Vintage Didion (15 page)

In fact this came close to the heart of it: that it seemed, on the basis of the videotaped statements, fairly clear who had done what to whom was precisely the case’s liberating aspect, the circumstance that enabled many of the city’s citizens to say and think what they might otherwise have left unexpressed. Unlike other recent high-visibility cases in New York, unlike Bensonhurst and unlike Howard Beach and unlike Bernhard Goetz, here was a case in which the issue not exactly of race but of an increasingly visible underclass could be confronted by the middle class, both white and black, without guilt. Here was a case that gave this middle class a way to transfer and express what had clearly become a growing and previously inadmissible rage with the city’s disorder, with the entire range of ills and uneasy guilts that came to mind in a city where entire families slept in the discarded boxes in which new Sub-Zero refrigerators were delivered, at twenty-six hundred per, to more affluent families. Here was also a case, most significantly, in which even that transferred rage could be transferred still further, veiled, personalized: a case in which the city’s distress could be seen to derive not precisely from its underclass but instead from certain identifiable individuals who claimed to speak for this underclass, individuals who, in Robert Morganthau’s words, “sought to exploit” this case, to “advance their own private agendas”; individuals who wished even to “divide the races.”

If the city’s problems could be seen as deliberate disruptions of a naturally cohesive and harmonious community, a community in which, undisrupted, “contrasts” generated a perhaps dangerous but vital “energy,” then those problems were tractable, and could be addressed, like “crime,” by the call for “better leadership.” Considerable comfort could be obtained, given this story line, through the demonization of the Reverend Al Sharpton, whose presence on the edges of certain criminal cases that interested him had a polarizing effect that tended to reinforce the narrative. Jim Sleeper, in
The Closest of Strangers
, described one of the fifteen marches Sharpton led through Bensonhurst after the 1989 killing of an East New York sixteen-year-old, Yusuf Hawkins, who had come into Bensonhurst and been set upon, with baseball bats and ultimately with bullets, by a group of young whites.

An August 27, 1989,
Daily News
photo of the Reverend Al Sharpton and a claque of black teenagers marching in Bensonhurst to protest Hawkins’s death shows that they are not really “marching.” They are stumbling along, huddled together, heads bowed under the storm of hatred breaking over them, eyes wide, hanging on to one another and to Sharpton, scared out of their wits. They, too, are innocents—or were until that day, which they will always remember. And because Sharpton is with them, his head bowed, his face showing that he knows what they’re feeling, he is in the hearts of black people all over New York.

Yet something is wrong with this picture. Sharpton did not invite or coordinate with Bensonhurst community leaders who wanted to join the march. Without the time for organizing which these leaders should have been given in order to rein in the punks who stood waving watermelons; without an effort by black leaders more reputable than Sharpton to recruit whites citywide and swell the march, Sharpton was assured that the punks would carry the day. At several points he even baited them by blowing kisses …

“I knew that Bensonhurst would clarify whether it had been a racial incident or not,” Sharpton said by way of explaining, on a recent
Frontline
documentary, his strategy in Bensonhurst. “The fact that I was so controversial to Bensonhurst helped them forget that the cameras were there,” he said. “So I decided to help them…. I would throw kisses to them, and they would go nuts.”
Question
, began a joke told in the aftermath of the first jogger trial.
You’re in a room with Hitler, Saddam Hussein, and Al Sharpton. You have only two bullets. Who do you shoot? Answer: Al Sharpton. Twice
.

