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The Carrier
To ask how Sylvester Carrier became embroiled in the Rosewood disaster is like asking what really happened to Fannie Taylor, or whether Sam Carter really gave someone a ride in his wagon, or whether Aaron Carrier ever really saw the fugitive: There are plenty of tales, boasts, and alibis offering answers to such questions, and the answers contradict. The confirmable evidence, meanwhile, leaves many a loose end.
On Thursday night, January 4, Sylvester Carrier would suddenly be catapulted into the position of central protagonist in the Rosewood drama, the giant in the legends. As with real-world outsider heroes ranging from Emiliano Zapata to Jesse James (a hero to many in the defeated Confederacy), Syl Carrier would not be allowed to die.
His death on that Thursday night would be followed by insistent voices saying that the last grand moment didn’t really get him after all, that his apparent death was really just an official cover-up, allowing him to secretly escape far away and never be found (Zapata in Mexico left mourners insisting that the fallen hero had secretly fled all the way to Arabia; regarding Sylvester Carrier, voices variously said that his secret escape led to Texas, or Louisiana, or South Florida, or Alachua County, or Putnam County, or Kentucky).
As these words are typed there stands a $2,000 state historical maker at the site of Rosewood, placed in 2004 amid fanfare and a governor’s speech, that tacitly bows to the legends of Sylvester’s secret escape, by the device of omitting his name from the list of Rosewood's fatalities—so flexible is historical truth in the obliging sunshine of Florida.
On Saturday, January 6, 1923, his mystical-sounding name—with its whispered Latinate undertones of forest titans and burdens carried—was bursting into newspapers coast to coast, simultaneously appearing on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, as well as in Chicago, Dallas, Seattle, Memphis, Omaha, Denver, New Orleans, and others uncounted: “…killed when they advanced on a negro house last night to see Sylvester Carrier, negro…”
If that phrase in the New York Times seems a bit fixated on the color line, the Washington Post on January 5, 1923, went one better, discovering “Sylvester Carrier, negro desperado.” Eventually William Randolph Hearst’s International News Reel would rush in among the ruins to snap a photo of overwhelmed Levy County Sheriff Bob Walker displaying for the camera the desperado’s by-then fabled gun, his 1886-model Winchester pump shotgun, apparently in a feeble effort by Walker to tell the hundreds who were running riot: “They got him, boys, so now you can just go on home.” Such efforts were more than enough to start the legends.
Yet when it had all started, on Monday, January 1, Sylvester was nowhere on the stage. Not even a hint of a memory tells what he was doing that day. His activities didn’t matter to the issue of the moment—the manhunt—and few seemed to notice him.
He was in no way implicated in the Fannie Taylor attack, nor even in the getaway accusations aimed at his cousin Aaron. The one link to him was trivial, a mere matter of coincidence: At the same house where Fannie Taylor’s alarm broke out, Sylvester’s mother Sarah, by seemingly innocuous happenstance, was due to come and do the wash. This could barely qualify as even an omen—though talk would grow.
As dawn broke on Thursday, the news value of a failed manhunt in remote wilderness had plummeted to near zero. The only newspaper still trying to squeeze a gasp or two out of the dying story was the local stalwart, the Gainesville Daily Sun, more than 45 miles from the scene, though there was nothing new to tap out on the Sun’s Associated Press telegraph wire. The paper’s front page that morning said feebly: “NO FURTHER TRACE OF NEGROES WANTED FOR ASSAULT AT SUMNER.” Its one-man reporting staff was still plumping the insinuations about a gang rape, but that had diminishing importance: however many, they’re now gone.
By this point, very vague stories would be left in Rosewood about Sylvester Carrier’s responses to the growing tension. It was said that by Monday night he had run into the manhunters. Supposedly at the end of the day he was at the open-fronted Rosewood railroad depot, the customary after-work gathering place, and supposedly there was some kind of heated exchange with wandering manhunters looking for clues. It is unclear whether the story was true or was instead a retrofitted explanation that tried to make sense of Sylvester’s involvement only after the fact.
The story centered on a sundown ultimatum: Be out of town by sundown or else. Sylvester was portrayed as coming away from the depot with the feeling that vengeful vigilantes were likely to be coming back for him later in the night—but the story then had to shrug that they didn’t.
Both Lee Carrier and Sam Hall heard that for the next three nights—Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights—Sylvester did sit up through the night with a gun, waiting for the visitors—who still didn’t come. Lee recalled running into him during the day on Thursday, and finding that Syl looked exhausted, not at all his usual confident, boastful self. “I ain’t had no rest,” he muttered, as Lee remembered it. “They’re not comin’. I can’t get any work done. I’m goin’ home to bed.”
At this point another myth should be shot down. In 1982 I talked repeatedly to survivor Lee Ruth Davis, who at the time of the 1923 events was seven. Ms. Davis was very cooperative and even helped me past some of the difficulties with her hostile cousin Philomena Doctor, but her memories presented more subtle problems.
It was clear that some of her impressions from age seven were being filled in with imagined flourishes, though at the time I didn’t grasp how completely this was happening. It would take years more to find enough witnesses for conclusive disproof. Among other things, Ms. Davis recalled dramatically that when Sam Carter was killed he was strung up in a tree just behind her uncle Sylvester’s house, as a warning to Sylvester. This image had the effect of promoting Sylvester to the status of a kind of community guardian, and it turned out to be only one of Lee Ruth’s recurrent promotion fantasies. She promoted her cousin Wade from being a jail bailiff in Volusia County, Florida (which he really was), to being the “high sheriff” there (which under Jim Crow would have been a stellar accomplishment). She promoted Sylvester himself from being a manual-labor fireman on the Cummer log train in 1920 to supposedly being the train’s lordly engineer. And she promoted Sylvester into the Carter killing by having Sam Carter hung behind Sylvester's house.
In 1982 I published the tree-behind-Sylvester’s story as a kind of waffling possibility. By now generations of copyists have found the image of the hanged man in Sylvester’s tree too good to pass up, and it has become a standard in quick Rosewood recaps, no checking required. I should have a rubber stamp for such places in that 1982 opus, saying, “DON’T USE THIS. IT TURNED OUT NOT TO BE TRUE.”
Noteworthy as well is yet another alleged explanation of Sylvester’s involvement. This one appeared as Rosewood went viral and hit the New York Times on January 6, 1923. The Times used one of the Associated Press wire stories from Gainesville near the swamps, and that story blamed Sylvester’s big mouth:
“…an attack on a young white woman…was said to have resulted in Carrier saying this act was an example of what the negroes could do without interference.”
For Sylvester Carrier to have made such an insurrectional call to arms was about as likely as Wade Carrier being a sheriff. The AP dispatch is saying, with a straight face, that this rabble-rousing Carrier fellow seems to be advocating epidemic cross-racial rape, finding it to be just the remedy for racial injustice—if it can be undertaken “without interference.”
However, the glimpse might look different if walked back through the fog of rumors to the real Sylvester Carrier—who in fact was noted in Rosewood for his irrepressible exclamations, especially his boasting, or “cracking.” The thought of a black “Florida Cracker” might be a bit subtle for the AP wire, but the informants grew specific.
“He loved to crack—and fight too,” said Sam Hall.
Lee Carrier was a bit more general, finding Syl’s personality grating and “overbearing,” and adding that the whole household at Sarah Carrier’s, where Sylvester lived, was both talented and a little too obnoxious about announcing their talents. Minnie (Mitchell) Langley, though seeing Sylvester himself only from a distance, had a closer view of his mother Sarah, and described her in similar terms. This was a talented, expressive family, especially musically, with Sarah Carrier’s upright piano in the parlor, but the reputation had an edge.
The New York Times added: “The white men went to Carrier’s house to see if Hunter was there”—referring to their search for the disappeared and never-caught convict allegedly named Jesse Hunter. Back on Monday no one had seemed to pay any special attention to the house where Sylvester Carrier lived, let alone saying that a fugitive might be hiding in there. But again there is some possible translation. Rumors in Sumner that week said that a specific white woman, Ila Hilliard, had gone to Sarah Carrier’s to pick up some freshly washed laundry, and that Hilliard then brought back tales of how Sarah’s son Sylvester was behaving. He was said to be boasting bizarrely about the disappeared fugitive, saying something like: “I knew where he was all along, but nobody asked me.” On its face as improbable as the Times polemic, this story does not rule out the possibility of a joking, cracking Sylvester intentionally kidding a nervous white matron.
Speculation down this dwindling rabbit hole rapidly becomes too thin, but Sylvester’s entry onto the stage did not entirely contradict his Rosewood reputation. The simplest explanation is that expectations aroused by the manhunt had found no exciting release, and they continued to seek one. As Monday passed into Thursday, retrospect suggests, a fateful race was invisibly occurring, between the straining for release of the tension on the one hand, and, on the other, a weary inertia saying to let it all blow over. No one could say by Thursday whether any such race was over and done with, or whether there was still some kind of probing for a weakest link in communal harmony, where a torrent might burst through.
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If anyone had said to recently fired quarters boss and deputy sheriff D. P. “Poly” Wilkerson on Thursday, January 4, 1923, that he represented some kind of weakest link in his community’s hope for harmony, he might not have entirely disagreed.
Things had not been going well. As consequences from his missteps crept closer, Poly Wilkerson was gazing into private corridors of impending doom, in ways his neighbors scarcely guessed. Yet they could see the outward signs—the thousand-yard stare as he sat motionless on his porch, interrupted by desperate bouts of activity suggesting alcohol; then more lassitude, lapsing back into “a deep study.”
Perry Hudson, a logger for Cummer Lumber (1983), said he happened to be present when Poly was fired. Suddenly Sheriff Walker was striding grimly into Tom Holt’s dry goods store, in which Poly was a partner (this was the other hat he wore, outside law enforcement). Poly was perhaps behind the counter. Reportedly the firing only took a moment, then Walker stalked out again.
This loss of Wilkerson’s county paycheck as a deputy sheriff was painful enough, but it was only the iceberg’s tip of his loss.
Customarily in old Florida, a man appointed as local deputy sheriff in a timber corporation’s town, its “company town,” automatically became an employee of the company as well, filling the niche called quarters boss. This specifically meant he was the boss over the quarters that was black, the one for manual labor, and not the smaller white quarters street for foremen and skilled craftsmen and their families.
Bottom line: at the same time Poly was fired as the county’s local deputy sheriff, he was by definition also being fired as the Cummer company’s quarters boss. This lost him crucial authority over a cryptic building in the black quarters: the company’s tavern and dance hall for African Americans, its jook.
The essence of a jook was alcohol, which was illegal. The national experiment called Prohibition had begun in 1920 (to last until 1933), and Levy County had had local prohibition before that. But there was a special way that the liquor laws were bent, quite unlike the speakeasies and gang wars in more civilized places like Chicago.
Florida’s big sawmill and turpentine operations used African American labor almost exclusively, and the managerial consensus was that black labor would not stay in a godforsaken swamp outpost without some entertainment, which meant a jook. As World War I began fueling a “Great Migration” of black labor going north for better pay, Florida’s remote timber counties strained to help keep laborers in their main economic engines, the big timber jobs. At some point a standardized system spread across the woods, by which company-town jooks and their alcohol were outside the law—and were run by the law.
A jook’s legal illegality was officially overseen by a combined public and private officer, the deputy sheriff/quarters boss. There was a tacit understanding that sounded a bit like a later quote in the movie The Godfather, when a mafia don growled that coloreds have no souls, so promoting their substance abuse would be okay.
The company-run black jooks of Florida timber country got a pass from Prohibition. In 1921, U.S. Bureau of Investigation agents (the precursor of the FBI) poured into a notorious swamp labor operation not far from Levy County, but their target was peonage violation. They talked happily and without complaint to the managers of the camp jook. The topsy-turvy world of Jim Crow had created a kind of consolation prize for one race. Whites continued to be subject to Prohibition laws and were forbidden to drink in the jooks; some who tried were arrested.
In the years leading up to 1923, before Poly Wilkerson was fired, he reigned as Saturday night king of the Sumner jook, overseeing an exotic world of excitement that his white neighbors would never know. White in a sea of lamp-lit dark faces, Poly’s position recalled that other racial icon, the lost trader Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, and the old colonial saw, “going native.”
