Route 453 partially follows a vanished rail spur used by a log train. In 1923 this was a limerock and sand lane going up to Shiloh Cemetery. It was the road taken by a mournfully slow-moving wagon bearing the corpulent corpse of Poly Wilkerson on January 5, 1923, after Wilkerson had led his small band of ad hoc investigators into disaster on Thursday night. Poly’s dry goods store was not far from where Highway 24 is now, though on a vanished lane.

Our map exploration, however, is not concerned with Poly. It seeks to pinpoint a spot to the south of his store. There began the events that would consume Wilkerson, along with a woman he apparently killed and a tragic parade of others. Somewhat distant from all that was the beginning of the chain reaction, on the morning of January 1, 1923.

So for the location of that beginning, we return to the map: From where the two roads meet, 453 and 24, a virtual line can be drawn due west for 500 feet to a strange dark blob on the map, circular in shape. This is a depression or incipient sinkhole in underlying limerock, which in 1923 caught rain water and gave rise to small aquatic cypress trees, forming a densely tangled cypress “dome.” Some people called this “the cypress pond.” Children waded in it to catch minnows. Raccoons and opossums were said to creep out at night toward tempting henhouses. Just west of the southwest edge of this dark pond, according to people who were elderly in 1982, there stood a house.

The apparent location of the house can also be triangulated more systematically, by moving the eye to a point on the Shiloh Cemetery road that is just over a quarter mile from the junction with Highway 24. That spot is marked by the intersection of route 453 with a meticulously straight north-south lane without a name. The Cummer Lumber Company, operator of the company town of Sumner in its life from 1911 to 1926, was precise in its surveying.

Envision now the newly encountered north-south lane as not ending where it ends today, at the fork with route 453, but instead as if it continues straight south, into the edge of what is today the sleepy snowbird maze of the Cedar Key RV Resort, with its moored motorhomes. This street, thus mentally extended, was in 1923 a nerve center of residential Sumner, edged by houses for foreman-level white personnel, about a dozen homes on each side. The street was known simply as “the quarters”—though just west of it was a larger area of more rustic company homes for more numerous manual laborers, all or nearly all of whom were black. That area, too, was called simply ”the quarters,” and not “the black quarters.” No one seemed to get confused.

Our mental extension, marking out the white quarters street, runs due south from the fork for just under a quarter mile. It’s not clear exactly where the double row of houses would have started, but the position of the last one is indicated by the cypress pond. That end house was surrounded by a wooden fence about four feet high, standard in the quarters since about 1920, to keep out free-roaming livestock. The end house had gates front and back, and the back gate opened toward the area around the southern edge of the pond. In terms of the present-day map, it’s possible that the crisply right-angled border of cleared land that is visible between our mental street and the dark pond follows the south and east edges of the old quarters property, and hence perhaps the south and east edges of the sandy yard of the end house, with its fence.

This last house in line, facing the quarters street from the east, was arguably the most isolated company residence in white Sumner, while also being the closest to the Seaboard tracks. The tracks were not visible from the house but were reachable across a couple of hundred yards of palmetto thickets and blackjack scrub. If a hobo—or fugitive—should happen to drop off a slow-moving freight bound for the nearby Gulf, such a visitor could conceivably dart up to the cypress pond and hide there in the brambles and muck, waiting to pounce.

Or conversely, the same geography could give rise to fearful imaginings inside the house—perhaps even nightmares—about such a possibility.

But airy speculation aside, we have now arrived at an essential element in what more innocent eras used to call mass hysteria. By whatever name, this is a loose psycho-social category subsuming the narrower niche of the Symbolic Community Scare, which is one label that might be applied to the first week of 1923 in Rosewood and Sumner. These quaint-sounding categories aren’t usually thought of in connection with the non-quaint moral meat-grinder of lynching.

As our map journey reaches its end at the end house (approximately 29° 12' 57.528'' N, 82° 58' 12'' W), a more abstract quarry, the previously mentioned essential element, looms darkly, like the dark dome of trees on the cypress pond. The thing to which this element is essential might also be given yet another name: a Mass Conversion Event. In such an event, such an element assumes top-heavy importance because everything else seems to spring from it.

This element is The Alarm.

On January 1, 1923, the alarm arose at the four-room home of Frances Coleman Taylor, age 22, known as Fannie. Publicity in the 1990s Rosewood claims case, and then the 1997 motion picture Rosewood, would make Fannie Taylor perhaps one of the most hated women in the history of Florida—on evidence that is endlessly said to have come from two separate eyewitnesses, but which in fact is cherished fantasy.

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The Morning Events Index

On that short winter day, January 1, 1923, sunrise came to the area around Sumner, Florida, at 7:26 a.m., according to the astronomical tables. Just before that sunrise, starting around 7:00, there came a gray half hour of civil twilight, or “false dawn.”

Returning now with this in mind to Sumner’s white quarters street, we can shift the focus a bit, from the end house to the third house from the end, two doors up from Fannie Taylor, and on the same side.

There, Elizabeth Smith, assistant bookkeeper in the Sumner sawmill’s pay office, is now dressing for work, according to her recollections 59 years later in 1982.

Smith was alone as she dressed, she said, for her husband Charles—“C. C. Smith” as people knew him—had left for work earlier on a pre-shift schedule. C. C. was like several such early-bird workers at the sawmill. Out and about at that earliest hour, they left home in deep darkness ahead of most of their co-workers.

Another early-bird was a neighbor just south, a millwright—that is, a sawmill carpenter. Performing his tasks before the mill started running, he was Henry James Taylor, known as James. He lived two doors down from the Smiths with his wife Fannie, in that end house. Circumstances suggest that Fannie’s husband James left home that morning at some point after 5:00 a.m.

Florida’s hard-knocks timber country did not generally recognize New Year’s Day as a holiday from work. In the houses of Sumner’s quarters, January 1, 1923, found kerosene lamps glowing before dawn.

At the head of the street, nearly a quarter mile north of Elizabeth Smith, the sawmill’s commissary, or company store, had been lighted since 5:00 a.m.

Eighteen-year-old clerk Ernest Parham had walked over at that point and opened the padlock on the front door. By way of catering to the early birds (as long-lived Parham would recall in 1993), each morning he laid out on the commissary counter an unvarying ensemble of merchandise: three cigarette-like cheroots and a Coca-Cola. This was the usual early-bird purchase made by a customer named Spearman, who was the company’s log train engineer. Spearman would savor his treats on his lunch break in the woods.

Early visits to the commissary were also made periodically by millwright James Taylor. And this piqued the young clerk’s curiosity. Taylor, not his wife Fannie, seemed to do the family’s grocery shopping, a startling departure in the tradition-bound quarters.

Parham had seen Fannie Taylor on occasion in his delivery trips to the end of the street, but he could not remember ever seeing her at the commissary. When he had delivered a block of ice to her end house one day she seemed polite but unreadable, not saying very much. Such daily affairs left few clues to illumine what was coming.

Yesterday, Sunday, had been Sumner’s day off, and close behind it was a breather for Christmas. Hence this Monday signaled not only a new year but a return to workday reality. On Sundays as well as Saturday nights, a “jook” sent its noise through Sumner’s black quarters—a house-like dance hall for African American laborers. Afterward a quarters boss or company enforcer might check to make sure that no one in company housing was sleeping it off on Monday morning, but this particular Monday seemed to see no such controversies.

