The Sacrifice

Not a healthy woman, Iglesias guessed. She knew many women like Ednetta Frye—overweight, probably diabetic. Varicose veins in her legs and a once-beautiful body gone flaccid like something melting.

Yet, you could see that Mrs. Frye had been an attractive woman not long ago. Her deep-set and heavy-lidded eyes would have been startlingly beautiful if not bloodshot. Her manner was distraught as if like her daughter she’d been held captive in some terrible place and had only just been released.

But when Iglesias tried to speak to Sybilla Frye, Mrs. Frye could not resist urging, “You tell her what you told me, S’b’lla! Just speak the words right out.”

The battered girl sat slumped on the gurney wrapped in a blanket, shivering. Iglesias found another blanket, folded on a shelf, and brought it to her, and drew it around her thin shoulders. Close up, the girl smelled of disinfectant but also of something foul and nauseating—excrement. Her hair was oily and matted and had been cut in a jagged fashion as if blindly.

With both adult women focused upon her, Sybilla seemed to be shrinking. Her shut-in expression was a curious mixture of fear, unease, apprehension, and defiance. She seemed more acutely aware of her mother than of the plainclothes police officer who was a stranger to her.

Between the daughter and the mother was a force field of tension like the atmosphere before an electric storm which Iglesias knew she must not enter.

Iglesias asked the girl if she was comfortable?—if she felt strong enough to answer a few questions?—then, maybe, if the ER physician OK’d it, she could go home.

A trauma victim resembles a wounded animal. Trying to help, you can exacerbate the hurt. You can be attacked.

“Sybilla? Do you hear me? My name is Ines—Ines Iglesias. I’m here to speak with you.”

Gently Iglesias touched Sybilla’s hand, and it was as if a snake had touched the girl—Sybilla jerked back her hand with an intake of breath—Ohhh!

There was something childish and annoying in this behavior, Iglesias thought. But Iglesias wanted to think The girl has been badly hurt.

Mrs. Frye said sharply to her daughter, “I’m tellin you, girl. You just answer this p’lice off’cer’s questions, then we goin home.”

Sybilla continued to hunch shivering inside the blanket. She had shut her eyes tight as a stubborn child might do. Her upper lip, swollen like a grotesque discolored fruit, was trembling.

Iglesias had been told that the girl’s assailants had rubbed mud and dog excrement into her hair and onto her body and that they’d written racist words in black ink on her body.

When she asked if she might see these words, Sybilla stiffened and did not reply.

“If you could just open the blanket, for a minute. The curtain is closed here. No one will see. I know this is very unpleasant, but …”

Sybilla began shaking her head vehemently no.

In a plaintive voice Mrs. Frye said, “She don’t need to do that no more, Officer. S’b’lla a shy girl. She don’t show her body like some girls. They took pictures of the writing, they can show you. That’s enough.”

“I would so appreciate it, if I could see this ‘writing’ myself.”

“Ma’am, that nasty writin is all but gone, now. I think they washed it off. But they took pictures. You go look at them pictures.”

“If I could just—”

“I’m tellin you no, ma’am. It’s enough of this for right now, S’billa comin home with me.”

Iglesias had been briefed about the “racist slurs”—scribbled onto the girl’s body “upside-down.” Clearly it was already an issue to arouse skepticism—upside-down? She would study the photos and see what sense this might make.

Iglesias had placed a recording device on the examination table. Mrs. Frye objected: “You recordin this, ma’am? I hope you aint recordin this, I can’t allow that.”

The small spinning wheels were a provocation. Iglesias had known that Mrs. Frye would object.

Carefully she explained that it was police department policy that such an interview would be recorded. “A recorded interview is for the good of everyone involved.”

“No it ain’t, ma’am! Like with pictures you can mess up what people say to twist it how you want. Like on TV. You can leave out some words an add some others the way police do, to make people ‘confess’ to somethin they ain’t done. You got to know that, you a cop you’self.”

Mrs. Frye spoke sneeringly. The sudden hostility was a surprise.

