Vintage Didion (14 page)

In this city rapidly vanishing into the chasm between its actual life and its preferred narratives, what people said when they talked about the case of the Central Park jogger came to seem a kind of poetry, a way of expressing, without directly stating, different but equally volatile and similarly occult visions of the same disaster. One vision, shared by those who had seized upon the attack on the jogger as an exact representation of what was wrong with the city, was of a city systematically ruined, violated, raped by its underclass. The opposing vision, shared by those who had seized upon the arrest of the defendants as an exact representation of their own victimization, was of a city in which the powerless had been systematically ruined, violated, raped by the powerful. For so long as this case held the city’s febrile attention, then, it offered a narrative for the city’s distress, a frame in which the actual social and economic forces wrenching the city could be personalized and ultimately obscured.

Or rather it offered two narratives, mutually exclusive. Among a number of blacks, particularly those whose experience with or distrust of the criminal justice system was such that they tended to discount the fact that five of the six defendants had to varying degrees admitted taking part in the attack, and to focus instead on the absence of any supporting forensic evidence incontrovertibly linking this victim to these defendants, the case could be read as a confirmation not only of their victimization but of the white conspiracy they saw at the heart of that victimization. For the
Amsterdam News
, which did not veer automatically to the radical analysis (a typical issue in the fall of 1990 lauded the FBI for its minority recruiting and the Harlem National Guard for its high morale and readiness to go to the Gulf), the defendants could in this light be seen as victims of “a political trial,” of a “legal lynching,” of a case “rigged from the very beginning” by the decision of “the white press” that “whoever was arrested and charged in this case of the attempted murder, rape, and sodomy of a well-connected, bright, beautiful, and promising white woman was guilty, pure and simple.”

For Alton H. Maddox, Jr., the message to be drawn from the case was that the American criminal justice system, which was under any circumstances “inherently and unabashedly racist,” failed “to function equitably at any level when a Black male is accused of raping a white female.” For others the message was more general, and worked to reinforce the fragile but functional mythology of a heroic black past, the narrative in which European domination could be explained as a direct and vengeful response to African superiority. “Today the white man is faced head-on with what is happening on the Black Continent, Africa,” Malcolm X wrote.

Look at the artifacts being discovered there, that are proving over and over again, how the black man had great, fine, sensitive civilizations before the white man was out of the caves. Below the Sahara, in the places where most of America’s Negroes’ foreparents were kidnapped, there is being unearthed some of the finest craftsmanship, sculpture and other objects, that has ever been seen by modern man. Some of these things now are on view in such places as New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Gold work of such fine tolerance and workmanship that it has no rival. Ancient objects produced by black hands… refined by those black hands with results that no human hand today can equal.

History has been so “whitened” by the white man that even the black professors have known little more than the most ignorant black man about the talents and rich civilizations and cultures of the black man of millenniums ago …

“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 reports, 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.”