The Sacrifice

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It was stirring, to see so many concerned residents of Red Rock.

  Primarily these were adults, but there were also high-school-aged girls, and slightly older boys. Word had spread quickly of “Sybilla Frye” who was one of their own.

  Iglesias had been thinking, since her conversation with Harvey Curzdoi: it wasn’t likely that any black man would smear dog-shit and scrawl racist words on a black girl, still less the daughter of his common-law wife. A black man might murder such a girl, for the reasons that men murder females, but he wouldn’t defile her in such a way.

  But maybe gang members. Some sort of nasty initiation. And Curzdoi was right—it would be virtually impossible to get anyone in Red Rock to snitch on a black youth gang.

  The “news conference” began shortly after 4:00 P.M. when Reverend Marus Mudrick appeared at the pulpit with his arms lifted in welcome. In a grave sonorous voice amplified by a microphone he introduced himself as “Reverend Marus C. Mudrick, director of the Care Ministry of Central New Jersey, headquarters in Newark, New Jersey.” There was a scattering of excited applause. Reverend Mudrick then welcomed “Sister Ednetta Frye” and “Sister Sybilla Frye” and “my brother, renowned civil rights attorney Byron R. Mudrick” who joined him at the front of the church, to more applause.

  The audience was riveted observing Ednetta Frye and her daughter Sybilla taking seats behind and to the right of Reverend Mudrick. Many knew Ednetta and Sybilla—and so it was intriguing to see them in this new way, dressed in prim church-clothes, strangely modest and downlooking. Ednetta was self-conscious and somber, her face puffier than Iglesias recalled; she wore tasteful dark clothing, and no evident makeup. Sybilla appeared stricken with shyness, her hair plaited into pigtails; she wore a very pretty white silk long-sleeved blouse with a bow and a dark, pleated skirt, white woolen socks and black patent leather shoes. At the hollow of her throat a small gold cross gleamed. Her facial injuries had faded, or were not visible at a little distance. The sly drift of her left eye was not visible. Iglesias wondered if Sybilla’s friends and relatives recognized her—the lanky-limbed, sassy teenager reinvented as a demure doll of another era.

  As Reverend Mudrick spoke, voice swelling with righteous indignation at the “outrage” perpetrated upon “a daughter of Red Rock,” the pigtailed girl sat with her knees tightly pressed together and her eyes lowered, but well aware, Iglesias thought, of the audience staring at her and her mother.

  At one point, flinching at a statement of Reverend Mudrick’s, Sybilla groped for her mother’s hand. A shiver of sympathy rippled through the audience.

  Those TV crews allowed inside the church were using bright blinding lights. Instead of staying in the area set aside for them, photographers began to wander about taking flash pictures, several crouched directly beneath the pulpit. Reverend Mudrick’s eyes glared red in the flashes. He seemed consumed by an inner, thrumming energy.

  Mudrick was wearing one of his signature three-piece suits, custom-made, Iglesias had read, to fit his deformed upper spine. His head appeared large for his body, even as his legs appeared foreshortened. His torso seemed to fall outward, softly, restrained by his clothes. Yet Mudrick was an attractive man, thrilling in the Pentecostal mode with a deep rich voice that soared and swooped like a bird of prey. He spoke in a way to incorporate Biblical imagery, the wisdom of Jesus Christ, quotations from Abraham Lincoln, W. E. B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. There were no preachers like the Pentecostals in the Roman Catholic church in which Ines Iglesias had been confirmed as a young girl; sitting through the Catholic mass each Sunday with her family, Ines had tried to keep her mind from leaping and darting restlessly about, but without success; she’d known herself a bad girl, for the mass was deeply boring to her. She had tried to see that familiarity might be a spiritual comfort and not deadening. The truth was, she had not ever felt anything for her religion. Communion was awkward and embarrassing to her, a ritual for children. The entire mass was a ritual for children, or child-sized minds. This is my body, and this is my blood. Take ye and eat. She’d been too skeptical to believe such brazen nonsense! Yet, she’d never argued with her parents. She’d never so much as hinted at her disbelief. She’d been brought up to respect her elders and would not have wished to challenge them, or hurt them. And she loved them.

