Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (52 page)

Disbelief of a woman who said she had been raped had been built into male logic since the days when men first allowed a limited concept of criminal rape into their law, and the male leaders of the Communist Party did not question this logic al though they had forthrightly exposed and challenged other aspects of property law. To Communists, feminism was always a dirty word, a right-wing deviation, a bourgeois "error"-Lenin had said as much to Clara Zetkin; Mother Bloor had made it plain. The Communist Party, for all its talk about equality, maintained (and

still
maintains, although it hardly matters today ) that male su

premacy was nothing more than an unfortunate "attitude" among workers that would be eliminated af ter socialism had been achieved. So it was historically inevitable that the American Com munist Party of the nineteen thirties, controlled and directed by white men, like all other political parties, would slight the veracity

A QUESTION OF RACE
I
229

of women and charge them with the sins of Potiphar's wife in its effort to clear the reputation of blacks.

Still, it took a woman, a Viennese disciple of Freud who had probably ventured no farther south than Boston, to provide the clincher. In the turbulent thirties two strains of thinking, Marxism and Freudianism, the one concerned with social forces and the other concerned with the individual psyche, collided and crashed against each other in the public arena. Yet these two currents of thinking, arising from such vastly diff erent ideological wellsprings, managed to dovetail with startling precision on the role of the white woman in interracial rape. Once Dr. Helene Deutsch laid down her dictum of the hysterical, masochistic female, it was adopted with astonishing speed by those who wanted, or needed for their own peace of mind, to dilute white male responsibility for the Southern rape complex.

Describing the rape complex of the Reconstruction period from the vantage point of 1941, W. J. Cash had written of "neu rotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls," borrowing from a latter-day Freudian perspective. From where had the idea sprung? Four years earlier John Dollard, a Yale professor of psychology, had published a well-received appraisal of modern life in the South, Caste and Class
in
a Southern Town. In it Dollard quoted ver batim the views of Helene Deutsch, which he claimed to find "illuminating." Deutsch, he reported, had analyzed several white Southern women in whom she had found "marked sexual attrac tion to Negro men and masochistic fantasies connected with this attraction." Her blanket indictment followed: "The fact that the white men believe so readily the hysterical and masochistic fan tasies and lies of the white women, who claim they have been assaulted and raped by Negroes, is related to the fact that they ( the men ) sense the unconscious wishes of the women, the psychic reality of these declarations, and react emotionally to them as if they were real. The social situation permits them to discharge this emotion upon the Negroes."

When Deutsch produced her two-volume Psychology of Women in 1944-1945 she reiterated her thesis. "Rape fantasies," she wrote, "often have such irresistible verisimilitude that even the most experienced judges are misled in trials of innocent men accused of rape by hysterical women. My own experience of ac—

2
3c
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

counts by white women of rape by Negroes ( who are often sub jected to terrible penalties as a result of these accusations ) has convinced me that many fantastic stories are produced by the masochistic yearnings of these women."

If
one case convinced the American public-and international opinion-that lying, scheming white women who cried rape were directly responsible for the terrible penalties inflicted on black men, the name of that case was Scottsboro. Most famous of all the Southern rape cases for its miscarriage of justice, for the awesome fact that it almost claimed nine lives, for its incredible longevity it dragged through the courts and the penal system for two decades before the last defendant was finally set free-Scottsboro remains an ugly blot on American history and Southern jurisprudence, and damning proof to liberals everywhere that Eve Incarnate and the concept of Original Sin was a no-good, promiscuous woman who rode a freight train through Alabama.

It began routinely enough for the Depression year of
1931.
Two young women, "po' white trash," millworkers from Huntsville recently laid off and used to supplementing their earnings with a little catchas-catch-can hustling, hopped a freight to Chattanooga for a bit of adventure. Ruby Bates was seventeen and Victoria Price was in her mid-twenties. They spent the night in an open field known as a hobo jungle with some male companions and the next morning, outfitted in denim overalls on top of their dresses, they climbed aboard a Southern Railway gondola for the trip back to Huntsville. Victoria Price had already known trouble with the law, an arrest for violating the Volstead ( Prohibition ) Act and a short stretch in the workhouse on an adultery conviction. Ruby Bates was clean, but a minor.

They were not the only rootless young people riding the rails that morning. Scattered the length of the train in open gondolas and boxcars were black youths and white. Somewhere past Steven son a fistfight broke out between the blacks and the whites and the white youths were forced off the train. News of the race fight was telegraphed ahead to Paint Rock along with the information, vol unteered by the vanquished white boys, that two white women were still aboard the train and were in serious trouble. When the train pulled into the Paint Rock station, rape was already in the air and an armed posse of seventy-five men, augmented by an angry

A QUESTION OF RACE
I
231

crowd, was waiting. Nine blacks, ranging in age from thirteen to twenty, were rounded up. Victoria and Ruby tried to duck away and vanish in the confusion but they were cornered by the station master. Ruby was the one who first answered his question with a faltering Yes.

