Ednetta, hugging Sybilla, pressing her face against the girl’s hair, shuddered. It wasn’t clear that she’d heard Reverend Mudrick’s question. Mother and daughter huddled together as if very cold.
“Sister Ednetta? The accusation is a true one, is it not?”
Ednetta, not meeting Reverend Mudrick’s eye, nodded
yes.
Adding then, still not meeting the man’s eye, that Sybilla was fifteen, not fourteen.
“In the simplest terms: the black girl was attacked by white cops. Yes?”
Hesitantly, Ednetta nodded
yes.
“There have been no arrests, and hardly any investigation by the Pascayne police, or by any law enforcement officers?”
Ednetta nodded
yes.
“No coverage of the case in the local media. In any media.”
Ednetta nodded
yes.
“But there are medical records? At the Pascayne ER?”
Ednetta nodded
yes.
Reverend Mudrick contemplated the mother and daughter before him for several seconds, brooding and silent. Ednetta was uneasily aware of the man’s attention, and did not dare to lift her eyes to his.
He don’t believe us! He will let us go.
But then, Reverend Mudrick drew in a deep breath. Ednetta dared to glance up at him, and saw that he was smiling.
How handsome Marus Mudrick was! Especially when he smiled, and you felt his approval, his manly affection, sweeping over
you
.
A warm melting submissive sensation. Like kneeling to take Jesus into your heart—you didn’t know you would do it, you didn’t want to do it, the risk of ruining stockings if you knelt on the church floor, but then suddenly a sensation like weeping rose in your chest, into your throat, you began to bawl, you were on your knees bawling to Jesus to come into your heart.
In a kindly voice Reverend Mudrick was saying, as if something had been decided: “Dear Sister Ednetta! And dear Sister Sybilla! My brother Byron—the revered civil rights attorney-at-law Byron
Mudrick—will work with me on this crusade for justice. Next time we meet, Byron will have some questions for you. If Sybilla doesn’t care to discuss this traumatic incident, she will not be obliged to. We are here to protect, not intimidate. All questions I need answered I can ask
you
, Sister Ednetta. That will be sufficient. I promise to shield you and your daughter from harm—we will control all access to Sybilla—as she is a minor, as well as a rape victim, it is not up to her to be interrogated; she will not be required to answer police questions, to ‘testify,’ or ‘swear on a Bible’—that white-folks shit they use to intimidate us. It will be the
court of public opinion
we gon apply to, not the Nazi-racist-swine court that ain’t gon give a black man justice unless it is dragged out of his white-honky ass.” With the timing of a TV comedian the Reverend slurred these last words, in comic-black-menace dialect. Ednetta was too startled to respond but Sybilla, huddling in her arms, laughed.
“There will be media ‘interest’—requests for interviews—many people wanting to purchase your story—both your stories. The mother’s story in such a case is almost as interesting as the victim’s story—you will see. We will be discreet about this. We will look before we leap. We will
not leap
. The kind of white folks we gon appeal to is likin to punish white folks—not themselves—but other white folks. The feeling is, white folks want to think they are ‘friends of the Negro’—while they neighbors are racist cracker-swine. Jews the most like this, they anxious they ain’t ‘hundred-percent
white
.” Reverend Mudrick laughed heartily now, seeing the look of bafflement in Ednetta Frye’s face.
It seemed that the Reverend had a document for them to sign—“Not a contract per se but a ‘letter of agreement’ drawn up by my brother Byron. Before you leave, Sister Ednetta, and Sister Sybilla, I will ask you to sign this—here is a pen . . . I’ll call in my assistant to witness our signatures.”
Ednetta took the contract from the Reverend’s fingers and looked at it warily.
“As your daughter is a minor, Sister Ednetta, you will sign beside her name as her guardian, as well as by your own name. D’you see?”
“Yes . . .”
“The ‘letter of agreement’ is a formality only. It addresses the issue of ‘exclusivity’—that, so long as Reverend Marus Mudrick and Attorney-at-Law Byron Mudrick are your representatives, you will not engage with any other ‘representatives’; and you will follow our strategy at all times.”
