“Who?”
A sullen pouty look came into Sybilla’s battered face.
“Told you, M’tine—I can’t tell.”
“You can tell me.”
“Nah that’s stupid. I aint gon ’danger you. Anyway there was more’n one of them—there was five of them.”
“Five!”
“Five I counted but maybe more. Comin and goin, there was three days an three nights they had me in the van. Fuck anybody could keep track how many fuckers there were.”
Sybilla spoke in a strange mocking voice. Martine could not recognize that voice.
“Some guys in the neighborhood? Some gang?”
“Nah! Nobody in the neighborhood.”
“Herc’les an them?”
(Hercules Johnston was a boy with whom they’d gone to school
who was several years older than the girl-cousins but kept back often so he’d spent most of his time in the class just ahead of theirs. Hercules had dropped out of school at sixteen and now he and his friends were errand-boys for the drug-dealer bosses in Red Rock.)
“I said
no
. Not Herc’les or anybody you know.”
“Who, then?”
“I told you, M’tine—I can’t tell you. They threatened me they would murder me if I did. And my mother, and anybody in my house or my family and that includes you.” Sybilla spoke with a kind of exasperation, as if there was something here, plain-faced and obvious, that Martine wasn’t getting.
Martine tried to think. What Sybilla was saying wasn’t irrational but made total sense to her. You
did not tell
—if
telling
meant naming an individual or individuals who could punish you worse than you’d been punished. Even if it was an open secret who’d done what to who—which usually in Red Rock it was—you
did not tell
.
“’Nother thing they sayin, there was ‘writin’ on you. Like ‘nigger’—‘slut’—‘Ku Kux Klann.’ Like, in dog shit.”
Martine giggled, this was so weird and so awful! But Sybilla only just made the snuffling-snorting sound like this was some old boring news.
“They sayin you talked to cops. You told cops—somethin.”
“I
did not talk to fuckin cops
. There was that female ‘detective’—I told you—Puerto Rican tryin to jive my mama an me, she was a ‘sister’—fuckin bullshit!—came to see me in the ER when I wasn’t halfway conscious, an Mama was there, an she got me to say some things. Mama said we had to do that—but no more than that. Nobody ‘filed charges’—that’s what they want me to do, Mama says. You have to go to the police station and report that a crime was perp’trated on you and make that charge. And they write it down, and you can’t erase it. They ask you a thousand stupid questions and take ‘evidence’ like
from the hospital—take pictures of you and you look at pictures in the police station—they
never let up
, once it starts. So they aint gonna get me. And I aint goin back to any white doctor, either. They could give me some kind of ‘truth serum’ without Mama or me knowing, Mama says.” Sybilla spoke hotly, squirming in distress.
Ednetta had taken her to a doctor on Trenton Avenue before bringing her to Eleventh Street, Sybilla said. Ednetta didn’t trust “white” doctors. (To Ednetta, any Asian-looking professional person was “white”—or worse than “white.” Looking at you with that pissy-polite face so you know they’re thinking how pitiful you are.) This “Dr. Cleveland” had a diploma on the wall certifying him as a
chiropractor
but he had painkiller pills he could dispense in his office, chalky-white pills so large you had to cut them in two with a knife-edge.
“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.
O
verheard 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? Bull
shit
.”
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 rise 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.