Some African American workers, like shingle-mill veteran Robert Missouri (1982), avoided the brawls of the jook and were more likely to spend Sunday night in church—especially this Sunday night. In the early 1920s, Watchnight on New Year’s Eve was a nationwide religious tradition.

In Florida timber country, midnight at the birth of 1923 featured the two opposites of the contemp-orary South, the preacher and the bootlegger: Small chapels in the woods heard hymns and midnight prayers, but outside in the dark there were less pious celebrants, drunkenly marking midnight by firing guns into the air. Minnie Mitchell over in Rosewood would recall being warned at Watchnight service not to stray outside, so plentiful were the random bullets coming down.

But if any midnight sounds reached Fannie Taylor, they apparently reached her at home. Church was another place where neighbors failed to remember seeing her. Sumner shrugged this off, being accustomed to personal mysteries. The gossips knew that brassy Mrs. Murphy was feuding again, and that Troy Jones had a stutter that could disintegrate into fits, and that Mrs. McElveen’s stovepipe had blown up, and that Billy Surles got a black eye from falling down in a fire alarm.

But as to Fannie Taylor, the talk was only that she was “selfish”—that is, that she stayed to herself, and was not prone to being neighborly.

Just up the street and on the side opposite the Taylors, impish Edith Surles, age 15 (interviewed in 1982 and 1983) thought it unfair to call Mrs. Taylor selfish. Edith had ventured down there and befriended the young stay-at-home, and found her friendly, once you got to know her. Both Edith and Elizabeth Smith used remarkably similar language about Fannie Taylor in their 1980s reminiscences, though the interviews were widely separated and could not have cross-pollinated. Both puzzled that young Mrs. Taylor was “peculiar,” but if you could get her into conversation, each said, she seemed nice as could be.

Edith: “You get to talkin’ with her and you couldn’t help but like her.”

Elizabeth: “A nice sweet woman and all, but she just didn’t have anything to do with anybody.”

Sumner knew nothing of agoraphobia, a word coined in 1871, designating a form of panic disorder that imprisons sufferers at home. Reports from rare visitors to such homes tend to have a surprised quality, finding that the supposedly crazy recluse is actually rather nice.

But diagnosing Fannie Taylor at such a distance would be quite a speculative stretch, and perhaps quite unfair. The isolated company town of Sumner did have a company doctor, Augustus B. Cannon, living near the commissary at the head of the street, but he had been sent in by the government as an anti-malaria man, and did not specialize in Freudian riddles. Company physicals tended to stick to broken bones and hungover malingering, known as “jook flu.”

At any rate the first hours of the new year had seemed picturesque enough, under a bright moon, nearly full. But at 5:50 a.m. the moon sank behind the forest, making the darkness complete. The sawdust-paved quarters street boasted electric streetlamps overhead (despite the lack of electricity inside the houses), but each night the lamps winked off at 10:00 p.m., when the sawmill’s generator shut down. This night, the fabled darkest hour was indeed just before dawn.

No chorus of summer frogs came from the cypress pond to break the January silence, no whistling din of whippoorwills, unlike the symphony of summer nights. But the temperature, at least, was mild. no lower than the high 50s, Fahrenheit. And this told a tale of its own.

This small detail—the question of how cold it was as dawn came on January 1, 1923—would rise as an indicator of the way that myth and fantasy can step in and overpower a story involving the passions of race, where just about any old lie can seem fine in a virtuous cause.

Surviving witnesses would agree with records showing nothing extraordinary in the weather that night, but in a best-selling 1996 book, applauded by Publisher’s Weekly as important “history,” that night and its following morning explode into meteor-ological grandeur.

The book, recounting the 1990s Rosewood claims case in a tie-in promotion with the 1997 Rosewood movie, opened with this stentorian line: “This much is known.”

The four words, set off to themselves in a one-line opening paragraph, seem surely to say that the information on the rest of the page (the “this much” that is “known”) will not only be rigorously factual, but will be about all that is “known,” as if such mystery lies here that little besides the “this much” has ever been discovered. Whatever the subtleties, “this much” was supposedly beyond doubt:

“This much is known.

Dawn broke keen and crisp that day, the first dawn of the new year. The coldest day anyone in Rosewood could remember. A half century later they would remember how cold it was, how frost glistened on the palms and palmettos, how sheets of ice sparkled in the swamp and crystals of rime coated the moss sagging from the branches of the oak…Years later they would remember that, too, the ones who were still alive.”

Nope. Never happened. Not just the outrageously false weather report, but repeated assertions like “they would remember” and “the coldest day anyone in Rosewood could remember” tell the reader that multiple sources must surely have corroborated all these creepy icicles, presumably in laborious interviews.

Again: Nope. Not only did this pseudo-factual New Year’s scene never happen, but no Rosewood survivor ever said it did. Perhaps more important is that various descents into falsehood made by the same book seem never to have been questioned, but have been periodically applauded without checking, as if to remind that myth, not fact, can be the operant desideratum in a story about race. And if myth can be made to look like fact, that’s all the better. But it must not be fact. Because fact has a strange way of getting off-message.

The 1990s Rosewood reparations case filled a public relations need in public consciousness (We’re doing something about bygone racial injustice), so the resultant book filled a related niche (And now we’re saying something about what we did about bygone racial injustice). The outcome posed as non-fiction history, complete with end notes. But the house of cards wasn’t meant to be poked.

In a precariously balanced nation, a story of race and horror will likely be either cheered or avoided. Neither response involves much questioning, so the myths about Rosewood can pile up like fallen leaves. Believers may love the myths—for a moment—while segments of opinion tending to doubt will simply avoid the whole subject as a playpen for sentimental believers. The temperature at Rosewood on January 1, 1923, could be as spectacular as a fantasizing author wished. Potential doubters would never pick up the book, and the cheerleaders would love the thrill. The only loser would be a small voice called history.

Later in New Year’s week, genuinely cold weather would indeed come into northern Florida, not on Monday but on Thursday night, January 4. So what’s the big deal? Just four days’ difference? Why should history quibble over whether it’s true?

Rosewood myths about the weather are small potatoes compared to the ones about the Rosewood death toll, and the nature and size of the violence—not to mention the passionately believed myths about what was about to happen to Fannie Taylor, on that not-so-cold Monday morning.

_________

The Scream Events Index

Elizabeth Smith, two houses north of Fannie Taylor's house, would describe the alarm in terms that put it at about 7:00 a.m. The time was “about daylight” but “it was dark.” This sounds like the dark beginning of civil twilight or false dawn.

Another factor makes the timing less speculative. Everyone agreed that when the alarming incident occurred, men living along the street had already departed for the main shift at the sawmill, and only wives and children were left in the houses. A large cylindrical steam whistle atop the Cummer mill announced the beginning of the shift, and could be heard for miles. Since the mill stood well beyond the commissary, the walk to it from the far end of the white quarters street was about a half mile, taking at least ten minutes.

Smith’s recollections, as well as stories from slightly more distant viewers, suggest that the men had not been gone long when the alarm took place, though apparently all the men had had time to reach their sawmill posts, putting the alarm at least ten minutes after their leaving home.

This was not the only pedestrian movement, however. In those same moments at least six men and boys from Rosewood were approaching the sawmill from another direction. Lee Carrier, Bishop Bradley, Raleigh Bradley, Sam Hall, Raymond Jones, and Perry Goins were making their usual walk to work. Two of them, Carrier and Hall, would live to be interviewed in 1983.

