The Sacrifice (Oates novel)

On October 7, 1987, in Pascayne, New Jersey, a badly beaten young Black woman is discovered in the cellar of an abandoned factory. At the hospital, she is identified as Sybilla Frye, a 15-year-old girl who has been missing for the past several days. The hospital staff finds that feces has been smeared in her hair and racial slurs written in marker on her body. They note that, oddly, the slurs were written upside-down.

Sybilla's mother, Ednetta, arrives at the hospital and demands that they release Sybilla into her custody. She refuses to allow a rape kit to be administered to Sybilla, but concedes to a police interview on the condition that the police officer be a Black woman. Sybilla communicates to the officer, a young Puerto Rican woman named Ines Iglesias, that she was abducted, raped, and left for dead by a group of five or six white police officers. As Sybilla is largely uncommunicative and Ednetta is outright hostile to Iglesias, the interview ends quickly, and Ednetta insists on taking Sybilla home.

Ednetta takes Sybilla to Sybilla's grandmother's house to hide and refuses to tell the police where she is. She tries to conceal the attack from Anis Schutt, her common-law husband who has harbored a deep hatred of the police since they killed his brother, and she rebuffs the entreaties of neighbors and civil rights lawyers to pursue the case against the police.

A month after Sybilla was discovered, word of the alleged attack reaches the ears of Marus Mudrick, a Black preacher and prominent civil rights activist. Mudrick spots an opportunity to capitalize on the crime, and reaches out to Ednetta and Sybilla offering to represent them and publicize their case. Ednetta and her daughter are hesitant, but eventually given in to Mudrick's charm.

Mudrick and his brother Byron, a respectable lawyer with a milder temperament who somewhat resents Marus' success, quickly drum up outrage over the attack and the inaction of the Pascayne police. A rally that Mudrick convenes in Pascayne turns violent when Mudrick urges them to march on the city hall. In the ensuing chaos, Iglesias, who is attending the rally off-duty, is injured, loses her service weapon, and is subsequently reassigned to a different division as punishment.

In December, rookie police officer Jerold "Jere" Zahn kills himself after finding out that he has been let go from the force. Seizing on the news, Mudrick compels Sybilla to identify Zahn as one of her rapists. When the district attorney challenges the accusation, Mudrick accuses him of participating in the rape, too. Meanwhile, Mudrick has increasingly taken control of Ednetta and Sybilla's lives, moving them from their home and even confiscating a Rolex watch that Mike Tyson gave as a gift to Sybilla. At the height of the crusade, Mudrick is stabbed and nearly killed by an agent of one of his rivals, the militant leader of the Kingdom of Islam known as the Black Prince.

A few months later, Sybilla has joined the Kingdom of Islam and the Black Prince has taken up her cause. In a series of flashbacks, it is implied that Sybilla and Ednetta concocted the story of the gang rape after Anis beat her brutally. At a rally for Sybilla organized by the Black Prince in Pascayne, Anis is stopped by the police. After hesitating, Anis shoots two of them and is instantly killed by a barrage of return fire.

The novel closely follows the details of the Tawana Brawley case.[1] Like Sybille Frye in the novel, Brawley was discovered in a degraded state with feces smeared on her body and racist slurs written on her body. Brawley's mother was seeing a man who had killed his previous wife. She went on to accuse a prosecutor of participating in the crime, and her case was taken up by Al Sharpton (for whom Marus Mudrick stands-in in the novel[1]) and received national attention. Her claims were later found to be false by a grand jury.[2]

Some details of the novel differ from the Brawley case. Brawley lived in Wappingers Falls in upstate New York, while the novel takes place in the fictional town of Pascayne, New Jersey, based on Passaic.[3] There is no direct counterpart to Byron Mudrick, although Alton H. Maddox and C. Vernon Mason may have served as inspiration. The Kingdom of Islam and the Black Prince bear resemblance to the Nation of Islam and Louis Farrakhan, respectively, although both the Kingdom of Islam and the Nation of Islam exist in the novel's fictional universe.[4]

Writing in The New York Times, Roxane Gay offered measured praise for Oates' ambition but criticized the novel for its "lack of empathy" and "utter disregard for nuance", singling out inaccuracies in Oates' rendition of African American Vernacular English.[1] In a review for NPR, Alan Cheuse was more positive, calling the novel a "raw and earnest work of fiction [that] offers a mix of fiery drama and the cold bone truths of race as we all live it today."[3] Several reviewers noted the depiction of the Mudrick brothers as particularly compelling.[5][6]