Iglesias had wanted to think that she’d been persuading Mrs. Frye, making an ally of her, and not an adversary. It was a painful truth, what the woman was saying, yet, as a police officer, she had to pretend that it wasn’t so.

“Not in this case, Mrs. Frye. Not me.”

Mrs. Frye folded her arms over her heavy breasts. She was wearing what appeared to be several layers of clothing—pullover shirt, long-sleeved shirt, sweater, and slacks. On her small wide feet, frayed sneakers. Iglesias saw that Ednetta Frye’s nails had been done recently, each nail painted a different color, zebra-stripes on both thumbnails, but the polish was chipped and the nails uneven. The girl’s nails were badly broken and chipped but had been polished as well, though not recently. The daughter wore no jewelry except small gold studs in her ears. The mother wore gold hoop earrings, a wristwatch with a rhinestone-studded crimson plastic band, rings on several fingers including a wedding band that looked too small for her fleshy finger.

“See, ma’am, I can’t allow my daughter to be any more mishandled than she’s been. No recordin here, or we goin home right now.”

The woman didn’t remember Iglesias’s name or rank. You had to suppose. She didn’t intend a sly insult, calling Iglesias ma’am.

Iglesias could only repeat that recording their conversation was for the good of everyone concerned but Mrs. Frye interrupted—“Nah it ain’t! You must think we are stupid people! Have to be pretty damn stupid not to know that white cops turn your word around on you, or say you goin for a ‘weapon’ when you’re reachin for your driver’s license so they can shoot you down dead.”

Iglesias spoke carefully to the excited woman saying she understood her concern, but this was an entirely different situation. In the heat of confrontations, terrible mistakes sometimes happened. But allowing Iglesias to record a conversation with her daughter, in the safety of the ER, was not the same thing at all.

Mrs. Frye said, snorting with indignation, that that was just some white folks’ bullshit.

Iglesias said, pained, that “white folks” had nothing to do with this—with them. They could both speak frankly to her, that was why she’d come to speak with them.

Mrs. Frye was unimpressed. She said to Sybilla she was going to get her some decent clothes to put on, and they were getting out of this place. Unless they were arrested, nobody could keep them.

“Mrs. Frye, please—let me speak to Sybilla without recording our conversation. For just a few minutes.”

Iglesias had no choice but to relent, the woman was about to take away the girl. Arranging for another interview would be very difficult.

“Nah I’m thinking we better be goin. Talkin with you aint worked out like I hoped, see, ma’am, you one of them.”

Mrs. Frye spoke contemptuously. Iglesias felt dismay.

I am one of you, not one of them. Believe me!

“Please, Mrs. Frye. Just a few minutes. No recording.”

All this while Sybilla had been sitting mute and shivering. Only vaguely had she seemed to be listening to the adult women, with an air of disdain.

Iglesias saw herself in the girl, she believed to be fourteen. She saw herself at that age, sulky, sullen, defiant and scared.

She’d been sexually molested, too. More than once. And many times sexually harassed and threatened. But never raped, never brutally beaten. Not Ines Iglesias.

The Fryes lived on Third Street, in that run-down neighborhood by the river. Abandoned factories, shuttered and part-burned houses, streets clogged with abandoned and rusting vehicles. Pascayne South High, lowest-ranked in the city. The Fifth Precinct, with the highest crime rate. You had to grow up swiftly there.

In the Iglesias neighborhood, adjacent to Forest Park, there were blocks of single-family homes, neatly tended lawns and attached garages. There were streets not clogged with parked, abandoned vehicles. There was Forest Park High from which an impressive number of students went on to college and where there were no fights, knifings, rapes on or near the premises.

But I am one of you! Please trust me.

Though she hadn’t grown up in the inner city, Iglesias had had good reason to fear and distrust the Pascayne police. Family members, relatives, friends, neighbors had had encounters with (white) police of which you had to say the good thing was, none of these encounters had been fatal.

Though she knew of encounters that had been fatal.

Though she knew police officers who were racists, even now—in 1987. After the Pascayne PD had been “integrated” for twenty years.

It was a mark of their contempt for her, she supposed—making racist remarks when she could overhear.