These were frank, credible witnesses, but in oral history, as in criminal investigations, the recurrent lament is that chance tends to put the best available eyes in the most irrelevant position, where nothing much is happening to be seen. The walkers came from Rosewood on the railroad and entered Sumner by a side track, arriving from the southeast, separ-ated from the Taylor house not only by the cypress pond but by a wide expanse of blackjack scrub. They began work as usual at the mill in first light, without ever knowing that any kind of alarm had occurred.

It should be said that whites at the sawmill never accused or seemed to suspect these prime targets of having been involved in any way in the events at the Taylor house. The “hysteria” that would begin building on Monday night, then to subside and explode more disastrously on Thursday night, was not a cliché lynching frenzy. Worldwide, “deadly ethnic riots” (to use the terminology of authority Donald Horowitz) tend to pass from a milder specific targeting phase (hunting specific accused individuals) to the general targeting of random bystanders in a rampage. Sociologists object to even the word “frenzy” in describing how this happens. Video of deadly crowds shows many members looking aimless and passive, almost as if bored, rather than like some of the leering faces in the unrepresentative lynching photos that have come down to us. The Rosewood workers came and went without problems.

Elizabeth Smith, speaking reluctantly as she sat on her front porch in 1982, said that her first awareness of the alarm of January 1, 1923, began with realization that a strange sound had begun creeping into her pre-work routine at home, coming from somewhere outside. She said she went to her door to look out, and was able to discern a pale figure in the street in front of the Taylor house. She realized it was Fannie, crying out in distress.

Smith’s description of the incident seemed discreet-ly selective, unless prodded. It occurred to me as she spoke that a person in distress would likely be screaming actual words, rather than just going completely ballistic. I wondered if Fannie was perhaps screaming something like “Help me, please!” When Smith was asked whether she heard distinct words, she peered at me silently, as if not wishing to go onto forbidden ground. At age 92—having been 27 in 1923—this informant repeatedly showed small signs of possible fantasy intrusions in her recollections. They seemed not to be severe, but still sufficient to erode the level of certainty in her memory-pictures. Continuing to peer at me, seeing that I was still waiting for an answer, Smith looked miffed that I would force this indelicacy from her. Then she released it, like a firebell in the Jim Crow night. She said she heard her neighbor screaming: “A nigger! A nigger!”

Her description of what happened next showed hints of what could be grandiose pseudo-memory—or could be a frank retelling of events that really were grandiose. She said she grabbed a pistol as she ran to Fannie’s aid, thus becoming the lone rescuer in the drama, while other women stayed on their porches. Whatever the situation, the drama was so small at that point that Edith Surles up the street was unaware of it until later. In Smith’s telling, the two central figures were Smith herself and an infant, for Fannie had begun adding to her screams: “Somebody, please, go get my baby!” Little Addis Taylor, born October 4, 1922, was still in his crib inside the house.

Smith recalled dashing into the gloom there to get the child, holding the gun, not knowing whether Fannie’s attacker might still be on hand. This resonates. Smith herself had lost a six-week old infant to mysterious crib death in 1921. One neighbor said she was never quite the same since. In the 1982 interview, that other life-changing tragedy kept filtering in, with a faint air of unconscious rescripting, as if the loss in 1921 could convert into the successful rescue of an infant in 1923. Or not. The signs of possible fantasy were so small that even mention of the possibility may be unfair. However, in wildfire rumors soon to develop, despite their love of melodramatic flourishes, Smith’s heroic rescue of the baby seemed not to be mentioned.

All this is by way of saying that, yes, an eyewitness to the elusive ignition moment was definitely found, but no, the word “eyewitness” here does not mean one hundred percent certainty. Most important is the general picture of the timing, on which all the neighbors seemed to agree.

The timing is crucial because there is another witness, not a resident of the street but a confirmed regular visitor, whose story is so fantastically different from Smith’s that they can’t both be true. Either story could easily be seized upon to make a satisfying narrative seem proven, but this could be done only by ignoring the difficulties in each—and especially in the second one. The reality is that while Elizabeth Smith’s recollections cannot stand on their own because of subtle questions, the second witness, far more extremely, presents a startling mixture of both delusion and fabrication.

Before we get to that minefield, however, here are three more details from Smith.

All the stories from the white quarters agreed that Fannie Taylor answered her door that morning, found herself confronting an attacker, and was immediately knocked to the floor. The implication was that this was done to silence her for a robbery, perhaps by a desperate fugitive needing cash or food, so that the assault didn’t necessarily mean rape. Elizabeth Smith said that inside Fannie’s darkened home she saw physical signs of the onslaught, highlighted by a detail related to Fannie’s “peculiar” reclusiveness. Smith said that Fannie obsessively bleached her floors. Heavy floor-bleaching was not unique in that time and place, but Smith said that “peculiar” Fannie went to extremes. And because of that extreme whiteness, Smith said, she could see on the floor an array of ugly black scuff marks, and “ole feetprints,” marring the pale planking. A fugitive hiding in a cypress pond might have gotten muddy, and the scuff marks could go further, as a rape indicator. But again, a nagging sense of too-perfect symbolism whispers in the description, sounding dream-like: this dire black soiling of virtuous white.

The second detail is that Smith said she saw bruising on Fannie Taylor’s face. Smith did not volunteer this, and only nodded cryptically when asked about it. The importance here—this matter of visible bruises—speaks not only to the second witness’s alternative story, soon to come, but bears on a still more disconcerting third possibility, also discussed below. Smith’s reply about the bruising was too vague to close the issue.

And now third, Smith said that while inside the house she looked out the Taylors’ back door and saw broken fence palings where the intruder had gotten in. I pressed her on this for a specific reason. Second-hand stories about men soon answering the alarm talked about a back fence still solidly intact—to the extent that a tracking dog put onto the intruder’s scent came up against the solid fence and had to be lifted over. But Elizabeth was calmly insistent. She said she saw the broken fence not just in the shadows and haste of her rescue effort, but later as excitement mounted in full daylight and she looked back in: “I saw those palings pulled off.”

With this rapidly fragmenting picture in hand, we can now turn to the second witness.

_________________

The Secret Boyfriend Events Index

The second witness describing events at Fannie Taylor’s house is the source of perhaps the most famous of the Rosewood myths. This is the story of the Secret White Boyfriend. The fame attaching to this story, however, does not usually present it as a myth, but as stark, shocking fact.

The source of the story—the second witness—vehemently disputed the whole narrative told by first witness Elizabeth Smith (and the more general story told by neighbors). True, this second witness was eleven years old at the time of the events, but she was certainly old enough for solid observations, well beyond the age-seven threshold suggested by Rosewood’s early childhood pseudo-memories. The difficulties in this story have other roots.

Former Rosewood resident Philomena Doctor was born Philomena Goins on August 26, 1911, in a delivery by Rosewood midwife Mary Ella McCoy. Her parents came from two of Rosewood’s core African American families, the Goinses and the Carriers. In 1982, Ms. Doctor was reluctant to talk but then did talk at some length; in 1983 she angrily refused to go on-camera for 60 Minutes, accusing interviewers of being secret spies from the long-ago 1923 mob, still tracking her down. No other Rosewood survivors, whatever their pain, reacted in ways even remotely like this.

