The Sacrifice

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “This ‘Dr. Cleveland’—Mama said he could ’xamine me, like, my ’gina, where I been hurt so bad, an there was more bleedin so I had to wear a damn Kotex—but I wouldn’t let him. God damn I told Mama, I had enough pokin up there, let them poke her big fat ’gina see how she like it.”

  “S’b’lla! You didn’t say that to your mother!”

  Sybilla giggled. Her heavy-lidded eyes were blinking sleepily.

  “You didn’t say big fat ’gina to Aunt Ednetta—I bet.”

  Sybilla giggled, yes she had.

  “’Nother thing they been sayin, it was ‘white cops’ hurt you.”

  Martine spoke hesitantly. Sybilla stiffened and did not reply.

  “‘White cops’ picked you up on the street and kept you handcuffed for three days an three nights in some police van, an raped you an beat you all that time then left you in the fish-factory cellar to die. That the worst thing people sayin.”

  Martine was hoping that Sybilla would deny this. So nasty!

  But Sybilla only just shrugged. “Yah. Some shit like that. ‘White cops.’” Again Sybilla spoke in that curious mocking voice, a mock-child-voice, as if she were reciting words prepared for her which she resented.

  “You sayin—‘Five white cops.’”

  “Five—or six. Or seven. White-cop fuckers.”

  Sybilla laughed, and winced. Her jaw was hurting her.

  Martine said, carefully, “The ‘white cops’ got you—like, last Thu’sday? That’s what Ednetta says.”

  “Yah I guess—‘Thu’sday.’ Some day like that.”

  Yet more carefully Martine said, “How’d you get out, then, to visit Jaycee at M’t’nview? His sister Shirley been sayin you were there on Friday? Visitin hours Friday mornin?”

  Sybilla lay very still, snuffling deep inside her head.

  “Shirley sayin you cut school and you an her went together on the bus and she got you in sayin you was Jaycee’s little sister Colette?”

  Sybilla lay still making no reply. Martine wondered if her cousin had fallen asleep.

  Martine continued, cautiously.

  “Anyway, that’s what Shirley goin around sayin. Of course, if you visited Jaycee at M’t’nview, an it wasn’t your name on the books, nobody gon prove you were there an not Colette. Nobody gon prove you were anywhere at that time.”

  Martine had been hearing about Sybilla and Jaycee Handler—not from Sybilla but from others. Jaycee was nineteen, a big hulking boy with a scarred, shaved head, tight-muscled arms and legs, a way of making you laugh with him even if you were damned scared of him. Jaycee had met Sybilla Frye at somebody’s place at the Justice Warren project when she’d been in just eighth grade and crazy for hip-hop music. Martine had never heard that Sybilla and Jaycee were a couple exactly—one of them built like a pro wrestler six foot three weighing beyond two hundred pounds and the other just five foot one inch tall weighing less than one hundred pounds. (That’d be scary for Sybilla especially if Ednetta or the stepfather Anis Schutt found out.) Back last spring Jaycee had been incarcerated at Mountainview Youth Facility, an hour bus-ride from Pascayne, on charges of drug possession and aggravated assault. Martine hadn’t heard that Sybilla had visited Jaycee in the past but maybe Martine just hadn’t heard.

  Martine wasn’t jealous of her cousin! Not over Jaycee Handler who used up silly little girls like toilet paper. (And they sayin something wrong with Jaycee, he prefer these young girls still in school.)

  Lots of guys Martine knew including relatives were at Mountainview but Martine had never gone to visit. Wouldn’t have gone except her mother took her. There was nobody there wanted to see her. At Mountainview you were released at age twenty-one no matter your crime which seemed strange to Martine, but a damn good deal. If you went in at fourteen, on a serious charge, like aggravated assault, or even manslaughter, you’d stay in until twenty-one; but if you went in at eighteen, as Jaycee had done, you’d only stay in until twenty-one. It was the same for girls of course, at the girls’ correctional facility at Barrow. What sense that made, you’d have to ask the assholes who make up the laws.

