No Shades Of Gray

What drives history? Facts? Or people's perception of the facts? Twenty-five centuries ago, Thucydides enlisted on the side of literal, close-focus truth. His older contemporary Herodotus took the more expansive view that people's self-images and folklore and even self-delusions are as important as the hard facts of history. Myths open windows upon fears, fantasies, possibilities. The old bipolar question always comes into play when Americans, black and white, approach the facts and myths of race.

For example: What exactly happened in Los Angeles on the night of March 3, 1991, near the corner of Foothill and Osborne? The famous videotape showed a cluster of police savagely and gratuitously beating a black man named Rodney King. The scene replayed indelibly on television sets around the world. Did the videotape show the truth? Whose truth? All of it? Enough of it?

Or consider a case that began in obscurity, without benefit of videotape, about 10 weeks after the King beating. The body of a 16-year-old black youth named Eric McGinnis was found floating at the mouth of the St. Joseph River where it flows into Lake Michigan. How did Eric die? Accidental drowning? Racial murder? But in the "Twin Cities" on either side of the river--in the overwhelmingly black town of Benton Harbor, Mich., and in the overwhelmingly white community of St. Joseph--people's suspicions tend to be shaped by the folklores and assumptions that emerge from separate experiences, black and white.

Two journalists have now done admirable work along the fact-myth continuum of these two cases. Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here, a 1991 best seller about two black boys growing up in a Chicago housing project, spent five years investigating the death of Eric McGinnis. In The Other Side of the River (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; 317 pages; $24.95), Kotlowitz attempts a kind of narrative mediation, shuttling back and forth across the bridge between the white and black universes--the somewhat gentrified white St. Joseph and the dirt-poor Benton Harbor, with its drug gangs and the highest murder rate in the country.

While Kotlowitz reaches no conclusion about what caused McGinnis' death, his account is a saddened, sympathetic portrait of two Americas. At the same time, however, the book often seems curiously unmoving and thin, perhaps because it is ultimately inconclusive, perhaps because of a note of self-importance that sometimes falsifies the author's narrative voice.

In Official Negligence (Times Books/Random House; 698 pages; $35), Lou Cannon has written an exhaustive and considerably more complicated book--a study of the Rodney King case and of the riots that followed, of the Los Angeles police department and of the city itself. The result is that Cannon, the former Los Angeles bureau chief for the Washington Post, has put together a multidimensional model of patient, dispassionate journalism.