It was not as if jooks were secret hideaways like blind tigers or speakeasies with a password or a special knock. In a company town most every child, black or white, knew where the jook was, and what it did. At night many could hear the tantalizing noise. But whites didn’t go over there.
Less definable was the aspect of the jook that would both elevate and ensnare Wilkerson: the economics. The safe in Cummer Lumber’s pay office might seem an unlikely repository for sodden bills and coins accruing from illegal moonshine, but the closing-hour proceeds from the jook had to go somewhere. The jook was owned by Cummer Lumber and was a valuable tool for recouping large portions of employee wages, but it was a compromise for Cummer superintendent Walter Pillsbury.
As Sumner’s top sawmill manager, Pillsbury occupied the pay-office swivel chair that guarded the safe, but he was also a reformer and a Baptist stickler, whose mission after World War I had been to go into barbarous Sumner and clean it up. As such, Pillsbury had caused resentment by closing down a dance hall for whites. But even for Pillsbury, and for the relatively enlightened Cummer family behind him, meddling with the Jim Crow balance in the jook was a bridge too far.
This delicate balance meant that an impressive flow of cash was receiving creative bookkeeping, if any. The Cummers, per custom in the timber jobs, would eventually burn their bridges behind them, leaving no discoverable records. But while Poly Wilkerson reigned on his precarious throne at the moonshine-spattered bar in the jook, he was overseeing a good deal of money, with only dubious higher monitoring as to how much of it stuck.
The indicators that this was an extraordinarily lucrative job are indirect, but appear in the tax rolls: In 1922 Poly Wilkerson owned two automobiles, more than anyone else in Sumner but his boss Pillsbury, who had three. On May 14, 1923, a company jook in Dixie County, across the Suwannee from Sumner, made its way into the Miami News: “Gambling and drink bills were on the cash basis on Saturday night, but tokens known as ‘babbits,’ and ‘cross tickets,’ were issued by company agents to those who went broke after Saturday night until the next pay day.” In that same trans-Suwannee no-man’s land, one embezzlement of jook proceeds was rather precisely reported. The disappearance of $972.63 was said to cause the firing of a camp manager.
But as to why Wilkerson himself was fired from such a plum position, there are only rumors from his underworld, all of which may be mistaken. Commissary clerk Ernest Parham thought vaguely that Wilkerson might have gotten too hard on black labor. This sounds like logical deduction on no facts. At closer range, Robert Missouri in the black quarters, not a jook patron but knowing those who were, hinted at the Heart of Darkness syndrome, depicting Poly as going native in the den of passion, growing too insistent with the jook’s waitresses, who allegedly feared him. This too may have been just deduction. More concrete were apparent gambling debts. Among African Americans it was said repeatedly that Wilkerson’s binges at cards had gone over the edge.
As mentioned earlier, the card game called Georgia Skin, played in a jook’s back room, was a sudden-death form of blackjack that could wipe out a player in a heartbeat, to the opponent’s triumphant cry of “You fall!” How a white enforcer could have gotten involved in this, or could be in the red to a subordinate black underworld, was a little too subtle for the rumor mill to explain. Lee Carrier of Rosewood, age 20 in 1923 and a non-church-goer unphased by jooks, said that as 1923 neared, Wilkerson’s gambling debts had cost him one of his two cars.
If the jook’s bagman fee, formal or informal, had been keeping the gambling debts barely at bay, the sudden cut-off of that flow meant curtains. All at once the big man had lost his longtime prestige as an enforcer (his father before him had been a frontier justice of the peace), his lordship over the racy black domain, and, worst of all, even his ability to feed his wife and five children.
The point of this discussion is that on the night of January 4, 1923, the fateful Thursday night, Poly Wilkerson would be removed from his dilemmas by death, kicking off the next-level phase of the Rosewood violence. The death itself would rip the mask of discretion from his finances, for his family, far from inheriting a nest egg, was plunged into destitute despair. His share in Tom Holt’s dry goods store was forfeit, his children were turned out of school to try and scrounge, and his widow was forced to take last-ditch, splinter-ridden work at the sawmill, stacking scraps of lumber like a man.
This, then, was one half of an ominous drumbeat that was moving toward Rosewood on Thursday night. The other half was in the second man who would be framed for an instant with Poly Wilkerson that night, filling a moon-shadowed doorway as Sylvester Carrier’s six-shot pump shotgun turned night into day.
The second man in the doorway, more prestigious and powerful than Wilkerson, was not part of Walter Pillsbury’s world at the sawmill, but moved around it. He was the local manager of Cummer Lumber’s field operations, supplying the sawmill with its timber. This was “woods boss,” or logging superintendent Henry Andrews.
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The extent to which Henry Martin Andrews really was called Boots, or “Cap’n Boots,” is debatable. It was certainly not said to his face. Its use was imputed to the African American loggers he supervised in the woods, but surviving loggers who could be found in the 1980s did not seem to recall using a specific nickname for him. It nonetheless traveled. The translation of “Boots” was that he kicked people.
Henry Andrews, unlike his soon-to-be Thursday night companion Poly Wilkerson, showed no indication of having suffered any prior reverses or humiliations that might explain the night, or might have inspired a disastrous nighttime expedition.
By all accounts Andrews continued to stand successfully and indeed unstoppably at the peak of Cummer Lumber's local logging operations, in a domain that stretched from the logging quarters in Otter Creek, through the nerve center at Sumner, and then far up the log train spur to the Fowler’s Bluff logging camp on the Suwannee, a realm of influence more than 20 miles long.
In the deep swamps, Andrews's world contrasted with that of his co-ruler Walter Pillsbury in Sumner. Pillsbury ran the sawmill and the company town on a stable platform—hard and dangerous enough, but with an industrial regularity suited to Pillsbury’s forceful but pensive temperament, which found him going home at night to hear one of his daughters play piano while thumbed his Bible and smoked his pipe. This was quite a ways from Andrews’ familiar environment of giant trees crashing down in stinking muck, jungle vines clutching like giant spider webs, and a straining, roaring steam log skidder whose cable could snap and slice a man in two.
Logging bosses were expected to drive men past the easy mark, and the men being driven were often towers of strength, making top money, above that of sawmill hands, but often up to their knees or even their waists in tea-black water so filled with discomforts that you rarely even thought about snakes. Smoking a cigar might cut the mosquitoes, for a moment. Throwing down a denim jumper into the water and donning it wet might briefly cut the suffocating heat. Crosscut saws were plied atop makeshift scaffolds to get above not only the water but the buttress bases of the cypress giants, anchoring them in the mud. No vehicle roads came into this theater of struggle, only the log train rails, trestled through the mire in some long-forgotten past by convicts or other wraiths snared for insufferable labor. No prying eyes were out there as Andrews, in the big boots, might leap down from the skidder skirts or kick a stuck log, or fume about the board-feet quota falling behind.
Beyond the Suwannee in notorious Taylor County a superintendent captured a portrait of the woods boss persona, recalling how one such head logger had grumbled wryly that no injuries had yet occurred that day, so he must be doing something wrong. The lack of outsiders in such worlds meant no record of how many kicks might or might not have been aimed at humans—though even little Minnie Mitchell, far back down the log-train tracks in Rosewood, had heard about Henry Andrews, and said, like others: “he loved to put his feet on people.”
Andrews’ son-in-law, L.W. Norsworthy, tried to keep things in perspective: “He was a lover of his children and his family, but as far as everything else, you see, times were different back then…You had to be mean to work those people the way they worked them.” Former State Senator Charlie Johns, known for other controversies, had known Andrews and felt that he was “just hard. He was a really likeable man, but he was just tough.”
Logger Pompey Glover was nine when Andrews met his fate on a Thursday night in Rosewood, but Glover grew up with the tales: “He was a devil man. Not only black but everybody was scared of him.”
Robert Missouri, a peacemaker who generally had a kind word for everyone, including Poly Wilkerson, made an exception for Andrews: “He just didn’t beat up colored. He’d beat up white, too.” Sam Hall lumped the two together: “Two ole bad guys, Poly Wilkerson and Boots Anders.” Hall said of “Anders”: “Kick him? White and black. Lotta white folks be glad he got killed. He wasn’t playin’ bad. He was bad.” Lee Carrier: “Andrews kicked a many people out there in that log camp.”
wo stories about Henry Andrews, from the same white teller, not only suggest the level of hatred he could evoke (in some whites as well as many blacks) but illustrate the mysterious limbo of the tall tale. These two Paul Bunyan stories rambled on for minute after earnest minute, replete with solemn affirmations of eyewitness verification, and yet they flew some classic warning flags of confabulation:
Andrews strides into a store in Otter Creek, meditatively picks up the storekeeper’s cat, pulls out a pocketknife and threatens to cut the cat’s tail off,. He is backed down only by a pistol from beneath the store counter.
Then tale number two:
Andrews strides into a pool of lantern light in the Saturday night crowd on the street in Otter Creek. He grabs a black drifter, hammerlocks him, pulls out a pistol with his free hand and begins chipping down with the gun butt like an ax, chipping off bits of the man’s bleeding scalp, then cries to the awed spectators: “Got to have me a little nigger wool on Saturday night!”—whereupon he lifts the bleeding scrap and eats it.
And the warning flags? The two tales are surreptitiously the same: the immobilized target, the one-hand hold, the cutting edge for torture in the free hand, the unconscionable goal. The second tale, as if encouraged by the attention given to the first, builds to greater and greater heights, at last reaching the stratosphere of the unthinkable, the gastronomic. There is no archive to say whether lumber executive Henry Andrews might really have been like this, or whether perhaps he had simply cut a path so harsh that he engendered slander.
Some whites said they liked him (including whites who had worked under him, though never including blacks), but at the same time, the whites he chose as hunting companions on his days off did not seem to be executives like Pillsbury, but on occasion were drunken outcasts. Grandiose alcoholic meanness was the implication in the tales. Son-in-law Norsworthy allowed tersely: “a heavy drinker.”
Early on Thursday evening, January 4, 1923, generous drinking was said to be occurring on a Fowler’s Bluff hunting trip that had found no deer. A card game resulted (poker, not Georgia Skin, since these were whites), and talk was said to arise about how nobody had done anything about the attacker of Fannie Taylor. Henry Andrews was said to be one of the card players, as remembered by another one, Perry Hudson, a forthright informant but with severe health problems that could have worked on his memory.
It was generally agreed that Andrews and his wife and small children had once lived not far from Fannie Taylor in Sumner, almost in the path of the Monday attack. The card game was said to break up with the decision that something should be done at last. Two players, Perry Hudson and a man named Rogers, were said to reject the emerging plan and opted out. At a logging camp en route, Hudson said, the two dissenters got out of the car that was carrying Andrews and others back to Sumner. He said that still in the car was Andrews’ hunting buddy Mannie Hudson, a woodland hog catcher known mostly for drinking. Mannie Hudson was a brother of Bryant Hudson the shooter on Monday night, and would be found the morning after the card game blasted in the face on Sarah Carrier’s front porch, left for dead by repentant companions.
Perry Hudson (their cousin) said he watched the car depart and wished he could have talked them out of it. Notably absent from this story of the hunting trip and card game is Poly Wilkerson. He was a kinsman of Henry Andrews’s wife Cuba, but Andrews and Wilkerson moved in different circles. At some point on Thursday night, however, they would converge, for they, too, would appear on Sarah Carrier’s front porch, along with the slightly more fortunate Mannie Hudson. Beyond this story of the hunting trip, nothing more would emerge about the preliminary movements of Henry Andrews.
If a drunken Andrews talked a dejected Wilkerson into a heroic foray that night, like a fling at recouping lost prestige by doubling down, any proof of that would grow so buried that barely even gossip was left on the trail.
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During the day on Thursday, January 4, 1923, Rosewood moved along uneasily. After the killing of Sam Carter on Monday night there were two more nights with no apparent violence.
By Thursday, Sam Carter’s funeral had come and gone. Aaron and Manulda Carrier had disappeared, with only rumors left to wonder about their fate. The posse and white mob had continued manhunting into Tuesday and Wednesday, but now faded away.
