There is a challenge, which practically amounts to a moral responsibility, in making a drama set in the era of American slavery of black people. That is to say: find a way to make its fundamental horror understand to an audience that has long been accustomed to its representations.
Lawmen: Beginning in Arkansas in 1862, in the midst of the American Civil War, Bass Reeves finds him in a scene set around a card table. Bass (David Oyelowo, co-producer and star) and his enslaver, George Reeves (Shea Whigham), play for his freedom. This opportunity, this card toss, is Bass's reward for performing heroically in the Confederate army, to which he was indeed drafted when George enlisted.
Creator: Chad Feehan
Stars: David Oyelowo, June Christopher, Dennis Quaid
The scene combines terrible tension (Bass trembles and almost cries) and an even more terrible evocation of what it means for another person to have dominion over you. He captures how terribly unfair and inhumane this is and makes vivid the reality (it's based on a true story) of living in a country built on that extraordinary foundation.
The outcome of that game means Bass must flee the state in fear for his life, leaving his wife, Jennie (Lauren E Banks, who has such a presence she's almost hard to watch), and seeking refuge in native territory. American. He is taken in by Sara (Margot Bingham), a Seminole woman whose husband died in the war, and her son, Curtis (Riley Looc). The Seminole Nation “never surrendered, never made a worthless treaty,” and that is why it remains – at least technically – free.
But Lawmen is a drama designed to question at every turn what freedom means to colonized or enslaved peoples. Bass lives there peacefully for a few years, learning the language and occasionally working as a translator between shopkeepers and visitors to the local trading post. There he meets a former soldier, now a prisoner, from his Confederate days and discovers that the Union has won and that emancipation has formally arrived. Hot on its heels come events that demonstrate how useless formal triumphs can be. Bass must move on again.
About a decade later, as a father of many and a farmer beset by crop failures, he shows us how poverty keeps a man from being free, regardless of the much-questioned achievements of Reconstruction. When a U.S. Marshal, Sherrill Lynn (Dennis Quaid), offers him a job helping track down Native American outlaws, he must accept it for the sake of his family.
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