Sybilla burrowed deeper into Ednetta’s embrace. “Mama! What’m I spost to do?”
“You will do only as you are told,” Marus Mudrick said in his kindly voice, as if he were speaking to a small child and not a big girl of fifteen as tall as her mother. “You will not need to make decisions, ever: I will make them. My brother Byron will be your ‘legal counsel.’ If it’s required for anyone to talk to the police, or prosecutors, or the media—Byron and I will talk to them. Your mother will give your statement to me, and we will work on it. We will perfect it. The ‘kidnapping’—‘inside the police van’—the ‘white cops’—what they did to you, and how many times; how long you were kept captive, and where you were found; the injuries you sustained, which are in the medical files at the hospital ER. We will practice your statement until you have memorized it and you will not ever have to re-think it, or re-word it, Sister Sybilla. That is my promise.”
Sybilla fretted licking her lips. She had the look of one who is gazing into a blinding light, trying bravely not to flinch.
“If you’d rather not speak directly of the rape even to your mother, that will be honored. You are a young, shy girl—you are a virginal girl—except for this rape. In your soul, you are
virginal
. You can write down what happened to you—as you did with the Pascayne police.
The fewer words, the better. The simpler our message, the more effective. It is not expected that the surviving child-victim of a violent sexual assault will remember ev’y least little detail of that assault. We will swear by your words. We will not ever let you be ‘questioned’ or ‘interrogated’ by any police officer or prosecutor except we are right beside you, and you are not obliged to reply in any case. You are a minor, and you are exempt from many laws that pertain to adults. You are your mother’s child, and Ednetta Frye is your guardian. And Reverend Marus Mudrick is your spiritual counsel, and Byron Mudrick is your legal counsel.”
Ednetta was glancing distractedly through the document, which was a single page of several paragraphs. A surprise to see her name at the bottom—
Ednetta Frye
. Beside this, Ednetta signed her name.
Sybilla fumbled the pen signing beside her name, dropped the pen and had to snatch it up, with a wild little laugh.
“Like signin for a record, Mama! Like this my first ‘hit-single.’”
As he was about to escort Ednetta and Sybilla from his office, Reverend Mudrick said, “This is for you, Sister Ednetta, and for your daughter Sybilla. It is a gesture of my faith in our cause and a prophecy of what lies ahead for you.”
Counting out ten one-hundred-dollar bills into Ednetta Frye’s quivering hand.
B
lack girl, white cops, kidnap, rape, assault & left to die.
Quickly then it became a poem. An incantation. These few words uttered again, again and again.
“There’s this ‘Occam Razor’—he say how the simplest you can make things, the more effective they be. More urgent the sound, the more it will be heard. And the angrier the voice, the more emotion it will arouse.”
In the final, tense two weeks of a trial of eight-months’ duration—a class action suit brought against the Passaic County Board of Education on behalf of a number of African-American custodial employees claiming to have been wrongfully dismissed from their jobs in the years 1978 to 1985—he hadn’t had time for more than cursory research into the Sybilla Frye case. He’d made a few telephone calls to contacts in Pascayne, he’d questioned a few potential witnesses,
but he hadn’t yet spoken with Ednetta Frye face-to-face, nor had he spoken with Sybilla Frye even on the phone; he was working approximately ninety hours a week, and he was exhausted, but hopeful, for the lawsuit would be adjudicated soon, and the long effort would be over.
And the plaintiffs would win. And the settlement, though not large, would constitute a great moral victory.
Byron Mudrick would burst into tears in the courtroom, and his clients would embrace him.
Hope is a stimulant. His heart raced with hope. But hope can cloud judgment, as he should have known by now. He was forty-three, not a young man.
He’d taken a deep breath. He’d gripped his brother Marus’s arm at the elbow as if to steady Marus, or himself. For Marus had been speaking passionately about the Frye girl—what had been done to her, how she and her mother had been traumatized by the assault, how dazed and helpless they were, like victims of war. Byron had often seen his brother in elated, excitable moods, but he’d rarely seen him so moved—genuinely moved, Byron thought.
He’d brought his face close to his brother’s face, regarding him searchingly. The eyes of twin brothers, each peering into the soul of the other.
