Essay: Tawana And Her Three Wise Men

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?