At dawn on this Thursday, as on any ordinary weekday, at least six Rosewood men and boys walked to work in Sumner, meeting no problems. The Gainesville Sun’s forlorn manhunt headline—“NO FURTHER TRACE”—seemed a rebuke. White manhood had left the wily aggressor unpunished..
In this uncertain atmosphere, no one knew that in only a few more hours Thursday night would bring spectacular release. There would be only confusing snatches of allegation about what was going on inside Rosewood as the moment neared, and who might have caused what:
1) During the day, saintly but perhaps addled Julia Edwards was spreading a rumor that the white mob was not yet finished, but would return to Rosewood “to kill out all the Carriers and the Bradleys.” The rumor said the mob was planning to target only those two families. Fretful Julia Edwards was a Bradley.
2) A white woman, Ila Hilliard, was said to pick up her laundry at Sarah Carrier’s house, after which she allegedly returned to Sumner with news that she heard Sarah’s son Sylvester boasting that he knew where the fugitive was.
3) Apparently contradicting the tale above, Sarah Carrier was said to do wash in Sumner on this Thursday, much as she had been scheduled to do on Monday, but at a different home. If so, her arrival back at home was presumably before sunset, which bears on allegation #4 below.
The Thursday washing is said to be done at the home of Poly Wilkerson. From Wilkerson's, Sarah was said to have “brought word” that the whites were coming to get Sylvester.
Conversely, stories soon emerging among whites would say the opposite, that it was Sarah herself, or others at her house, who “sent word” to the whites, telling them to come to Sarah’s house, on a puzzling promise: that the fugitive was being held there for white pickup.
4) Around sunset on Thursday, it seems firmly established, Sylvester Carrier went to the home of his aunt Emma Carrier, just up the tracks from where he lived with his mother Sarah. There he told Emma that the whites seemed likely to cause trouble tonight, so Emma should bring her entire household of children and grandchildren down to Sarah’s house, where Sylvester could protect them. This was apparently a real encounter, not a rumor or false memory, but it conflicts strangely with the one following below, also apparently real.
5) By the time Lee Carrier had walked home from work in Sumner on Thursday, it was just after sunset. In Rosewood Lee ran into his cousin Sylvester. Syl looked exhausted from sitting up three nights to watch for aggressing whites. He muttered to Lee that lack of sleep was ruining his work cutting crossties in the woods—and these exhausting vigils were seemingly for nothing. “They’re not comin',” Sylvester grumbled disgustedly. “I’m goin’ home to bed.” Subsequent details from other witnesses would show that Sylvester did do just that—that he went home and went to bed—seeming to feel that the crisis had passed. But if so, why did he detour first to offer the alarming invitation to Emma’s household (item #4 above)—an invitation which, as it turned out, would draw them into the worst possible position, veritably into the lion’s mouth?
6) Emma Carrier waited until after nightfall before going to Sarah’s as Sylvester suggested. Two of Emma's boA son and grandson have been working through the day in Wylly, and she must gather them in before trooping all nine of her household members (or seven if two stay behind as sometimes said) down the railroad to her sister Sarah’s house. Granddaughter Minnie Mitchell was present on this walk. When they arrived at Sarah’s house it was dark. Everyone there seemed to have gone to bed, leaving no indications of tension or siege mentality. Sarah came to the door in her nightgown. Sarah and a grown daughter, Bernadina, slept in the same downstairs bed, and Bernadina was apparently asleep when Emma’s group arrived. Sylvester, far from anxiously standing guard, was nowhere to be seen and was apparently in his room at the back, also in bed. Stories from his wife Gert would say the same. Why then had Sylvester made the sudden invitation?
The arrival of Emma Carrier’s frightened delegation at Sarah's house placed a total of either fifteen or seventeen occupants in the house, almost all of them women and children. And just as the new arrivals were getting settled in, a very different kind of group also arrived, in a car that pulled up in front of Sarah’s house, bringing white men, who would start the Thursday night shootout.
Two episodes that are beyond doubt—the arrival of Emma’s ill-fated household from one direction, and the arrival of the whites in the car from the other—form a convergence not easily explained. A puzzle piece in the chain of causation seems to be somehow missing. The whites did not know that Emma’s household had just arrived, and Emma’s household did not know that the whites were about to arrive. Did this all occur by coincidence?
If each of the itemized preliminary episodes or allegations is considered, a wobbly hypothetical scenario can be constructed that might fit them all, to form a barely logical progression. The result is far too dependent on guesswork to be viewed as anything more than a tool to focus questions:
Amid increasing tensions Sarah Carrier goes to Poly Wilkerson’s house, perhaps to plead for her son Sylvester, though the pressured ex-deputy interprets this in light of his earlier suspicions about Sylvester’s boasting. Sarah, unsettled by Wilkerson’s reaction, then goes home and feels she must do something. Her son Sylvester has grown skeptical about the possibility of a vigilante visit and he is not in alarm mode, but at his mother’s urging he trudges up the tracks and invites Emma Carrier’s household down “for protection.” Then Sylvester, having placated his mother, goes home to bed.
In such a scenario, which may be quite unfair, the missing puzzle piece would be Sarah Carrier. Her grandson A.T. Goins, who was eight in 1923, was certainly in Sarah’s house as Emma’s household arrived, and was there shortly afterward as the whites arrived. A.T. testified in March 1994 that just prior to those two converging arrivals, his grandmother Sarah had come home bearing a message from the whites: “They sent word by grandma, my grandmother, to tell Sylvester he was next.”
The testimony saying this came in the context of the Rosewood claims case, under pressures leaving this line of revelation little more certifiable than other doubt-ridden allegations, some of which contradict it.
Moreover, the hypothetical workings of the scenario suggested here would seem to require a large dose of psychological mystery, in the form of inexplicable motivation on the part of Sarah Carrier. What unlikely psychological factors could possibly motivate her to do all this?
Perhaps the simple answer is that she didn’t do all this, and the guesswork scenario is just one of many possible avenues for empty speculation.
However, there is also Rosewood’s longer history. Similarly unlikely-sounding questions had come up in Rosewood once before.
__________
It may be a stretch, in the effort to understand the riddles leading up to Thursday night, January 4, 1923, to reach back into a previous communal trauma in Rosewood. This was the shooting in the First A.M.E. Church.
In that event, three strong men were suddenly brought to ruin by the inexplicable act of a powerless player on the sidelines. People were left shaking their heads in bafflement. What could the motivation have been? Was it simply panic? Why in the world, they asked, would someone do that?
Many community members were present in the crowded church that night, attending Rosewood’s yearly Christmas pageant. Many survived into later years still talking about the mystery they had witnessed. Their memories retained no exact date of the occurrence, and, as in the 1923 events, no law enforcement documents resulted to fix the date. Apparently it was in December 1916.
Lee Ruth Davis, born in 1915, would hear her father Wesley talk about it. Eva Jenkins (b. 1910) and Sam Hall (b. 1906) also heard the stories. But the body of testimony grows more specific than hearsay. Lutie Foster, Lee Carrier, and Ernest Blocker were present in the events, and the first two, both born in 1900, retained detailed memories.
Aside from any light this incident might shed on a Thursday in 1923, the Christmas shooting forms a prime example of how the customary tools of historiography, consisting of written documents, can leave gaping holes in the biography of a rural African American community under Jim Crow. The Christmas shooting is invisible in written records—as if nothing had occurred—but its impact was pervasive. Lutie (McCoy) Foster, an adolescent at the time and personally caught in the conflict, said sadly of the Christmas shooting: “That finished tearing up Rosewood.”
What she meant was that a series of tragedies had unfolded after the 1911 closing of H. E. Charpia’s cedar sawmill in the center of Rosewood, a closing that removed the community’s main economic engine (and indeed the source of its name, in red cedar wood). In 1910, the census had found both Sylvester Carrier and his father Haywood gainfully employed at the cedar mill, but by 1911 Sylvester was mortgaging the oxen and mules he had used to haul cedar. Clear-cutting of the Rosewood area’s valuable swamp cedar trees had been so relentless that it left scarcely a cedar tree big enough for a fence post, according to one authority.
However the timing of this demise was not as represented in an academic paper growing out of the claims case, saying that the cedar was gone by 1890. Rosewood’s 1911 events formed the real marker of the cedar’s end. The claims case distortion, like its later-confessed misinterpretation of census records, was promoting an image of Rosewood’s black majority success as going back for decades. In reality it was well after 1911 that the community became mostly African American, during a twilight decade when few black-owned businesses were left, and those few would close before 1923.
As to the tragedies, on August 18, 1911, the African American Church of Rosewood caught fire and burned down. Arson was universally agreed upon as the cause, as was the impression that it was an internal matter not involving whites.
The collapsing cedar town had never been free of violence, and shrinkage did not lessen the stress. In 1912, Rosewood’s violence grew so disturbing that a white female resident used as grounds for divorce her husband’s inaction in moving her out of what she characterized as a gunfire zone.
Among the African Americans emerging as a new communal majority, one internal feud was manifest in the abandonment of the Pleasant Field Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in 1886, which was rejected in favor of the A.M.E. Church of Rosewood, the church that burned in 1911. In that abandonment “some kind of falling out,” as Sam Hall heard it, may have translated as community outrage because of an apparent double household kept by Pleasant Field’s lay preacher, Bacchus Hall.
The 1911 A.M.E. arson was prosecuted, though this only deepened a picture of severe divisions within the coalescing new remnant community. Fingers pointed at aging trapper John Coleman, a non-church-goer with a possible grudge from an earlier killing. But at trial the accusation against Coleman turned out to be so baseless that an entirely new suspect emerged, a more credible one. Former church treasurer Richard Williams, reportedly fired for embezzlement, was said to have sworn to get even, among other indicators. But when Williams was then tried before a new jury, he, like Coleman, was acquitted.
Internal feuds in Rosewood in the decade after 1911 were also said to have caused arson against the community’s African American school, for unspecified reasons, and against its third church, a small Baptist chapel in the Goins Quarters area. Some stories had the school being hit twice. Minnie Langley said it was rebuilt and reopened by 1923.
The community enduring these misfortunes was not the halcyon paradise of “thriving...businesses” promoted by Rosewood myths, which gained prominence in the Rosewood claims case. The discordant reality was doubly disconcerting because many residents were clearly hard-working and religiously devout. When tempers flared, surviving traces sometimes left no explanation of the motivations behind the eruptions.
In 1912, Rosewood resident Ellen King, a resourceful seamstress and loving mother, was acquitted of defaming the character of her Rosewood neighbour Agnes Marshal. But as to why, and how such rancors might reveal the community factions that could lead to feuds, the traces are mute. Ellen King and her husband Sam were light-skinned Goins migrants who had adopted a very dark-skinned toddler, the former Eloise Carrier, coming from Lee Carrier’s atomized branch of that family. Far from being alienated by skin color, little Eloise was lovingly spoiled and isolated from other children, as everyone seemed to agree, as if the aim was to shelter her from racial unpleasantness. But did any of this help explain the slander suit of 1912? The crumbling courthouse files don’t say.
However, the theme of unexplained rancors would grow more public in the church shooting.
Apparently on a December night in 1916, as war raged in Europe, the First A.M.E. Church of Rosewood was filled with light and sound. Each year, Christmas pageants were carefully staged at the church, using instructions in Sunday school quarterlies sent by mail from A.M.E. headquarters. The hope was that vivid entertainment would draw in the larger community, and thus fill the collection plate to help support A.M.E. administration and mission headquarters in distant Philadelphia. Also in other ways,. the pageant in question was a statement of continued hope, for this church, built in 1912, was the replacement for the one burned down in 1911.
Lutie McCoy, age 16, was proud to be a part of Mrs. Carrier’s big show. The talented church pianist and organizer Sarah Carrier was known for directing these pageants, Lutie would recall. She found Mrs. Carrier to be a nice woman who paid tireless attention to rehearsals, working until the performance was just right.
On the night in question a featured attraction was “marching the double-cross,” a form of synchronized promenade where young girls in pretty blue knickers briskly moved in two opposing streams along the church walls, circling the pews to keep meeting and passing each other at two points, at the front by the altar, and at the back by the door. These dynamics would cradle the night’s upheaval.
