A child's lie splits black and white America

More than 10 years ago, a young black girl in a quiet town in the Hudson Valley, upstate New York, made up an excuse. Coming up to the Thanksgiving holiday, she had skipped school. She went missing for five days. She stayed out late at night. She was afraid to go home. The man who lived with her mother, Ralph King, had warned her against such misbehaviour and she had good reason to be scared of him. He had served seven years for killing his wife. He had a long history of violence and mental instability. He and the girl's mother had beaten her severely for previous misdeeds.

This time, even her mother was so scared of what King might do that she helped the girl make up a cover story. Even now, over a decade later, that story is still running in the headlines.

The excuse was an elaborate and rather extreme hoax. With her mother's help, the girl, a 15year-old called Tawana Brawley, wrote racist slogans - "Nigger" and "KKK" - on her body. She made burn marks on her clothes. She stuffed wads of cotton in her ears and nose to protect herself from infection and got into a rubbish bag smeared with excrement. When she was found, an ambulance was called. She was taken to hospital. A criminal investigation began.

At first, she said nothing. Then, gradually, in scribbled notes or, in laconic answers to questions from her family and from the police, she began to suggest that she had been abducted, raped and abused by a gang of white men. That story gradually hardened into an allegation that her attackers were law enforcement officers.

There was no supporting evidence for this story and a great deal to suggest that it was fabricated. Medical examinations showed that she had not been raped or injured in any way. Some neighbours had seen her jumping into the rubbish bag. Though her clothes were burned, her skin was not. Her story was full of gaps and internal contradictions, but in the charged atmosphere of black-white relations in America, the whole thing spun wildly out of control. A frightened child's lie came, by accident, to dramatise a greater truth about racism and the law. The problem with Tawana Brawley's hoax was that it was more than a mere desperate concoction. It was a fable. If you had put it in a novel or a film, it would have seemed starkly truthful, not a literal description of something that actually happened, but an accurate, unflinching image of the kind of thing that really goes on in America.

The police and the legal system were and are rife with racism. Many black women and girls had been the objects of sexual contempt on the part of white men. Millions of insults and injuries, both petty and gross, seemed, for the black community to be summed up in this girl's story of being abducted, violated, discarded and dumped by a system that held them cheap.

So the girl's small shift in the surface of reality became an avalanche. One of the main television networks, NBC, interviewed Tawana and her family. Bill Cosby, the best-known and most beloved black man in America, put up a reward for the capture of her attackers. The leader of the Black Muslims, Louis Farrakhan, took up her cause, warning whites that, "You will not do to another black girl in America what you did to Tawana Brawley and get away with it!"

The boxer, Mike Tyson, himself later convicted of rape, arrived at the Brawley home with his egregious promoter, Don King, and his movie-star wife, Robin Givens. He gave Tawana his diamond-studded gold Rolex watch, worth $35,000, and promised to pay for her college education.

Of course it all spilled over into politics with such enduring force that it still hangs over the career of the most important black politician in New York, the Rev Al Sharpton. A man of genuine charisma, Sharpton caused a political sensation last year when, without money or media attention, he very nearly forced a run-off in the Democratic Party primary for mayor of New York.

He is an extraordinary figure, easily the most interesting politician in the city. He grew up poor and fatherless in Brooklyn, but gave his first sermon at the Washington Temple Church of God in Christ when he was four years old. He became the protege of the black preacher and politician, Adam Clayton Powell. At 15, he was running a huge campaign against businesses in New York which did not hire black workers. He became almost a surrogate son to the soul singer, James Brown, who took him under his wing.

Sharpton copied Brown's big hair, flashy medallions and flamboyant style, turning himself in to a weird but heady cocktail of religious leader, political agitator and Soul Man. Inevitably, he got involved in the Tawana Brawley story, becoming the family's unofficial adviser and spokesman. As the story spiralled into the outer reaches of mania, he became party to a direct accusation that Steven Pagones, the assistant district attorney for the county and a neighbour of the Brawleys, was one of the attackers. Pagones, in turn, began a defamation suit against Sharpton and two black lawyers, demanding $800 million in damages. Last week, after a wild, nasty trial that went on for months, he finally won his case, though hearings on the amount of damages continue.

TO ANY objective observer, it is clear that Pagones was grossly traduced and that the allegations against him were rooted in a crazy concoction. A grand jury investigation of the case concluded in 1988 with a 176page report based on testimony from 180 witness and on 250 physical exhibits. It found no indication of any sexual assault on Tawana Brawley. To many black people, however, the story has too much power and carries too much symbolic weight to be simply abandoned in the face of all the evidence. Al Sharpton, in particular, invested too much in it to admit that he was wrong and to apologise.

And so this mad tale rumbles on. As I write, there is talk of Tawana Brawley giving evidence at the hearings on damages in the Pagones trial. Since she failed to appear at the trial itself and since she has always avoided any rigorous cross-examination of her story, this seems unlikely, but even if she does appear, she will only give new life to a sad, mad episode.

No one wants to ask the most important question: what's wrong with a society when a story that a kid makes up to avoid a beating becomes a 10-year psychodrama? To comfortable whites, the episode is useful as confirmation that charges of racism are wild inventions. To militant blacks, it serves to show that the system is so rotten that the most vicious abuse of a black girl gets covered up. To supporters and opponents of Al Sharpton, who is still intent on becoming mayor of New York, it proves that he is (a) a fearless man who fights The Power or (b) a mendacious opportunist who sacrificed the truth for temporary advantage.

The more credible stories - that blacks had good reasons to believe Tawana Brawley's lies and that the mendacious Sharpton is the best they have in the way of political leadership - are just too complicated to be worth telling.

Fintan O'Toole is temporarily based in New York