  As she had minimal interest in visiting Puerto Rico, her grandparents’ birthplace, so she had minimal interest in replicating their lives in any way. This included marriage, having babies. As a girl she’d preferred playing with her brothers’ toy guns to dolls.

  As a police officer, Iglesias had not yet fired her weapon. She’d drawn it as a patrol officer more than once but had not fired it and did not like to think of the prospect of having to fire it—self-defense . . .

  Bold and brash of Reverend Marus Mudrick to boast that he didn’t wear a bulletproof vest. There had been no security check at the front entrance of the church.

  Yet she was fascinated by the man. You had to admit, Mudrick was charismatic. Everyone jammed into the pews was swept along by his words including those reporters and TV people who should’ve evinced more skepticism. Mudrick was a master of preacherly rhetoric seasoned with brilliantly timed lapses into black dialect—you listened to him as you would listen to the improvisations of a jazz musician. His sarcasm made you laugh, even when it was tinged with black racism: words like honky, cracker like whip-lashes, stinging without exactly drawing blood.

  Iglesias was uneasy, amid the crowd. Thinking He is a black racist but who can blame him. None of us can blame him.

  Any of these people—who can blame them!

  She felt the seething excitement, the thrill of a common enemy. In the church there were no “whites” except in the pews reserved for the media.

  Iglesias had investigated: The CRUSADE FOR JUSTICE FOR SYBILLA FRYE had been established as a non-profit charitable organization with headquarters in Newark, and Marus Mudrick its CEO. The Passaic County district attorney’s office intended to look into its finances; the New Jersey attorney general had been alerted. “Misuse of charitable donations” seemed a likely charge, to Marus Mudrick’s (white) enemies.

  Mudrick had campaigned for office, but had failed to get the Democratic nomination from his Newark district. Riding the waves of the Sybilla Frye publicity, he would very likely try again for a U.S. congressional seat.

  After forty minutes of stirring rhetoric, Mudrick introduced his brother Byron—“the internationally renowned civil rights attorney”—who spoke much more calmly, rationally, and flatly. Within a few minutes the audience grew restive.

  “Law is civilization, and there is no civilization without law. Yet, there are times when . . .”

  Byron Mudrick was a diminutive man with a wise, creased face and hair much thinner and grayer than his brother’s; his clothes were not distinctive, and his voice neither swooped nor soared as he reiterated Marus Mudrick’s main points and added, with painstaking thoroughness, points of his own. The kind of attorney you would want for legal advice, but not the kind of fiery attorney you would want to defend you in court. By the time Byron finished his prepared talk, he seemed as relieved as the audience.

  Another time now, but with renewed zest and revulsion, Mudrick recounted the “unspeakable outrage” perpetrated upon Sybilla Frye. “When white men assault a black girl, it is ‘blackness’ they are assaulting—that is, all of us.”

  With salacious indignation Mudrick described the kidnapping—the repeated rapes and beatings—the terrified girl kept captive in a van for two nights—smeared with dog feces and “Nazi-racist-swine words written on her body”—hog-tied in the cellar of an abandoned factory and left to die. “Only through the intervention of Jesus Christ was Sybilla Frye discovered by a good Samaritan, who heard her cries. Her rapists are white men dwelling and working right here in Pascayne; they are law enforcement officers of some kind, believed to be in the Pascayne PD, who remain unidentified, unapprehended, and free to this da
y. Sybilla could no more than glimpse them in her terror, as her eyes were blindfolded. It is believed that there are four or five of them, though they might have been joined, in the course of several days of captivity, by others. Only one of the men was seen by Sybilla Frye more clearly than the others, who had ‘yellow hair’—one of the younger men. And she saw a badge—or badges.”

  At this recollection Sybilla Frye seemed about to faint, and Ednetta Frye caught the girl in her arms. A seismic shudder ran through the church.

  Iglesias was thinking Blindfold? Sybilla was blindfolded?

  This was the first she’d heard of a blindfold. There was nothing in her original notes about a blindfold.

