Vintage Didion

by Joan Didion

“Our proud African queen,” the Reverend Al Sharpton had said of Tawana Brawley’s mother, Glenda Brawley: “She stepped out of anonymity, stepped out of obscurity, and walked into history.” It was said in the corridors of the courthouse where Yusuf Salaam was tried that he carried himself “like an African king.”

  “It makes no difference anymore whether the attack on Tawana happened,” William Kunstler had told New York Newsday when the alleged rape and torture of Tawana Brawley by a varying number of white police officers seemed, as an actual prosecutable crime if not as a window on what people needed to believe, to have dematerialized. “If her story was a concoction to prevent her parents from punishing her for staying out all night, that doesn’t disguise the fact that a lot of young black women are treated the way she said she was treated.” The importance of whether or not the crime had occurred was, in this view, entirely resident in the crime’s “description,” which was defined by Stanley Diamond in The Nation as “a crime that did not occur” but was “described with skill and controlled hysteria by the black actors as the epitome of degradation, a repellent model of what actually happens to too many black women.”

  A good deal of what got said around the edges of the jogger case, in the corridors and on the call-in shows, seemed to derive exclusively from the suspicions of conspiracy increasingly entrenched among those who believe themselves powerless. A poll conducted in June of 1990 by the New York Times and WCBS-TV News determined that 77 percent of blacks polled believed either that it was “true” or “might possibly be true” (as opposed to “almost certainly not true”) that the government of the United States “singles out and investigates black elected officials in order to discredit them in a way it doesn’t do with white officials.” Sixty percent believed that it was true or might possibly be true that the government “deliberately makes sure that drugs are easily available in poor black neighborhoods in order to harm black people.” Twenty-nine percent believed that it was true or might possibly be true that “the virus that causes AIDS was deliberately created in a laboratory in order to infect black people.” In each case, the alternative response to “true” or “might possibly be true” was “almost certainly not true,” which might have seemed in itself to reflect a less than ringing belief in the absence of conspiracy. “The conspiracy to destroy Black boys is very complex and interwoven,” Jawanza Kunjufu, a Chicago educational consultant, wrote in his Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys, a 1982 pamphlet that has since been extended to three volumes.

  There are many contributors to the conspiracy, ranging from the very visible who are more obvious, to the less visible and silent partners who are more difficult to recognize.

  Those people who adhere to the doctrine of white racism, imperialism, and white male supremacy are easier to recognize. Those people who actively promote drugs and gang violence are active conspirators, and easier to identify. What makes the conspiracy more complex are those people who do not plot together to destroy Black boys, but, through their indifference, perpetuate it. This passive group of conspirators consists of parents, educators, and white liberals who deny being racists, but through their silence allow institutional racism to continue.

  For those who proceeded from the conviction that there was under way a conspiracy to destroy blacks, particularly black boys, a belief in the innocence of these defendants, a conviction that even their own statements had been rigged against them or wrenched from them, followed logically. It was in the corridors and on the call-in shows that the conspiracy got sketched in, in a series of fantasy details that conflicted not only with known facts but even with each other. It was said that the prosecution was withholding evidence that the victim had gone to the park to meet a drug dealer. It was said, alternately or concurrently, that the prosecution was withholding evidence that the victim had gone to the park to take part in a satanic ritual. It was said that the forensic photographs showing her battered body were not “real” photographs, that “they,” the prosecution, had “brought in some corpse for the pictures.” It was said that the young woman who appeared on the witness stand and identified herself as the victim was not the “real” victim, that “they” had in this case brought in an actress.

