THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9602010385
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 99 lines
LIKE JUDGMENT DAY:
The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood
MICHAEL D'ORSO
Grosset/Putnam. 362 pp. $27.50.
On a wintry Florida dawn in 1922, the residents of a small Gulf Coast village were roused by the noise of a lynch mob. Days later that town and those people were gone, never to return. But why and where they went were secrets kept for over 70 years.
In Like Judgment Day, Michael D'Orso tells the story of the Rosewood massacre from the viewpoint of some of its survivors. The coastal black community west of Gainesville was moderately prosperous in an area known for its mullet, second-growth pine and hurricanes. Today its only visible legacy is a green and white highway sign on Route 24.
The people of Rosewood and nearby white Sumner appeared then to get along. Men worked together at the sawmill; children played together. But a failing economy fueled tensions and the sight of a thriving black community rankled white supremacists.
In Sumner, just past dawn on New Year's Day, 1922, Fanny Taylor runs from her house, shrieking, battered, bleeding. She tells neighbors that she has been raped by a black intruder. Her husband James is working at the sawmill; she is taken to a friend's house. The Taylor children are discovered, unhurt; a neighbor takes charge.
Taking charge is the order of the day. A posse quickly forms and assumes an escaped black convict is the culprit. Bloodhounds sniff scraps of Fanny's clothing and race toward Rosewood. En route the posse encounters two men, both black and from Rosewood. When they finish with one, there's much blood, but no information. An impatient vigilante shoots him dead. The other is luckier; a sympathetic white sawmill boss spirits him away.
Frightened blacks believe the worst is over. Actually, it's just beginning. That night the mob returns for an orgy of shooting and burning. Some blacks shoot back. White outrage draws the Klan, carloads of armed men from as far away as Georgia. In Rosewood, women and children flee shivering into the swamps, and are hidden or helped by sympathetic whites. They leave behind `` . would never exist again.'' They keep silent about it for 70 years.
D'Orso, a Virginian-Pilot reporter whose previous books include Rise and Walk, co-written with former pro football player Dennis Byrd, does yeoman's work with documented testimony, old news clippings, interviews, rumors and faded photographs, assembling a compelling history. But the focus of Like Judgment Day is on recent events. In 1993, a handful of Rosewood survivors filed for compensation for what they had lost: parents, land, homes, jobs, friends. The defendant, who had failed them miserably in 1922, is the state of Florida.
When the violence broke out, then-Florida Gov. Cary Hardee wired Levy County, where Rosewood and Sumner are located, to offer the National Guard. But the local sheriff assured him that everything was ``under control.'' Feeling his duty done, the governor took the afternoon off and went hunting. Rosewood burned on, and the death toll mounted.
How could Hardee have guessed that the whole shameful story would pop up again, a lifetime later? That ``60 Minutes'' would train cameras on a patch of swamp and palmetto scrub and tell viewers that Rosewood used to exist? That a man named Arnett Doctor would spend his savings and his health to bring a reparations bill before the Florida legislature? Or that this unprecedented bill would be sponsored in part by a Cuban-American legislator? Or, most incredible, that it would pass?
D'Orso traces this long path to redemption, meeting survivors, attorneys, get-rich schemers, legislative sponsors, even a white eyewitness to the massacre. His low-key style enables smooth reading and belies the hours of research that frame his book. D'Orso profiles survivors growing up in a slowly changing society; but he also portrays the ``other'' side, white residents living and dead who played a part, too.
Like Judgment Day is more than a history of one atrocity. It is a larger study of good and evil; of greed and envy, which drove a frenzied white mob. Ironically, decades later, when cash compensation seemed forthcoming, the solidarity of the survivors and descendants, painfully won by Arnett Doctor over the years, was split by bickering and recriminations. Greed and envy destroyed Rosewood in 1922; nearly 75 years later they would tear apart the survivors from within.
Most current Levy County residents were born after 1922, but constant media scrutiny takes a toll. When D'Orso stands on land once part of Rosewood, talking to some hunters, the landowner tells him that since he bought the property from a timber company in 1972: ``It's been aggravatin' . . . People driving up in my yard day and night. Black people. White people . . . news people. All these reporters. I'm sick of it.'' Racial slurs erupt, until the man's wife interrupts: ``Blacks have never been welcomed around here.''
Like Judgment Day brings home that in the end, truth is never whole, but splintered in the hearts of those who lived it. It takes more than legislation to heal terrible old wounds. Ingrained attitudes, good or bad, rarely change. And forgetting is impossible when there is so much at stake. MEMO: Eastern Shore novelist Lenore Hart is a native Floridian and the author
of ``Black River.'' Her forthcoming second novel, ``Ibo Key,'' is set in
Levy County, Fla. by CNB