Yet, racist remarks that weren’t directed toward her or her kind—light-skinned Hispanic.

It was African-Americans they held in particular contempt—niggers.

Though maybe behind her back, in their careless, jocular way, that exaggerated the bigotry they naturally felt in the service of humor, they referred to her as nigger, too.

Iglesias not bad-lookin for a nigger, is she?

Man, not bad!

Got her an ass on her.

I seen better.

In a quiet urging voice Iglesias was telling Sybilla Frye how she wanted to help her. How she wanted to know who’d hurt her so badly, who the assailant or assailants were so that they could be arrested, gotten off the street.

With a little shiver of dread Sybilla drew the blanket closer around her. She seemed to be rousing herself out of a dream.

Shaking her head looking now scared and miserable. Iglesias was wondering how a rape victim returned to her life—to school, to her friends. Already news of the missing Frye girl found hog-tied in the canning factory was on the street.

Sybilla leaned to her mother and murmured in her ear. Her swollen lips moved but Iglesias couldn’t make out what she was whispering.

“Oh honey, I know,” Mrs. Frye said to the girl; then, to Iglesias, with grim satisfaction, “S’b’lla sayin they gon kill her, ma’am. Told her they gon kill her whole family, she tells you.”

It was strange how Mrs. Frye addressed her daughter gently and lovingly, or harshly and reproachfully. If you were the daughter you would have no way of guessing which Mama would emerge.

Though generally, it was safe to surmise that when Sybilla did not oppose her mother in any way, in even the expression on her face, the tilt of her head or the set of her back, the gentle-loving Mama emerged.

“But we can protect you, Sybilla. We can put you in protective custody until your assailants are arrested.”

Iglesias was a police officer, she said such improbable things.

How many times uttered by police officers in such situations in Pascayne, to whatever futile end.

“Off’cer, that is such bullshit. Half the people we know believe that shit you tell them, they shot down dead in the street. Whoever do it don bother waitin for dark, he just shoot. You aint bein honest with my daughter an me, an you know it. Why I asked for an African-American woman, and you aint her.”

“I am her. I’m here to help you.”

“You a woman, you got to know what they gon do to my daughter if she say who hurt her. All she told me, it was five of them—men. Men not boys. Nobody she knew, from the neighborhood or her school. That’s all she told me, she’s too scared.” Mrs. Frye smiled a sharp mirthless smile revealing a gap between her two front teeth like an exclamation mark.

Iglesias tried again with Sybilla. “So—you say—it was five men? No one you recognized? Could you begin at the beginning, please? Your mother says you went missing on Thursday …”

Slowly then, as if each word were a painful pebble in her mouth, Sybilla began to speak in a hoarse whisper. She was squirming inside the blanket, looking not at the police officer who’d fixed her face into an expression of extreme solicitude and interest but staring at the floor. There appeared to be a slight cast in her left eye. Perhaps this was why she didn’t look up. Iglesias could not determine if the girl was genuinely frightened or if there was something childishly resistant and even defiant about her—an attitude that had to do less with Iglesias than with the mother who remained at all times close beside her, half-sitting on the examination table, a physical presence that must have been virtually overwhelming to the girl yet from which she had no recourse.

Iglesias could see that, though Sybilla’s eyes were swollen and discolored, these were Ednetta Frye’s eyes: thick-lashed, so dark as to appear black, large and deep-set. During her hurried briefing Iglesias had been told that the victim was possibly mentally defective, maybe retarded, which was why it was so difficult to communicate with her, but Iglesias didn’t think this was true.

Iglesias asked Sybilla to repeat what she’d said, a little louder. She was leaning close, to listen.

In the hoarse slow whisper Sybilla recounted how she’d been coming home from school Thursday afternoon when somebody, some men, came up behind her with a canvas they lowered over her head and grabbed her and dragged her away in a van and kept her there for three days—she thought it was three days, she wasn’t sure because she was not conscious all the time—and punched and kicked her and did things to her and laughed at her when she was crying and later put mud and dog shit onto her and wrote on her “nasty words” and tied her up and left her in the factory cellar saying there were “other nigras” in that place who had died there.

