The Sacrifice

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “I told them go fuck themselves. Just walked out.”

  “Well girl, you can’t ‘just walk out.’ You aren’t old enough to quit school.”

  “I’m gon get a job an make some money. Grandma said she could find work for me. There’s a lady in her building has two little children an the person who was takin care of them got sick. I can do that.”

  “S’b’lla, you too young.”

  “Fuck ‘young’! There’s girls my age had babies by now, an you know it. Fuck you lookin at me like I am crazy, Mama—you the crazy one, got us into this shit.”

  Sybilla spoke with a peculiar sort of elation. She’d picked up her backpack and let it fall again now, onto the floor. She kicked the backpack shouting with laughter and stamped her feet until Ednetta hugged her tight, to calm her.

  Very still mother and daughter stood panting and hot-faced. It made Ednetta uneasy that Sybilla was her height now—Ednetta stood somewhat stooped as if her body was settling in upon itself while Sybilla stood wiry and straight.

  Sybilla giggled and said, quietly, “Where’s he?”

  “I told you. He ain’t here.”

  “Where, then?”

  Ednetta shrugged. “He ain’t say.”

  “He comin back here tonight?”

  “No.”

  “He been callin you?”

  “No.”

  Sybilla pushed out of Ednetta’s arms. “Bullshit, Mama. You must be simple, thinkin I would believe you.”

  Carelessly Sybilla rummaged in the refrigerator. Lifted a quart container of milk and drank from it before Ednetta could stop her. Took up a jar of grape jam, slices of bread, and a bread knife, and ran back into her bedroom and slammed the door shut.

  Ednetta stood in the hall calling after her. Inside the room, Sybilla screamed what sounded like Fuck fuck fuck you big fat Mama ass then lapsed into a fit of laughter, or coughing.

  “If you go to the police and make a formal charge, as I think you should, Ednetta—they will have to investigate. They will at least have to pretend to investigate. It may get in the media then—it may receive some attention. But if you don’t, then the police will never act—they will claim they don’t have enough evidence, and they don’t have a cooperating witness. They might even know who hurt your daughter in this outrageous way, but they won’t investigate. We can’t tolerate such injustice in our community—this is 1987, not 1967.”

  The woman from Crisis Ministry, speaking to Ednetta in a fast-clip way like she was scolding Ednetta. A light-skin black woman with fussy speech sounding like a radio or TV voice.

  Or, no—maybe this was the woman from NAACP. Maybe a lawyer? Same way of scolding like Ednetta Frye was some rural-South fool had to be set right.

  “Mrs. Frye? If you’re reluctant or afraid to go alone with your daughter, I will accompany you. I’ll bring two or three of my colleagues, in fact. We will march into the police station here in Red Rock—I’ve done it in the past, and you do get attention.”

  Ednetta said evasively, stroking her arm, “Well. That might maybe happen . . . Trouble is, S’b’lla not feelin like she want to ‘cooperate.’ That girl, it’s hard for me to get to her sometimes, she fifteen years old . . .”

  “I need to talk to Sybilla, Mrs. Frye. I’d thought she would be home this morning—I thought you’d said so. But I can come back. We have to move ahead with this, and quickly. The longer a crime goes uninvestigated, the less likely the perpetrator or perpetrators will be found.”

  God damn, Ednetta hated this female! “Herring-bone” pantsuit and lace-up grannie shoes, eyeglasses, not a touch of makeup on her face that had to be young like early thirties, and a sneering look to her mouth. A lawyer is the worst kind of son-bitch she’d heard Anis remark, he get paid for just talkin an you can’t shut his mouth. Had to be, the females were no different than the males.

  Ednetta had been crinkling her face to show that she was listening. Saying in a dull-whining voice, “Ma’am, nobody expect justice from the racist cops an pros’cutors anyway. The thing that would happen is, S’b’lla get in more trouble, all kinds of nasty attention and threats. Her whole family get in trouble. Already at the school her teachers look at her funny—she refusin to go back, and I’m gon get in trouble for that. These ‘white cops’—God knows how many of them they are, and how high-ranking. They could drive by in the street here an shoot in our windows, like they did in ’67. They could harass S’b’lla so she runs away from home—she that desp’rate! They could harass me. And Anis, the police always stopping him and friskin him, askin where he live, where he goin, pretendin they don’t know who in hell he is. One of these days, Anis say he gon take his gun and blow some white cop’s head off. Get him a shotgun, and go to war.”