At the front of the church, lay pastor Elias Carrier looked down approvingly from the pulpit behind the chancel rail. The marchers found that pass, at the front, to be the easy one. To make room for it, the snugly built church had been rearranged a bit. The front row of pews had been removed, which meant unscrewing the pews from narrow strips of wooden lath that seated them on the floor. The lath strips, being nailed to the floorboards, were naturally left in place, barely visible and easily stepped over by the marching girls. This would turn out not to be a trivial detail.
The more difficult pass for the marchers was at the back of the congregation, where the main door opened toward the darkened Seaboard tracks outside. The difficulty might be called a back-hand tribute to the pageant’s popularity. The doorway was crowded with standees, attracted, as hoped, to the engaging spectacle of young girls marching chastely but vibrantly in short knickers, which were coquettishly held in place by baby blue garters. At the approach to each pass by the door Lutie felt dread, knowing what waited there.
In the crowd at the door was George Goins, the youngest heir to the Goins turpentine business, which had once bustled at the edge of Rosewood but had dissolved, its last equipment auctioned this same year. George, said another neighbor, Sam Hall, was not turning out well, and “stayed drunk.”
George Goins’ more respected older brother Charlie, the leader of the Goins heirs, was also at the pageant, seated decorously in a pew, but George seemed exiled into the ranks of the standees at the back. This was doubly striking because George was married to Sarah Carrier’s daughter Willie, and Willie Carrier Goins, a talented pianist like her mother Sarah, was helping Sarah to direct the pageant. One or the other of them was at the church organ, playing as the girls marched.
Lutie’s attention was focused elsewhere, on her marching, for a disturbing reason. As girls passed George Goins he would reach out and hook a finger into a garter, then pull and let it snap back, trying to make them lose step. Lutie barely knew this man, and she had no idea why he was being such a spoiler.
The answer may have had nothing to do with an extenuating circumstance, which left George Goins, in a manner of speaking, trapped between worlds. Later an army recruit in World War I, pale George Goins would be listed in one army record as black, in another as white.
His game with the garters, at any rate, soon seemed to be only a warm-up. Staggering free of the knot of standees at the door, visibly inebriated, the intruder drew every mortified eye as he brazenly strode directly down the aisle, clear to the chancel rail. The choir corner there was filled with aromatic foliage, for a large Christmas tree had been cut, one of the last of the old swamp cedars, somehow not clear-cut with the others, and located deep in the hammock where no axe had gone, until now.
The tree was gaily hung with presents for the congregation’s children. Distribution was about to begin. But George Goins, lurching and leaning far in over the rail, seemed determined to show disdain for everyone present. He began drunkenly batting and grabbing at the presents on the tree. Forcing tensions to a breaking point, he had ensured that no matter what the reaction of those present, it would be humiliating. The most innocent of activities, for the joy of children, had been turned into something dirty and mean.
Preacher Elias Carrier tried to take charge. Coming down from the pulpit he gently put his arm around George, trying to lead him away.
This was when it happened.
As Elias and George moved across the floor together, their bodies braced against one another, Elias’s forward-moving shoe was suddenly brought to a dead halt. At a stretch of open flooring where no obstacle should have been, an invisible gremlin seemed to grab Elias’s foot--that gremlin being one of the small strips of lath nailed securely to the floor.
Elias was caught totally off guard, as his forward momentum threw hiim off balance. Elias and George were hurled together in the only direction that the caught foot would allow, downward. The small strip of lath, still firmly in place on the floor, was quickly obscured by a jumble of flailing arms and legs. The sudden sight of the unexplained fall struck the tensed congregation like a cannon shot.
Thus came the voice, the one they would all remember, shrieking, splitting the air, coming out suddenly with the words that no one could explain.
In the shock of the fall she cried:
“Eli’ cuttin’ George to death!”
There would be slightly varying memories of the exact words, as there would be varying memories of exactly who, over by the organ, the scream had come from. Lutie thought it might have been Willie Carrier Goins, George’s wife. But this was not the majority opinion. The community at large soon seemed to agree that it was Sarah.
In an instant the scream had phenomenally reframed stressed interpretations as to what was going on. The tableau before the shocked and startled watchers was transformed and escalated, from being one of merely awkward embarrassment into one of dire alarm, mortal alarm, which someone must answer.
The leading figure in the Goins family, Charlie, craned his neck in horror, seeking clues to help him interpret the urgency. How should he react? What was he reacting to? He leaped atop a pew in his effort to see. The scream had spelled out the danger. This was no time for indecision.
Not quite as decorous as he had looked, Charlie Goins had brought a pistol to church. He drew and fired.
They tried to rush Elias Carrier to the hospital in Gainesville, over some very bad roads, but the shot was fatal. Almost as soon as the trigger was pulled, Charlie Goins seemed to grasp that his own life was ruined as well. The lights in the church went out. People fled in all directions in fear of more gunfire. Lutie McCoy, running down the railroad in the dark, later learned where Charlie had fled to seek refuge after the shooting—for he went to the home of her parents, old-time Goins retainers John and Mary Ella McCoy. Charlie borrowed a horse, rode it nearly to death for twelve miles, then caught the plank ferry across the Suwannee, fleeing into territory where he could lose himself, into the outlaw swamps on the other side of the river.
Of the three lives ruined, the process by which George Goins, the provocateur, became an outcast was the least obvious. He would be migrating through logging camps for years, before and after the 1923 Rosewood disaster. His brother Charlie would eventually surface again, keeping to the shadows. Apparently no warrant was ever made out for him. Elias of course was gone. And there was of course no knife.
Everyone agreed that in the pandemonium evoked by the shot the lights in the church extinguished. Whether this was from percussive effect on the kerosene lamps lining the walls or whether astute deacons had dived to twist the wick knobs, the darkness added to the confusion. Another eyewitness was Lee Carrier, about the same age as Lutie McCoy. While others were dashing out of the church, Lee would remember, he took the closer option, diving under a pew.
For what seemed a long time he stayed there, until the church was quiet. Then rising up cautiously for a look, he saw someone lighting a lamp in the empty building. He would never forget his surprise to see Sarah Carrier there, leaning over the chancel rail with her lit lamp, as she thought she was unobserved.
As it turned out, Lee Carrier had never much liked the arrogance and boastfulness that he felt was in Sarah’s houseful of Carriers, with their undeniable talents and skills, but also their brassy conviction of their own superiority. Perhaps this helped to shape what Lee was sure he saw next in the shadows of the church. Sarah, thinking herself alone, was taking presents off the tree. Lee, positioned to take in details that the telling could not recapture, was sure that she was not just preserving the presents, but stealing them. He felt sure of it partly because it seemed in character for her.
He was far from being alone in not being one of Sarah Carrier's fans. Minnie Langley would angrily describe other behavior by Sarah Carrier that seemed inexplicable.
In the story of the Christmas scream, a voice was portrayed as packaging what had become unbearable tension, and thus translating a trapped situation into a sharpened, actionable interpretation, an interpretation that could move strong men to dispel the suspense—by plunging them ruinously into destruction.
_______
“Listen…” said a puzzled voice on a rambling, L-shaped porch in the bright moonlight of Thursday night, January 4, 1923.
This was the way that Leroy “Lee” Carrier would recall his first intimation of trouble that night. It was now perhaps around 9:00 p.m., well past sunset into full night. As Lee sat on the porch, he recalled, he spoke because he thought he had heard a car.
He was seated with his cousin Bishop Bradley on the porch of Bishop’s family home, where they both lived, under the authority of Bishop’s widowed father, lumberjack Wesley Bradley. Wesley and his smaller children had already gone to bed. In the morning, Lee and Bishop would both have to be up before dawn to walk the three miles into work in Sumner, but they delayed turning in. A sharp drop in temperature this night had given the brilliance of the moon an invigorating thrill. The two cousins continued talking quietly.
The house, apparently passing down in an occupancy arrangement with the Methodist Episcopal Church, had once served a vanished chapel as lodging for circuit preachers, then came to rest in John Wesley Bradley’s devout hands. It stood well north of storekeeper John Wright’s larger residence, thus being barely within earshot of the sandy turnoff into Rosewood from the ruts of Highway 13.
The sound was tiny, at the threshold of hearing. An automobile seemed to have pulled up to the turnoff, then cut its engine. Then came another such sound, as if from a second car, and perhaps another, in a dim series. “Why all them stoppin’ up there,” Lee would recall saying to Bishop.
After an interval of silence a lone car seemed to start up again, now audible continuously in the distance as it made its way into the network of sand wagon lanes in Rosewood. Later events and declarations would pinpoint this car as belonging to Poly Wilkerson.
Despite a growing cloud of tales, the evidence points repeatedly to only one car on this moonlit ride, Wilkerson’s Model-T Ford. A newspaper dispatch claimed that a total of fifteen white men were present, and this may have been true, but only five names would surface: Poly Wilkerson, Henry Andrews, Mannie Hudson, Bryan Kirkland (not to be confused with Bryant Hudson from Monday night), and Minor Studstill. It’s possible that only those five made up the group, though others could have been on the running boards of the car or walking alongside (for a rather long stroll). At any rate there was no great crowd.
The task of determining the number of men in the groupt would be complicated by the later fame of this visit. Levy County would seem to fill with boasting among whites about supposedly being present at the great battle. At least three local residents—Jason McElveen, Roy Foster, and Morris Cannon (and probably a good deal more)—later told spellbinding stories about personally living through the night’s carnage, though glaring errors and impossibilities in their descriptions suggest strongly that they weren’t really there.
Tales among whites suggest that at the turn-off before entering Rosewood more than one car did arrive, by surprised coincidence, as the shivery, silvery moonlight and provocative weather sent drivers prowling out aimlessly toward Rosewood in search of a post-manhunt mission.
There is a faint implication, barely a guess, that before Wilkerson was brought into the mix the hunting-trip car bearing Henry “Boots” Andrews and Mannie Hudson (if there was such a car) arrived in Sumner and made a preliminary stop. Some kind of contact seemed to occur with the new deputy sheriff in Sumner, Clarence Williams, perhaps an effort to persuade Williams into a Rosewood foray and thus give it the color of law. Reportedly Williams later made cryptic mention of some such contact, though he apparently stayed aloof and did not participate in whatever expedition was congealing. This would have left the adventurers to seek the next best alternative in local law enforcement. Across town lived the resentful fired deputy, still carying a valid badge as a district constable, in a network apart from the sheriff's department.
If the adventurers called at Poly Wilkerson’s house with their desire to search Rosewood, they could have learned of his encounter that day with Sarah Carrier (if there was such an encounter), which might gell their vague ambitions onto a specific Rosewood target, Sylvester Carrier.
Such a sequence would tortuously fit most of the known evidence, though there is nothing directly saying that things went that way. Logging superintendent Andrews may have needed scant encouragement to narrow his search field onto Sylvester. Sylvester had been dismissed as a fireman on the Cummer log train because of some kind of quarrel with a boss, and the boss could have been volatile Henry Andrews. Or, even if the argument was with a lower-level foreman, Andrews may have remained irritated enough for revenge.
The swarm of possible reasons why the group made its visit is pertinent mostly because of later white claims that they came in complete innocence—that they were allegedly “sent word” to come and pick up the mysterious Monday fugitive at Sarah Carrier’s house--only to be met there by treacherous black ambush. That this story smacks of alibi and rationalization even on its face is reprised by the group’s actions once they arrived at the house, as described by agreeing testimony from within the house and even by some of the stories from the visitors themselves.
The implication is that though they may have talked themselves into hazy justification, the pretension almost immediately broke down into a deeper desire that had been present from the beginning, a desire to have a fight, of whatever sort might develop.
The moon had risen that night at 7:44 p.m., virtually full, and the full moon of January can look larger and more magical than any other moon of the year, as a skewed orbit brings it slightly closer to earth. Meanwhile the temperature was dropping toward a recorded low that night of 37 degrees Fahrenheit, perhaps a bit lower in the woods. By morning there would be frost, which can form at temperatures slightly above freezing. The combination said too cold and bright to sit still, a message ripe for disastrous adventure.