The 1991 death of Philomena (Goins) Doctor, just prior to the 1992-1994 Rosewood claims case, allowed advocates in that case, notably her son Arnett Doctor, to make crucial changes in what they said had been her story. The fantastic narrative she had been telling for decades became an unacknowledged revision better suited to the reparations claim. Laundered out for public consumption were elements suggesting the severity of the mental problems intruding on the teller.

Known in her family for disconcerting behavior, including shouting rage, physical aggression and visions such as seeing God at the foot of her bed, this Rosewood survivor was made a posthumous public figure by the claims case, but the resulting picture made her look angelically sane, as if what were in fact angrily shouted bouts of free-form depiction were instead the soul of reason and and restraint.

My 1982 interview with Ms. Doctor, occurring long before the politics and financial rewards opf the claims case stepped in to clean up the view, found her speaking for herself, telling her original story in its long-accustomed form, as she had been telling to a few carefully chosen relatives for years.

The psychological background of this story led far back before the 1923 violence, to find this informant at age five, when she had endured severe trauma. Witnesses agreed that her father George Goins provoked a shooting in the First A.M.E. Church of Rosewood, resulting in the death of preacher Elias Carrier, and adding a coffin nail to the already-failing remnant of Rosewood's Goins turpentine business. George Goins was apparently forced from the community. The actual shooter was George's brother Charlie, presumptive heir to M. Goins & Bros. Naval Stores, who became a long-term fugitive. In the communal horror of the shooting, resulting in church congregants fleeing wildly for their lives amid agonized embarrassment at the inebriated provocation made by Philomena Goins's father, she was apparently present.

By age eleven at the dawn of 1923, Philomena Goins and two younger siblings were periodically coming back from their father’s new location to stay for extended periods with their grandmother Sarah Carrier. They were then taught to call their grandmother “Mama” and refer to their real mother as “Sister..” And in a quietly horrifying way these children were instructed to refer to their real father, George Goins, not as "Daddy," but as “Baby George.”

Philomena Goins/Doctor’s cousin Minnie Langley characterizedMs. Doctor's psychological problems as predating the 1923 violence, calling the phenomenon “Philomena’s old mean,” or meanness.

By age eleven, as a regular chore, Philomena Goins was making periodic trips with her grandmother to the back gate of Fannie Taylor’s house in Sumner, because her grandmother Sarah Carrier did weekly wash there. Three children from Sarah’s household would sometimes come as helpers. Sumner resident Elizabeth Smith said that Sarah Carrier washed for two Sumner households at once, Smith’s own and the home two doors south, that of the Taylors. Smith knew the 50-year-old laundress as “old Aunt Sarah,” and said she came to wash each week on Mondays.

Smith knew no names to distinguish the children sometimes seen accompanying Sarah Carrier, but paid them a dismally time-warped compliment: “Little clean, slick lookin’ niggers. Little straight dresses.”

Inadvertently, this backlights elusive narration problems in employer Elizabeth Smith. On the one hand, Smith knew her laundress lived in Rosewood three miles away, and even knew she lived in an “ole two-story house”—but Smith had seldom if ever been there and knew nothing of the life there. Her memory envisioned all of Sarah’s child helpers at washday as being girls, in dresses. However, only one girl, Philomena, was in Sarah Carrier’s household. The other two helpers, coming only at intervals, were Philomena’s younger brother Arnett Turner Goins (“A.T.”), and Sarah’s youngest son Harry, age about 14 in 1923. Both Harry and A.T. did their part on washdays with masculine-style chores such as stacking firewood for the Taylors and Smiths. Their rearranged image in Smith’s memory asks what realities might also lie hidden behind another of her remembered images, that of the pistol-and-baby rescue on an excited Monday morning.

The washday tasks for eleven-year-old Philomena, as both she and Smith would recall, were gendered as well. Philomena not only helped at the wash pot but was sometimes a babysitter. She agreed that she had tended little Addis Taylor in his crib, as well as the Smith infant who in 1921 had died suddenly.

The story told by Philomena Goins about the Monday morning in question painted a panorama, describing not only Fannie Taylor’s alarm but the manhunt that followed. Special insider knowledge was claimed in both cases, knowledge possessed only by the informant, revealing a spectacular secret side to what other people thought of as reality..

This story accepted into its structure the general narrative many neighbors were repeating, but it held that adults on the scene were blindly or deceptively missing the big secret—a sensational hidden element that changed everything,

Ms. Doctor accepted that after Fannie Taylor’s alarm a tracking dog was taken to the Taylors’ back yard, and she accepted that the dog found a clear scent trail left by the apparent attacker, leading up the railroad to a house on the far side of Rosewood. And there, she further accepted, the dog followed the scent into the house and out the back door, but then came up short, as the scent trail vanished. She also accepted the widespread supposition among whites saying that the vanished trail meant that the owner of the scent had lifted it off the ground, by the accustomed evasion technique of hitching a ride in a wagon.

All of these widely told story elements were incorporated into Philomena Doctor’s version of the events, but they were radically reinterpreted. The evasive maneuvers followed by the dog, she said, were being made not by a fugitive who was black, but, secretly, one who was white.

Thus emerged the story of the secret white boyfriend. Many local residents had naturally been struck by the startling nature of Fannie Taylor's alarm story, and many forms of speculation about it arose as vague gossip. But at some point after the incident Philomena Goins began to take ownership, saying she knew the missing link—and that she had personally seen him.

For decades after 1923, this witness would continue telling her reconfiguration of the Monday alarm to a tight circle of grieving relatives, mostly women who had been children in 1923 and were excluded from adult discussions of the alarm and the manhunt. Those who had been older and in better positions of observation accepted as a matter of course that the fugitive was black. They apparently never heard Philomena’s secretive story and would have dismissed it as ridiculous. A key distortion in the 1990s claims case was to portray the white boyfriend story as having been widely known in Rosewood in 1923 and accepted by residents. It wasn’t.

The significance of the story is not in any miniscule possibility that it might have been true, but in the way that such evident fantasizing became—after the 1990s Rosewood claims case—an unquestionable article of faith, even among many institutional gatekeepers of opinion. The story had to be true—not because of any real facts on the ground, but because of a mysteriously but powerfully shared desire in the believers. The most basic criteria for determining what did or did not happen had broken down—even as overarching criteria for determining what was or was not history were breaking down in the same process.

This is the real—and deeply ominous—significance of the secret white boyfriend story.

At a family funeral in 1978 a Rosewood survivor who had been nineteen in 1923, Donarion “Bishop” Bradley, scoffed at Ms. Doctor's story as nonsense. Lee Carrier, Minnie Langley, Sam Hall and other black neighbors outside the loop of belief were surprised and baffled to learn, only in the 1980s, of this allegation that there had been a racial impostor.

But in the 1990s, enthusiasm accompanying the Rosewood claims case swept aside the background and proclaimed the story as proven fact, allegedly confirmed by two eyewitnesses, Philomena Goins and, allegedly, her grandmother Sarah Carrier. In truth, no survivor (including Philomena herself) spoke of ever hearing Sarah Carrier mention a white interloper, leaving only the word of a lone child-informant whose lack of credibility was extreme. But in 1982 the teller herself was emphatic. “He was white!” she exclaimed to me. “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles tall as you!”

