Iglesias asked Sybilla to repeat what she’d said, a little louder. She was leaning close, to listen.
In the hoarse slow whisper Sybilla recounted how she’d been
coming home from school Thursday afternoon when somebody, some men, came up behind her with a canvas they lowered over her head and grabbed her and dragged her away in a van and kept her there for three days—she thought it was three days, she wasn’t sure because she was not conscious all the time—and punched and kicked her and did things to her and laughed at her when she was crying and later put mud and dog shit onto her and wrote on her “nasty words” and tied her up and left her in the factory cellar saying there were “other nigras” in that place who had died there.
Starting to cry now, and Mrs. Frye squeezed her hand, and for a moment it didn’t seem that Sybilla would continue.
Iglesias asked if she’d been able to see faces? Could she describe the men—their age, race? Were they known to her?
Sybilla shook her head, they weren’t known to her. She seemed about to say more, then stopped.
“You’re sure that these men are not known to you, Sybilla? Could you describe any of them?”
Sybilla stared at the floor. Tears welled in her eyes and spilled over her bruised cheeks.
“Did they hurt you sexually?”
Sybilla sat very still staring at the floor. Her face was shiny now with tears.
Mrs. Frye said, gently urging, “S’b’lla, honey, you got to tell this lady, see? You got to tell her what you can. You aint told me all of it, has you?—you know you aint. Now, you tell
her
.”
“Did they rape you, Sybilla?”
Sybilla shook her head just slightly, yes.
“More than one man, you’ve said?”
Sybilla shook her head yes.
“You told your mother—five men?”
Sybilla shook her head yes.
“Not boys but men.”
Sybilla shook her head yes.
“And not men you know?”
Sybilla shook her head no.
“Can you describe them? Just—anything.”
Sybilla stared at the floor. Mrs. Frye was crowded close beside her now, an arm around the girl’s shoulders.
“The color of their skin? You said they used the word
nigra
—”
Mrs. Frye urged her to speak. “Come on, girl! Was they black men, or—some other? Who’d be sayin ‘nigra’ except some other?”
Sybilla stared at the floor. She didn’t seem resistant or defiant now, but exhausted. Iglesias worried that the girl was about to faint or lapse into some sort of mental state like catatonia.
Once, interviewing a stricken and near-mute girl of twelve, Iglesias had given the girl Post-its upon which to write, and the girl had done so. Iglesias gave Sybilla a (bright yellow, cheering) Post-it pad and a pencil to write on and, after some hesitation, Sybilla printed:
WHITE COP
“‘White cop’—”
Iglesias tried not to show the surprise she felt.
Mrs. Frye took the Post-it from Iglesias’s hand, read it and began to wail as if
white cop
was a death sentence.
Iglesias asked if the “white cop” had hurt Sybilla?
Sybilla shook her head yes.
“Was just one of the men ‘white’—or a ‘cop’?”
Sybilla shook her head to indicate she didn’t know.
“How did you know the man was a ‘cop,’ Sybilla?”
Sybilla wrote on the Post-it:
WEAR A BAGDE
“He was ‘wearing a badge’? When he raped you, he was ‘wearing a badge’?”
Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know. Thought so, yes.
Her eyelids were drooping, her mouth was slack with exhaustion.
“Were any of the others ‘wearing a badge’?”
Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know.
“Could you describe him? The ‘white cop’?”
Sybilla printed on a Post-it:
YELOW HAIR
“Could you say what his approximate age was?”
Sybilla shook her head, uncertain.
“Thirty? Thirty-five?”
Sybilla shook her head.
“My age is thirty-six. Was he older or younger than me, do you think?”
Sybilla squinted at Iglesias. Her left eye seemed to be losing focus but her right eye was fixed on Iglesias. On a Post-it she wrote:
AGE 30
“Were the other men ‘white’ also? Could you see?”
Sybilla printed on the Post-it:
THEY WHITE
Sybilla took back the Post-it and printed:
THEY ALL WHITE
“These men abducted you, kept you captive in a van, beat and raped you, intermittently for three days and three nights? Where was the van parked, do you have any idea?”
Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know.
“Could you describe the van? Inside, outside?”
Sybilla shook her head slowly, she wasn’t sure.