  Martine nudged Sybilla to answer her but Sybilla only said, snuffling, it was like she’d been telling people—“Thu’sday comin home from school in the alley behind the car wash, where I was walkin alone, somebody come up behind me with a—one of them—like a ‘tarpaulin’—an drop it over my head, an drop me down like—some kind of animal bein hunted. And taken me in a van. And there was a white cop—I saw his badge. And—five white cops. Or six. Like that.”

  Sybilla’s voice trailed off into silence. Martine didn’t feel that she could challenge her cousin, who spoke flatly and defiantly.

  “Ohh hey. Just remembered.”

  In her school bag Martine had brought things for Sybilla: chocolate chip cookies, tortilla chips, a twelve-ounce plastic bottle of Coke the girls could share, purple-sparkle nail polish, hairbrush and combs. Ravenously Sybilla began to devour the cookies though her jaw made her wince. She complained to Martine that their grandma was feeding her food to make her gag like collard greens, hominy, fatty ribs and that nasty slimy white stuff—“okra.” The girls made gagging sounds together.

  Soon then Sybilla began to cry. Martine began to cry, too.

  This windy afternoon of October 14, 1987, in their great-grandmother Pearline Tice’s apartment on Eleventh Street, the girl-cousins fell asleep exhausted in each other’s arms.

  The Investigator

  Overheard as she’d passed them in the precinct corridor.

  That the one? Hot spic chick is she?

  She’d made her initial report. She’d reported to the Lieutenant. She’d told him all that she’d learned. Not a taped interview with Sybilla Frye and her mother but “notes.” She’d smoothed out the yellow Post-its on the Lieutenant’s desk so that he could see them, each singly.

  WHITE COP

  YELOW HAIR

  AGE 30

  THEY WHITE

  THEY ALL WHITE

  The Lieutenant stared at the Post-its with their painstakingly printed words. The Lieutenant laughed harshly.

  “This is what she’s saying? That black girl? Bullshit.”

  With the back of his hand the Lieutenant pushed the Post-its off his desk. A beat, and Detective Iglesias decided to interpret this as a joke, just playful, fucking with her but not seriously, or anyway not seriously enough to register as shock and not rather amusement, so she laughed to show she’s a good sport, one of the guys, stooped and picked up the precious Post-its with care and returned them to her file marked SYBILLA FRYE.

  How alone this was going to be.

  How she’d been shunted into it as a farm-creature—cow, calf, hog—is shunted along a chute into the slaughter-house.

  Because the mother Ednetta Frye had requested a black police officer. A black woman police officer.

  Black had always seemed harsh to her. African-American was a preferable term. And there was Negro, no longer fashionable.

  If she was anything, she was Hispanic. In crude mouths, spic.

  Yet among Hispanic Americans she was “too white”—not just her appearance but also her way of speaking, her manner.

  Her life had been, since adolescence, an effort to overcome the crude perimeters of identity. Her skin-color, ethnic background, gender. I am so much more than the person you see. Give me a chance!

  Must’ve been, in her early twenties Ines Iglesias had some confused idea—idealism—about serving the community, serving the country.

  Several of her (male) cousins had enlisted in the U.S. Army. Scattered among the Iglesias relatives were women who’d made decisions similar to Ines’s—inner-city teacher, social worker, psychiatric nurse, Red Cross nurse, youth facility psychologist.

  An older relative, an uncle of her (adoptive) father’s father, had been a New Jersey State trooper. Another relative, also in her father’s family, was a Pascayne police captain in the Forest Park precinct—the first Hispanic officer to ris
e to that rank.

  When she’d graduated from the police academy and began to wear the patrol officer’s uniform she’d felt suffused with pride. She’d thought Now I am one of—something. Now there are many like me.

  Apart from the Forest Park captain Ramon Iglesias there were few Puerto Rican–American police officers in the Pascayne PD. Very few African-Americans. And very few women.

  Not quite out of earshot her fellow officers had begun saying of her If Iglesias believes that rape bullshit she’s crazy. She’s finished.

  Driving the streets of Red Rock.

  Not wanting to think she was becoming obsessed with Sybilla Frye.

  The girl, and the mother.

