director John Singleton and producer Jon Peters have built the set for Rosewood, replicating several houses that once stood in and around a small black logging town in Florida that was burned by a white mob 73 years ago. The remains of the actual Rosewood lie several hours to the south in Levy County, and those who've made the pilgrimage report that it's not much to look at. Today it's a place of mud patches, roaming dogs, and the occasional junked car or boat, the wary, all-white residents watching from behind screened windows. There's little to indicate that it was the site of an atrocity, although the black folks who've been there say that it's not a good idea for some to linger after dark.

I don't go see the real Rosewood myself while I'm in Florida. It's been odd enough coming to the duplicate, with its black extras hanging nonchalantly from safety nooses during setups, the white extras milling around craft services tables smoking or juicing up on caffeine until it's time for the lynch mob to be made up. I don't know what I'd learn from seeing the town itself except that there are still plenty of angry white people living in swamps. Seeing how black people remember is much more interesting to me.

With Rosewood, a young black director from L.A. is trying to shoot and edit together two hours of black memory, applying the tools of Hollywood moviemaking to the ephemera of old tax records, family photographs, and yellowed newspaper clippings. All of it harkens back to the week of New Year's 1923, during which survivors huddled in the surrounding swamps and watched their homes go up in smoke, their fathers strung from trees, and their mothers shot and dumped in mass graves, which the State of Florida has, to this day, yet to locate. Decades passed before anyone who could actually remember it would even speak of Rosewood above a whisper, but since the late '80s, there has been an official apology from the state for its inaction, reparations to survivors, token restitution of property, a book, and of course this movie. All these amends hope to restore a bit of the Rosewood that was lost, making the movies unique among mediums: where else can you honor a place by burning it down a second time?

On the main Rosewood set, a large clearing in the woods, the crew has been doing night shoots out here for the last month and a half, with six-day-a-week vampire schedules of 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. By the time I arrive on set at 10 one Saturday night, the mosquitoes are already out in force and members of the crew are clapping the air around them, one grip occasionally holding up his blood-flecked hands and wondering aloud whose blood it might be--white lead Jon Voight's, perhaps? The only building burning is the one-story Prince Hall Mason Lodge, and that just barely: Controlled jets of gas-powered flame shoot out from the windows, and between shots, p.a.'s douse the building with high-powered hoses, steam and spray rising up into the sky.

The set took three months to build, production designer Paul Sylbert using local architectural models as well as the memories of Rosewood survivors. Off to the north is a road leading to the set for Sumner, Rosewood's neighboring white town. It was there that on the morning of New Year's Day 1923, a white woman named Fannie Taylor was found in her home beaten, bruised, and screaming that she'd been assaulted by a black man.

The lynch mob never found their rapist, but turn a few paces southeast on set and you'll find the remains of the Carrier House, already burned to the ground when I arrive. A white posse congregated there four days after New Year's, when word reached Sumner that armed black men were massing inside. In fact, it was just the aged and younger members of the Carrier family, all brought together for safety by Sylvester Carrier (played in the film by Don Cheadle). The posse demanded Sylvester come out with his hands up anyway, taking pot shots at the house and killing Sylvester's mother Sarah (played by Esther Rolle). It was at that moment that Rosewood went from a horribly typical tale of Southern ``justice'' victimizing blacks to a suitably heroic tale of black male resistance. Sylvester Carrier, holed up by himself with kids in the attic and his mother dying at his feet, returned fire on the white men outside. His self-defense precipated a bloodbath: about 1500 white men would converge on Rosewood soon after and a week later there would be no Rosewood at all.

Turn away from the Carrier House and you'll spy the back door of John Wright's home, which is the setting for the scene now being filmed. Wright was Rosewood's only white resident, owner of a general store. His two-story house (the finest in town, it was said, and certainly the finest here) was the only structure left standing once the destruction of Rosewood was complete, a good thing considering that Wright had hidden a number of black women and children inside. In this shot, Ving Rhames's character, Mann, is trying to get an older couple into the safety of Wright's home, Wright being played in the film by Jon Voight. I get to watch Singleton direct them for some time before I'm introduced to him. Once quietly run rehearsals and lighting are taken care of, Singleton plants himself behind video monitors, hunching close and shaking an excited finger at the video whenever he gets the shot he wants. He seems very relaxed in a slightly sleepless kind of way, and watching him you'd have a hard time telling t at this is the biggest motion picture he's ever worked on.

Like Boyz N the Hood (and The Color Purple), Rosewood is a Jon Peters production, but for Singleton it's the first time he's ever worked as a hired gun; the project was already in development when he was attached to it, and the script already written by a white writer, Greg Poirer. Rosewood's budget was described to me by associate producer Tracey Barone as ``well below the industry norm,'' but it's certainly more money than Singleton has ever had to play with, between 20 and 30 million dollars. As he leads his crew (a little more than a third of them black by my count) through another take, industry concerns seem as far removed from here as Hollywood itself.