  What was being expressed in each instance was the sense that secrets must be in play, that “they,” the people who had power in the courtroom, were in possession of information systematically withheld—since information itself was power—from those who did not have power. On the day the first three defendants were sentenced, C. Vernon Mason, who had formally entered the case in the penalty phase as Antron McCray’s attorney, filed a brief that included the bewildering and untrue assertion that the victim’s boyfriend, who had not at that time been called to testify, was black. That some whites jumped to engage this assertion on its own terms (the Daily News columnist Gail Collins referred to it as Mason’s “slimiest argument of the hour—an announcement that the jogger had a black lover”) tended only to reinforce the sense of racial estrangement that was the intended subtext of the assertion, which was without meaning or significance except in that emotional deep where whites are seen as conspiring in secret to sink blacks in misery. “Just answer me, who got addicted?” I recall one black spectator asking another as they left the courtroom. “I’ll tell you who got addicted, the inner city got addicted.” He had with him a pamphlet that laid out a scenario in which the government had conspired to exterminate blacks by flooding their neighborhoods with drugs, a scenario touching all the familiar points, Laos, Cambodia, the Golden Triangle, the CIA, more secrets, more poetry.

  “From the beginning I have insisted that this was not a racial case,” Robert Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said after the verdicts came in on the first jogger trial. He spoke of those who, in his view, wanted “to divide the races and advance their own private agendas,” and of how the city was “ill-served” by those who had so “sought to exploit” this case. “We had hoped that the racial tensions surrounding the jogger trial would begin to dissipate soon after the jury arrived at a verdict,” a Post editorial began a few days later. The editorial spoke of an “ugly claque of ‘activists,’” of the “divisive atmosphere” they had created, and of the anticipation with which the city’s citizens had waited for “mainstream black leaders” to step forward with praise for the way in which the verdicts had brought New York “back from the brink of criminal chaos”:

  Alas, in the jogger case, the wait was in vain. Instead of praise for a verdict which demonstrated that sometimes criminals are caught and punished, New Yorkers heard charlatans like the Rev Al Sharpton claim the case was fixed. They heard that C. Vernon Mason, one of the engineers of the Tawana Brawley hoax—the attorney who thinks Mayor Dinkins wears “too many yarmulkes”—was planning to appeal the verdicts…

  To those whose preferred view of the city was of an inherently dynamic and productive community ordered by the natural play of its conflicting elements, enriched, as in Mayor Dinkins’s “gorgeous mosaic,” by its very “contrasts,” this case offered a number of useful elements. There was the confirmation of “crime” as the canker corroding the life of the city. There was, in the random and feral evening described by the East Harlem attackers and the clear innocence of and damage done to the Upper East Side and Wall Street victim, an eerily exact and conveniently personalized representation of what the Daily News had called “the rape and the brutalization of a city.” Among the reporters on this case, whose own narrative conventions involved “hero cops” and “brave prosecutors” going hand to hand against “crime” (the “Secret Agony of Jogger DA,” we learned in the Post a few days after the verdicts in the first trial, was that “Brave Prosecutor’s Marriage Failed as She Put Rapists Away”), there seemed an unflagging enthusiasm for the repetition and reinforcement of these elements, and an equally unflagging resistance, even hostility, to exploring the point of view of the defendants’ families and friends and personal or political allies (or, as they were called in news repor
ts, the “supporters”) who gathered daily at the other end of the corridor from the courtroom.

  This seemed curious. Criminal cases are widely regarded by American reporters as windows on the city or culture in which they take place, opportunities to enter not only households but parts of the culture normally closed, and yet this was a case in which indifference to the world of the defendants extended even to the reporting of names and occupations. Yusuf Salaam’s mother, who happened to be young and photogenic and to have European features, was pictured so regularly that she and her son became the instantly recognizable “images” of Jogger One, but even then no one got her name quite right. For a while in the papers she was “Cheroney,” or sometimes “Cheronay,” McEllhonor, then she became Cheroney McEllhonor Salaam. After she testified, the spelling of her first name was corrected to “Sharonne,” although, since the byline on a piece she wrote for the Amsterdam News spelled it differently, “Sharrone,” this may have been another misunderstanding. Her occupation was frequently given as “designer” (later, after her son’s conviction, she went to work as a paralegal for William Kunstler), but no one seemed to take this seriously enough to say what she designed or for whom; not until after she testified, when Newsday reported her testimony that on the evening of her son’s arrest she had arrived at the precinct house late because she was an instructor at the Parsons School of Design, did the notion of “designer” seem sufficiently concrete to suggest an actual occupation.