Sharpton did not exactly fit the roles New York traditionally assigns, for maximum audience comfort, to prominent blacks. He seemed in many ways a phantasm, somebody whose instinct for the connections between religion and politics and show business was so innate that he had been all his life the vessel for other people’s hopes and fears. He had given his first sermon at age four. He was touring with Mahalia Jackson at eleven. As a teenager, according to Robert D. McFadden, Ralph Blumenthal, M. A. Farber, E. R. Shipp, Charles Strum, and Craig Wolff, the
New York Times
reporters and editors who collaborated on
Outrage: The Story Behind the Tawana Brawley Hoax
, Sharpton was tutored first by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (“You got to know when to hit it and you got to know when to quit it and when it’s quittin’ time, don’t push it,” Powell told him), then by the Reverend Jesse Jackson (“Once you turn on the gas, you got to cook or burn ’em up,” Jackson told him), and eventually, after obtaining a grant from Bayard Rustin and campaigning for Shirley Chisholm, by James Brown. “Once, he trailed Brown down a corridor, through a door, and, to his astonishment, onto a stage flooded with spotlights,” the authors of
Outrage
reported. “He immediately went into a wiggle and dance.”

It was perhaps this talent for seizing the spotlight and the moment, this fatal bent for the wiggle and the dance, that most clearly disqualified Sharpton from casting as the Good Negro, the credit to the race, the exemplary if often imagined figure whose refined manners and good grammar could be stressed and who could be seen to lay, as Jimmy Walker said of Joe Louis, “a rose on the grave of Abraham Lincoln.” It was left, then, to cast Sharpton, and for Sharpton to cast himself, as the Outrageous Nigger, the familiar role—assigned sixty years ago to Father Divine and thirty years later to Adam Clayton Powell—of the essentially manageable fraud whose first concern is his own well-being. It was, for example, repeatedly mentioned, during the ten days the jury was out on the first jogger trial, that Sharpton had chosen to wait out the verdict not at 111 Centre Street but “in the air-conditioned comfort” of C. Vernon Mason’s office, from which he could be summoned by beeper.

Sharpton, it was frequently said by whites and also by some blacks, “represented nobody,” was “self-appointed” and “self-promoting.” He was an “exploiter” of blacks, someone who “did them more harm than good.” It was pointed out that he had been indicted by the state of New York in June of 1989 on charges of grand larceny. (He was ultimately acquitted.) It was pointed out that
New York Newsday
, working on information that appeared to have been supplied by federal law-enforcement agencies, had in January 1988 named him as a federal informant, and that he himself admitted to having let the government tap his phone in a drug-enforcement effort. It was routinely said, most tellingly of all in a narrative based on the magical ability of “leaders” to improve the commonweal, that he was “not the right leader,” “not at all the leader the black community needs.” His clothes and his demeanor were ridiculed (my husband was asked by
Esquire
to do a piece predicated on interviewing Sharpton while he was having his hair processed), his motives derided, and his tactics, which were those of an extremely sophisticated player who counted being widely despised among his stronger cards, not very well understood.

Whites tended to believe, and to say, that Sharpton was “using” the racial issue—which, in the sense that all political action is based on “using” one issue or another, he clearly was. Whites also tended to see him as destructive and irresponsible, indifferent to the truth or to the sensibilities of whites—which, most notoriously in the nurturing of the Tawana Brawley case, a primal fantasy in which white men were accused of a crime Sharpton may well have known to be a fabrication, he also clearly was. What seemed not at all understood was that for Sharpton, who had no interest in making the problem appear more tractable (“The question is, do you want to ‘ease’ it or do you want to ‘heal’ it,” he had said when asked if his marches had not worked against “easing tension” in Bensonhurst), the fact that blacks and whites could sometimes be shown to have divergent interests by no means suggested the need for an ameliorative solution. Such divergent interests were instead a lucky break, a ready-made organizing tool, a dramatic illustration of who had the power and who did not, who was making it and who was falling below the line; a metaphor for the sense of victimization felt not only by blacks but by all those Sharpton called “the left-out opposition.”
We got the power
, the chants go on “Sharpton and Fulani in Babylon: Volume I, The Battle of New York City,” a tape of the speeches of Sharpton and Lenora Fulani, a leader of the New Alliance Party.
We are the chosen people. Out of the pain. We that can’t even talk together. Have learned to walk together
.

