Alice Sebold's 'If They Caught You," LUCKY #BlackMisandry

 

Anthony Broadwater

“If they caught you,

long enough for me

to see that face again,

maybe I would know

your name.

I could stop calling you 'the rapist',

and start calling you John or Luke or Paul.

I want to make my hatred large and whole.

If they found you, I could take

those solid red balls and slice them

separately off, as everyone watched.

I have already planned what I would do

for a pleasurable kill, a slow, soft, ending.

First,

I would kick hard and straight with a boot,

into you, stare while you shot quick and loose,

contents a bloody pink hue.

Next,

I would slice out your tongue,

You couldn't curse, or scream.

Only a face of pain would speak

for you, your thick ignorance through.

Thirdly,”

“Should I hack away those sweet

cow eyes with the glass blades you made

me lie down on? Or should I shoot, with a gun,

close into the knee; where they say

the cap shatters immediately?

I picture you now,

your fingers rubbing sleep from

those live blind eyes, while I rise restlessly.

I need the blood of your hide

on my hands. I want to kill you

with boots and guns and glass.

I want to fuck you with knives.

Come to me, Come to me,

Come die and lie, beside me.”

They were going to turn this into a movie.

The above poem is from Alice Sebold’s 1999 “memoir,” Lucky, which purportedly details her 1981 rape by a black male while she attended Syracuse University. Sebold’s biography was recently spotlighted after convicted rapist and registered sex offender Anthony Broadwater was exonerated for this crime. He’d already served a sixteen year sentence for sodomizing a White Woman while steadfastly maintaining his innocence.

Ironically, executive producer Timothy Mucciante was working on the film adaptation of Lucky and found Sebold's account fishy. He hired a private investigator, which cemented his belief that a black male was wrongfully caged. He’s now working with Broadwater to make a documentary about his experience of White Terrorism called Unlucky.

Many White-dominated outlets have discussed this case and the destruction wreaked on Broadwater’s life. The former U.S. Marine decided against having children because of his status as a “rapist.”

But there is no analysis of Sebold’s poem, which is smack in the middle of a book that boasts a million copies sold. And they were going to turn it into a film!

This poem - and Lucky in total - represents another dynamic of White Power: Individuals classified as White are allowed to be publicly, violently angry and vengeful. Whether the 2015 Mother Emanuel AME Victims of White Terrorism or Anthony Broadwater himself, black people are obligated to forgive and reconcile with Racist Woman and Racist Man. The book publishing industry - which is dominated by White Women - would not tolerate the publication of a manuscript where Dylann Storm Roof’s Victims talked about their fantasies of violent retribution against Whites.

But Lucky sold a million copies… And was about to made into a film.

Dr. Tommy J. Curry and Melissa K. Stein visited The C.O.W.S., and both talked about the willful erasure of White Women from the scene of Racist violence against black people. Both scholars dissected how White Women like Sebold were often present for lynchings and, sometimes, like Sebold’s poem, participated in the bloody carnage.

Sebold's poem is not the product of sublime imagination or literary genius. Sebold is writing the history of her White Supremacist ancestors. Every act of torture she hopes to carry out, has been executed against black males many times over.

She kicks off the poem with the most cliche act of White barbarism, hacking away “Negro” testicles. The similarly dubious accusations of Carolyn Bryant Donham cost 14-year-old Emmett Till his genitals and his life. Countless White Men have raped White Women, non-white females, and other males. You do not hear anyone talk about castrating Harvey Weinstein or Jerry Sandusky - both White Men are convicted sexual abusers.

After proving once again that Whites are the undisputed champions of genital mutilation, Sebold hopes to slice out the black male tongue. In 1944, White Supremacists lynched Rev. Isaac Simmons “so they could steal his land.” The White Terrorists “killed him brutally – shooting him three times and cutting out his tongue.”

Sebold talks incessantly about her White virginity and innocence throughout the text. All pretense of “White fragility” is lost when it’s time to pluck out “Negro” eyeballs. Like Broadwater, Isaac Woodard was a U.S. veteran. On the February 1946 evening he received an honorable discharge, a White South Carolina police chief beat him in the face until he was permanently blind. The History Channel states that Emmett Till also had both eyes gouged out.

It’s not surprising that Sebold includes that White Syracuse University security officers, when told that her alleged “Negro” rapist was in the vicinity, “were not as much university representatives that night as they were hunters with a fresh scent.” One of the White "hunters" uses his billy club on three random black males, even though Sebold writes, "It was wrong to hassle, and perhaps physically hurt, three innocent young black men on the street."

Animals, not people, are “hunted.” And black males are never presumed innocent.

Sebold’s father explicitly brands random black males “animals” following his daughter’s alleged rape. White men rape and rob the elderly in Sebold’s Lucky. They are not dehumanized, and no one speaks gleefully about carving their carcasses in retaliation for White wrongdoing.

The only priority and lone focus of the book is to reinforce the mythology of the black male rapist, the innocence and purity of White Women, and the necessity for White violence to keep the black male penis subdued.

If Sebold was raped by a White Man (or White Woman), there is no universe where an audience would be treated to her depraved fetish to “fuck” a White man with knives. Only the culture and System of White Supremacy craves and devours literature and movies that justify extraordinary (often, extralegal) violence against black males.

The final line, where Sebold beckons Broadwater to come “die and lie” with her, suggests a familiar component of necrophilia and sexualized violence against black people - black males especially. The fact that a million mostly White readers feasted on Lucky and the presumed guilt of Broadwater for nearly a quarter century without question or interrogation is evidence of the widespread belief in the black beast rapist and the White duty to violently subdue him/“it.”

Mr. Broadwater said he never read Lucky, which, thankfully, spared him from reading about the lynching a White Woman planned for him.