Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (47 page)

THE POLICE-BLOTTER RAPIST
I
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dull, blunt, ugly act committed by punk kids, their cousins and older brothers, not by charming, witty, unscrupulous, heroic, sen sual rakes, or by timid souls deprived of a "normal" sexual outlet, or by super-mensc11en possessed of uncontrollable lust. And yet, on the shoulders of these unthinking, predictable, insensitive, violence prone young men there rests an age-old burden that amounts to an historic mission: the perpetuation of male domination over women by force.

The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. Loyal and unquestioning, the Myrmidons served their master well, functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.

rAr:wodd without rapists would be a world in which women , rn,gyedfrely without fear of men. That some men n1pe provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimida tion;' forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool · must .be held in awe for it may tum to weapon with sudden ',Swif tness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society's aberrants or "spoilers of purity," men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.

7

A Question of Race

No single event ticks off America's political schizophrenia with greater certainty than the case of a black man accused·of raping a white woman. Facts are irrelevant to the public imagination. Ob jectivity is thrown out the window. A maze of angled mirrors buried deep within the individual psyche rises to confront the perceiver and distort the vision. What is the truth? Upon hearing the bare out lines of such a case-no, upon merely learning the race of defendant and victim-a convulsive reaction sets in. Part of the public screams guilty while another part, equally vociferous, equally certain, screams innocent, a frameup.
Racism and sexism and the
fight
a ainst bot e at the oint of interracial rape, the baffling cro oads of an
n
an i emm

There is no unemotional way to approach the subject of inter racial rape, and no way for me to pretend to an objectivity of my own. I speak as a white woman whose first stirrings of social conscience occurred when I read of certain famous cases, now legend, in which black men had been put to death for coming too close to white women. Tales of Scottsboro, Emmett Till and Willie McGee were part of my formative experience. As a rebel lious young woman during the height of McCarthyism, when most people could not say the word "Communist" without trembling, I took myself down to the old Jefferson School and enrolled in a night course taught by Dr. Herbert Aptheker, the American Com-

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munist historian. There, while the outside world screeched and red baited, I sat as a respectful student and listened to Aptheker's analysis of black slavery. Thunderous and dogmatic, Aptheker was an impressive teacher.
In
his classroom I heard for the first time in my life that rape was a political act, for it was Aptheker's thesis that the white man imposed a special burden of humiliation and oppression on the black woman by forcing her to submit to his sexual will.

My political and intellectual debt to Herbert Aptheker is great and this is as good a place as any to acknowledge it, for as the child grows up and finds the parent wanting, so too, from my present vantage point, I find the Aptheker thesis severely limited. Aptheker and the Communist Party understood rape as a political act of subjugation only when the victim was black and the offender was white. White-on-white rape was merely "criminal" and had no part in their Marxist canon. Black-on-black rape was ignored. And black on-white rape, about which the rest of the country was phobic, was discussed in the oddly reversed world of the Jefferson School as if it never existed except as a spurious charge that "the state" employed to persecute black men.

But as I said, I owe a debt to Aptheker, who was the first to tell me that rape was a political crime, who taught me the tools of dialectic logic, and who shouldn't be surprised that I have carried his argument further than he intended.

In 1968 I wrote a long piece for Esquire which appeared under the title "Rashomon in Maryland." It was the story of three black youths who had received a death sentence for raping a sixteen-year old white girl near a lovers' lane. At the time I asked for the assignment, the young men had spent six years on Death Row, their case had been to the Supreme Court twice and an active citizens' defense committee, formed to protest the severity of the sentence, had become convinced of their innocence. To the de fense committee, the original crime appeared to be nothing more than a little escapade of consensual sex that upon discovery a promiscuous, unstable white girl decided to call rape.
It
didn't take them long to convince me. As it happened, while I was preparing my final copy, a new trial was ordered, the case was dismissed, and the three defendants were set free, which wrapped things up neatly in terms of the piece.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

But while I was pursuing my single-minded researches, a friend who lived in Washington and was following the case asked me one day, "How can you be so sure they're innocent?"

"What do you mean?" I testily replied. "There's a long line of these cases. It's a little Scottsboro, there's a defense committee."

"Yes, I know," she answered. "But what makes you so posi tive? You weren't there. How do you
really know
what went on? How does anyone know?"

How did I "know"? I didn't. At the time it was enough for me to know that the defendants were poor and black, that the girl's "reputation for chastity" was not good, and that an unpaid defense committee was working itself to a frazzle to get the conviction overturned. That was all the proof I needed.
My
knee-jerk re actions were as fast as anybody's, lef t or right.

One other thing I had learned at the Jefferson School was the value of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture housed on
i
35th Street in Harlem. And so when I began my researches for this book and knew I wanted to have a chapter on rape in slavery, I went to the Schomburg to see what it had in the way of documentation.

'Tm writing a book on rape," I told a librarian. "You wouldn't by any chance have any special files."

He looked acutely unhappy. I was soon to learn that no library in the world has efficiently catalogued rape material, but that wasn't the cause of this librarian's discomfort. "Why did you come here?'' he asked with caution.

"Beca use I thought this would be the best place to find his torical stuff on the rape of black women. I'm writing a serious book."

"Then you mean to ask about the lynching of black men." "Sir, I know about that," I answered, "and I know where to

find the material when I'm ready for it. At this point I really need to know about the rape of black women."

"I'm sorry, young lady.
If
you're serious about your subject you need to start with the historic injustice to black men. That must be your approach."

1

'
That has been your approach, sir. I'm interested in the historic injustice to women."

"To black people, rape has meant the lynching of the black man," he said with his voice rising.

It
was an awful facedown, this confrontation between an aging black man with old lef t values and an irascible white feminist with beginning-a-book anxieties. He directed me to a seat and for the next two hours he patiently filled the long wood table in front of me with bound volumes of trial records, comparative studies of conviction rates and sentences, NAACP anti-lynch pamphlets and the like. True to his word, all the material focused on the black man as victim. Finally I screwed up my courage to
try
again. "There's nothing here about women," I said in what I hoped were even tones.