At Sarah Carrier’s house, Minnie Mitchell’s first perceptions of the arriving car were indistinct—and would grow more so as her memories came under later pressures in the Rosewood claims case in 1992-1994. By then Ms. Langley was approaching eighty and repeatedly expressed hostility toward questioners who seemed to prod her away from what she really remembered. When I first located her in 1983things were different. No money was involved and no rehearsed or prompted legal displays. On April 23, 1983, Minnie spoke freely and movingly to a tape recorder. Her disarming frankness and lack of guile (also remarked in the claims case) was all the more poignant because the events she brought herself to describe periodically caused tears. She seemed the stellar opposite of the bullying demands and fantasies presented by her cousin Philomena Doctor. Both were describing events of crushing emotional weight, but two differing personalities were apparently affected very differently by the strain.
It was never clear to what extent the claims case was seeking to simplify the Rosewood narrative for legal impact. For whatever reason, Minnie’s presented testimony in the 1990s seemed to omit what she had told me on tape about the arrival of the car—not a spectacular omission on its face, but reinforcing some troubling questions.
Just after the group of new arrivals from Emma’s house crowded into the downstairs area at Sarah’s, the children were mingling in the parlor, near the silent piano (the story that Sarah Carrier was staunchly playing church hymns as the whites arrived was another fervently repeated Arnett Doctor/Philomena Doctor fantasy, as other testimony also makes clear).
In this moment a small dog on Sarah Carrier's porch, perhaps having calmed down for a moment from the arrival of Emma’s group, now began furiously barking. It wasn’t clear whether Minnie was recalling the sound of the car first or the barking of the dog, but the car had now arrived, stopping somewhere by or in the front yard, between the house and the railroad. Unlike at Emma’s relentlessly maintained home down the tracks, which was fully circled by a picket fence, Sarah’s increasing isolation and weariness (the debacle of the church shooting was now more than a half decade in the past) was suggested by her fence having gradually fallen away, with only a front corner post and a backyard portion remaining. The men getting out of the car had no front gate to deal with.
More important in Minnie’s memory of this moment was the behavior of two other participants, Sarah and her grown daughter Bernadina. When Sarah, in her nightgown, had sleepily appeared at the front door and invited Emma and household to come in, Bernadina was not in evidence. She and Sarah slept in the same large bed in the front downstairs bedroom facing the porch, opposite the parlor, and Bernadina seemed to have already gone to sleep there. This was spelled out as the car arrived. Minnie recalled the bedroom door opening then, and Bernadina appearing. She seemed groggily curious about the sound outside, and was holding a lit lamp, as if to say, “What in the world kind of callers could this be at this hour?”
Minnie mentioned these details only as incidental asides, but their presence has the effect, as noted earlier, of emphasizing an apparent lack of alarmed expectation at Sarah’s house—a lack seen in everyone but Sarah. Though Bernadina apparently saw no alarming reason to cloak her lamp (at least in Minnie’s recollection), Sarah reacted differently, immediately hissing, “Put out that light!”
At this point even Sylvester, though soon to be center-stage, seemed to be feeling no alarm and was to bed, as his wife Gert later described. If in the hours just before this moment Sarah Carrier had been at Poly Wilkerson’s house, as both Minnie and her cousin A.T would say, then another kind of coincidence becomes unconvincing: How did the post-hunting itch of Henry “Boots” Andrews manage to coincide with the moment of Poly Wilkerson’s reactions to Sarah’s visit? Might it really be true, as white excuse stories would endlessly maintain after there was a lot to excuse, that Sarah Carrier had “sent word” to Poly that the fugitive was at her house and to come and pick him up? Might some nervous or misconstrued word or act from Sarah have moved Wilkerson to suspicions?
Or was it just that the moonlight and bracing cold air were enough to cause impulsive action, which perhaps zeroed in on Sylvester Carrier only because Henry Andrews remembered the quarrel on the log train?
Minnie Mitchell’s impressions of the first moments were soon curtailed. The parlor went dark and grandmother Emma Carrier shooed the children upstairs to bed. Amid muffled sounds from the yard, Minnie heard a man who seemed to have gotten out of the car calling for Sarah. Only one word was recalled, a plaintive “Sarah!” The dark house was making no response to the callers, and was being impatiently rebuked.
Whether some inexplicable “invitation” had been made or inferred, or whether a moonlit whim had simply sent drunken idlers to harass a target of opportunity, the petulant words from the yard might have been much the same: Open up!
However, the next response from the yard did not seem to come immediately. Upstairs, Minnie had time to undress and crawl into a spot on one of the two beds there (the easy one, reserved for the three girls, Minnie, Goldee and Philomena, while the other bed, drafted to hold the seven boys now present in the house, may have put some of them on the floor). Minnie still felt no alarm that would cause her to remain dressed. She was expecting to drift off to sleep.
This home, still standing on the half-acre lot bought by Haywood and Sarah Carrier in 1899, conformed to the general definition of a common feature in old Florida, the “frontier I-house.” The upper story of Sarah’s residence was one large room, basically a furnished attic. Minnie said the roof slope prevented windows except along the sides, but the upstairs area had glass window panes at the sides, white curtains, and mirrors on brass-knobbed dressers. Only figuratively a sleeping loft, this upstairs area was reached by a full stairway, complete with banister rail, casement, and a small closet built under the stairs. By contrast, the house where Minnie lived with her grandmother Emma was a full two-story affair, with five persuasively described bedrooms.
This was timber country and old settlers tended to know carpentry. The custom with I-houses was that as an older son matured he might move from the children’s sleeping space upstairs to an annex built onto the back. This had happened with Sylvester Carrier, giving rise to the apartment he shared with his wife Gert behind Sarah Carrier’s back porch, tied to the main house by a short dogtrot walkway. One former resident of frontier Florida, Zora Hurston, grew up in such an I-house in the town of Eatonville, an all-black settlement now part of metro Orlando. Hurston called her I-house-style birthplace “one story and a jump.”
Ensconced in bed upstairs, Minnie would remember, she found that she couldn’t sleep after all, though the reason was not the white men with their mysterious business out in the yard. She couldn’t sleep because as she lay there she was thinking about Mama.
Her grandmother Emma often filled her thoughts. Though two households of Carriers, Emma’s and Sarah’s, both had caretaker grandmothers and live-in grandchildren who called the caregiver “Mama,” Minnie’s attachment had taken a distinctive turn.
Her patient descriptions inadvertently characterized an emotional problem called Separation Anxiety Disorder. Though the backdrop might seem obvious—anxiety in a child who had lost a parent—the symptoms of this problem are surprising. The child switches roles with a remaining caregiver and acts like a stern parent, scolding the caregiver for anxiety-producing behaviors like taking risks or being away from the child too long. “Fighty” little Minnie had lost her real mother, Daisy Carrier, at her own birth. Now she often seemed to lecture the substitute, “Mama,” on how to behave for proper tranquility. She called herself Mama’s little shadow, hating to be out of Emma’s sight.
Hence the flight of ideas as she lay awake upstairs. Mama had stayed downstairs in Aunt Sarah’s front bedroom. In bed, Minnie found herself counting the possibilities that Mama might decide to come up to the children. After all, what was Mama doing down there? Where was…
Then the world stopped, and everything seemed to happen at once.
Though the continued roaring of the small dog on the porch had been forming a muffled motif, it suddenly ceased, in the shock of a greater roar, that of gunfire. Glass was breaking and there was blood on the floor. The room was a mad scramble.
_________
D. P. “Poly” Wilkerson was evidently in no mood to learn that the deafening little demon on the front porch was named Shant Tail. The dog’s furious barking added an irritating overlay to a frustrating moment. Poly’s big chance to redeem himself was going sour.
Whatever the preliminaries, Wilkerson’s appearance at Sarah Carrier’s house signaled a perceived chance to reverse his terrible recent fortunes at a stroke. Could he break the manhunt case that nobody in the haughty sheriff’s department could solve? Did he fancy this moonlit ride as a real law enforcement mission? Had Sarah Carrier somehow drawn him into all this? Or had he only lured himself?
Was he just a convenient accessory for ideas formed by moonlight and moonshine in the mind of his prestigious comrade, logging boss Henry Andrews?
By whatever logic, their actions said that they had believed it would all go straightforwardly. You go to the house, you call them out, they obligingly obey. There seemed to be a glaringly drunken lack of a Plan B—so that apparently Wilkerson soon had to improvise, very poorly—and all the more so because of that damned little dog.
Minnie knew the unreasonable little animal from her visits to Aunt Sarah’s on Sundays. Aunt Sarah spoiled shaggy little Shant Tail on table scraps, and it never left the porch—a fact that gladdened anyone walking by on the railroad, considering the territorial racket that was emitted. Minnie didn’t pet the little thing, or even touch it. It would bite.
The brilliant moon rising to the east-southeast did not much illumine the northeastward-facing front porch, if at all. Wilkerson had to blunder up into a forbidding cave of darkness, perhaps trying the locked front door. The next logical move would be entreaty or command at the window to the right, the one facing onto the front porch and the porch swing. As a wide-ranging lawman, the visitor may have known that this was the bedroom window of his washerwoman, a place where she might be located as she took shelter in silence and refused to let him in.
Events would soon show that by this point both Sarah and 20-year-old Bernadina were indeed in bed, as if in some last-ditch strategy to protest against the lateness of the hour: Go away! Can’t you see we’ve gone to bed!
That Wilkerson was very near the window was also suggested by subsequent events, whose simultaneity apparently came much more rapidly than the plodding pace of the words required to describe them.
It is not certain that it was Wilkerson who shot the dog. But various stories, apparently originating with men farther back in the yard, said he did. And though those stories were filled with alibis and evasions, assorted other circumstances also said he did. The coming catastrophe, when at least four bodies would be buried hastily without death certificates, would not be suited to inquests, especially on a man who, by the time an inquest might have occurred, had already crafted his own fatal punishment.
Did the enraged little teeth actually contact flesh? Or did they just try? There would be no announcement of any examination of the big man’s trousers. It seemed to be a pistol shot. But this was hard to isolate because of what it seemed to shake loose.
If Plan B was falling apart and he whirled and fired, the next part, as terrified Minnie noted, happened with such immediacy that it all seemed to be one big wall of sound. At the same time that the dog suddenly stopped barking, many guns seemed to be firing at once, obviously more than one, because one of them, not a pistol but a shotgun firing buckshot, broke out an upstairs window.
The phenomenon called target panic, whether in war or controversial police shootings, finds a tensed group of armed men suddenly cued by a panicked misinterpretation made by just one of them, whose sudden impulse firing, at a shadow or at some perceived weapon, communicates to the rest—in far less time than it takes to tell—that they are in such mortal danger from whatever the first man saw that they too must immediately fire, even if they can’t see anything there.
Some advocates continue to protest that the classic Amadou Diallo police shooting of 1999 in New York had to have been some kind of monstrous planned execution, because to those skeptics it sounds impossible that four trained men could have fired 41 rounds in four seconds—at an unarmed target in a dark alley—on merely a contagious impulse.
There is no way to prove that this is what happened on Thursday night to Minnie’s thirteen-year-old brother, Ruben Mitchell. The degree of calculation or intentionality in the shot is forever masked.
Apparently a split second before the men out in the yard let loose, Ruben was the first party triggered by the shot that killed the dog—triggered to suddenly sit bolt upright in his upstairs bed, beside a window. In a way, he paid the price of his serenity. A good-natured joker, fond of clowning to get grouchy Minnie to laugh, he was famed in the family for being so relaxed that he could go to sleep anywhere, as soon as he grew bored. Minnie recalled that arriving at Aunt Sarah’s that night, Ruben proved true to form; rather than mixing with the others downstairs in the prelude, he immediately climbed Aunt Sarah’s stairs and went to bed (perhaps also stealing a march on the bedtime space limitations). When the shot came, Ruben had been asleep longer than the rest, and apparently the sleep was deep. Jerked upright by the surprising sound of the shot, he gazed dreamily out the window, trying to orient. This face at the window, and not the shot itself, could have been the proximate spark for a target panic: Uprisers! Ambush! The house is crawling with them! Look up there in the window!
No one can say whether any such thoughts moved the trigger of the shotgun that found Ruben Mitchell, or whether that shotgun might have arrived with Henry Andrews from the hunting trip, which had found no deer. One of the scattering slugs caught Ruben’s chin and tunneled along the line of his jaw. But the most damaging slug failed to hit him at all, instead shattering the window glass by his face, putting out one of his eyes.
