The Sacrifice by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

“statement”—when she was well enough . . . Mrs. Frye said indignantly That girl aint gon be “well enough” for a long time so you just let her alone right now. I’m warnin you—let my baby an me alone, we gon home right now or I’m gon sue this hospital an every one of you for kidnap and false imprisonment.
    But finally Mrs. Frye relented, saying she would allow Sybilla to talk to a cop— One of her own kind, and a woman—if you have one in that Pas’cyne PD.

The Interview
    I t was not an ideal interview. It did not last beyond twenty stammered minutes.
    It would be the most frustrating interview of her career as a police officer.
    She’d been bluntly told that a black girl beaten and (possibly) gang-raped had requested a black woman police officer to interview her at the St. Anne’s ER.
    Getting the summons at her desk in the precinct station late Sunday morning she’d said, D’you think I’m black enough, sir?—in such a droll-rueful way her commanding officer couldn’t take offense.
    She couldn’t take offense, she understood the circumstances.
    She was not minority hiring. She didn’t think so.
    She’d been on the Pascayne police force for eleven years. She had a degree from Passaic State College and extra credits in criminology and statistics as well as her police training at the New Jersey Academy.She was thirty-six years old, recently promoted to detective in the Pascayne PD.
    As a newly promoted detective she worked with an older detective on most cases. This would be an exception.
    Iglesias did not check black when filling out appropriate official forms. Iglesias did not think of herself as a person of color though she acknowledged, seeing herself in reflective surfaces beside those colleagues of hers who were white , that she might’ve been, to the superficial eye, a light-skinned Hispanic.
    Her (Puerto Rican–American) mother wasn’t her biological mother. Her (African-American) father wasn’t her biological father. Where they’d adopted her, a Catholic agency in Newark, there was a preponderance of African-American babies, many “crack” and “HIV” babies, and Iglesias did not associate herself with these, either. Her (adoptive) grandparents were a mix of skin-colors, a mix of racial identities—Puerto Rican, Creole, Hispanic, Asian, African-American and “Caucasian.” There was invariably a claim of Native-American blood—a distant strain of Lenape Indians, on Iglesias’s father’s side. The Iglesias family owned property in the northeast sector of Pascayne adjacent to the old, predominantly white sector called Forest Park; they owned rental properties and several small stores as well as their own homes. It was not uncommon for a young person in Iglesias’s family to go to college—Rutgers-Newark, Rutgers–New Brunswick, Bloomfield College, Passaic State. The most talented so far had had a full-tuition scholarship from Princeton. They did not think of themselves and were not generally thought of as black.
    Iglesias did not take offense, being so summoned to St. Anne’s ER. Something in her blood was stirred, like flapping flags in some high-pitched place, by the possibility of being in a position unique to her.
    For racism is an evil except when it benefits us.
    She liked to think of being a police officer as an opportunity forservice. If not doing actual good, preventing worse from happening. If being a light-skinned female Hispanic helped in that effort, Ines Iglesias could not take offense and would not take offense except at the very periphery of her swiftly-calculating brain where dwelt the darting and swooping bats of old hurts, old resentments, old violations and old insults inflicted upon her haphazardly and for the most part unconsciously by white men, black men, brown-skinned men— men .
    With excitement and apprehension Sergeant Iglesias drove to St. Anne’s Hospital. The emergency entrance was at the side of the five-story building.
    This was not a