The complete story went like this:

It is a Monday morning as usual. Philomena and her grandmother Sarah are at the large black wash pot behind the Taylors’ back fence. Only the two of them are present. Philomena’s brother A.T. and Sarah’s son Harry did not come today.

As Philomena helps her grandmother with the wash they are standing in bright sunlight. This scene is occurring at a point in time well up in the morning (This timing was a central part of Ms. Goins's description; she grew angry at any attempt to move it back toward dawn— though her son’s post-1991 revision for the claims case would do so, after she was deceased and could not object, repositioning the story in pre-dawn darkness to better agree with other accounts).

In this sunlight the two figures at the wash pot suddenly look up to see that a white man has arrived at the Taylors' back gate. He is in no hurry. He certainly does not climb over the fence or break through it. He simply saunters through the gate. Grandmother Sarah has seen him there before. She knows he is Fannie Taylor’s secret lover.

The man stays in the Taylor house with Fannie for some time. There are sounds of a commotion. But when he comes out he is again in no hurry (Why Ms. Doctor stressed this point emphatically is hard to see; she seemed determined to make her impostor other-worldly, having him shape-shift from mild sauntering at the gate to fleeing wildly once he had gained a little distance).

Now the washing continues. The man has dis-appeared. Then Fannie rushes from the house screaming about a black man. There are bruises on her face. She must justify them to her husband.

But this is not all. The white man has a formidable escape strategy, drawing on mysterious ceremonies that an eleven-year-old in Rosewood might have heard of vaguely. The fleeing white boyfriend, the story reveals, is a freemason, a member of the cryptic brotherhood that has both black and white branches, and is bound by blood oath to help a brother in trouble.

At the house that the white Mason reaches in Rosewood, he makes the secret Masonic distress sign, and the householder, though black, is also a Mason, and must risk his life for his white brother. He dashes to another Rosewood home, knowing that he will find there a topmost Masonic colleague, a thirty-second-degree master, also black. And that brother Mason will also risk his life to answer the call.

Together they put the conniving white boyfriend into a wagon, lifting his scent off the ground. And then they carry him far out into the swamps, to an inlet of the Gulf of Mexico, where he steps into a boat, then disappears forever.

Thus was Philomena Goins Doctor’s story. Many well-educated and sophisticated people have encountered it, slightly laundered, and have felt that it must be true. Indeed, acceptance has been so thorough that any questioning of it here may receive indignant denunciations as being insensitive bigotry. It should be noted that at least in the general idea of there being blame-a-black-man accusations there was nothing impossible. Criminal hoaxes falsely blaming a mysterious black stranger for a crime actually committed by a white have been dismal reality for generations—though without the miraculous Masons and other luminous aspects of the specific story told by Philomena Doctor. The force of belief that would come to surround this story—as seen in a video as late as 2019—has seemed to begin treating it as supposed proof that any crime anywhere alleged to an African American perpetrator must be self-righteously dismissed as being mere blame-a-black-man false accusation. This is the phenomenal power of psychological denial compressed within the secret-white-boyfriend beliefs.

Out of the many questions that could be asked about Philomena Doctor's story, perhaps one will suffice at this point: How would an eleven-year-old know about all the Masonic maneuverings, when there was no public hint that they existed at all? Did the Masons come to her secretly and clue her in?

Writing in 1982, and identifying both Elizabeth Smith and Philomena Doctor only with pseudonyms, at their insistence, I saw no choice but to give the benefit of the doubt to suggestions that Sarah Carrier did talk about witnessing the white visitor, thus becoming the support for her granddaughter's account—though even at that early stage of investigation the suggestions of this were very vague, and much clearer were indications that the informant was clinically impaired.

At that early stage I didn’t feel that I could discard the white-impostor story just because it sounded improbable. The whole Rosewood incident, and its disappearance from public knowledge for deacades, sounded improbable at first glance—and yet many of the improbabilities turned out to be true. Years more of collecting evidence would be required to adequately address the assertion that Sarah Carrier had verified her granddaughter’s story. At last the evidence was overwhelming that that allegation was baseless. It can now be said conclusively that no one (apparently including Ms. Doctor herself) seemed to make any contemporary report of Sarah Carrier speaking about seeing a mysterious white intruder.

In the 1982 interview with Ms. Doctor, confronting the implausibility of what she was saying, I asked whether perhaps it had been hard to see the man there in the dark at the washpot. She retorted that of course it was not dark when she saw him. Did I think her grandmother, she demanded, was going to walk three miles to work in the dark? She insisted angrily that the two of them, grandmother and granddaughter, did not even head for Sumner from Rosewood until after daybreak.

All of white Sumner agreed that Fannie Taylor’s screams occurred in darkness. Was an entire popultion cooperating in some gigantic conspiracy, or perhaps in an exotically racist form of delusion?

Philomena Doctor’s son Arnett did not seem to think so, as he moved his mother’s story back into the dark to fit with the consensus.

Elizabeth Smith, the shaky but surely present primary witness on the scene, said that on that particular Monday, January 1, 1923, her laundress, trusty “old Aunt Sarah,” did not come to work at all. Conceivably on that turbulent morning, Sarah Carrier’s normal footsore trajectory from Rosewood might have gone no farther than the edge of the cypress pond near the Taylors’ back yard, where it could have been apparent that excited whites were gathering in response to an alarm. It wouldn’t have been unthinkable, then, to quietly retreat and leave the washing for another day.

But there was also one more survivor-witness in the mix, a quieter one. Philomena Goins’s younger brother Arnett Goins, “A. T.” should not be confused with her similarly-named son, Arnett Doctor, who was born thre decades later than A.T. Everyone seems to agree that A.T. Goins, then aged eight, was not at the Taylor house that day, but he still could have shed light as to how soon after the events Philomena began telling her dramatic story about a secret white stranger, and whether Sarah did as well.

A.T. Goins was a quietly honest man but also quietly averse to family conflict, and the boyfriend story was fiercely controlled within the family by his domineering sister. Through the 1980s he was kept out of reach of investigation and refused to declare. Finally in 1994 a new kind of family pressure based on $150,000-apiece claims payments pushed him into public testimony, but even then, partisan claims case interviews avoided questions that might have illumined the washday riddles.

As to Philomena’s Doctor’s credibility, the points to consider include the following:

*In 1982 she insisted to me that after Rosewood’s pivotal Thursday night shootout, on January 4, she fled from her grandmother’s home across its front porch, and stepped over nineteen dead white men there. I asked hesitantly whether she perhaps meant “about nineteen.” This caused an outpouring of scorn. Absolutely not, she snapped. There were exactly nineteen corpses. And she knew this because she counted them—even as she was stepping over them. This was at a moment when, by her own description, she was fleeing wildly for her life and was only eleven years old, yet somehow in her mind she managed a hopscotch calculation, on a porch whose murky corpses seemed to stretch on forever. Moreover, testimony by her relatives agrees that she was not even on the front porch. Everyone fled through the back porch.

*Another impassioned point with this informant was her assertion that after the flight described above she hid in nearby swamps for nine days, without food or water the entire time. She intoned dramatically, in oratorical fashion, that doctors insist such survival is impossible, but she knew she had done it. Many other witnesses and other evidence put the time of hiding in the swamps at two nights and one day, and food and water was brought to the refugees. Survivors like Wilson Hall described the hiding period accurately and matter-of-factly. Philomena Doctor's bizarre histrionics were not typical of the survivor pool, and indeed were seen in no one else. This was the single least credible informant in that pool, but hence was the one who could provide an unfettered vision for later blame-a-black-man believers.

