The Sacrifice. Joyce Carol Oates

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       Red Rock

       Hog-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 Ed-son 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 СКАЧАТЬ