  The female lawyer stared at Ednetta and didn’t speak for a moment.

  “Mrs. Frye, I don’t think that’s a good idea. To think that way, or to talk that way. Is Mr. Schutt your husband?”

  “Yes, he is my husband.”

  “You don’t want him to provoke the police, do you? There’s strain enough in Red Rock without provoking more. My suggestion is that you allow the NAACP to take up your case, and I will drive you to police headquarters—not the precinct here, but headquarters, at Flint Square across the river. I think that’s a much better idea than the Red Rock precinct. There, your daughter will file formal charges of abduction, aggravated assault, rape, with evidence from the hospital. You may be correct—the local police won’t conduct a serious investigation. But there are other police forces in New Jersey, for instance the state police. If this is a ‘hate crime’—as it obviously is, with obscene racist epithets written on your daughter’s body—the FBI should already be involved.”

  Ednetta was staring at the floor. Caressing her arm slowly, to ease the arthritic pain in her joints. The woman’s sharp voice had rattled by like a freight train.

  Thinking how Anis had said of lawyers They will sell you out to the pros’cutors. Telling you one thing an they make a deal with the other law’ers behind your back.

  “Ma’am, it’s one thing for you to say all this, but somethin else for S’b’lla and me. You ain’t got to live with it. You gettin some salary at the NA’CP, but we ain’t gettin any salary to be spendin all that time at the police station where S’b’lla be treated like some freak an insulted. Who is goin to protect my daughter, when all this start? You?”

  “We can certainly try to protect your daughter, and you. We could arrange for a place for her to live . . .”

  “‘Place for her to live’—where? S’b’lla got to live here. Her family here, and her school an friends. Bad enough people talkin about her now, without anything in the paper or on TV. There’s people lookin at me like I was some leper already.”

  The female lawyer stared at Ednetta. She removed her wire-rimmed eyeglasses to stare at Ednetta more closely.

  “But—you want justice for your daughter, don’t you, Mrs. Frye? You don’t want these rapists to remain free, do you?”

  “Ain’t what I want, ma’am. It’s what the mother of a black girl in Pascayne got to expect.”

  “But, Mrs. Frye, I don’t understand. Just a few minutes ago . . .”

  Ednetta was on her feet. Ednetta would usher the astonished female out of her house with flurried gestures of her hands as you’d drive away annoying chickens.

  “Mrs. Frye, please—”

  “Excuse me, ma’am! The migr’n headache come over me! Good-bye.”

  Shut the door behind the stunned-looking woman almost catching her heels. Stood at the front window peering around the edge of the blind to make sure the woman got into her car and drove away. Ednetta was quivering with laughter.

  Ednetta was thinking how, before this nasty thing happened, just back in September she’d been a young woman yet. Skin around her eyes not so saggy, and her breath not so short, and in the street she’d looked good in men’s eyes, and laughed back at them they whistled in her direction, or made some wise remark
leaving her feeling damn good.

  But now—things had got strange. Unpredictable day to day.

  The car was gone from the curb. Ednetta had to think for a moment who it had been, in her living room. Mashed her knuckles against her mouth, laughing aloud.

  So funny!

  You thinkin you can manuplate Ednetta Frye! Fuck all of you.

  Hauled herself up the stairs that seemed to be getting steeper every damn day. And there was Sybilla in her cubbyhole room languidly brushing her snarled hair. That big girl sprawled on her bed amid a scattering of stuffed baby-animals not troubling to glance up when her out-of-breath Mama appeared in the doorway.

  “That law’er gone now, girl. You don’t need to hide up here.”

  Ednetta was thinking, she’d take Sybilla to the Jubilee Salon and have her hair done right. Hot comb, and (maybe) cornrows. On his way out that day Anis had handed her a wad of bills including two crumpled fifties.

  “I ain’t hidin up here, Mama. Jesus!”

  “Well, that NA’CP law’er gone. Who she’s been talkin to, I don’t know. Neighbors, maybe. God damn I hate to think what people be sayin—we the last to know.”

  Sybilla winced, as if the pit of her belly hurt her. A chill thought came to Ednetta—Is that girl pregnant?

