Stories Sacred, Lies Mundane

By LANCE MORROW

Our minds drift back and forth between the sacred and the mundane: between our ideas, our myths about ourselves, on one hand, and on the other our everyday, mortal disorder, our contradictions, our injustices and our need for the law. In the borderland between the two realms we encounter the dangerous, interesting kingdom of lies.

It was 10 years ago that the three realms intersected in the Hudson River town of Wappingers Falls, N.Y. There, Tawana Brawley, a black teenager, proclaimed that a gang of white law officers had abducted and held her for four days in the woods, raping her repeatedly, writing KKK and NIGGER on her belly, smearing her with dog feces and leaving her in a plastic garbage bag outside an apartment complex where her family had once lived. Inconveniently, a witness at that apartment complex had glanced out a window and seen Tawana furtively installing herself in the garbage bag. And a grand jury, after a long, hard look, concluded that there was not a shred of evidence from the real world that the story was true.

As lies go, it wasn't a very good one. To anyone who ever raised a child, Tawana's story had the unmistakable ring of a whopper--an extreme example of a script that a desperate 15-year-old might well invent if, like Tawana, she had gone AWOL for a few days and needed to deflect a feared stepfather's wrath.

But some stories are so deeply embedded in a culture that like black holes, they have the power to overwhelm and devour lesser tales that stray into their fierce field of gravity. Tawana's narrative--a messy, lesser tale that in a society uncontaminated by race hate would have been universally dismissed as a hoax--merged with deeper American memories of race and rape and lynching (the mobs sometimes made up of white law officers). Tawana's lie claimed the prestige of tragic precedent and a legacy of sacred indignation. Tawana became indistinguishable in moral terms from, say, Emmett Till, the Chicago 14-year-old lynched in 1955 in Tallahatchie County, Miss., for daring to get fresh with a white woman.

Who was the victim in the Tawana Brawley case? Tawana? It was such a parenthetical sadness--though also a stroke of cunning--that she was led to such a degrading fantasy, herself as garbage. But the unambiguous casualty was a white assistant prosecutor from Dutchess County named Steven Pagones. Tawana's was not a harmless lie. Once the story went public, it attracted three professional race men named C. Vernon Mason, Alton Maddox and Al Sharpton, lawyers who arrived to work as Tawana's handlers and to demagogue the case in the media. The three identified Pagones as one of the white rapists. Pagones has spent 10 years trying to clear his name.

We seek patterns. Politicians, commentators and storytelling media (movies, television) give us myths; to supervise everyday chaos, we need the law, especially in the borderland of lies. Last week the law did its work: a jury vindicated Pagones. It found that Sharpton and the others were guilty of defaming him. The jurors then withdrew to consider how much to assess in damages.

In an era of media mythification, every rumor and sensational dysfunction is raw material, like timber to be felled or ore to be mined and smelted for the vast media story market. Where the standard of journalistic truth is menaced by the mandate to be entertaining, there is something to be learned about not trying to force the facts of disorderly life to conform to tempting cliches.

America's race and rape and lynching archetypes have a terrible truth to them, a truth rooted in American history from the earliest time. It is because of that history that some American blacks say it does not matter if, for example, O.J. Simpson was guilty, it does not matter if Tawana was telling a lie. The deeper story's truth supersedes the incidental tale. Hearing this thinking, most whites smack their forehead in outrage and disbelief.

The idea has seductive force. It says that a massive cultural equivalent of jury nullification is justified--that the vast historical outrage of slavery and race in America blanks out the individual true-or-false details and sanctifies, or excuses, even a destructive hoax. Tawana Brawley equals Emmett Till simply because she (opportunistically) conjures the deep memory.

But the conceit, like all lies, partakes of magic thinking, a reality override. When Napoleon, one of history's great habitual liars, dictated a battle dispatch of particularly outrageous falsehood, his secretary, Louis-Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne, wrote sadly in his diary that the Emperor had "wounded the truth." Sharpton and the others injured Steven Pagones. But they inflicted a more grievous wound upon the memory of Emmett Till. A bitter reflux of the lie washes back upon the truth.