  Possibly, Mudrick had made this up, on the spot. The Reverend seemed to be improvising with much zest, as waves of emotion from the audience encouraged him. Or, Sybilla Frye had told him—Blindfold. If she’d been abducted, it was plausible to think that she’d also been blindfolded; but maybe not for such a duration of time as she was claiming. Or: if you were composing a plausible statement of having been abducted, you might decide to add blindfold.

  “Jesus here with us now. You feelin Him?—is you?—I’m feelin Him! Jesus gon protect us in this place of holiness and the ‘white cops’ will not harm us though they be out on the street a thousand-fold, the Nazi-racist-swine hopin there will be a ‘riot’ an they can shoot us down dead like they done in 1967 here in Pascayne as in Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles. If there is blood to be spilt in this crusade for justice for Sybilla Frye, I pray Jesus it be my blood, and all innocent sisters an brothers spared. The white man will never confront the evil in hisself, but when he see you, he see the burning finger of Truth. The blaze that will never be extinguished. Amen!”

  Amen! the audience responded.

  Everyone around her appeared to be deeply moved. Iglesias saw individuals wiping their eyes, and these were not solely women.

  Breathing hard, mopping his forehead with a white handkerchief, Mudrick paused to take questions from the media people, who’d become increasingly restless. Several reporters called out the same question—why hadn’t Sybilla Frye and her mother cooperated with the police if she was a “legitimate rape victim,” why was Marus Mudrick intervening in this public way?—and Mudrick said, indignantly, “Cooperate with the po-lice? In this Nazi-racist city? When the Pascayne po-lice is the problem?”

  There were shouts of agreement—You tell it, Brother!—You tellin them! Mockingly Mudrick spoke over the reporters’ raised voices: “Tellin that poor ravaged girl to go to the po-lice is like tellin Jews to appeal to the Nazi Führer. Only a white-skinned person with no notion of life in a Nazi-racist state would ask that foolish question. Some white lib-rals might be fools but we sure ain’t! We ain’t goin to no local po-lice, nor even New Jersey State Police, they all brothers together under the skin, that ‘blue line’ nobody gon cross.”

  In this vein Mudrick continued, in a voice of ballooning wrath. Iglesias could feel the temperature in the pews rise as she could feel her heartbeat accelerate. There came many more shouts and cries of agreement.

  Iglesias wondered if the media people, sequestered in the first few rows of the church, felt trapped and vulnerable. Their responses to Mudrick’s assertations were surprisingly tame. Since the New York Times had started covering the case, with extensive, damning quotes from Mudrick, Iglesias had been reading the paper with increasing bewilderment and chagrin—the New York Times, giving columns of its front page to the race-baiter’s unsubstantiated charges. Slandering the Pascayne PD, in virtually every issue of the paper, with very little space given, at the end of the articles, to statements from the Pascayne PD chief of police.

  White liberal credulousness, Iglesias thought. Liberals eager to ally themselves with black accusers. Ready to believe the worst of their fellow whites and the worst of cops.

  In this crowd, she was “white”—unless you knew Ines Iglesias.

  Most of the media coverage she’d seen had stressed the girl’s accusations and Reverend Mudrick’s charges but failed to make it clear that, as soon as Marus Mudrick had become the official “spiritual advisor” for Ednetta and Sybilla Frye, and Byron Mudrick had become their “legal counsel,” they’d been invited to meet with high-ranking police officers and attorneys from the Passaic County district attorney’s office, and repeatedly they’d refused. Byron Mudrick, previously an attorney who’d cooperated, to a degree, with legal adversaries, seemed to be concurring with his radical brother. Their first obligation was to their clients, the brothers claimed. These clients had been threatened by police officers in the Pascayne PD. The Fryes’ lives were at risk, as were their relatives’ lives. They were living in fear and terror “as of the Nazi Gestapo.” Both Sister Ednetta and Sister Sybilla had been threatened by police officers, and by the “hierarchy of law enforcement” in New Jersey. They could no longer dwell in their home on Third Street, but had to take refuge in a safe house.

  The other night, someone had thrown a rock through the Fryes’ window on Third Street. There’d been shots fired. Cries of nigger slut. More than one witness had claimed to see what appeared to be “unmarked police vehicles” cruising Third Street at all hours of the day and night.