Minnie and her young uncle Lonnie crawled across the floor to pull the still half-sleeping Ruben away from the window. A towel was wrapped around his bleeding eye. Incredibly, through subsequent nights of flight, hunger, and sleeping in the cold, Ruben Mitchell would survive. Growing to be a large, bear-like man known for his strength, but with a continuing sense of sly humor, he would deadpan to shocked hearers about how he had lost the eye in the great slaughter, out of which no one survived, he mourned gravely, but him.
The time needed for the telling of that disastrous moment has now run far out in front of the actual split-second event—for in real time we are still only a split-second advanced from the shooting of the dog, as the air now fills with gunsmoke and apparently a number of the men in the yard are firing impulsively—or maliciously. There is only the seeming impossibility of the next event to suggest how that event occurred.
Suddenly Wilkerson, embroiled with the indignity of the dog, seems to fire again, this time in a new direction. The reason implicating Wilkerson is in the impossibility: How did his gun know, through a closed window shutter in the dark, precisely how to find Sarah Carrier?
The implication—far less than a demonstrated fact—is that when Sarah heard what Minnie upstairs also heard—the sudden cessation of barking in the roar of a gun—she may have cried out—in anguish, rage, horror or disbelief—at the death of her beloved pet. This is implied because immediately the second shot went through the window shutter, as if following the sound of her voice, and struck Sarah Carrier in the head.
This was no buckshot flesh wound. Bleeding was so profuse that the nightgown of Bernadina, who was paralyzed by fright in the same bed, grew horribly stained.
So if this one-two pistol scenario bears any resemblance to the truth, Wilkerson had now shown twice, with the dog and then with a human target shot in blind confusion, that grace under pressure was not with him tonight. But of course there could be other explanations, on a descending scale of intentionality and malice. The first choice, however, is further implied by the events themselves, suggesting that in his shattered equanimity, Wilkerson did not realize what the bullet through the window had done. For he continued calling to her, imperiously. Or was it now in a tone of increasing desperation? “Sarah!”
And now, at last, the simultaneity is ended. The dazed men in the yard grow deathly quiet. One story, with some signs of truth, had Wilkerson now calling gallantly for Sarah to send out the women and children, so they won’t get caught in a manly battle over Sylvester—which of course would mean that nobody had ever really believed that the fugitive was in there in the first place, which in turn would mean that surrounding white society was about to break out in epidemic tales that had as much logic as little green men.
Unheralded, the atmosphere had now passed over into the great mystery land, home to fevers of delusion like those in war. And people more or less said so, exclaiming that the blacks had now broken out in organized rebellion.
The house did not send out the women and children.
So what now should Constable Wilkerson do? His civilian backup man, Henry Andrews, now joins him on the silent porch, which no longer looks very dangerous. Mannie Hudson is not far behind. Only a bit farther out are Kirkland, Studstill—and the cleverly non-existent ghosts of all those other men who will later boast to friends and family about their death-defying night in the great battle, though apparently they weren’t there.
The group—whether five or fifteen—now closes in on the house, as if now convinced of the harmlessness of a passive old building that has just taken quite a beating, and yet has showed no resistance. Time to mop up, and see who or what might be in there. Wilkerson eyed the locked front door.
__________
In the silence after the barrage of gunfire, Minnie’s attention and memories kept a single frantic focus: Where was Mama? Grandmother Emma Carrier was still somewhere downstairs. Had the gunfire reached her? As Minnie dived and tried to stay close to the floor in the upstairs sleeping area, she thought she heard activity on the stairs. Could that be Mama? Was Mama trying to creep up to the children?
At this point it has to be said that the simultaneity of many reactions after the initial gunshot has one more element yet to be described. At about the same moment that Ruben Mitchell lost his eye to flying glass and Sarah Carrier was killed in bed, a pale figure leapt from the back of Sarah’s house and fled screaming. The screams were so high-pitched that neighbors thought an infant might have been killed. This escapee, wearing a pale nightgown, was Sylvester Carrier’s wife Gert.
In her flight from the house, Gertrude Carrier plunged into thickets so furiously that she was scratched and bleeding when she found her way to a light in a shed behind storekeeper John Wright’s house. There other neighbors, including the households of George Bradley and Wesley Bradley, were already congregating, hiding on a white man’s property that was hoped to be exempt from any arriving mob. Astonishingly swift calculations had taken place, throughout the community, concluding that the sounds of a gun battle involving whites meant a need for immediate flight. It was apparently an automatic assumption that such a clash would be followed by larger mob action.
In the lamplight of the shed where Gert arrived, occupants would recall, she excitedly told how she had screamed as she ran from Sarah’s house, begging the whites somewhere behind her in the yard not to kill her. As the gunfire was exploding she felt sure that some was aimed at her. Apparently an unspoken aspect of her flight—its tacit abandonment of the others in the house, including children—would haunt Gert Carrier in later years, as seen in stories she began to tell to selected hearers. In the great battle, she would reportedly recall more than a decade later, she had been fearlessly loading Sylvester’s gun, and personally watched him kill six whites, then dashed through hellish danger to gather up the children and bring them out to safety.
This never happened. Sylvester had apparently not yet done any shooting at the time his wife fled. in the very beginning of the encounter. The fact that Gert was still in her nightgown, as variously witnessed, suggests immediate panic without systematic actions such as putting on one’s clothes.
The poignant presence of innocent children in a highly dramatic battle would weave similar spells on some of the area’s white male narrators, who also invented rescue stories of their own, telling how they (as if substituting for Gert) had allegedly dashed into the house of death and valiantly led the children to safety. This too never happened. None of these tellers would have guessed that a far future age might be able to inquire of the aging former children from the house, to discover that in the moment of truth they were left pointedly on their own.
In the upstairs sleeping area, as silence fell over whites gathering downstairs on the porch, Minnie’s thoughts about Mama moved her closer to the door to the stairs. Her heart leapt when she saw the door begin to open. This had to be Mama! That furtive movement Minnie had heard on the stairs, it had to be...
But the figure appearing in the doorway was Bernadina, Aunt Sarah’s daughter. Bernadina looked ghastly, not only in facial expression but because a large dark stain had spread across her nightgown (also confirmed by witnesses who saw her later).
The ensuing dazed conversation between Minnie and Bernadina, as Minnie recalled it, took place in terse family code. Two households, Sarah’s and Emma’s, both referred to a caregiver grandmother as “Mama,” though Bernadina was using the same word for her real mother.
“Mama’s dead,” Bernadina sobbed.
Minnie then implored: “Where’s Mama?”
Bernadina: “Ï don’t know whether she’s
down there or not.”
This was how Minnie remembered it. At one point Emma Carrier had been in the downstairs bedroom where her sister Sarah now lay dead. The thought of that sent Minnie’s worries through the roof.
The next scene might seem too melodramatic to have occurred in real behavior—or simply too illogical. But all those present, sharing information afterward, seemed to agree that Minnie Mitchell’s counter-intuitive actions were as she described. What was invisible was the force of separation anxiety (if that term can be used for the psychological state that Minnie succinctly described). The bare feet of a nine-year-old were impelled forward as if in an inverted parent role. She had to go and see about Mama.
One problem with oral history when applied to mass violence is that almost never does one find the perfect witness who is not only willing to talk and is credibly frank, but was improbably positioned to personally observe the violent heart of the incident. Typically the best witnesses might be able to tell chapter and verse about details of routine life surrounding the crisis, but when it comes to the actual plunge of the knife, or the pull of the trigger, or the toss of the torch, those actions are usually reserved for observation by only an intimate, shut-mouthed few. The improbable, separation-driven actions of Minnie Lee Mitchell would create a remarkable exception to this rule.
Whether or not traumatic shock was setting in by this time, Minnie could not explain her audacity in this moment. She presented it with a matter-of-factness that sounded adult—or parental: “I figured whatever happen, me and Mama go down together.”
There was no memory of the cold stairs on her feet as she went down. Soon she was on the ground floor, in a central position. Anyone coming in the front door of the house would have found this position, in a small foyer, to present four options of travel: 1) to the left was the parlor with its piano; 2) to the right was the door to Sarah Carrier’s front downstairs bedroom; 3) then straight ahead the visitor could look down a cavernous hall leading out to the back porch; and 4) beside the hall was the option to go upward, by climbing the stairs, whose casement was built into the right wall of the hallway. Thus the stairs emptied out toward the front door. This position became the next image preserved in Minnie’s memory.
Standing transfixed at the bottom of the stairs, she knew that the most likely place to look for her grandmother was behind the bedroom door to her left. But in there, she now also knew, lay the horror she had seen manifested on Bernadina’s gown. So she stood there, facing the front door, while not knowing that inches beyond the door's thin partition stood white men wondering how to get in.
In examining matters of combat or other conflict, if one does find the rare witness whose eyes took in a reality that others could only imagine or boast about in stolen valor, there is sometimes a plaintive guardedness in the witness, because the real events, occurring in a world of adrenal action most people never get to see, may sound too theatrical—or too luminous and archetypal—to be easily believed by a casual hearer.
Suddenly the darkness itself seemed to seize Minnie, jerking her backward, and dragging her to the side of the stairs. A voice was in her ear, speaking words she would never forget, and she did not care how melodramatic—or mysteriously archetypal—the flood of images might sound.
The voice said: “Come here and let me save you.”
She realized she had been pulled to the stairs by Sylvester.
Apparently as Bernadina was climbing up the stairs, Sylvester had been inching forward through the hallway from his room at the back. The distraction of Gert’s earlier flight may have helped him to move unobserved across the short breezeway leading onto the back porch. Minnie had little time to assess, but saw that Sylvester had drawn her to the small closet that was cut into the side of the stairs. This was Aunt Sarah’s bin for firewood, a doorless cubbyhole as if made for midgets, known to Minnie as “the wood hole.” It made a snugly sheltered turret for any marksman covering the front door.
The next image was the explosion. Outside on the porch Poly Wilkerson had gathered his weight, and now threw it against the locked front door. The door burst open. Wilkerson’s momentum carried him forward.
Minnie would remember no sound at her ear. Tunnel acoustics are not uncommon in the intensity of combat, reducing memories of deafening or overwhelming explosions to incidental pops in the background. Minnie was emphatic about her memory of the placement of Sylvester’s gun, which she could feel not only resting on her shoulder but also in motions that were striking her back, as Sylvester intently cocked and pumped.
The gun (later confirmed by an actual photograph, among other improbabilities in the Rosewood “uprising”) was Sylvester’s 1886 model Winchester .12-gauge pump shotgun, capable of six quickly pumped shots without a pause for reload. This formidable antique, outdated by a newer Winchester model, was said to have been passed down by one of the wealthy white sportsmen who came to hunt in Gulf Hammock, in gratitude to a particularly astute black hunting guide.
The gun’s age had taken away none of the power that causes .12-gauge shotguns to be called wall-busters and door-makers. The World War I era called them “riot guns.” Their scatter pattern can carve a hole not only in a wall but a crowd.
As Minnie felt the trigger-guard pumping action behind her, she was convinced that the gun must be a rifle, not a shotgun, though its pattern of damage would reveal her mistake. Ironically, her insistence on this point was one more indication that this witness was faithfully reporting real impressions. The 1886 Winchester .12-gauge shotgun did not use a sliding pump along the barrel but a trigger-guard lever—like a rifle.
There was no time to register how the blasts were turning night into day. Her mind captured the awful image of a large white man framed in the doorway as he was hit and collapsed. Then apparently Wilkerson’s main companion, Henry Andrews, rushed into the doorway in turn, and was also hit, not in the face like Wilkerson but in the chest, also fatally.
The pumping motion that was beating against Minnie’s back continued in her memory as the dark forms of bodies in the doorway piled up. She was completely convinced that she watched more than two men get killed. And indeed, just behind Wilkerson and Andrews, Mannie Hudson was also shot in the face, falling and not moving, as if dead. Out in the yard, Kirkland and Studstill jerked to the ground in actions that could have looked fatal at a distance, though their wounds were minor. Minnie’s unshakeable insistence that many white men died on that porch that night, so that they must have been concealed by embarrassed white society, soon translated into growing stories among those with whom she would flee, including Philomena Goins.