Sybilla smiled, a nervous twitch of a smile. How like a child she looked, a badly beaten child, with a gat-toothed smile, looking almost shyly now at the police officer.
Iglesias wanted to take the girl’s hand, to comfort and encourage her. But she dared not touch her, after Sybilla had shrunk from her.
“If you saw a van, you could maybe compare it to the van they’d taken you in? You could try to describe it?”
Sybilla shook her head yes. She could try.
“When they left you in the factory cellar, they told you they would kill you, if you told anyone? Who said these words?”
Sybilla shook her head, she didn’t know.
“Did one of the men say this, or others? Did they all say this?”
Sybilla hid her face in her hands. Mrs. Frye whispered to her, and drew her hands away.
The interview had exhausted the girl. Iglesias was exhausted.
Thinking
White cop! White cop.
Thinking
None of this story is true. This is all a lie. The mother has coached her. The mother has beat her. The mother’s boyfriend—her own boyfriend—someone she knows . . .
Mrs. Frye was embracing her daughter. The two of them were weeping, wet-eyed.
“Ma’am, this interview over now. My girl got to get home where she safe, and her mama can take care of her.”
And there was no recording of this interview! Iglesias had known that was a mistake.
Only her notes, and the bright yellow Post-its.
Only her word.
“Mrs. Frye, if we could just—a few more minutes, and . . .”
“I said no! My daughter’s health come first, before anythin else. You got this girl to tell you somethin could get her killed, and you better not misuse it, or S’b’lla, I’m warnin you—Off’cer.”
Off’cer
was spoken in indignation as Mrs. Frye heaved herself up from the gurney and gathered Sybilla into her arms. The girl was unresisting now, and hid her face in the older woman’s bosom.
Iglesias backed away sick and stunned.
“‘White cop.’”
Her very mouth seemed to have gone numb.
And how many times in the weeks and months to come would the thought come to her, remorse like a stab in the gut—
But what if it is true? What if white men did debase her? And we didn’t believe her? God help me to know what is truth and what is false.
H
og-tied and left to die.
The Frye girl, fourteen. Beaten and raped and shit-on and left to die in some factory cellar.
She sayin it was white cops. In a cop-van drivin around with a black girl they arrest like pretendin she a hooker so they use her like some sex-slave, then they rub shit on her, and write nasty words on her, and dump her and left her to die.
Except she ain’t die, she been rescued. By her own lady schoolteacher!
Aint died and tellin what the white cops done now see what the fuckers gon do, to punish themselves.
In Red Rock it began to be told. In the small storefront businesses, in the taverns, rib joints and diners of Camden Avenue, Penescott, Ventor, Twelfth. In the brownstone row houses of Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth streets and in the tenements of East Ventor, Crater, and Depp. In the several towers of the Earl Warren high-rise project on the river at Twelfth Street, its gritty-floored foyers, erratically
operating elevators, shadowy staircases and corridors and vast open courtyards ravaged as earth over which a Biblical pestilence has raged. In the hair salons, nail salons, wig shops, beer wine and liquor stores, groceries and pawnshops and bail-bond shops and Red Rock’s single drugstore—(a bleak Walgreens of narrow corridors and a low stamped-tin ceiling doomed for closure within the year)—at the windswept intersection of Camden and Freund. In Passaic County Family Services, Polk Memorial Medical Center, Planned Parenthood and Veterans’ Furniture Outlet and Goodwill as in the defaced bus shelters of Camden, Trenton, Crater, Jersey and West River Street. In the vicinity of the Pascayne Police Department Fifth Precinct on First Street with its commandeered side streets of white-and-green cruisers and vans parked as in a stalled but belligerent military formation. In the shadow of the Pitcairn Bridge rising hunched above the river and running parallel with the New Jersey Transit railroad bridge that in turn ran parallel with the elevated Turnpike bridge blotting out much of the eastern sky above Red Rock. In the sandstone tenement buildings like corroded pueblo dwellings of an ancient time jutting up against the elevated spiraling lanes of the Turnpike. In Hicks Square, in Polk Plaza, in the weedy no-man’s-land littered with bottles, cans, styrofoam containers, junkies’ needles and used condoms like shrunken sea slugs abutting the Passaic River at Washburn where the city had intended a park. In the drab factory-like Pascayne South High School where Sybilla Frye was a tenth-grade student and in Edson Middle School and in even Edson Elementary where she’d been a student when younger it began to be told, and retold.