*This informant also boasted to me, for whatever reason, that her ancestors had owned slaves. She displayed sneering pride about this. One scarcely knows where to begin trying to understand such complexities. But they formed the only source of the secret boyfriend story.

As to the boyfriend himself, it wasn’t as if the story presented him as being completeely faceless. The narrator had an identity for him—and a special one, explaining how he could pop in and out of the scene. He was an engineer on the railroad, she explained. He was able to step down handily from the cab for his rendezvous. But then on the fateful day he missed the train, and he had to go to the Masons (the teller unknowingly reversed the local train schedule to accommodate these moves).

Following the 1990s claims case, the 1997 film Rosewood became one of Hollywood’s most denounced distortions of history, likened by one reviewer to a reverse-polarity version of Birth of a Nation in 1915. Nor, in a new millennium, was there respite from the haunting power of the Rosewood events to evoke ever-new fantasies.

Into the fray came Wikipedia, in a way that might seem to single-handedly impugn Wikipedia’s vital knowledge mission.

Not only did the formidable online encyclopedia accept the boyfriend story as fact, including even the Masonic escape artist miracles, and his identity as a nefarious train engineer—but, by unfathomable turns, a fantasy-loving consensus among Wikipedia editors began insisting that the engineer-cum-boyfriend had a name, and that he was “John Bradley”—though no such “John Bradley” ever existed, and no Rosewood survivor ever said he did. Philomena Doctor herself might have been astonished at this new-age insanity.

The “John Bradley” fantasy was embraced for years by Wikipedia, especially around 2007-2009 but still posted in 2023, presenting him as representing sober and solemn historical documentation—as if in eagerness to craft and wave publicly an indicator of very self-congratulatory delusion. Evidently the power of racial controversy and racial fantasy knows few cyber-frontiers.

How Wikipedia editors came to hoist themselves on this fantasy petard is an elusive but instructive story, but first the example:

A Wikipedia “Talk” article on Rosewood was reverently touted by the editors themselves as being “one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community.” Here, John Bradley is presented as well-established, Wikipedia-endorsed reality, not only in summary pages but behind the scenes in self-congratulatory editorial deliberations--which managed to anoint Philomena Doctor’s son Arnett Doctor as being a supposed “witness” to the Monday morning events, though he wasn’t born until 1943:

“John Bradley, a white man, heads to Rosewood after leaving Fanny's. He meets up with Sam Carter, a black man, who along with Aaron Carrier, another black man, drives him to a river in a wagon to help him get away. Were these men friends?”

In other words, all of the above is accepted as factual narrative, so these Wikipedia sages (one styled as “Pirate Dan”) are striving to dissect these supposed facts—meaning that they are intricately examining the movements of someone who never existed.

The new millennium tends to feel superior to the superstitious old Middle Ages, where robed and revered scholastics soberly debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. But are we so different?

In the “Talk” discussion, one Wikipedia sage chides another:

“The article is fairly clear that Carter, Aaron Carrier, and Bradley were all three Masons, a brotherhood that looked out for each other.”

The angelic pin is getting crowded. But the real question is about the shadowy Wikipedia believers: Who are these people? What authority gives an anonymous “Pirate Dan” the right to fantasize as truth for the whole planet?

Of course, many fine and indeed indispensable Wikipedia articles refrain from going over this cliff. So what is the LSD that breaks down the defenses in the potion called race?

The discussion airily accepts as fact the 1990s revisions that don’t even allow Philomena Doctor to fantasize for herself:

“She [Sarah] and Philomena Goins arrived before daybreak to start this, as they usually did. Sarah and Philomena heard the train stop and saw the man arrive at the Taylor house.”

Here, John Bradley the non-existent engineer has been safely moved back into the pre-dawn hours, so that the impossibility in the original fantasy won’t show too much. And we even hear the (non-existent) train. The Wikipedians accept as holy writ the racial pomposities that made these shifts—again like medieval scholastics, counting those tiny angels because holy writ says so.

See, we have to really get into John Bradley’s head, like, to really get the truth….

“…but the question remains if John Bradley would have considered Carrier a brother enough to go to him. Any employee of the railroad would probably be familiar with people living along the tracks …”

And what, exactly, is the fair and accurate amount of blame to place on poor “John Bradley”? The sages wonder magnanimously whether (non-existent) John Bradley hit Fannie Taylor (non-existently) only because she provoked him. Or might it have been somebody else who (non-existently) hit her, and not our man John Bradley? They have to chew on this.

It begins to sound insame just to protest: There was no white John Bradley. Not in Rosewood, not in Sumner, not on the railroad, not anywhere. Not even the most ardent fantasizers or outrageous spinners of tall tales at the actual scene ever said there was such a being. But somehow, somewhere far down the line, some night shift at Wikipedia apparently got the idea that there was a white John Bradley—and suddenly the great encyclopedia’s Achilles heel is jumping off the tracks: If it’s written down somewhere in auspicious-sounding language, we know it just be be true. And if it’s on the side of the angels in anxiety-producing racial controversy, doubt is doubly out of the question.

By believing solemnly in the evil white anti-Santa Claus, the Wikipedians were crusading for justice, weren’t they? Mustn’t any old allegation be true if it helps the cause? Isn’t a good solid name for the Secret White Boyfriend much to be desired because it makes his kind of despicable evil easier to crusade against (and makes us feel important)?

I have a theory on how Wikipedia wackily got hold of the name John Bradley—a theory at least as solid as angels on a pin. At the very beginning of the Rosewood claims case in May 1992, when a tabloid-TV tipster started the case with an eye to a made-for-TV movie, there were thousand-dollar movie options paid and some statements signed. One was signed by survivor Lee Ruth Davis, who as a seven-year-old in Rosewood in 1923 had been Lee Ruth Bradley, whose father was known as Wesley Bradley, though his full name of record was John Wesley Bradley.

Ms. Davis in that tumultuous 1992 beginning was doing her best to stay afloat amid self-righteous Hollywood hosannas that kept promising to pay her money. But people kept asking her clueless questions about things that never happened, and it was hard to know which of the many starry-eyed delusions she was supposed to tacitly support.

On May 4, 1992, at the Miami office of Florida’s largest law firm, Holland & Knight, the following confusing interview with Ms. Davis got taken down on paper, perhaps to go wafting through nameless future reinterpretations:

Question: “How about John or William

Bryce? Does that name ring a bell? “

Answer: ”Bryce.”

Question: “Bryce, yes, It may not. that is

okay.”

Answer: “I don’t know. My father named

John Bradley.”

Whoa. “My father named John Bradley.” Was this the tiny spark that started it? Did eager enthusiasts somewhere up the line yearn so mightily to get a name for that quintessential white villain, the Beastly Boyfriend, that finally…Eureka!

Why, look here. Isn’t this the venerable survivor Lee Ruth Davis? And isn’t she saying straight out that her father actually named the sleazy miscreant?

Could a frazzled stenographer’s accurate rendition of Black English have been the tiny, almost invisible origin behind years of Wikipedia John Bradleys? Well, there's more.