These stories would in time somehow converge, as improbably as much of the rest of it, at a point a thousand miles away, in the State Street office of the nation’s most influential newspaper for African Americans, the Chicago Defender. The Defender’s belated January 13, 1923, headline on Rosewood would proclaim in enormous type: “NINETEEN SLAIN IN FLORIDA RACE WAR,” though text in the story said that only 14 of those allegedly killed were whites.
Rosewood was taking its place among the legend-cloaked World War I-era race riots, as in the “Red Summer” of 1919. Each such clash brought a flood of “scorekeeping” myths among both races: white boasts claiming the masterful slaying of gigantic numbers of blacks, and black boasts claiming the opposite, saying that fearful whites had secretly hauled off and concealed vast numbers of white corpses, allegedly picked off by unsung black marksmen, whose prowess, it was felt by the tellers, would undoubtedly give the winning fatality score to the home team.
This was the psychological pit into which perceptions of the Rosewood events were now descending. Here was the credulous, seemingly almost hypnotized susceptibility to myth that is sometimes called war fever.
Minnie Mitchell really was directly witnessing something that most people are never called on to endure. And her cousin Sylvester’s pump shotgun really was creating sights that most marksmen never have to live with. But the reality was only subjectively enormous. This is suggested even by Minnie’s own statement, starting with the death of Wilkerson:
“When he fell, somebody else jump up there, and Syl shot him down. And the next one jump up there, Syl shot him.”
Here are Wilkerson, Andrews, and Hudson, the first two being fatalities. Beyond this, Minnie specifically reported seeing only a man or two running across the yard and going down (Kirkland and Studstill?). The rest is a blur.
“You wouldn’t think it would last too long,” Lee Carrier mused, having heard the gunfire and then later the stories from afar. Fleeing whites would soon arrive in Sumner gasping that they had been forced to withdraw by a houseful of heavily armed black rebels, emitting “streaks of fire from every window.” They had much to explain away, not only the death of a washerwoman so unoffending that she was in bed, but also the abandonment of their own dead on the porch, even leaving the hapless Mannie Hudson, down but still breathing.
Minnie was absorbing the reality of darkened forms piled in the doorway when she heard a car crank up. A faint voice from the yard seemed to her to cry: “He done kill all us up. Let’s get out of here!” Whatever the untranslated words, the car was said later to have been recruited by the injured nightrider Cephus Studstill, reportedly juggling his arm wound until running off the road into a tree. Studstill would appear later that night in Sumner’s company hotel after Doc Cannon put his arm in a sling.
Sylvester’s gun had stopped firing. In Minnie’s memory he remains a voice without a face, behind her. As the silence deepens and the car is gone, the voice says to her: “Go on back upstairs with the rest of ‘em.”
The voice did not say, unlike countless stolen-valor boasts about that night made by fantasizers: “We must now gather up the children and lead them to safety.” Sylvester, like Gert and others, was evidently not thinking in such a lofty direction. One adult alone, Bernadina, had gone up to the children. It could be argued that Sylvester felt the need to continue guarding against a next wave of whites—but if that was his conviction, it would seem all the more urgent to get the children out of there. The questions pair with his original invitation to Emma Carrier’s household, bringing them into the line of fire for supposed protection.
As with me in 1983 when she was 69, Minnie would remain adamant about a central point as she spoke in 1994 at age 80 in the claims case. Consistently she brushed aside any suggestion that perhaps as Sylvester was firing he was crouching beside her, or in some way even shielding her behind him. Defiantly honest, this witness rejected any rearrangement of what she knew to have been her experienced reality. Proudly, she felt that this reality was all the more proof of how Sylvester was protecting her—and was protecting all of them from whites who, in her conception, seemed to have come to massacre them all. This belief, that the whites had planned to “kill out all the Carriers and the Bradleys,” would become orthodoxy among haunted refugees, many of whom called Sylvester’s stand a successful prevention of a bloodbath conspiracy.
In both 1983 and 1994 this defiant survivor touched her shoulder to demonstrate, saying: “I could feel his gun right here”—never seeming to think how this implied a shield.
_____
As Minnie turned back to the stairs with the bodies in the doorway still before her, she had the impression that Sylvester was also departing, leaving the firewood closet and moving down the hall toward the back porch. Soon Minnie was back upstairs gazing into Bernadina’s shocked face, and saying in her customary prosaic way: “I couldn’t find Mama.”
The oldest male in the upstairs sleeping area was Eddie Carrier, Emma’s son, age about fifteen. In the heat of crisis he had rushed to help the younger children as they squeezed under beds. But in the silent aftermath Minnie found him sitting “dumb-sided,” seemingly in a dazed trance, as if absorbing the panorama of this moment: their world now effectively gone, the material completion only a matter of time, waiting only for the massive white rampage that both races assumed would now be the response.
Along with Bernadina, Minnie prodded anxiously: “They gone, Eddie! They gone! Let’s get out of here!” Sarah’s youngest son Harry crawled to a window and looked out, confirming it. Eddie seemed to wake, resuming authority. He said something like, “We can go out this back way”—meaning they could slip down the stairs and then out through the back porch, away from any whites still in front.
At the bottom of the stairs they flinched at a sudden wail back above them. Sarah’s youngest grandson, four-year-old George Goins Jr., known as Buster, had been left behind. His sister Philomena, along with older Harry, rushed back and carried him down. The same later witness, Philomena Goins Doctor, who would angrily scoff that she had stepped over nineteen dead white men on the front porch, while carefully counting them, and said that Poly Wilkerson had led “lines of cars” to a planned massacre, was in the real event never on the front porch at all, but was busy with real heroism, carrying Buster out the back porch exit.
Sheltering first in moon shadow at the back of the house, the fleeing group dashed for “the back road,” a sandy lane paralleling the railroad up toward Aaron Carrier’s now-empty house. Soon crossing the tracks, they began darting in and out of bushes for a flight of over a mile to Wylly. Eleven crouching figures were certainly present: Minnie, Ruben (still bandaged with the towel), Goldee, little J. C., Lonnie, Eddie, Buster, Philomena, her brother A. T., Harry, and Bernadina. In addition, two more silhouettes remain in limbo as to whether they, too, had been present in the “house of death.” Both had disabilities that left them as quiet background figures: Emma Carrier’s husband James, who after two cerebral strokes dragged one foot and spoke only with difficulty, and their grown son Willard, or “Big Baby,” suffering an affliction looking like autism. They were part of Emma’s household, which James had headed before the strokes. Reminiscences grew oddly conflicting as to whether the two had come with the others to Sarah’s on Sylvester’s invitation, or had stayed behind at their own home, left there by Emma and the children. Both the shadow figures were adult males subject to later stories about allegedly shooting at whites, and one was soon consumed by a shocking tragedy; possibly, both alibis and guilt feelings may have encouraged vagueness about them in declared memories.
But there is still one more figure who had been in Sarah’s bullet-riddled residence. Emma Carrier was certainly present in the house, but just as certainly was not in the fleeing group. Minnie feared the worst. Mama had disappeared.
The two separate streams of immediate refugees mentioned thus far—Minnie’s group going to Wylly and the previous group found by Gert at Wright’s shed—were elements in a remarkably systematic, almost ritualized community dissolution. In the moment, such flight was hoped by some to be only an overnight precaution, but still it happened with great speed. In a later age, after the community’s most knowing adult residents had passed away, none of the remaining survivors could cast much light on the thinking behind such hair-trigger mobilization.
Had they been primed by the pogrom a month earlier and two counties away in the town of Perry? Had there been family discussion about national news items like the Tulsa riot of 1921, Ocoee in 1920, or Chicago, Elaine, Washington, Knoxville and other flashpoints in 1919’s Red Summer? Did the fear and almost synchronized response date back to the nightriders of Civil War Reconstruction? The answers were obliterated in memory.
The Rosewood events, as panic levels rose, had entered a tunnel of silence where even sizeable population movements were observed only by the mute: either mute perpetrators, not so confident as to risk unlikely prosecution by talking, or frightened targets isolated from information, or—in perhaps the most obsessively silent category—white dissenters who were resisting the week’s mob violence at least passively, and shunned any public acknowledgement in fear of retaliation.
The fact of such white resistance—or at least evasion—was utterly invisible in contemporary news accounts, and thus invisible to the eyes of history. The white resistance and hidden refugees went unseen by newspapers using no on-site investigation, and may not have been mentioned by harried lawmen briefing desk-bound media on the phone. Even if snatches were confided in such briefings, the news media themselves may have kept the glimpses secret from the general public, as their own form of discreet damage control.
What Minnie Lee Mitchell would see in Rosewood’s refugee concealment, January 4 to January 6, no mortal eye would find in public information until a surprised Information Age began stumbling into the traces in 1982.
The full list of sanctuaries hiding groups of refugees would include: 1) Wright’s shed and yard in Rosewood; 2) a turpentine grove belonging to M. & M. Naval Stores in Wylly; 3) the lumber stacks and then a communal building on company property in Sumner; and 4) woods rider Jack Cason’s farm between Rosewood and Otter Creek. Some individual fugitives were also said to be hidden by other furtive white helpers.
Minnie’s group was headed to Wylly because Minnie’s uncle, Emma’s son Wade, was working there, apparently in a job a cut above ordinary dollar-a-day turpentine labor. In 1925 Wade Carrier and his wife would move to Volusia County surrounding the old city of St. Augustine, where Wade eventually worked as a transportation bailiff for the sheriff’s department, and was marked in his file as hard-working and noticeably educated, having graduated from the eight grades in Rosewood’s black school.
When Minnie survived the terrified trek to Wylly and burst into the lamplight of Wade Carrier’s small company house, she expected her uncle Wade to grab her up joyfully and hug her in relief that she was still alive.
Her feelings froze as Wade seemed stone-faced and distant. People in Wylly were standing in their doorways with their coats on, poised to make their own flight if the explosion now resounding in Rosewood should spread. Whether by rumor or simple assumption, whites were now said to be seeking to kill anyone who had been in the house that killed Wilkerson and Andrews—which also was seen as placing a bulls-eye on anyone found to be harboring such accused uprisers.
Whether Wade Carrier was thinking about the greater good of vulnerable Wylly, or about danger to himself, he never looked quite the same to Minnie. A white man came in and said the group couldn’t stay there. Instead they were guided into the depths of a turpentine grove where they were hidden in the open air, as frost was forming in temperatures in the thirties, and the children were in their night clothes. By that time the process had found assistance from another resident of Wylly who came from the Carrier family, a party more willing to take some risks.
Wade’s sister Beulah, known as Scrappy, had moved to Wylly for a reason that filled her devout mother Emma with outrage and horror. Scrappy, separated from her husband with two small children in tow, had gone to work as a waitress in the Wylly jook.
It was a spacious old fortress, recalling vanished boom times when it had been the Suwannee Inn, a turn-of-the-century lodge for moneyed adventurers coming by train to hunt in Gulf Hammock—before the game was hunted out and turpentine camps took over. What had been an upstairs dining room at the Suwannee Inn, romantically looking out into the jungle-like hammock and served by a gourmet chef, had become by 1923 the spacious dance floor of the jook.
Downstairs in a honeycomb of guest rooms was where Scrappy lived. Some jooks in old Florida, unequipped with rooms like the former Suwannee Inn, had waitresses who were said to turn tricks outside on the ground. Scrappy was described in reminiscence as a waitress, with no further elaboration.
Apparently when no one else would come, Scrappy stepped up. First guiding the frightened children and Bernadina to the pine grove, she stayed with them through two very cold nights, covering her charges with Spanish moss and palmetto fans and building a fire, which she kept small to avoid telltale smoke. The children were arranged in a circle with their feet to the flames. Annie Blocker, a Wylly resident and formerly of Rosewood, brought food, as perhaps did others. Until some clothing could be found there were only the nightgowns, Bernadina’s still bearing the dark stain.
Beulah “Scrappy” Carrier’s heroism was transfigured in 1997 by the motion picture Rosewood, which carefully showcased both her real name and her nickname, “Beulah,” and “Scrappy,” in on-screen dialogue. But these names were bizarrely pinned onto onto a laundered persona.
In the movie, “Scrappy” was an ethereally innocent and wonderfully articulate schoolteacher, who, in a prim romance with the film’s main star, barely even held hands. This unblemished Scrappy was then depicted as sheltering the children.
