Sunday, January 11, 2004
We Americans seem to want to make life into art. Real stories - even dramatic or tragic ones - frustrate and disappoint us. Real life tends to have loose ends and ambiguities, things that don't quite fit. Real people, even those thrust into the news, have imperfections. Real life is tough and confusing.
We find fiction -in books, movies or on TV - more satisfying, more comprehensible. We want the stars of our news, the real-life stories that unfold before us, to be clear cut. We want heroes, villains and victims, and we want to be able easily to tell the difference among them. We want a story to hold together, and we want it to be a great story, with every detail suitably terrible or wonderful.
Thus it was with Jessica Lynch, whose real story of survival and rescue quickly became transformed into a saga fit for Hollywood. Embellishments and distortions spiced it up. Lynch became some sort of petite, fair-haired symbol of tough, patriotic womanhood. When we learned more about her as a real, complex young woman, some people felt disillusioned. We preferred a made-for-TV, gun-toting angel. The Bush administration, needing a morale booster, might have helped with the fictionalization of Lynch, but we were all too eager to embrace the story.
And thus it is with Darryl Hunt. The real story of the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, and the botched investigation and years of bungling or worse that led to Hunt's spending 18 years in prison while the real rapist and murderer went free, is complicated, painful and rife with ambiguities.
As that story has been told and retold, discussed and debated, it has at times been neatened up and repackaged in a way that omits some of those ambiguities.
Those who have called the story of Darryl Hunt a latter-day version of To Kill a Mockingbird are wrong. Harper Lee's gripping novel of Southern racism is about a black man falsely accused of a crime committed by a white man; a black man was accused of beating and raping a white girl, but there was no rape, and it was the girl's father who beat her. How many men might have been involved in the attack on Sykes has been in dispute, but there has never been any doubt that the murderer was a black man. Such a comparison only fuels misunderstandings.
Whatever role racism might have played in the arrest, prosecution and convictions of Hunt, it was not as simple as blaming a black man for a white person's crime. The racism involved was much more subtle than that, and consequently much more difficult to combat. It is also racism that is harder for many white people to comprehend.
That's one of the reasons this case has been and continues to be so divisive.
Focusing on Hunt might have been wrong and the result of sloppy police work, but it wasn't racist, many white people will say.
Blacks are more likely to talk about how racism means that a black man is unlikely to get fair treatment in the white man's justice system. It is all too common for someone who is young, poor and black to get railroaded into prison, they will tell you.
White people remember O.J. Simpson and wonder aloud if those who have been crusading for Hunt's freedom would champion any black man arrested for Sykes' murder, even if they thought he was guilty.
Another convenient fiction that feeds the bitterness surrounding this case is the portrayal of the young Darryl Hunt as an innocent whom police had no reason to suspect. Bob Herbert, a syndicated columnist for The New York Times, wrote a scathing two-part account of what he sees as the racism in the Hunt case; it was reprinted on these pages last week. He described Hunt as "once a free-spirited youngster and now a soft-spoken, deeply religious man...."
The "now" part of Herbert's description is one of the remarkable parts of the real-life story of Hunt. He apparently used his years in prison to better himself so that he now appears poised to lead a law-abiding, productive life - something he was not doing at the time of his arrest.
The "once" part of Herbert's description too neatly glosses over the fact that when he was 19 and a suspect in the Sykes murder, Hunt was in and out of trouble with the law, living with a 14-year-old prostitute, frequenting drink houses and running with criminals. He was a part of, as the foreman of the jury that convicted him described it, "the underbelly of Winston-Salem." He was hardly just a "free-spirited youngster." Nor was he a hero by any stretch of the imagination.
If he is cleared of all involvement in Sykes' murder, Hunt will deserve at the very least sympathy, explanations, apologies and help with the new life he is building. The grace and forgiveness he has shown since his release have been admirable. But he has yet to do anything in life to make him warrant hero status.
Possibly the worst thing about our penchant for embellishing and repackaging real-life stories is that it's so unnecessary. Often, it even diminishes the reality. If evidence had proved that Darryl Hunt had been railroaded for something a white man did, there would be fewer people who continue to believe he was somehow involved. If Darryl Hunt at 19 had been just a "free-spirited youngster," he probably would never have been arrested, and if he had, convincing the courts and the public that he was innocent would have been easier.
But the American system is supposed to be about equal justice for everyone - even a poor, black teen-ager who has been in trouble before; even someone a lot of people in town believe is guilty. For far too long, it didn't work the way it should have for Darryl Hunt. But because of the efforts and perseverance of a lot of people, justice may be served at last in this case.
That's really a far better story than the ones some people have been trying to tell. Truth can be not just stranger than fiction, but also stronger than fiction.