The flood of myth-like information in the Rosewood claims case brought many glitches. Soon, in 1993, a supposed academic report cheerleading for the claim seemed to further flip the switch on the new-born Frankenstein:

“According to Lee Ruth Davis, who got the story from her father, John Bradley, the white lover of Fannie Taylor,…”

One little comma too many from the good professors (in a statement that was false to begin with)—and the wording transforms “her father John Bradley” into an entirely imaginary personage: “John Bradley, the white lover of Fannie Taylor,” The damning comma, almost invisible, is extraneously inserted after the word “Taylor,” turning “the white lover of Fannie Taylor” into a modifying phrase (page 32 of the 1993 report).

Or thus eager eyes could have seen it—as a sacredly unquestionable “written source” met the gnomes of worldwide truth.

Just a theory. Maybe you’d like a different one. Then go ahead. Just pick one, any one. And go ahead and call it fact. This is a story about race. No one will mind.

________________________

The Uncatchable Suspect:

Mr. Cauchemar

Events Index

One of the stories circulating among Fannie Taylor’s neighbors claimed to describe the Monday morning attack from the inside, as told by the only identifiable observer inside the house: Fannie herself.

The story begins with two puzzling sounds (somewhat as Elizabeth Smith’s story also began with a puzzling sound, in the form of an anguished scream). However, the two sounds alleged to have been described by Fannie were more elusive, more tantalizing—and yet they loomed into identifiable form as she concentrated on them.

They came in succession, first one, then the other, without connection. Or so the story says. We have no picture of where in the house the hearer was, or what she was doing. She could have been cooking breakfast, as some stories said (or assumed). But, owing to her husband’s skewed work schedule, there is nothing to say she was not still in bed. Her two small children, three-month-old Addis and older Berness, age four, would both insist to me in adulthood, in 1982, that they had been too young that morning to retain any memories of it.

The first sound, faint, at the threshold of audibility, was said to be a periodic crackling, coming from outside in the back yard. At first unable to place it, the young housewife puzzled until she came up with the only plausible explanation. It must be the Monday washerwoman, trusty old Aunt Sarah, out there breaking sticks of kindling wood for the wash fire.

This cracking or crackling is the lesser of the two sounds, but the story goes on to give it a kick. Fannie could not have known—the story announces triumphantly—that this sound in fact came from the sly attacker out there in the dark, as he broke palings off the fence to creep in.

Unfortunately, this explanation comes up against other stories telling how the tracking dog that was brought to the back yard stopped short at a fully intact fence, and had to be hefted over. And both of those forking alternatives in turn belie Philomena Doctor’s story of the boyfriend, in which the calm, unhurried (and white) mystery visitor simply opens the back gate.

After Ms. Doctor’s 1991 death, as the claims case found her to have become a conveniently silent source, a second point of believability was added to her rearranged narrative by her son, claims promoter Arnett Doctor. The wording “stepped across” the fence then seemed to become standard in Philomena Doctor's family, with her younger brother A. T. also cooperatively repeating it in claims testimony—as if the phrase “stepped across the fence” had come from Philomena, which it did not, at least as she told the story to me. “Stepped across” would seem to mean rather long legs on a fence reportedly four feet high, and gone from the laundered version is Philomena’s insistence on the gate.

Such dream-like ambiguity now takes us back to the two sounds. The first one, the faint crackling, disappears from the story, but the main one is coming up—not emanating from the back of the house, but now, having traveled around, coming from the front. The new sound comes from the front door—perhaps not exactly a knocking, perhaps partly a scratching sound. Fannie can’t for the life of her figure out what this sound could be.

She feels no alarm at all (the story says), only a dreamy curiosity—which finally leads her to the only plausible explanation. It must be her husband James, sneaking home early from work to play a trick on her. “You just as well to come on in, James,” she calls out, with a bold confidence surprising in a shy recluse. “I know it’s you.”

But the sound continues. More puzzled than ever, and without fear or qualm, she then walks dreamily to the door, and opens it.

And there he is!

The dark form staring directly into her face has insidiously lured her into his clutches, and now he knocks her down. But this initial intimation of rape transmutes. He is on top of her on the floor, but not sexually, instead beating her into silence. The technique was not unknown. Occasional news items in those days told of predatory hobos luring housewives this way.

But now the story goes two ways at once: The attacker leaves silenced Fannie on the floor while he rummages the house to steal whatever money he can find. Fannie remains too paralyzed to take the opportunity to flee—at least not yet. But bold mastery is now resurging in her, as with the flippant shout to James, but this time as part of a desperately clever plan.

“Berness! Berness!” she cries to her hidden four-year-old (pronounced BURN-us! BURN-us!). “Bring me the gun! And I’ll shoot the ole black rascal!” (The wording is verbatim from a local raconteur; others said much the same).

Notably, the story of the two sounds is laced with descriptions of tricks: the tricks of hearing, the trick imputed to James, the one played by the attacker at the front door, and now Fannie tricking the attacker into believing that little Berness is a concealed adolescent or adult, who can fly to the rescue with a gun. Each trick swells from a dream-like twist in the action, providing a barely plausible explanation.

The last trick works perfectly. The same thug who was daring enough to walk right up to a front door in a crowded quarters now hears the cry to Berness and falls apart. He panics, running out the back door.

Only now does Fannie pick herself up and dash out the front, into the street. The back-door getaway is another explainer, telling why, as neighbor women begin peering at the house, no one gets a glimpse of the attacker. A newspaper report, composed at a distance from a non-witness telephone briefing, will give the impression that “housewives in the neighborhood” chased off the “black brute,” as if spying him in the flesh and thus confirming that he ever existed at all. In the real events, no neighbors seemed to catch sight of him.

There is no material evidence saying that the preceding discussion, with its two sounds, could not be describing a real attack by a real stranger. Moreover, the rendering here is written specifically to foreshadow a startling alternative explanation, so it may not do full justice to the simplest, most obvious explanation, the one saying that Fannie Taylor really was attacked, just as she said.

Nevertheless, the story of the two sounds, with its oddly specific yet intangible elements, could as easily serve as a textbook description—element by element in eerie congruence—of a psychological phenomenon that was not even on the books in 1923. That phenomenon, though appearing down through history, was through most of that time known only by folk names or theological labels, in various cultures and tongues: the incubus/succubus, kanashibari, hexendrücken. gui ya—and le cauchemar. One label for it today is sleep paralysis hallucination.

In a stressed or restless sleeper, imperfect waking occurs. The person merely dreams that he or she is really awake. The familiar details of the bedroom may appear as usual, though into this scene come ambient sounds, perhaps from a car passing outside, or wind in the trees—which may transfigure into the dream and at first puzzle the unknowing sleeper, until some seemingly plausible explanation is applied. The sounds change and grow. At last they congeal into a single source, a horrifyingly sentient presence—who overpowers the terrified perceiver, now unable to move, feeling paralyzed (physiologically, routine sleeping anesthesia of the limbs is still in force). But typically this demon is oddly aloof. Despite aggressive physical contact, in case after case of experiences like this, the contact does not become sexual.

Then at last comes the finale, as consciousness begins to seep in more and more fully, so that now the dream, still partially in session, portrays the struggler as mastering the situation—and the demon disappears. Emergence from such a state often brings the conviction that this was much too real to have been a dream. Some sufferers have run screaming from their homes. It is very vaguely reported that on occasion an only partially paralyzed struggle may toss the victim onto surrounding furniture, causing bruises.