  It was no secret in Red Rock that law enforcement claimed fraudulently all the time that they would protect police informers and witnesses against criminals, then left them to die in the street. That was how cops treated their own “nigger-snitches.”

  The Reverend spoke in a voice heavy with sarcasm. There was startled, harsh laughter in the church.

  A journalist in the front row stood to ask that if Reverend Mudrick had no intention of meeting with the police, not even the chief of police, or with the district attorney of Passaic County, what was the purpose of his news conferences?

  “‘What is the purpose?’—you aint been listenin, has you. Our purpose is to bring this tragic story of Nazi-racist-swine rape of black women to the attention of the world. To the ‘court of public opinion.’ We are exposin the rotten core of the police state. White privilege. White ‘masters.’ The rich white capitalists settin they foot on the back of our necks, an they act surprised when we throw it off. They act surprised when we defend our women. This badly wronged girl Sybilla Frye is our Joan of Arc here in New Jersey—but the girl is no martyr. She has been hurt deep in her soul, you can see, but she be strong in her soul, and she will survive. And we will find justice for her, long prison terms for the white rapists and monetary reparation from the Pascayne police department, many millions of dollars for all who have suffered the white boot on the nape of the neck. All the white cap’lists give a damn for is the mighty buck which is where we will kick them—hard. This, we swear.”

  Amid cries of approval one of the reporters managed to ask if Reverend Mudrick would be appealing to the New Jersey attorney general and Mudrick said he hadn’t yet decided. He was demanding a “state-wide” and “federal commission” to investigate the case but it would have to include black investigators—black lawyers—from both New Jersey and out of state; and it would have to involve an investigation of the entire Pascayne PD as well as the Pascayne mayor’s office and the district attorney’s office. “The whole hive of them is sick, rotten with corruption, and Nazi-racist. You from out-of-town—from New York City—are thinkin it would be a good strategy for us here in Jersey to try to cooperate with the officials that are not so sick and corrupt, and clear out the rogue cops and corrupt politicians. But consider—this is the hallowed state of New Jersey which is number two in corruption in U.S. history, behind only the state of Louisiana which takes that dubious trophy.” These remarks were greeted with raucous laughter. Reverend Mudrick frowned as if such mirth was inappropriate, and gravely continued: “Now, I am a Christian minister, and I am a reasonable man—I understand, there are ‘good cops’ in this city—maybe even a majority of ‘good cops.’ There are ‘persons of color’ on the force—a few. Putting pressure on the entrenched white bosses to hire black and H
ispanic, like they putting pressure on the firemen in the big cities to cast aside their race-bigotry. But these are not the law enforcement officers with authority or seniority, and they are vulnerable to their superior officers. They take orders, or they out on the street. These brothers and sisters are not the ones who are the problem. Outside this house of worship at this very hour—you saw them, intimidatin you as you entered this church of Christ—as you exercise your God-given and Constitutional right to ‘freedom of assembly’ without harassment and fear of police violence. And the ‘superior officers’ who ain’t present givin them orders—that is the problem, that is the challenge before the Crusade for Justice for Sybilla Frye.”

  As the press conference was ending, Mudrick turned to Ednetta Frye to take her hand, and to Sybilla Frye to take her hand. As the audience stared rapt with attention Mudrick brought both Ednetta and Sybilla to the pulpit.

  “We are not askin these victims of race violence to speak this afternoon, as they are not accustomed to public speaking, and it has been my promise to them, they need not be subjected to any public scrutiny at this time. But, Sister Ednetta, will you say just a few words to this gathering?”

  Meekly Ednetta Frye stood at the pulpit, rapidly blinking and smiling awkwardly; her gaze darted about the audience before her, she licked her lips and said, in a barely audible voice, “I—I am Ednetta Frye—I thank you all for comin here today—in support of my daughter Sybilla and her ‘crusade for justice.’”

  Mudrick turned to Sybilla, saying, “Sister Sybilla, will you say just a few words to this gathering, that is filled with love and support for you in your suffering?”

  Meekly Sybilla Frye stood at the pulpit, rapidly blinking and smiling awkwardly; if she’d been coached to speak as her mother had spoken, she seemed to have forgotten what to say, overcome by the rows of raptly staring people before her, and the distractions of flash and TV cameras.