  White cop. White cops.

  Talkin with you ain’t worked out like I hoped, you one of them.

  She’d never lived in Red Rock. She’d grown up across the river scarcely a mile away. A thousand miles away.

  She’d been sixteen in August 1967, when the inner city of Pascayne had erupted into several days and nights of sporadic gunfire, burning and looting, martial law, the deployment of the New Jersey National Guard to control violence. Twenty-seven people had died in what was called a “race riot” and of these twenty-four were black.

  Of the twenty-seven deaths, at least twenty were individuals uninvolved in the violence, unarmed, incidental bystanders who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time or who’d come unwisely to stand at a window in an area in which “sniper gunfire” was suspected by police officers. Three were children younger than twelve and two were elderly women shot inside their homes by National Guardsmen firing into windows.

  Two had been police officers, determined to have been shot by “friendly fire”—“in the line of duty.”

  Pascayne PD officers had been outfitted in riot gear, carried tear gas canisters, automatic weapons, shotguns. They’d shot freely at individuals with dark faces who’d been perceived as behaving “suspiciously”—“threateningly.” They’d shot at passing vehicles and into the windows of houses and apartment buildings. Many had removed their badges and covered the license plates of their vehicles with tape. Of investigations into wrongful deaths in the months following the riot not one condemned the use of extreme force by any officer.

  In the wake of August 1967, much of Red Rock was burnt-out and would not be rebuilt. But in the wake of August 1967, a new city administration and a new police chief initiated an era of reform in the Pascayne PD. There were campaigns to integrate the police force, programs to train minorities and women. A new era, an era of social justice, and Ines Iglesias had wanted to be part of it.

  Now it was twenty years later. The inner city had lost population, like most of Pascayne. Red Rock still resembled a battle zone.

  In her (unmarked) police vehicle driving the devastated streets of Red Rock. Neighborhoods of single-story woodframe houses and two-story brownstone row houses. Churches, soup kitchens. Public housing projects by the river. Human habitations in clusters surrounded by empty lots, acres of abandoned and derelict buildings. Along the riverfront, miles of desolate old factories, mills. And one of these Jersey Foods where the girl had been found.

  Iglesias had studied photographs of the scene: the cellar, the stairs leading down to the cellar, the exterior of the building covered in graffiti to a height of about ten feet. As in much of Red Rock there was an exhilaration of violence enacted against what you could see: walls of buildings, broken windows, fences.

  It seemed fitting, the badly beaten, sexually abused black girl had been found in the cellar of one of these condemned buildings. Left to die was the refrain heard on the street.

  White cops, kept her tied up, raped, left to die. This was the refrain of the street.

  It hadn’t been clear, from Sybilla Frye’s fragmented statement, how long she’d been “hog-tied” in the cellar. There was evidence that the girl had wet herself but minimally on the tarpaulin which suggested that she hadn’t been in the cellar more than a few hours. Countless footprints in the cellar’s soft sinking floor both human and animal, and much evidence of human activity over a period of time, but nothing that suggested recent activity except in the specific area where the girl had been found lying on the tarpaulin. Here there were seemingly fresh footprints belonging to just two individuals and these were not likely prints made by adult men. Scattered throughout the cellar were the desiccated remains of small animals. Bones to which mummified tufts of fur accrued. Despite rumors on the street there’d been no human bones discovered in any area of the factory.

  The filthy tarpaulin upon which the girl had lain, clothesline allegedly used to bind the girl’s wrists and ankles, dish towels allegedly wrapped around the girl’s head and shoved into her mouth to gag her—these had been examined by Pascayne PD forensics team, and had yielded “inconclusive” evidence. On the tarpaulin were badly smudged fingerprints and encrustrations of mud and dog excrement. Iglesias had requested that the department forensics team examine virtually everything in the cellar, but this wasn’t possible—there was just too much, and resources were limited.

  Of the debris accumulated in the cellar over a period of years it was possible that there was an item—for instance a soft-drink bottle or can tossed into a corner—bearing the prints of Sybilla Frye, that would suggest the girl having come or having been brought to the cellar voluntarily, to stage the scene.