Byron was thinking
But he has deceived you in the past. He has begged forgiveness, but he has deceived you
.
Why would you believe him now?
(It was true: Byron had been shocked to learn, belatedly, that his preacher-brother Marus Mudrick had been an FBI informant in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Marus had been an
anti-Communist informant
relaying confidential information about the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Howard University anti–Vietnam War protesters, and others, to the FBI; he’d told Byron defensively that he was an American citizen as well as a black man, and he wasn’t ashamed of it. And Byron had said, incredulously
But you informed on our brothers, our black brothers
and Marus said
We are
all brothers in Jesus. We are Christians before we are black but the Nation of Islam is not Christian. We hate and abhor godless communism.
It had not seemed to Byron that his brother was speaking coherently or honestly but in the end, he’d forgiven Marus. But he had not forgotten.)
Yet now, Byron was weakening. Marus had shown him a photograph of Sybilla Frye, who looked younger than fifteen, with swollen and discolored eyes and mouth, creased forehead. This was a child who’d been kidnapped by “white cops” and held captive for several days, raped repeatedly, and beaten. Dog feces had been rubbed into her hair and onto her body and racist epithets had been scrawled on her body. She’d been hog-tied and left in the filthy cellar of a boarded-up factory on the Pascayne waterfront and only through the accidental discovery by a neighbor had her life been saved. In a voice that trembled with indignation Marus said
This is a lynching in which the victim has been let live, that her humiliation and shame will endure through her life.
Byron felt a sensation of vertigo as if he were crossing a narrow board above an abyss. For he had daughters, of whom the oldest was sixteen and the youngest eleven. He adored and feared for his daughters in this world that, for all the gains of the past two decades, was yet a vicious, racist world. He’d spent much of his legal career dealing with the consequences of racism—direct racism, indirect racism (where the victims of racism harm one another as tortured or starving animals might harm one another, being unable to reach the source of their misery). He’d represented countless individuals who’d been mistreated by white cops—the least of their problems had been false arrest. He knew how cops—some, not all—but a sizable some—treated poor women of color who were helpless against them. The thought of his daughters being subjected to such horror made him feel—literally—sick.
He asked Marus simply: did Marus believe the girl?
Marus said
Yes. Yes
he did believe.
Still Byron gripped his brother by the elbow. Here was the “elder”—larger—Mudrick brother Marus with his smooth handsome face, the fattish dignity of a Buddha. Byron leaned close to Marus in a way that only an intimate might do, peering into his brother’s eyes.
You are sure, Marus?
Yes. She is telling the truth, and I am sure.
Byron regarded his brother for a long moment, then decided to believe him.
“We movin forward now. We ain’t never movin
back
.”
The Mudrick brothers were not strangers to righteous crusades. But rarely had they joined forces as they would in the crusade for justice for Sybilla Frye.
“My brother Byron with us now, an his staff workin with mine, we will have an
army
.”
The sexually abused Sybilla Frye had been so traumatized, she was near-mute in public. Only her mother could communicate with her. Though sometimes, at his specially convened news conferences, Reverend Mudrick would approach the girl and address her in a kindly, lowered voice, and elicit from her timid responses that signaled
Yes
or
No.
The first news conference of the Crusade for Justice for Sybilla Frye was held at Care Ministry of Central New Jersey headquarters on Fort Street, Newark, on November 11, 1987. Rows of chairs had been set up to accommodate 150 individuals who’d been invited by the Reverend’s staff, of whom forty-two came: journalists who worked for newspapers and news services, and journalists who called themselves “freelance”; writers of whom some were published, and
some were not; academics associated with Afro-American Studies departments in the Newark area; civil rights activists and associates of varying ages; a scattering of social workers, welfare workers, lawyers and paralegals, law students from Byron Mudrick’s classes at Rutgers-Newark Law School. Gazing out over the small but rapt audience, which was almost exclusively black and about equally divided between male and female, Reverend Mudrick cried: “Welcome, sisters! Welcome, brothers! You are blessed by the Lord: you will find yourselves at the fulcrum of history, by answering my heartfelt appeal on behalf of a martyred Christian black girl.”