Starting to cry now, and Mrs. Frye squeezed her hand, and for a moment it didn’t seem that Sybilla would continue.

Iglesias asked if she’d been able to see faces? Could she describe the men—their age, race? Were they known to her?

Sybilla shook her head, they weren’t known to her. She seemed about to say more, then stopped.

“You’re sure that these men are not known to you, Sybilla? Could you describe any of them?”

Sybilla stared at the floor. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled over her bruised cheeks.

“Did they hurt you sexually?”

Sybilla sat very still staring at the floor. Her face was shiny now with tears.

Mrs. Frye said, gently urging, “S’b’lla, honey, you got to tell this lady, see? You got to tell her what you can. You aint told me all of it, has you?—you know you aint. Now, you tell her.”

“Did they rape you, Sybilla?”

Sybilla shook her head just slightly, yes.

“More than one man, you’ve said?”

Sybilla shook her head yes.

“You told your mother—five men?”

Sybilla shook her head yes.

“Not boys but men.”

Sybilla shook her head yes.

“And not men you know?”

Sybilla shook her head no.

“Can you describe them? Just—anything.”

Sybilla stared at the floor. Mrs. Frye was crowded close beside her now, an arm around the girl’s shoulders.

“The color of their skin? You said they used the word nigra—”

Mrs. Frye urged her to speak. “Come on, girl! Was they black men, or—some other? Who’d be sayin ‘nigra’ except some other?”

Sybilla stared at the floor. She didn’t seem resistant or defiant now, but exhausted. Iglesias worried that the girl was about to faint or lapse into some sort of mental state like catatonia.

Once, interviewing a stricken and near-mute girl of twelve, Iglesias had given the girl Post-its upon which to write, and the girl had done so. Iglesias gave Sybilla a (bright yellow, cheering) Post-it pad and a pencil to write on and, after some hesitation, Sybilla printed:

WHITE COP

“‘White cop’—”

Iglesias tried not to show the surprise she felt.

Mrs. Frye took the Post-it from Iglesias’s hand, read it and began to wail as if white cop was a death sentence.

Iglesias asked if the “white cop” had hurt Sybilla?

Sybilla shook her head yes.

“Was just one of the men ‘white’—or a ‘cop’?”

Sybilla shook her head to indicate she didn’t know.

“How did you know the man was a ‘cop,’ Sybilla?”

Sybilla wrote on the Post-it:

WEAR A BAGDE

“He was ‘wearing a badge’? When he raped you, he was ‘wearing a badge’?”

Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know. Thought so, yes.

Her eyelids were drooping, her mouth was slack with exhaustion.

“Were any of the others ‘wearing a badge’?”

Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know.

“Could you describe him? The ‘white cop’?”

Sybilla printed on a Post-it:

YELOW HAIR

“Could you say what his approximate age was?”

Sybilla shook her head, uncertain.

“Thirty? Thirty-five?”

Sybilla shook her head.

“My age is thirty-six. Was he older or younger than me, do you think?”

Sybilla squinted at Iglesias. Her left eye seemed to be losing focus but her right eye was fixed on Iglesias. On a Post-it she wrote:

AGE 30

“Were the other men ‘white’ also? Could you see?”

Sybilla printed on the Post-it:

THEY WHITE

Sybilla took back the Post-it and printed:

THEY ALL WHITE

“These men abducted you, kept you captive in a van, beat and raped you, intermittently for three days and three nights? Where was the van parked, do you have any idea?”

Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know.

“Could you describe the van? Inside, outside?”

Sybilla shook her head slowly, she wasn’t sure.

Sybilla smiled, a nervous twitch of a smile. How like a child she looked, a badly beaten child, with a gat-toothed smile, looking almost shyly now at the police officer.

Iglesias wanted to take the girl’s hand, to comfort and encourage her. But she dared not touch her, after Sybilla had shrunk from her.

“If you saw a van, you could maybe compare it to the van they’d taken you in? You could try to describe it?”

Sybilla shook her head yes. She could try.

“When they left you in the factory cellar, they told you they would kill you, if you told anyone? Who said these words?”

Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know.