  She knew, this could not be. From what Sybilla had told her, in bitter little fragments like a shattered mirror you’d have to sweep up from the floor with care, there was no likelihood of pregnancy.

  “Is Martine comin over? Want for her to stay for supper?”

  That sly mocking look in Sybilla’s drifting left eye.

  “Martine comes, an you be bitchin we don’t do the dishes right. Or the dish towels too wet. What we want to see on TV ain’t what you want.”

  Ednetta was hurt, was this how Sybilla thought of her? And Martine, her favorite little niece—did Martine think Ednetta was a bitch, too?

  Ednetta came to Sybilla, and lay the back of her hand against the girl’s forehead. In the instant before Sybilla pushed her hand away, Ednetta registered the girl was warm.

  “Everybody want to ‘represent’ us, like we was the Supremes. Must be thinking they can make money out of us.” Ednetta laughed hoping Sybilla would laugh with her.

  Coldly Sybilla said, without a blink of an eye, “Make money out of me. Fuck ‘us.’ They all comin about me, Mama.”

  The Mission

  Black girl kidnapped beaten & raped by white cops & left to die in abandoned factory in Pascayne, NJ. No arrests, news blackout & censorship by white media, power structure & politicians.

  No more than this, and this was enough.

  Left a message for his brother Byron.

  En route to Pascayne NJ

  Prepare for emergency

  Reverend Marus Cornelius Mudrick, Attorney-at-Law Byron Randolph Mudrick.

  Fraternal twins born 1943 in Penn’s Mill, Virginia. Moved to Camden, New Jersey, with parents in 1952 where, after the departure of their father from the household, they lived with their mother and several siblings in a public housing project. By the age of five Marus’s gift for preaching had been cultivated by a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Penn’s Mill, Virginia; by the age of eight Marus was a regular guest-preacher in the St. Matthew AME Church in Camden, and, in time, a guest-preacher in other AME churches in New Jersey and New York City; by the age of twelve, Marus was enrolled as a “special-studies” part-time student at the Camden Bible College and Seminary, and by the age of fifteen he’d been ordained as a minister in the AME Church—the youngest in the history of the Camden Seminary. At the same time, Marus often sang solo hymns at church services; as a child, he had a beautiful boy’s voice, and in late adolescence he had a strong baritone voice. At the age of eleven Marus was a contestant on the popular TV quiz show Twenty One: the first child, and the first African-American, to appear on the show, though Marus only appeared for three weeks before losing to the young white “genius” Herbert Stempel. Years later, as a controversial public figure in the New York City area, Marus Mudrick appeared on the quiz show Let’s Make a Deal where he won several thousand dollars which he announced would be donated to the National Black Youth Fund, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping impoverished young black people.

  Both brothers graduated from Booker T. Washington High School in Camden, in 1962; Byron with honors, as class salutatorian, and Marus, by this time an ordained minister, voted “most likely to succeed.” Marus enrolled at the Newark campus of Rutgers University with the intention of studying political science but soon dropped out to work for two years in the Harlem office of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, while Byron remained at the university, graduated in 1966 (summa cum laude) and earned a degree from Rutgers-Newark Law School in 1971. Byron qualified for the New Jersey bar in 1972 and began work as a Legal Aid attorney in the state capitol at Trenton, while Marus, associated with no single black church, continued to give guest sermons while working for a succession of civil rights organizations—NAACP, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), the Summer Freedom School Project, and the National Black Youth Fund for which he became New Jersey coordinator in 1979. (In 1983, Marus was investigated on suspicion of “misuse of funds” by the national NBYF; though never formally charged with any crime, Marus paid back approximately $12,000 to the organization and resigned his position. Byron was involved in Marus’s defense and, following the lengthy investigation, the Mudrick brothers were estranged for several years.) While Byron kept a low profile in civil rights litigation, Marus acquired a reputation as a flamboyant black agitator more in the tradition of Congressman Powell than of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.; from Powell, Marus learned to organize black communities in rent strikes, the boycotting of selected (Jewish, Chinese, Korean) stores and services, civil rights demonstrations and picketing; he led marches through “lily-white” suburban communities in New Jersey and in the New York City area; he challenged the legitimacy of police shootings of black “suspects” and agitated for the hiring of black law enforcement officers, firemen, and bus drivers in Newark. Marus’s most publicized activist projects were the 1981 march of more than a thousand individuals to the New Jersey State Legislature in Trenton protesting the death-sentence conviction of a black man who’d been convicted on rape and murder charges primarily on the basis of a (white) jailhouse informer, and the even larger protest rally in Newark, in 1984, following the shooting-death of an (unarmed) black former Marine hero by New Jersey state police who’d stopped him on the Turnpike with a claim that he’d been speeding.