  Her story is a lie. Yet, no story is entirely a lie.

  She is telling us—she was badly hurt, and her life was threatened. That’s real—isn’t it?

  Yes. That is real.

  “Off’cer, I’m telling you Sybilla not here. She stayin in some safe place to convalesce. The doctor say she had a ‘severe trauma’—she ‘anemic’ from all that blood she lose.”

  Iglesias had come with a warrant to search the premises for Sybilla Frye. With two patrol officers she gained access to the household at 939 Third Street in which Sybilla Frye lived with her mother, a younger sister and brother, and the mother’s common-law husband Anis Schutt. But as Mrs. Frye had angrily insisted, the girl wasn’t there.

  “Go ahead, Off’cer, look! Nothin to see!”

  Iglesias stood in the doorway of the girl’s closet-sized room. A narrow bed over which a soiled comforter had been drawn. Bare floorboards, chenille throw-rugs. A chest of drawers. A single window with a cracked blind. Stuffed animals, a limp Raggedy Ann doll with a sallow face. Photos of smiling black faces, predominantly young, Scotch-taped to a dingy wall—Sybilla’s relatives and friends.

  The rest of the wall space was covered with glossy posters of rock musicians. Iglesias recognized most of the figures—Tina Turner, Whitney Houston were her own favorites.

  “Mrs. Frye, please tell me where Sybilla is. She may need further medical care. You should want to cooperate in this investigation.”

  Ednetta had come up behind Iglesias incensed and panting. Just barely audible Ednetta murmured what sounded like God damn bitch.

  Iglesias felt her face flush with heat. But she spoke calmly and without rancor.

  Telling Ednetta Frye that her daughter had made “serious charges” and that it would be determined eventually what had happened to her—“It will be better for you, and for Sybilla, if you cooperate now. We only have your daughter’s welfare in mind.”

  Ednetta snorted in derision. She was badly out of breath from the stairs. “Off’cer, you best go away now. You see Sybilla ain’t here like I told you.”

  “Where is she? With relatives?”

  Ednetta frowned. The way in which she stared at Iglesias suggested that yes of course, Sybilla was staying with relatives. And probably not far away.

  “She stayin where she safe. Ain’t gon do any good if you hound her, ma’am.”

  Iglesias was pained that Ednetta Frye so disliked and distrusted her. There seemed nothing she could say to persuade the woman otherwise.

  The animosity of men, she could comprehend. Sex-hatred of the female was common in the culture. But the animosi
ty of a woman so like herself—so essentially herself—was something very different.

  “We both want what is best for Sybilla, Mrs. Frye. I wish you would cooperate with the investigation and with me. I wish you would help me.”

  “No cop is gonna help us. No ‘white cop’ is gonna arrest any ‘white cop.’”

  Thinking But I am not a “white cop.”

  Iglesias was satisfied that Sybilla Frye wasn’t at her mother’s house but still the brownstone had to be thoroughly searched, upstairs and down. And the dank smelly cellar into which, as she descended the wobbly stairs, flashlight in hand, Iglesias felt a thrill of sheer visceral revulsion for people who lived in such quarters—who could not help themselves to live in any other way.

  Within a day Iglesias had traced the girl to Mrs. Frye’s grandmother’s home in an apartment building on Eleventh Avenue.

  Here, the elderly white-haired Pearline Tice told Iglesias that her great-granddaughter was “resting” and couldn’t “speak with a stranger.” But Iglesias managed to talk the elderly woman into opening the door to the room in which Sybilla lay in bed with a cover pulled to her chin, staring stonily in Iglesias’s direction. When Iglesias greeted the girl, Sybilla gave no sign of hearing her.

  The girl’s eyes were still bruised but not so badly swollen as they’d been when Iglesias had last seen her. Her face was near-normal except for stitches in her lip and above her eyebrow.

  Her hair had been washed and brushed. Wild frizzed and nappy dark hair tied up in a scarf.

  “See, Off’cer, S’b’lla all right—she ain’t sick—just needin to conval’sce. Her mother don’t want her to start back at school till she is feelin strong again.”