“Did one of the men say this, or others? Did they all say this?”

Sybilla hid her face in her hands. Mrs. Frye whispered to her, and drew her hands away.

The interview had exhausted the girl. Iglesias was exhausted.

Thinking White cop! White cop.

Thinking None of this story is true. This is all a lie. The mother has coached her. The mother has beat her. The mother’s boyfriend—her own boyfriend—someone she knows …

Mrs. Frye was embracing her daughter. The two of them were weeping, wet-eyed.

“Ma’am, this interview over now. My girl got to get home where she safe, and her mama can take care of her.”

And there was no recording of this interview! Iglesias had known that was a mistake.

Only her notes, and the bright yellow Post-its.

Only her word.

“Mrs. Frye, if we could just—a few more minutes, and …”

“I said no! My daughter’s health come first, before anythin else. You got this girl to tell you somethin could get her killed, and you better not misuse it, or S’b’lla, I’m warnin you—Off’cer.”

Off’cer was spoken in indignation as Mrs. Frye heaved herself up from the gurney and gathered Sybilla into her arms. The girl was unresisting now, and hid her face in the older woman’s bosom.

Iglesias backed away sick and stunned.

“‘White cop.’”

Her very mouth seemed to have gone numb.

And how many times in the weeks and months to come would the thought come to her, remorse like a stab in the gut—But what if it is true? What if white men did debase her? And we didn’t believe her? God help me to know what is truth and what is false.

Red Rock

Hog-tied and left to die.

The Frye girl, fourteen. Beaten and raped and shit-on and left to die in some factory cellar.

She sayin it was white cops. In a cop-van drivin around with a black girl they arrest like pretendin she a hooker so they use her like some sex-slave, then they rub shit on her, and write nasty words on her, and dump her and left her to die.

Except she ain’t die, she been rescued. By her own lady schoolteacher! Aint died and tellin what the white cops done now see what the fuckers gon do, to punish themselves.

In Red Rock it began to be told. In the small storefront businesses, in the taverns, rib joints and diners of Camden Avenue, Penescott, Ventor, Twelfth. In the brownstone row houses of Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth streets and in the tenements of East Ventor, Crater, and Depp. In the several towers of the Earl Warren high-rise project on the river at Twelfth Street, its gritty-floored foyers, erratically operating elevators, shadowy staircases and corridors and vast open courtyards ravaged as earth over which a Biblical pestilence has raged. In the hair salons, nail salons, wig shops, beer wine and liquor stores, groceries and pawnshops and bail-bond shops and Red Rock’s single drugstore—(a bleak Walgreens of narrow corridors and a low stamped-tin ceiling doomed for closure within the year)—at the windswept intersection of Camden and Freund. In Passaic County Family Services, Polk Memorial Medical Center, Planned Parenthood and Veterans’ Furniture Outlet and Goodwill as in the defaced bus shelters of Camden, Trenton, Crater, Jersey and West River Street. In the vicinity of the Pascayne Police Department Fifth Precinct on First Street with its commandeered side streets of white-and-green cruisers and vans parked as in a stalled but belligerent military formation. In the shadow of the Pitcairn Bridge rising hunched above the river and running parallel with the New Jersey Transit railroad bridge that in turn ran parallel with the elevated Turnpike bridge blotting out much of the eastern sky above Red Rock. In the sandstone tenement buildings like corroded pueblo dwellings of an ancient time jutting up against the elevated spiraling lanes of the Turnpike. In Hicks Square, in Polk Plaza, in the weedy no-man’s-land littered with bottles, cans, styrofoam containers, junkies’ needles and used condoms like shrunken sea slugs abutting the Passaic River at Washburn where the city had intended a park. In the drab factory-like Pascayne South High School where Sybilla Frye was a tenth-grade student and in Ed-son Middle School and in even Edson Elementary where she’d been a student when younger it began to be told, and retold.

That Frye girl gone missin you hear she been found? In that fish-factory cellar she left for dead all tied-up and bleedin these white cops grabbed her comin out of school Thu’sday sayin they got warrants to arrest her she be missin school an take her away in the police van. We saw it—right outside the school.