  Marus had himself been arrested by law enforcement officers numerous times, charged with “inciting riot,” “disturbing the peace,” organizing and marching without a permit, disobeying police orders and resisting arrest. It was Marus’s custom to drive new-model vehicles, favoring Cadillacs and Lincolns, with the consequence that he was many times stopped on charges of DWB—“Driving While Black.” (Often these stops escalated into arrests and bookings when Marus displayed an “uppity” tendency to confront police officers.) He’d been beaten and jailed in Albany, Georgia, in the summer of 1964, for his participation in the Freedom School, and again in the late 1960s and 1970s for his political activism in New Jersey–New York City. (In Rikers Island for several days in 1977, Marus Mudrick delivered impassioned sermons of black liberation to his fellow prisoners, until prison authorities intervened.) In 1985, Marus established the Urban Care Ministry of Central New Jersey, with the financial support of the Lewentine Foundation and other well-to-do (white) donors; the Ministry targeted underprivileged youths, helped find training programs and jobs for them, as well as temporary housing for their families. At the same time, less publicly, and less controversially, Byron Mudrick continued in civil rights/social activism law as well as adjunct teaching at Rutgers-Newark Law School; much of his work was pro bono, in alliance with the Innocence Project. (Byron Mudrick was one of several lawyers arguing on behalf of the boxer Hurricane Rubin Carter, for instance, wrongly
convicted of murder in the late 1960s, and released from prison in 1985.) It was said of the Mudrick brothers Marus proposes, Byron deposes.

  From his early, charismatic mentor Adam Clayton Powell, whose 1967 conviction on charges of embezzlement, bribe-taking, and an assortment of similar petty crimes Marus Mudrick had protested as an “egregious example of race-discrimination”—(it was an open secret that Democratic Congressman Powell was but one of countless politicians of the era, predominantly white, who were understood to be involved in what the press called corruption; Powell was singled out because he was black, not because he was corrupt)—Marus Mudrick had learned the importance of looking his best at all times, but particularly when photographers or TV crews were at hand. Like Powell, Marus dressed carefully—in three-piece, custom-made suits, often worn with striking silk ties, silk shirts and monogrammed cuff links; his footwear was elegant, and never less than highly polished. Like Powell, Marus cultivated a thin mustache; his dense, oily-dark hair was carefully barbered and pomaded; his fingernails were manicured, and he wore gold jewelry—rings, watch band, bracelet. Marus would no more wear clothing that had even the slightest appearance of being rumpled, soiled, or out-of-date, than he’d have stepped into a vehicle that wasn’t gleaming with newness. Black is beautiful came naturally to Marus, who hadn’t doubted, since he’d been a child-preacher of five, that he was beautiful—not because he was black but because he was Marus, who happened to be black.

  In the mid-1970s posters began to appear in black neighborhoods of the sleekly handsome Marus Mudrick in his signature three-piece suit with a flowing necktie, sternly smiling, vibrant and alert, exuding strength, masculinity, Christian resolution—“Black is Beautiful”—Rev. Marus Mudrick, Care Ministry of Central New Jersey. And, at times, provocatively—“I bring not peace but a sword” says Jesus—Rev. Marus Mudrick, Care Ministry of Central New Jersey. Though Marus was in his thirties at the time of these controversial posters he appeared a decade older, with fattish jowls, a puffy face, the portly, dignified air of a chief justice. His smile was enigmatic, a faintly sneering smile with a curled upper lip—My people I will do battle for you against our enemies. Believe in me—I am the man. Marus had been married, divorced and remarried, and often seemed to be living apart from his family; in his early thirties Byron had married a woman he’d known since high school in Camden, and lived with her and their children in an integrated inner-city neighborhood in Newark where his wife was a public schools administrator.