The Sacrifice (16 page)

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.”

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.

Born within minutes of each other, the twins did not—at first glance—closely resemble each other. Six minutes older than Byron, Marus behaved as if these six minutes had given him a mandate of authority in their twinness which Byron, quieter by nature, self-effacing and given to irony, didn’t contest. There was no competing with Marus Mudrick—you were a follower, a disciple, or an enemy; in Byron’s case, you were a
younger brother.

Both brothers had suffered from birth injuries that caused their upper spines to be slightly twisted and stunted their growth: Marus never grew beyond five feet five, Byron was at least an inch shorter. Marus compensated for this “short” stature by wearing shoes with substantial heels, standing very straight and holding his head high, speaking clearly and decisively, often in a loud, assured, preacherly voice; his staffers and associates were chosen partly for their height, and it was rare, except in celebrity-photographs, that Marus allowed himself to be photographed with individuals who were taller than he.

Byron, who professed himself bemused by his brother’s vanity, yet not wholly unsympathetic with it, compensated for his stature by immersing himself in his work, in which he exerted, at times, an extraordinary
will—
he liked to think of himself as a pit bull that never barks but sinks his teeth in his opponent’s ankle and will not be pried loose. Where Marus thrived upon attention, thrilled to be heard, to be seen, to be photographed and on TV, even to be reviled and attacked so long as he was able to exert influence in the cause of advancing his race, Byron was content to win court cases and to negotiate settlements behind the scenes, out of the glare of publicity.

Because of their spinal condition and short stature the Mudrick twins were classified 4F for the U.S. draft, and were not called up for service in the Vietnam War. Marus was (publicly) sympathetic with black draft resisters (like Cassius Clay) but overall not so sympathetic with the white-radical-led anti-war movement of the late 1960s which
he believed might be “Communist”-inspired as well as a movement generated by “hippies” who didn’t give Marus Mudrick the respect and recognition to which he was accustomed in the black community. Byron, a believer in black patriotism, in the wake of the Paul Robeson scandal careful to identify himself as an “enemy of communism,” had nonetheless defended a number of young black conscientious objectors in the 1960s, without much success in keeping them out of federal prisons. Of black activist attorneys, Byron Mudrick was hated less than most, for his cordial, professional, and non-declamatory manner; even politicians, public officials, and judges who sided against him, whose (covert) racism made of Byron Mudrick an ideological enemy, were courteous to the man, and admiring of his courtroom skills. He liked to joke that he should have cards printed—
THE
M
UDRICK BROTHER PEOPLE COME TO FOR HELP WITH
M
ARUS
.