Sacrifice, The by Oates Joyce Carol

Author:Oates, Joyce Carol [Oates, Joyce Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Modern Classics, Novel
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-01-16T02:00:00+00:00

The Crusade

Black 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.

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