Based largely on the infamous Tawana Brawley hoax of the late-1980s, Joyce Carol Oates’ latest novel, “The Sacrifice,” is a savage satire on race relations and the culture of sensationalism.
Oates moves the action from Wappingers Falls, NY, region, where 15-year-old Brawley claimed she was raped by three white men, one of them a cop, to the fictitious town of Pascayne, New Jersey, one of the foul, inner-city hellholes Oates, who became the go-to author on decaying American cities with her evocation of the 1967 Detroit riots in her award-winning novel “Them,” can conjure up in her sleep. The air has a “pale-cinnamon haze”; the “lead-colored” Passaic River looks like “a living creature with a hide that rippled and shivered in the sunshine.”
The nearby abandoned Jersey Foods canning factory is where 15-year-old Sybilla Frye is found, hog-tied, beaten and smeared with excrement, with racial epithets written upside-down on her body.
Her story of being raped by “white cops” is fishy from the start. Medical personnel summoned to the scene report the girl “was trying to simulate being unconscious but she was awake and alert. You could see her eyeballs kind of jerking around behind her eyelids.”
A minority cop summoned to the hospital where Sybilla’s mother, the wily Ednetta Frye (one of Oates’s best characters), refuses to let her daughter have a pelvic exam, figures out from the girl’s non-answers to questions that, “This is all a lie. The mother has coached her. The mother has beat her. The mother’s boyfriend — someone she knows . . ” There is an even an eyewitness who sees Sybilla sneaking into the fish-canning factory, carrying the piece of canvas the girl is eventually found on.
But rumor and sensationalism are more powerful than facts in “The Sacrifice,” and as Sybilla’s story makes the rounds in the neighborhood and beyond, she meets an unlikely champion — the Reverend Marus Mudrick, the Al Sharpton of the novel.
A villain of Dickensian proportions, the charismatic Mudrick offers to become “spiritual advisor” to Sybilla and her mother, whose cooperation he quickly buys for a thousand dollars. Mudrick markets Sybilla as a “black Joan of Arc” and soon has the media eating out of his hand. Celebrities sympathetic to the “crusade” for justice quickly join the bandwagon, including Mike Tyson, who gives poor Sybilla a Rolex watch that Mudrick instantly snatches out of her hand as a “donation” to the cause.
Mudrick and his twin, attorney Byron Mudrick, exploit the Frye family to further their own agenda, accusing the police of rape and doing anything to keep the story on the front pages of newspapers as donations pour in. Mudrick even twists Sybilla’s arm into publicly naming as one of her rapists a young cop whose suicide has just made the news.
As the case begins to crumble, Byron Mudrick flatly tells his brother, “There was never any rape, and we know it.”
But Marus has staked his reputation on the crusade and there’s no going back. He even, as Sharpton did, accuses a state prosecutor of being one of the rapists when the case goes to trial.
Oates has more at stake here than copying the Brawley case, though. Sybilla Frye has been the victim of a crime, one committed in the home, where her mother lives with her boyfriend, an ex-con named Anis Schutt who is the frequent target of police harassment. Ednetta is afraid of him but in the complicated dynamic of their violence-strewn lives, she wants to protect him, too, when he attacks Sybilla: “They put away Anis for the rest of his life and he die in that nasty place and Ednetta in her bed alone mourning him.”
A portrait of family damaged by poverty and violence as well as those who would happily exploit them, “The Sacrifice” ranks among Joyce Carol Oates’s best novels.