(711) Unprepared and slightly dazed, I finessed the questions with statistics and forgotten words; what actulaly comes to my mind, however, is one of the most tragically powerful embodiments of my ambiguous, tenuous, social positioning: the case of Tawana Brawley, a fifteen-year-old black girl from Wappinger Falls, New York. In late November 1987, after a four-day disappearance, she was found in a vacant lot, clothed only in a shirt and a plastic garbage bag into which she had apparently crawled; she was in a dazed state, responding neither to noise, cold, not ammonia; there was urin-soaked cotton stuffed in her nose and ears; her hair had been chopped off; there were cigarette burns over one-third of her body; the works KKK and nigger had been inscribed on her torso; and her body was smeared with dog feces. This much is certain-
certain because there were objective third persons to testify as to her condition in that foundling state (and independent "objective" testimony is apparently what is required before experience gets to be labeled
truth); and this much is certainly worth the conviction that she has been the victim of some unspeakable crime. Not matter how she got there. No matter who did it to her - and even if she did it to herself. Her condition was clearly the expression of some crime against her - some tremendous violence, some great violation that challenges comprehension.
It is this much that I grieve about, all told. The rest of the story is lost or irrelevant in the owrst of all possible ways.
(713)But the stories in the newspapers are no longer about Tawana anyway. They are all about black manhood and white justice – a contest of wills among her attorneys, the black community, and the New York State prosecutor’s office. Since Tawana’s statement implicated a prosecutor, an issue was the propriety of her case being handled through the usual channels rather than having a special unit set up to handle this and other allegations of racial violence. But even this issue was not able to hold center stage with all the thunder and smoke of raucous male outcry, curdling warrior accusations, the class and flash of political swords and shields – typified by Governor Cuomo’s gratuitous offer to talk to Tawana personally; by Al Sharpton’s particularly gratuitous statement that Tawana might show up at her mother’s contempt hearing because “Most children want to be in court to say good-bye to their mothers before they go to jail”. By television personality Phil Donahue’s interview with Glenda Brawley which he began with “No one wants to jump on your bones and suggest that you are not an honorable person but”; by the enlistment of the support of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan and a good deal of other anti-Semitic insinuation; by the mishandling and loss of key evidence by investigating authorities; by the commissioning of a self-styled Black Army to encircle Glenda Brawley on the courthouse steps; by the refusal of the New York Attorney General’s office to take seriously the request for an independent prosecutor; and by the testimony of an associate of Sharpton’s, a former police officer named Perry McKinnon, that neither Mason, Maddox, nor Sharpton believe Tawana’s story. (On television, I hear this latter story reported in at least three different forms: McKinnon says Tawana lied; McKinnon says Sharpton lied about believing Tawana’s story; and / or McKinnon says that Mason and Maddox made up the whole thing in order to advance their own political careers. Like a contest or a lottery with some drunken solomonic gameshow host at the helm, the truth gets sorted out by a call-in poll: Channel 7, the local ABC affiliate, puts the issue to its viewers. Do you believe Sharpton? Or do you believe McKinnon? I forgot to listen to the eleven o’clock news, when the winner and the weather were to have been announced.)
To me, the most ironic thing about this whole bad business - as well as the thread of wisdom which runs at the heart of the decision not to have Tawana Brawley testify - is that were she to have come out of her hiding and pursued trial in the conventional manner, I have no doubt that she would have undergone exactly what she did go through, in the courts and in the media; its just that without her, the script unfolded at a particularly abstract and fantastical level. But the story would be the same: wild black girl who loves to lie, who is no innocent, and whose wiles are the downfall of innocent, jaded, desperate white men; this whore-lette, the symbolic consort of rapacious, saber-rattling, buffoonish black men asserting their manhood, whether her jailbird boyfriend, her smooth-headed FBI drug-buster informant of a spiritual advisor; her grand-standing, pretending-to-be-professional unethically boisterous, so-called lawyers who have yet to establish "a
single cognizable legal claim," and so forth.
