Tawana And Her Three Wise Men

By LANCE MORROW

Sherlock Holmes once told Watson cryptically about the "giant rat of Sumatra." The terrible truth about the creature, Holmes said, is one "for which the world is not yet prepared." It was a lovely moment of conjuration: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suddenly, out of nowhere, created the hairy monster, and just as suddenly he whisked it out of sight: the world was not yet prepared to confront the horror. So the giant rat lingers in the mind as an enigmatic apparition.

Interestingly, there does exist an animal called the giant rat of Sumatra, just as there does exist a beast called racism. Those facts (that the creatures actually exist) have nothing to do, however, with the art of telling horror stories and lies. That skill has its earliest development in the imagination of children, standing in front of angry parents and frantically inventing alibis. Sometimes children are brilliant at it.

The illusion of the giant rat of Sumatra appeared in Wappingers Falls, N.Y., last November. In the telling of the tale, the rat took the form of six white men, one wearing a badge, who carried Tawana Brawley into the dark woods and held her for four days and raped her and chopped her hair and wrote KKK and NIGGER on her body and smeared dog feces on her and left her in a plastic garbage bag just behind the apartment where her family had lived until two weeks earlier.

It is a terrible story. Many embraced it. They even luxuriated in the outrage of it. The saga was extravagantly awful. Brawley is black and at the time of her disappearance was 15 years old. The old story: strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree, the night riders in sheets come North now. Was hers not the primal American tale of violated black innocence, of white bigotry that wears a badge and goes unpunished? Did it not reverberate with all the horrors of America's original sin? Did it not recapitulate, precisely, the original drama of abduction and violation that brought black Africans to America in the first place? Seized in the innocence of childhood, knocked unconscious, transported, held against her will (enslaved), violated, degraded, treated like trash that ends up in a trash bag.

How odd that the Brawley case should run in historical parallel to the political progress of Jesse Jackson. Any American with a memory watched in astonishment this spring as thousands of white Americans, blue-collar workers among them, an old reliable class of Wallaceites, took Jackson as their leader. Is there some buried law of collective psychological compensation requiring that each burst of light must be answered by a burst of darkness? That the Jackson victories must have the balancing underhorror of the Brawley rape?

In the Brawley case, one should descend from the symbolic to the specific. The truth has its unmistakable ring. Eighteen years ago, an Army captain named Jeffrey MacDonald told police that dope-crazed hippies, somewhat like the Manson family, broke into his house in North Carolina and murdered his wife and two children, while chanting "Kill the pigs" and "Acid is groovy." That phrase, acid is groovy, set off the alarm in the basement of the brain. No, no. That was an Army officer's clumsy fantasy of what a dope-crazed hippie might chant while murdering a family. It was the giant rat again. The same alarm began whooping when Brawley told her story. Something happened, no doubt. But the details (the white men, the badge, the dog excrement, the KKK and NIGGER) had a quality of the luridly contrived, the quality of something rehearsed in the psyche but experienced only there.

The great creativity in the Brawley case involved not Tawana's tale but rather the ministrations of her lawyers and advisers. In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain conjured up the Duke. The Duke's great Shakespearean soliloquy ran: "To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin/ That makes calamity of so long life;/ For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane . . ." And so on. Twain, or Dickens, might have invented the characters who have surrounded Brawley. There is a preacher called the Rev. Al Sharpton (perfect name) and the lawyers C. Vernon Mason and Alton Maddox Jr. The three concocted a wondrous flimflam that allowed them to play upon the media as upon a Moog synthesizer. They hurled idiotic charges. The rape gang was affiliated not just with the Klan but also with the Irish Republican Army. An assistant district attorney was one of the rapists. The three silenced Tawana and her family. The American system of justice can give no justice to Tawana, they said. The American system of justice is on trial. The victim of the crime will offer no evidence that any crime was committed.

Merely the apparition of the crime lingers in the air. Sharpton, like all con artists, knows how to fog the atmosphere with illusions and paranoias and half-plausibilities and rants. Lenin by way of Joe McCarthy: the facts don't matter, it is the cause, the movement. Sharpton and the others know how to hide behind the color black. The officialdom of New York State has been exquisitely gingerly about the case. The press has been dutiful and has spared Sharpton the ridicule he deserves. He is the billboard of his own buffoonery, of course. But the case has a sleazy insistence -- a ripe drama with a low IQ but a brute force about it. Even those who most passionately fell in line with Sharpton, however, have been shaken now that two of his lesser associates have left him, declared the case a hoax and said Sharpton did not believe Tawana's story: he merely thought it a handsome vehicle to ride to glory.

It is sometimes sad and dangerous to be a child in America now. Brawley's life is one of manifest perils. (The day she disappeared she was returning from a visit to a former boyfriend serving time in prison for shooting someone, and her stepfather did a stretch of seven years for killing his first wife.) She is a child being preyed upon by adults, and not the ones that she accused before retreating into silence. Racism is the deepest American wound. It should not be gnawed upon by rats.