  The Jogger One defendants were referred to repeatedly in the news columns of the Post as “thugs.” The defendants and their families were often said by reporters to be “sneering.” (The reporters, in turn, were said at the other end of the corridor to be “smirking.”) “We don’t have nearly so strong a question as to the guilt or innocence of the defendants as we did at Bensonhurst,” a Newsday reporter covering the first jogger trial said to the New York Observer, well before the closing arguments, by way of explaining why Newsday’s coverage may have seemed less extensive on this trial than on the Bensonhurst trials. “There is not a big question as to what happened in Central Park that night. Some details are missing, but it’s fairly clear who did what to whom.”

  In fact this came close to the heart of it: that it seemed, on the basis of the videotaped statements, fairly clear who had done what to whom was precisely the case’s liberating aspect, the circumstance that enabled many of the city’s citizens to say and think what they might otherwise have left unexpressed. Unlike other recent high-visibility cases in New York, unlike Bensonhurst and unlike Howard Beach and unlike Bernhard Goetz, here was a case in which the issue not exactly of race but of an increasingly visible underclass could be confronted by the middle class, both white and black, without guilt. Here was a case that gave this middle class a way to transfer and express what had clearly become a growing and previously inadmissible rage with the city’s disorder, with the entire range of ills and uneasy guilts that came to mind in a city where entire families slept in the discarded boxes in which new Sub-Zero refrigerators were delivered, at twenty-six hundred per, to more affluent families. Here was also a case, most significantly, in which even that transferred rage could be transferred still further, veiled, personalized: a case in which the city’s distress could be seen to derive not precisely from its underclass but instead from certain identifiable individuals who claimed to speak for this underclass, individuals who, in Robert Morganthau’s words, “sought to exploit” this case, to “advance their own private agendas”; individuals who wished even to “divide the races.”

  If the city’s problems could be seen as deliberate disruptions of a naturally cohesive and harmonious community, a community in which, undisrupted, “contrasts” generated a perhaps dangerous but vital “energy,” then those problems were tractable, and could be addressed, like “crime,” by the call for “better leadership.” Considerable comfort could be obtained, given this story line, through the demonization of the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose presence on the edges of certain criminal cases that interested him had a polarizing effect that tended to reinforce the narrative. Jim Sleeper, in The Closest of Strangers, described one of the fifteen marches Sharpton led through Bensonhurst after the 1989 killing of an East New York sixteen-year-old, Yusuf Hawkins, who had come into Bensonhurst and been set upon, with baseball bats and ultimately with bullets, by a group of young whites.

  An August 27, 1989, Daily News photo of the Reverend Al Sharpton and a claque of black teenagers marching in Bensonhurst to protest Hawkins’s death shows that they are not really “marching.” They are stumbling along, huddled together, heads bowed under the storm of hatred breaking over them, eyes wide, hanging on to one another and to Sharpton, scared out of their wits. They, too, are innocents—or were until that day, which they will always remember. And because Sharpton is with them, his head bowed, his face showing that he knows what they’re feeling, he is in the hearts of black people all over New York.

  Yet something is wrong with this picture. Sharpton did not invite or coordinate with Bensonhurst community leaders who wanted to join the march. Without the time for organizing which these leaders should have been given in order to rein in the punks who stood waving watermelons; without an effort by black leaders more reputable than Sharpton to recruit whites citywide and swell the march, Sharpton was assured that the punks would carry the day. At several points he even baited them by blowing kisses …

  “I knew that Bensonhurst would clarify whether it had been a racial incident or not,” Sharpton said by way of explaining, on a recent Frontline documentary, his strategy in Bensonhurst. “The fact that I was so controversial to Bensonhurst helped them forget that the cameras were there,” he said. “So I decided to help them…. I would throw kisses to them, and they would go nuts.” Question, began a joke told in the aftermath of the first jogger trial. You’re in a room with Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Al Sharpton. You have only two bullets. Who do you shoot? Answer: Al Sharpton. Twice.