Though coming from a major studio, the film made so many such distortions that it was denounced by a Rosewood survivor and even by the author of its tie-in book. Its inner energies seemed to find it necessary to repeatedly use the real names of real people (and town names like Rosewood and Sumner) but seemed to toy almost gleefullly with the named people by turning them into what they had never been—and sometimes into the slanderous opposite of what they had been. An on-screen world was created that was, so to speak, black and white: all angels in one race, devils in the other, as if the scorekeeping neuroses of the World War I riot era had never ended.
_________
At Wesley Bradley’s house, Lee Carrier would recall, the first sounds of the car coming into Rosewood had caused Wesley to begin pacing nervously. But stillness settled in behind the car as Lee and Wesley’s son Bishop, talking on the porch, then went to bed. Sharing a bedroom at Wesley's, they were in bed when they heard the next sounds: distant gunfire.
At some point Wesley gathered up his four youngest children and took them to John Wright’s, on the community-wide assumption that if a white rampage were to occur, the children would be safer on a white man’s property. These Bradley children were Ivory, Clifford, Wesley James, and Lee Ruth, the latter of whom would recall the scene for me in 1982 and 1983, and in the Rosewood claims case of the 1990s.
As previously mentioned, Lee Ruth (Bradley) Davis’s memories from the age of seven would turn out to contain striking accidental fill-ins from imagination, each time increasing the sensationalism or prestige of an anecdote (her cousin Wade became not just a sheriff’s bailiff but was the “high sheriff” himself; her cousin Sylvester became not just a fireman on the Cummer log train but was its engineer; her neighbor Sam Carter was not just left in the woods after death but was hung on display dramatically at Sylvester’s house—while the informant herself was not just imaginative as a child but was ”psychy,” or clairvoyantly able to see the future). This pattern also applied to the refuge at Wright’s.
Audiences in the Rosewood claims case learned how the Bradley family was so esteemed by white storekeeper John Wright that the children were immediately taken into Wright’s home and put to bed upstairs. In reality, John Wright was indeed taking a frightening risk by sheltering his African American neighbors, and he was especially fond of children after losing two of his own, but this did not quite break the era’s color line. Those sheltered at Wright’s found refuge in a shed, not in the house.
Nonetheless, the cozy bedroom image has by now had a long life in Web fantasies. In the 1990s there were even guided bus tours to Wright’s still-standing house at the site of Rosewood, with alert tour guides pointing out a secret hiding place in the house where Wright supposedly stuffed children, and, going out into the yard, the docents lovingly pointed to a picturesque water well, where, they enthused, Wright had also squeezed in hapless hiders. The whopper about the well, in turn, would be borrowed from the bus tours to become a teaching tool at the University of Florida, used by an engagingly orating professor who perhaps still teaches the children-down-the-well as real history. It’s a small sidelight to a somber atrocity, but it does suggest the information climate in a state prone to roadside tourist attractions.
Meanwhile back at Wesley’s just after distant shots were heard, Lee Carrier would recall his amazement at the speed of response. His roommate Bishop sprang from bed and, without stopping to put on warm clothes or explain to Lee, he dashed off into the night. It was as if Lee, the quiet outsider, raised as an orphan, had been left outside some family loop on how one properly behaves in this kind of crisis. And indeed, just what kind of crisis was this? Lee figured that a little shooting would surely be over by morning—though it could be a cold night. He pensively donned an extra pair of wool socks, then went out into the moonlight, where he found himself alone.
Not knowing where else to look for information, he started walking along the hogwire fence that led to Wright’s. Before drawing even with the house a gleam of light pulled him toward the refuge shed. Pushing open the door, he was amazed to find a whole census list of his neighbors, who seemed to peer at him with a particular intensity.
At first he failed to notice that they all shared an important trait. He sat down. They continued looking at him strangely. Again the door swung open and Gert Carrier rushed in, bringing her harrowing story of escape. Then the strange looks resumed. With a start, Lee realized that the shed held only women and children—except for him. He was painfully learning the rules of a bizarre but deadly serious game.
Among the apparently automatic assumptions if one fled to a white man’s property in a rampage was a crucial selectiveness: only women and children could go to such improvised shelters. Men and older boys had to fend for themselves in the woods. The white rioters conducting such a rampage were apt to consider themselves—and certainly did consider themselves in this case—as being hunters of savage black rebels, the kind who were said to have ambushed poor Wilkerson and Andrews. Males old enough to pull a trigger were considered fair game—and must not be found among the women and children, lest the fragile, fantasy-drenched rules that exempted the sanctuaries be torn away, putting everybody at risk.
Thus when Minnie’s fleeing group of eleven was guided to the pine grove in Wylly they had to lose two of their members. Eddie and Ruben were males old enough to qualify as targets. They had to go out into the night and hide by themselves, however they could, in order not to put the others in danger. The towel bandaging Ruben’s punctured eye made him no exception. The rules said he looked like a savage rebel, to be hunted down.
Since contemporary newspapers seemed to carry not a breath of a whisper about any such rules, or about their cat-and-mouse game of shelter and targeting, the very existence of such matters would seem to have remained unknowable if not for the Rosewood memories—which, notwithstanding all their flaws and mistaken beliefs, agree far too monolithically on this subject to have resulted from imagination.
It might easily be wondered whether something in the ghoulish Gilbert-and-Sullivan aspect of this hide-and-seek could have taken its cue from the era’s overarching ritual solution to race relations: that magic forest of special exceptions, invisible boundaries and dire taboos known sometimes as Jim Crow, and sometimes as Separate But Equal.
In the shed, Lee muttered something to the women and children gazing at him and sheepishly got up and left.
____________
As Lee Carrier walked back out into the moonlight from Wright’s shed, the wide world lay empty before him, as all possible points of human contact now seemed equally uninviting. Walking northeast along the railroad, he passed the mute shadow of Sylvester’s house, and did not pause to inquire.
He decided to walk to Wylly and see Annie “Sis” Blocker, a former Rosewood resident who everyone seemed to like, and one of the good Samaritans in Wylly who channeled food to Minnie’s group of hiders in the woods.
Lee had barely reached the Blocker home in Wylly, he recalled, when a child dashed into view from farther up the tracks, bursting into the center of town and crying out, “They’re comin’ this way!” A large bright light was reported, oddly moving. This apparently translated to mean that one of the rattling little gasoline-powered “motorcars” was barreling down the rails into Wylly from Otter Creek, its headlight glaring, as it rushed toward Rosewood. Some spoke of more than one motorcar.
Lee now marveled (once again) at the speed of the response. At the mere sight of the disconcerting light, people seemed to suddenly pour from doorways, fleeing into the night, primed by fears that the Rosewood gunfire might at any moment spread into reprisals in Wylly. Sis Blocker’s family would spend the night hidden under a railroad trestle, though Wylly went back to normal in the morning. Contrary to the fears, the Otter Creek motorcar expeditionaries were not interested in Wylly. They were urgently out to rescue their boss.
Henry Andrews, his whereabouts now subject to frantic rumors, was said to be not only woods boss but general superintendent for Otter Creek of Cummer operations there, including a logging quarters and a crate mill, in addition to logging along the Suwannee. Since Otter Creek was on the same telephone party line as Sumner and Cedar Key, inquisitive residents could hear a flood of disjointed news simply by picking up the black earpiece of a phone and listening to other people’s conversations.
Farther up the line in a camp at Lennon, turpentine woods rider Bud Campbell did just that, according to his sister-in-law Lillie (Burns) Washington. With the mouthpiece covered to hide his eavesdropping, Campbell reportedly said that he found himself listening to a pleading woman who kept phoning and phoning to different locations, with words like, “Where’s my husband? Please, has anybody seen my husband?”
This would seem to be Cuba Andrews, the wife of Henry Andrews, who now found herself trapped in the uncertainty of conflicting stories brought back by the Thursday nightriders. Those chastened nightriders had multiple reasons to be vague about what they said had happened, since the vanished husband not only lay dead because of a cruel escapade that was apparently drunken, but also he lay there because these same comrades had abandoned his body in their flight.
Andrews’s foremen in Otter Creek may have had no way to learn his condition, but they were evidently rushing to find out, perhaps within an hour of the Sumner crew leaving. Both newspaper reports and legends would make the night’s chaos sound like one long battle, but there seem to have been three distinct waves of whites before Sylvester Carrier was finally overwhelmed. The Otter Creek group was wave number two.
It was said you could pile up to fifteen men on a railroad motorcar. The specifics of the Otter Creek foray never surfaced. This was not a moonlit lark but an enraged mission to get the bodies off the porch. The new arrivals were understandably said to be cold after facing near-37-degree wind for twelve miles, and some said they built a bonfire on the tracks in front of the targeted residence. Apparently the ensuing clash was more of a give and take shootout than before.
At the end of the previous round, when Minnie Mitchell had gazed numbly onto bodies heaped in the doorway, she had felt a sense of finality, personally witnessing that her cousin Sylvester had made it through his big battle without a scratch. As he then broke the silence by telling her to go back upstairs, and seemed to slip away toward the back porch, this would remain in Minnie’s mind as the end of the night’s clashes, for soon she would no longer be on-site to witness any sequels, and any news of them might have seemed to her to be merely recapping the battle she had seen. It had to be false, she insisted, that Sylvester was killed that night, because she had seen him depart, in perfect health.
Nor was this the very last sign of his survival. As Minnie arrived back upstairs in the daunting aftermath—with Ruben disfigured and bleeding, Eddie staring numbly, Bernadina horribly stained—the efforts to rouse Eddie and flee were suddenly interrupted.
“Listen!” hissed Bernadina suddenly.
A sound could be heard throuigh a broken window—this time nothing so ordinary as the sound of a car. It came from outside in the direction of a small ooze of swamp water that ran under the railroad. A thicket there created a logical hiding place for anyone covering the house from outside.
As the children stopped and listened, they heard it too. Minnie distinctly heard it. They had known that sound for years; the community at large knew it.
Boastful, irrepressible Sylvester Carrier had an unusual way of laughing.
KA-KA-KA!
When people in later years tried to imitate his strange laugh, trying to set the scene, it sounded like a huge, triumphant crow. Sam Hall recalled it from back when Sylvester was hauling cedar, getting the oxen to do what no one else could, laughing and outrageously boasting: “Ka-Ka-Ka! Y’all ain’t no teamster!” Or when he was catcher on the baseball team, razzing the visiting batters: “Th’ow it on by him! He can’t hit!”
It went with the nickname he had earned as a child, when he was born into a household of extroverted, talented sisters who doted on him, giving him a nickname that to them did not sound strangely generic or bland, but anointed their budding hero, who they called “Man.”
Now only one of the sisters was still at home.
“Listen,” gasped Bernadina, pulling their attention toward the window:
“Man down there laughin’.”
This was how Minnie would remember it, in the aftermath of seeing the unthinkable with a shotgun roaring in her ear. It was at the faint threshold of hearing, where auditory hallucinations can weave their spell. But it did not fit the notion of some kind of joint auditory hallucination. It smacked more of the adrenal symbolism that in combat can suffuse real-life sights and sounds, marching them up to the eyes and ears of the combatant as larger-than-life archetype.
He was Man.
Down there laughing.
He knew they were coming back, and that he was not going away. At this point he may have only guessed what had happened to his mother. The ghostly sound heard through a broken window came perhaps more than an hour before the Otter Creek motorcar.
There would be less boasting after the assault from Otter Creek, and no glimpse of its outcome—perhaps for a good reason.
An indisputable indicator said that despite fierce attempts to storm the house, perhaps with one wounded, the six-shot pump shotgun inside kept this group, too, at bay. The indicator was the three bodies on the porch (including badly wounded Hudson). The Otter Creek rescuers apparently never got close enough to remove those bodies. The thought of sacrificing one’s life to a shotgun blast seemed decisive—and could always be bitterly explained as the Sumner group had done: strategic withdrawal in the face of vast numbers of black rebels packed into that evil old jook, their guns blazing fire from every hole.
It may have been the frustrated Otter Creek expeditionaries who, falling back, found ways to escalate things to the next level on easier ground, by creating scorched earth.
___________________________________________ [End Phase 3 of the Events: Escalation]