In contrast to the talkative Voigt, Rhames is a large but quietly contained presence. If he and Singleton share a particular bond from both being black men, it isn't apparent from watching: Both are friendly and professional but during downtime Rhames keeps to himself, moving off to the fringes of the set, a prop cigar kept smoking in his hand. When I wander off to where Rhames had earlier taken one of his solitary smokes, I find what's left of the Carrier House--a charred rocking chair on the ruin of a porch, mattresses and bedsprings piled up on what looks like a collapsed ceiling. Even burnt and broken, the place has a dignity to it, the conflicting reports and final unknowables of what transpired inside averaging out to a solemnity a contemporary watcher can link up with anything from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising to the bombing of the MOVE headquarters in Philadelphia.

Ving Rhames says the challenge of Rosewood for him was getting into the historical mind-set of his largely fictionalized character. ``At the time of the massacre, there were large numbers of black men who were WWI vets, so I have to account for the mentality of black men wanting to put on a uniform and fight in Europe and then coming home to Jim Crow. You can't tell me when they came for their families here in Rosewood only Sylvester stood up.''

It's a role Rhames figures he's particularly suited for. ``Some of the actors who were considered for the part were going to be physically...more palatable to certain audiences than me. I mean, I'm a quote-unquote big, shaven-head nigger, where someone like a Denzel Washington is physically more acceptable to white America. You think of Ving Rhames and you think of Marcellus in Pulp Fiction being a bad motherfucker. I may not even be that in real life, but that's what people see.''

The walks to the Carrier House show, though, that even a big, shaven-head nigger can be affected by the sight of black homes burning and black men hanging. ``There has been something very eerie about this project,'' he says, his voice going a little tentative. ``A stillness to it, not so much in terms of us suddenly being there with them in Rosewood but as if the ancestors have been here with us, watching us. It's hard to explain, but we've definitely felt it on the set, or at least I have.''

I ask whether he'll have to do some special decompressing after this.

He laughs. ``I've worked a year straight without any time off so I need to go somewhere in general and as far away as possible, so I can replenish myself physically, mentally, and spiritually.''

A long vacation. Where?

``Bali. My wife has the tickets.''

The next night of shooting there are no black actors on set. Flame bars are set up just about everywhere, and a posse led by Michael Rooker, best known as Henry the Serial Killer, is approaching the Wright house, wanting to know if they've got any nigras holed up in there. Lynchings were always carnivalesque for the white participants and that's certainly the case here. Rooker runs around making whooping noises and cackling his every comment in character to an appreciative crew, his voice hoarse from the yelling he does in the scene. Two posse members are having what looks like a tobacco-spitting contest while Jon Voight and a member of the crew engage in a mock serious discussion about one of John Wright's lines.

``I think,'' says Voight, ``the line should really be `What do you all peckerheads want?'''

``No one uses `peckerhead' around here,'' answers a voice from the crush around the camera. ``It's `peckerwood.'''