That Frye girl gone missin you hear she been found? In that fish-factory cellar she left for dead all tied-up and bleedin these white cops grabbed her comin out of school Thu’sday sayin they got warrants to arrest her she be missin school an take her away in the police van. We saw it—right outside the school.
Left her for dead, they’d been beating and raping and starving her. She’d lost more’n half her blood. Branded KKK in her skin with hot irons. Carved nasty words on her back. They’d picked her up outside the high school there was witnesses saw the white cops takin her away in a cop van tryin to say she a nigger hooker her pimp give to them for payment. Kept the girl tied up for three days while her mother lookin for her on every street, we seen that poor woman showin pictures of the girl to anybody who would look. They raped her, beat and kicked her an rolled her in dog shit an told her they would cut her throat an her family’s if she told and they told her nobody would ever believe her, take the word of a nigger slut against the word of white cops and they left her to die in that nasty place where in ’67 they dumped people they’d shot in the street and nobody found the bodies for a long time. But this girl didn’t die.
W
here my baby? She s’quest’d. She aint here. She sick, and she gon get well. You leave my baby alone!
In the brownstone row house at 939 Third Street the agitated mother scarcely opened the front door but shouted through a narrow crack for would-be visitors to go away. Initially, Mrs. Frye had tried to determine who it was ringing the bell or rapping loudly at the door when the buzzer-bell failed to sound, a familiar face, relatives, girlfriends of Sybilla’s, incensed and sympathetic neighbors or strangers—so many strangers!—then in a frenzy of fear and dismay she turned them all away slamming the door in their faces.
Through the windows Ednetta Frye could be seen, a shifting shadow-shape, peeking out at the edges of the drawn blinds. Her figure was both hulking and tremulous. Muttering to herself
God help us. God help us through this mis’ry.
It was known, Sybilla Frye was being kept home from school. Days in succession following the news of her discovery in the Jersey Foods factory she was absent from Pascayne High South where she was a sophomore with what school authorities were acknowledging was a
spotty record
—a history of sporadic and unexplained absences already since the start of the fall term after Labor Day and the previous year in ninth grade as well.
Questioned by authorities about the assaulted girl, the principal of the high school had no recollection of her nor did her teachers speak of “Sybilla Frye” with much certainty—classes at Pascayne South were overcrowded, students sat in seats not always assigned to them, Sybilla’s homeroom teacher had taken sick days in September during which time substitutes had monitored the thirty or more students in the homeroom and none of these had any clear recollection of “Sybilla Frye” still less any information about her.
Nor did Sybilla’s classmates wish to speak of her except in the most vague terms—
S’b’lla be out of school, somethin happen to her.
When someone from the high school called, Ednetta Frye interrupted without listening to whatever question, request, message this stranger had for her—
My daughter not livin in this house right now! She s’quest’d somewhere safe.
Repeated calls, Ednetta picked up the receiver and slammed it down without listening.
Juvenile Aid of New Jersey, Child Protective Services, Passaic County Family Services—calls from these agencies, Ednetta Frye dealt with in a similar fashion. Individuals from these agencies, even those dark-skinned and female like herself, Ednetta Frye turned away brusquely from her door.
She s’quest’d where you can’t get her! Just go away an leave us like you ever give a damn for us!
The Hispanic female police detective who’d pretended to be Ednetta’s friend in the hospital ER returned, with a (male,
Italian-looking) detective-companion who stared at Ednetta with an expression of barely concealed contempt. Ednetta had seen the white-and-green Pascayne PD cruiser park at the curb only a few yards away from the window at which she crouched pressing the palm of her hand into her chest as she panted in pain and apprehension—
Jesus help me. Jesus send these people away
—and she guessed she had no choice but to open the door to them, at least a crack, for possibly they had a search warrant? a warrant for arrest?—though which of them it might be, Sybilla, or herself, who’d be arrested, Ednetta had no idea. She was near-fainting with anxiety. High-blood-pressure pounded in her ears. As the female detective knocked Ednetta snatched open the door saying in a hoarse pleading voice what sounded to the detectives like—
My baby s’quest’d! She ain’t here! Can’t talk to you now gon shut this door.