“I’m no longer sure what I thought about Al Sharpton a year or two ago still applies,” Jerry Nachman, the editor of the
New York Post
, who had frequently criticized Sharpton, told Howard Kurtz of the
Washington Post
in September of 1990. “I spent a lot of time on the street. There’s a lot of anger, a lot of frustration. Rightly or wrongly, he may be articulating a great deal more of what typical attitudes are than some of us thought.” Wilbert Tatum, the editor and publisher of the
Amsterdam News
, tried to explain to Kurtz how, in his view, Sharpton had been cast as “a caricature of black leadership”:

He was fat. He wore jogging suits. He wore a medallion and gold chains. And the unforgivable of unforgivables, he had processed hair. The white media, perhaps not consciously, said, “We’re going to promote this guy because we can point up the ridiculousness and paucity of black leadership.” Al understood precisely what they were doing, precisely. Al is probably the most brilliant tactician this country has ever produced …

Whites often mentioned, as a clinching argument, that Sharpton paid his demonstrators to appear; the figure usually mentioned was five dollars (by November 1990, when Sharpton was fielding demonstrators to protest the killing of a black woman alleged to have grabbed a police nightstick in the aftermath of a domestic dispute, a police source quoted in the
Post
had jumped the payment to twenty dollars), but the figure floated by a prosecutor on the jogger case was four dollars. This seemed on many levels a misunderstanding, or an estrangement, or as blacks would say a disrespect, too deep to address, but on its simplest level it served to suggest what value was placed by whites on what they thought of as black time.

In the fall of 1990, the fourth and fifth of the six defendants in the Central Park attack, Kevin Richardson and Kharey Wise, went on trial. Since this particular narrative had achieved full resolution, or catharsis, with the conviction of the first three defendants, the city’s interest in the case had by then largely waned. Those “charlatans” who had sought to “exploit” the case had been whisked, until they could next prove useful, into the wings. Even the verdicts in this second trial, coinciding as they did with yet another arrest of John (“The Dapper Don”) Gotti, a reliable favorite on the New York stage, did not lead the local news. It was in fact the economy itself that had come center stage in the city’s new, and yet familiar, narrative work: a work in which the vital yet beleaguered city would or would not weather yet another “crisis” (the answer was a resounding yes); a work, or a dreamwork, that emphasized not only the cyclical nature of such “crises” but the regenerative power of the city’s “contrasts.” “With its migratory population, its diversity of cultures and institutions, and its vast resources of infrastructure, capital, and intellect, New York has been the quintessential modern city for more than a century, constantly reinventing itself,” Michael Stone concluded in his
New York
magazine cover story, “Hard Times.” “Though the process may be long and painful, there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen again.”

These were points commonly made in support of a narrative that tended, with its dramatic line of “crisis” and resolution, or recovery, only to further obscure the economic and historical groundwork for the situation in which the city found itself: that long unindictable conspiracy of criminal and semicriminal civic and commercial arrangements, deals, negotiations, gimmes and getmes, graft and grift, pipe, topsoil, concrete, garbage; the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a rabbi at the Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued and that’s the end of it. On November 12, 1990, in its page-one analysis of the city’s troubles, the
New York Times
went so far as to locate, in “public spending,” not the drain on the city’s vitality and resources it had historically been but “an important positive factor”:

Not in decades has so much money gone for public works in the area—airports, highways, bridges, sewers, subways and other projects. Roughly $12 billion will be spent in the metropolitan region in the current fiscal year. Such government outlays are a healthy counterforce to a 43 percent decline since 1987 in the value of new private construction, a decline related to the sharp drop in real estate prices…. While nearly every industry in the private sector has been reducing payrolls since spring, government hiring has risen, maintaining an annual growth rate of 20,000 people since 1987 …

That there might well be, in a city in which the proliferation of and increase in taxes were already driving private-sector payrolls out of town, hardly anyone left to tax for such public works and public-sector jobs was a point not too many people wished seriously to address: among the citizens of a New York come to grief on the sentimental stories told in defense of its own lazy criminality, the city’s inevitability remained the given, the heart, the first and last word on which all the stories rested. We love New York, the narrative promises, because it matches our energy level.