  Sharpton did not exactly fit the roles New York traditionally assigns, for maximum audience comfort, to prominent blacks. He seemed in many ways a phantasm, somebody whose instinct for the connections between religion and politics and show business was so innate that he had been all his life the vessel for other people’s hopes and fears. He had given his first sermon at age four. He was touring with Mahalia Jackson at eleven. As a teenager, according to Robert D. McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, M. A. Farber, E. R. Shipp, Charles Strum, and Craig Wolff, the New York Times reporters and editors who collaborated on Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax, Sharpton was tutored first by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (“You got to know when to hit it and you got to know when to quit it and when it’s quittin’ time, don’t push it,” Powell told him), then by the Reverend Jesse Jackson (“Once you turn on the gas, you got to cook or burn ’em up,” Jackson told him), and eventually, after obtaining a grant from Bayard Rustin and campaigning for Shirley Chisholm, by James Brown. “Once, he trailed Brown down a corridor, through a door, and, to his astonishment, onto a stage flooded with spotlights,” the authors of Outrage reported. “He immediately went into a wiggle and dance.”

  It was perhaps this talent for seizing the spotlight and the moment, this fatal bent for the wiggle and the dance, that most clearly disqualified Sharpton from casting as the Good Negro, the credit to the race, the exemplary if often imagined figure whose refined manners and good grammar could be stressed and who could be seen to lay, as Jimmy Walker said of Joe Louis, “a rose on the grave of Abraham Lincoln.” It was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself, as the Outrageous Nigger, the familiar role—assigned sixty years ago to Father Divine and thirty years later to Adam Clayton Powell—of the essentially manageable fraud whose first concern is his own well-being. It was, for example, repeatedly mentioned, during the ten days the jury was out on the first jogger trial, that Sharpton had chosen to wait out the verdict not at 111 Centre Street but “in the air-conditioned comfort” of C.
Vernon Mason’s office, from which he could be summoned by beeper.

  Sharpton, it was frequently said by whites and also by some blacks, “represented nobody,” was “self-appointed” and “self-promoting.” He was an “exploiter” of blacks, someone who “did them more harm than good.” It was pointed out that he had been indicted by the state of New York in June of 1989 on charges of grand larceny. (He was ultimately acquitted.) It was pointed out that New York Newsday, working on information that appeared to have been supplied by federal law-enforcement agencies, had in January 1988 named him as a federal informant, and that he himself admitted to having let the government tap his phone in a drug-enforcement effort. It was routinely said, most tellingly of all in a narrative based on the magical ability of “leaders” to improve the commonweal, that he was “not the right leader,” “not at all the leader the black community needs.” His clothes and his demeanor were ridiculed (my husband was asked by Esquire to do a piece predicated on interviewing Sharpton while he was having his hair processed), his motives derided, and his tactics, which were those of an extremely sophisticated player who counted being widely despised among his stronger cards, not very well understood.

  Whites tended to believe, and to say, that Sharpton was “using” the racial issue—which, in the sense that all political action is based on “using” one issue or another, he clearly was. Whites also tended to see him as destructive and irresponsible, indifferent to the truth or to the sensibilities of whites—which, most notoriously in the nurturing of the Tawana Brawley case, a primal fantasy in which white men were accused of a crime Sharpton may well have known to be a fabrication, he also clearly was. What seemed not at all understood was that for Sharpton, who had no interest in making the problem appear more tractable (“The question is, do you want to ‘ease’ it or do you want to ‘heal’ it,” he had said when asked if his marches had not worked against “easing tension” in Bensonhurst), the fact that blacks and whites could sometimes be shown to have divergent interests by no means suggested the need for an ameliorative solution. Such divergent interests were instead a lucky break, a ready-made organizing tool, a dramatic illustration of who had the power and who did not, who was making it and who was falling below the line; a metaphor for the sense of victimization felt not only by blacks but by all those Sharpton called “the left-out opposition.” We got the power, the chants go on “Sharpton and Fulani in Babylon: Volume I, The Battle of New York City,” a tape of the speeches of Sharpton and Lenora Fulani, a leader of the New Alliance Party. We are the chosen people. Out of the pain. We that can’t even talk together. Have learned to walk together.