Two years later Ruby Bates wrote a letter to her boyfriend. "Dearest Earl," she began,

I want too make a statement too you Mary Sanders is a goddam lie about those Negroes jazzing me those policemen made me tell a lie that is my statement because I want too clear myself that is all too
if
you want too believe me Ok.
If
not that is ok. You will be sorry some day
if
you had too stay in jail with eight Negroes you would tell a lie two those Negroes did not touch me or those white boys I hope you will believe me the law dont. i love you better than Mary does ore any body else in the world that is why i am telling you of this thing i was drunk at the time and did not know what i was doing i know it was wrong too let those Negroes die on account of me i hope you will believe my statement because it is the gods truth i hope you will believe me i was jazzed but those white boys jazzed me i wish those Negroes are not Burnt on account of me it
is
those white Boys fault that is my statement and that is all i know i hope you tell the law hope you will answer

Ruby Bates

The first set of trials held at Scottsboro were quick affairs that might be termed farcical were it not for the fact that eight of the nine defendants were sentenced to death. A court-appointed lawyer reluctantly provided a defense and Ruby Bates and Victoria Price,
who
were
kept
in
jail
with possible vagrancy and/ or prostitution charges held over their heads, testified for the prosecution. The singular opportunity afforded Price and Bates should be appreci ated by every woman. From languishing in a jail cell as the lowest of the low, vagrant women who stole rides on freight cars, it was a short step to the witness stand where dignity of a sort could be reclaimed by charging that they had been pathetic, innocent vic tims of rape. ( Victoria Price could never get herself to admit in court that she had spent a night in a Chattanooga hobo jungle. No, she stubbornly insisted in trial af ter trial; she had stayed in the home of a respectable lady.) Operating from precisely the same

2
3-A
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

motivation-to save their own skins-some of the black defen dants tried to exculpate themselves in court by swearing they had seen the others do the raping.

Af ter the plight of the Scottsboro Boys had received interna tional attention through world-wide publicity from the Commu nist movement-the Communists must be credited with keeping the youths alive-and a million dollars had been raised in their behalf, a new series of trials began. Samuel Leibowitz, hired by the International Labor Defense to represent the defendants, made legal history by getting the Supreme Court to acknowledge that black men had been systematically excluded from serving on Ala bama juries. Leibowitz later said that this was the proudest accom plishment of his life, and yet a feminist looking at the Scottsboro case today must note that while every person who ever served on a Scottsboro jury and voted to convict was white, he was also male, and no one, no political grouping, no appellate lawyer, no Scotts boro pamphlet ever raised the question of the exclusion of women from the jury rolls of Alabama, although many a pamphlet charged that Victoria Price was a prostitute. ( Women did not win the right to sit on Alabama juries until
1966.)

Would a fair number of women, white and black, have made a difference on a Scottsboro jury? Maybe so. Particularly when the prosecuting attorney went into his standard "protection of South ern womanhood" speech. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching had been formed to fight this ap proach. Would women sitting on those juries have been able to understand the predicament faced by Victoria Price and Ruby Bates? Perhaps. Might they have been able to distinguish a fake rape story from a true one? Would they have been quicker to understand the import of dead, nonmotile sperm in Victoria Price's vagina to the exclusion of living sperm, which the defense vainly argued was proof that whatever recent intercourse Virginia Price had experienced had occurred in Huntsville or in the hobo jungle but not on the train?

But why carry on with these speculations? The unalterable fact remains that no woman ever served on a jury of the Scottsboro nine, and each and every vote to convict was cast by a white man. As the black defendants sat in an alien courtroom in which all the forces of the law-judge, prosecution, defense and jury-were white, so too the forces arrayed before them were all male.
It
was a

A QUESTION OF RACE
I
.2
33

white man's game that was played out in the Scottsboro trials, with black men and white women as movable pawns, and white men judged interracial rape according to their own particular property code.

Sam Leibowitz, later Judge Leibowitz, once remarked that if Victoria Price and Ruby Bates had walked into a New York City police station and charged nine blacks with rape, af ter five minutes of questioning they would have been "tossed out of the precinct and that would have been the end of the whole affair. Even the dumbest cop on the force would have spotted those two as tramps and liars." While this may have been a fair assessment of the stereotypic Northern cop mentality, it seems to me that Leibowitz deliberately missed an essential point. Victoria and Ruby didn't quite walk into an Alabama police station either. They were cor ralled by a posse of white men who already believed a rape had taken place. Confused and fearf ul, they fell into line.