Sleep paralysis hallucination has been cited as a possible explanation for some reports of abduction by extra-terrestrials, and in earlier times for “hag-ridden” witch abductions. The symptoms were clearly implicated in a famous 1943 alarm in Mattoon, Illinois, involving supposed Nazi infiltrators using paralyzing gas, leading to a community-wide Mass Conversion Event, or “mass hysteria.”

The case of Fannie Taylor is too fraught with shaky evidence and missing pieces—too dream-like—to take sleep paralysis hallucination as any kind of full explanation for that Monday morning. For instance, there does seem to have been a real scent trail left by some kind of visitor and found by a tracking dog. It seems inexplicable that this could have combined somehow with a waking nightmare. Yet both threads of evidence—the evidence for a real visitor and the evidence for a visitation in a dream—seem too striking to ignore. The weasel words above, in phrases like “some kind of visitor” and “both streams of evidence,” may somehow point to the real explanation of Fannie Taylor's alarm.

Experienced tracking dogs don’t mistake or confuse scents and can even tell whether a quarry is coming or going. All observers, black and white, agreed that at least one dog, and probably two shifts of different dogs, found a distinct scent trail in the Taylors’ back yard, and that this spoor led straight up the railroad to the far side of Rosewood, and a home there. Reported details in the dog’s behavior seem to cinch the picture.

The dog was following someone—a real, material someone—who was not just a dream. The only way to reconcile specifics in the dog’s behavior and the conclusions of all those watching, including African Americans, is to conclude that the simplest explanation is again most convincing, that there really was a stranger who attacked Fannie Taylor, that he really did flee, that he really did make his way through the house in Rosewood, and that behind the house he really did climb into a wagon, lifting his scent off the ground and ending the chase.

But that’s only from the perspective of the dog. That explanation comes up against other problems in the earlier part of the attack story, inside the house. In short, no explanation seems to completely fit.

It sometimes happens in Mass Conversion Events that the Alarm—the ignition factor that leads to excitement, confrontation, and disaster—can't easily be examined because it was caused by something small and subtle, much less definable than the grandiose events that will take that alarm as a cue. If ever found, the origin can seem almost trivial—except for its consequences.

In a wide world there are examples.

____________________

Comparison: Catarina

Events Index

Fantasies and false beliefs have all the more easily rushed into the case of Fannie Taylor because in Mass Conversion Events (or mass hysterias) evidence and investigation on the ignition moment, The Alarm, often produce no firm narrative.

This is a damning admission to make to an expectant reader. The natural expectation in this case, and sometimes an impassioned expectation, is that the real story, finally revealed by the most patient of investigations,will tell all.

But unfortunately, Mass Conversion Events by their nature tend to throw a particularly impenetrable cloak over their beginnings. The larger event itself, in its eventual grandeur as a mass spectacle, arguably involves a release of communal tensions, and the alarm gives these a reason—or an excuse—to be released. But the initiating bump or hiccup used as that excuse may in the cold light of day seem insubstantial, materially almost nothing—and hence may be remarkably hard to pin down for analysis.

It might be said that when I found myself stumped by the initial stone wall in Rosewood—that is, what really happened to Fannie Taylor—in a sense I wound up spending much of the rest of my life searching the world for at least one conversion event in which the above-stated dynamics could be unmasked, and the ignition moment could be examined—just to show how such things really can work, and how the initial mystery at Rosewood might conceivably have worked.

At the time I certainly didn’t see myself as making such a lifelong quest, but as it happened I did wind up with the case—high in one of the most isolated mountain strongholds of Guatemala, a thousand miles south of Fannie Taylor. The case occurred on April 29, 2000.

A picturesque outpost called Todos Santos, perched in the Cuchumatan Mountains of western Guatemala, has long been a standard stop for adventurous tourists. The Mam Indians of alpine Todos Santos, one of the oldest Maya groups, continue to hold colorful market days in an idyllic-looking setting, surrounded by lush green slopes and majestic peaks, though grinding poverty is woven into this backdrop, desperate enough to send many residents to the United States as illegal immigrants. The local coyotes, or people smugglers who shepherd the trips, are formally outlaws, but locally are men of prestige.

April 29, 2000, looked superficially like one more routine market day. Two tour buses, one larger, the other a smaller van, came winding up into the mountains for a colorful excursion. As it happened, these buses were bringing tourists who were Japanese, on an off-the-beaten-track holiday to the exotic developing world. The speakers of the Mam dialect in Todos Santos were long accustomed to such Japanese groups, so there should have been no problem.

However, as the Japanese drew nearer to Todos Santos, they were unaware of some special circumstances, which were overlaid onto longer-term stress, not only from poverty but lingering trauma caused by Guatemala’s guerrilla war of almost two decades. The war’s end in 1996 had left many aftershocks in a struggling nation. The state capital serving Todos Santo seethed with fears of epidemic crime and street gangs, as in other Guatemalan cities.

About a year before the visit by the Japanese, the gang fears had coalesced. A young girl was found dead in the state capital with signs of ritual torture, which might have meant gang initiation. An excited flood of rumors carried the gruesome story farther and farther, as the alleged details kept mushrooming and rearranging. With apparent input from Guatemala’s burgeoning missionary community, the stories became theological, Influence from a 1980s-1990s scare in the U.S. over Satanism, the so-called Satanic Panic, was projected into a Third World environment, though in the U.S. itself the panic had subsided by then.

In northwestern Guatemala, the original gang initiation rumors now somehow became gossip-disseminated warnings that a powerful worldwide Satanist organization, supposedly based in Washington, D.C., had decided to celebrate the anniversary of Guatemala’s apparent torture killing. And, gasped the rumors (as amplified by countless small radio stations and fiery sermons), the Satanists were going to do their celebrating by coming to the state surrounding Todos Santos, on April 28 and 29.

The rumors said that the foreign Satanists would be looking for Guatemalan children to kidnap and sacrifice. A large segment of the public did not take this as a joke or a myth. The state governor put police on high alert. Mothers kept children home from school.

Then on April 28 nothing happened. There had been no mass arrivals at airports, no gathering, no incidents. The state capital breathed a sigh of relief and relaxed. It seemed inconsequential that the same rumors, on the same radio waves, might have reached high into the mountains as well, into a place precariously positioned for fervent belief and explosive release of tension. As April 29 dawned, a terrified siege mentality continued to grip the indigenous community of Todos Santos. Eyes warily scanned market-day crowds for signs of disguised Satanists—as the Japanese arrived.

What followed would cause an international incident and blaring headlines in the Guatemalan press. As if out of nowhere, the narrow streets of Todos Santos were engulfed in mob fury. Soon two people lay dead: a middle-aged Japanese businessman on holiday and the driver of one of the tour buses. A number of the tourists were injured.

The newspapers of Guatemala, not known as the world’s least sensationalistic, rushed to endorse a comforting picture of the tragedy, one that exonerated the hard-pressed local Mayans, while assuaging the nation’s sense of shame by putting the blame on the victims, the Japanese.

A noted daily newspaper ran a meticulous artist’s reconstruction supposedly showing the events, complete with allegedly heedless and arrogant Japanese tourists. The Japanese were said to have insisted on offending Mayan taboos by snapping photos. The artist’s drawing in the newspaper showed nosy Japanese shutterbugs in imagined action, making the Indians madder and madder until they could take no more, and they snapped. This became national truth.