OPENING SCENE OF “COLLEEN,” THE MOVIE
If I had to pick one of my novels to submit as a movie script, it would be Colleen and the Statue. The movie’s opening scene would be the novel’s Chapter 20, when Sgt. Nicholas Ruff, U.S.A. comes for his family in August 1865, after witnessing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. In war movies, the most emotional scene is when the soldier everyone thought had died, returns. Usually, this happens at the end. I would put it at the beginning, to set my story’s emotional tone. I would show Sgt. Ruff first slowly riding through his hometown in Nacogdoches County, Texas, accompanied by a platoon of Yankee cavalry, then going past the Ruff plantation’s Big House, and finally going out to the cabins where he had grown up as a slave. Along the way, I would zoom in on the faces of the spectators, to show their varied reactions to the totally unexpected return.
Everyone knew him when he was a slave and everyone remembered when he ran away in 1861 to go the North to join the Union Army—to win the war for ending slavery. He told his wife, “I’ll be back!” But she didn’t believe it. Yet here he was. When he left, he was malnourished, servile, dressed in rags, hopeless of living a normal life, constantly subject to the overseer’s lash, laboring seven days a week, sunrise to sunset, to enrich the slave master. Now upon his return, he is battle-hardened, muscular, well-fed, dressed in a new Union cavalry uniform—a black man in charge of a squad of white men—mounted on a stallion, an officer’s saber strapped to his waist, and armed with a rapid-fire, Winchester repeating rifle. An incredible transformation!
This movie scene of the return would have little dialogue—none until the ex-slave reaches the shack where is wife and kids live. As he leads the platoon and the mule team pulling an Army supply wagon over-loaded with food supplies down the main street of Nacogdoches, the camera zooms in on the disbelieving faces of the mayor and the county sheriff, and on the hate-filled faces of ex-Confederate soldiers, many of whom are wearing remnants of their Rebel-gray uniforms and are fitted with prosthetic limbs. As the sergeant then leads his squad past the Big House, the camera zooms in on the haggard face of Widow Ruff, who lost her husband, two sons, and a son-in-law in the war. Surrounded on the colonnaded porch by a handful of faithful black servants, she stares emotionless at the black soldier who used to be her slave and whom she recognizes as her deceased eldest son’s half-brother—fathered by her husband when he was the plantation’s slave master.
The first dialogue is one sentence: “Company, halt!” They stop in front of the shack that the sergeant left four years before. The next dialogue is equally short, when he spies his thirteen-year-old daughter in the crowd of ex-slaves that has gathered to witness the strange sight of a black man commanding white Yankee soldiers: “Girl, get your mother and brothers!” He doesn’t have to explain the need to hurry—ex-Confederate soldiers will be rushing to their houses for their guns. Next, the camera focuses on the note that Sgt. Ruff, U.S.A. quickly writes to Widow Ruff: “Dear Widow Ruff. I came for my family. I’m sorry for the death of your son, Sgt. Nicholas Ruff, C.S.A. at Gettysburg. He was my brother. He was a good man, but he was in the wrong army.”
Finally, the scene ends with the camera monitoring the ex-slave leading the platoon of cavalry and the wagon with his family, as they fade away and disappear into the evening horizon.