``Historically speaking, `peckerhead' is what the people around here would've said.'' Voight goes on in some detail until it's obvious he's not joking and that line changes are being discussed, at which point Singleton's head jerks away from the footage he's been reviewing.

```Peckerwood,' alright?'' he yells, spoiling the white boys' debate. I get to sit down and talk to him while all this swirls in the background.

``What really sparked my interest in this project,'' he begins, waving a hand at the lounging lynch mob, ``was meeting the survivors of this incident. They were all in their seventies and early eighties, people like Minnie Lee Langley and Wilson Hall and Arnett Goins, and I sat there and interviewed them about their experiences as children being chased in the swamps right after New Year's. It was so horrifying, I just felt it was a story that really needed to be told.''

Did you have worries about working on a film you hadn't written?

``Not about that. There was a time when I was preparing this movie last December when I was going to walk away from it because of the money thing. I felt it was a real important movie, but it looked like the studio was trying to make it for less than we thought it should be made, to lessen the scope of it.

``Then in December one of the survivors, Minnie Lee Langley, passed away and I went to her funeral and listened to family members and people who had been in her life and it was a really humbling experience. Because I met the woman, I interviewed her. She was the one on the 60 Minutes episode about Rosewood who tells Ed Bradley when he asks if she had any advice for the young children: `Never live in a place where there's a whole lot of white people, where you're surrounded, because if something happens, you'll be the first to go.' Going to the funeral gave me the strength to fight for my vision and what I felt the scope of this picture should be.''

He shrugs a little. ``And somehow we prevailed with the studio. Now everybody's on our side. I'm not a very religious person but there's a lot of spirituality in the picture, in it and around it.''

When Singleton talks, his manner and his words are all so distinctly urban I wonder if he's undergone any culture shock here. Lake County is a long way from South Central.

``A little. For a long time I've had a large amount of reservations about the Southern portion of the United States because I felt that a lot of the horror and despair that our people experienced was situated in the South. Growing up in the West, basically my attitude was just `F the South. I'll never do a movie there, I don't want to have anything to do with it.' Meeting these people, and doing this film, helped me deal with that attitude. Now I want to do a lot of films in the South because I think it's something people need to talk about.''

Does being from L.A. allow you to bring a different perspective to the South?

Singleton laughs. ``What I'm bringing to this film is a youthful perspective. If I was 15 or 20 years older, Rosewood would probably look more like a documentary. I'm doing this for people in my age range and the audience I've had. The older people, maybe they'll come, maybe they won't. I'm 28. I want people my age to come. I want this to be a date movie. I've got romance, I've got action, I'm counting off the times that one of my lead characters gets his and kills a couple of crackers. 'Cause I know the brothers on the street ain't gonna sit through a whole movie where there's a whole bunch of black people getting killed and no black folks are fighting back, you know what I mean?''

I do know what he means, but I wonder if aiming for it means compromising in other areas.

He shrugs. ``This is still a down-home kind of picture. The thing, too, is: I look at the arc of my pictures and this is probably my first adult movie. The other pictures, well, I started making pictures when I was 21, 22 [he really laughs here] and they made a lot of money basically because I was writing from the same perspective as the people who were going to the movies. The first three were coming-of-age, coming-of-consciousness pictures because I was going through that. But this movie, I've matured and I think the work reflects it. I've gotten out of the whole ghetto-movie thing. Hopefully Rosewood will get the Boyz N the Hood monkey off my back.''

I tell him it sounds like Hollywood has been getting him down.

``I had to get away from L.A. I was born and bred in L.A. and I'm starting to not be able to stand it. There's so much strife there and everybody's so pretentious about whose got whatever car and how you dress. I've never really been a part of that. I look down on it. I remember after I did my first movie I got a huge amount of money from the studio. It was these three white men--'course they all were white--and they handed me a check for, like, a large amount of money, okay? Large. And they were all waiting in there to see how I would react to it, like: this nigger's gonna come in here and he's gonna jump up and down and say `I'm gonna buy me a Mercedes!' Another studio executive, a black woman, said everybody had a bet on what kind of car I was gonna buy. So you know what I did? I didn't buy a car. They handed me a check and I said: When's the next one coming? I'm really a practical kind of person when it comes to that stuff. That's why I never fit into the hotsy totsy L.A. mentality.''

How do you go from there to a rural, God-fearing mentality like Rosewood's?

``It's all natural. Even the wildest and craziest black man has some kind of faith. I mean look at Tupac, look at how much he talks about God. Brothers in jail? First thing they do is move towards religion. They either become Muslims or Christians. So I think if you're born in this country and you're black with all the shit you have to go through, you're gonna get some faith, because otherwise you're gonna commit suicide or murder somebody.

``I've had moments on the set where I just walk off and I just sit and think: Man...I think about where I'm from and what I've been through and now I'm here. I feel very blessed and very lucky because at any one moment I could have walked around a corner and my life could have had a very different path. I could've not been accepted to college and I probably would've...I don't know. I wasn't planning to go to school unless I was going to be in film school.

``I'm wandering right now; my home is wherever I'm at. I really just want to make motion pictures that interest me. On one hand I feel real, real lucky and everything, then on another hand I feel like: Fuck it. I've earned the right to work on this level. There's a lot of irony down here. Here I am directing this big-ass film in Florida and if I play my CDs too loud in my apartment they call the cops on me. If I play Wynton Marsalis they call the cops. It's a trip. I've never been this far away from home in my life for so long. I've been here six months, and I've been out here, out in the woods, catching snakes. I have a five-footer I caught and keep in my apartment, but I always forget to videotape it when it eats....''

He laughs, reaches over and gives me a playful slap on the knee before pointing out at the swamp. ``There's nothing like this.''

Arnett Doctor, son of a Rosewood survivor, says, ``I choose to think that God was preparing me for all this,'' this being everything from his work on the restitution bill to Rosewood. ``And I know that God isn't something that media correspondents really want to hear about. The fact is that since a very early age, everyone that has been significantly impacted by Rosewood--survivors, legislators, and lawyers--their paths and my paths have crossed. That isn't a coincidence.''

I ask him if it isn't hard to think about something like faith when all these people were killed, but he tells me that I've missed the point entirely. ``The reason we're here now is because people had faith. You may not agree, but I believe that on one of those nights in 1923, someone black fell to their knees and called out to God save them. It took Him 70 years to hear them but He did, because if He hadn't, none of us would be here.''

I tell him I think 70 years is a long time to wait, but Arnett Doctor just smiles. ``Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; later comes understanding,'' he says. ``You can call the Lord whatever you want, but there has to be a point where you admit there are certain burdens you can't bear alone.'' The smile goes a little wry then. ``People who were born and raised in the cities often can't understand a thing like that.''

I don't know what I'll think of that idea back in the city, or even in the theater when Rosewood opens in late 1996, but driving through the fog I think for just a moment I can see Arnett Doctor's point. I think John Singleton can too, especially when he walks a few yards off his set and into the wet, ancient green of the Florida swamp.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Singleton on the set of Rosewood, with actor Badja Djola.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Rosewood reenacted: Don Cheadle and Ving Rhames as town heroes.

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By Gary Dauphin