Scott Stern’s disturbing legal history “There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas” takes its name from Maya Angelou’s poem “My Arkansas,” found in her third volume of poetry “And Still I Rise” (1978):
There is a deep brooding
In Arkansas
Old crimes like moss pend
From poplar trees.
The sullen earth
Is much too
Red for comfort
“There Is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas” is ambitious. The book misses its mark in many ways but, where it succeeds, it succeeds so magnificently that a watershed work results, demanding widespread attention:
Stern emphasizes that rape has been used to intimidate women and keep them in their place in much the same way that lynching was used to intimidate people of color and keep them in their place.
Whether or not one agrees with Stern, his suggestions shall receive increasing discussion in the fullness of time, confronted in conversation for years to come.
Beyond the core question of how the violation which is rape has been used to intimidate women, the outcome of rape prosecutions has been predictable. Defendants who were poor, black, or both were likely to be convicted. Defendants who were well-to-do, white, or both were likely to be exonerated.
Stern’s analysis raises troubling questions about the rule of law in the United States: Is ours a government of men, not laws? If the who, not the what, decides one’s fate, there might be need to reconsider the criminal justice system, at least popular perception of how it operates.
Assumptions embedded in the underlying narratives about rape are antediluvian. They predate Sigmund Freud’s pioneering insights into human sexuality and subsequent studies conducted by Alfred Kinsey and William Masters and Virginia Johnson, among others.
Stern indicates that rape trials followed a repetitive choreography, a predictable script: Victims of rape were defamed as promiscuous, prone to the sexual activity to which they took exception, inviting the acts for which defendants were prosecuted.
It is difficult to fathom the situation in which rape victims find themselves: A rape victim is subjected to physical violation and then experiences psychological trauma, being branded as unchaste; damaged goods.
Society would advance admirably if men and women alike would demand zero tolerance for rape; catalyzing a conclusion like lynching’s effective end after Mack Charles Parker was abducted from his Pearl River County Courthouse jail cell, in Poplarville, shortly after midnight, on Saturday April 25, 1959. (Howard Smead’s “Blood Justice: The Lynching of Mack Charles Parker” [1986] provides the best history of the episode to date.)
Stern’s study will interest women, attorneys, individuals interested in racial justice, and anyone concerned with contemporary corruption of the rule of law. Neither the United States nor the world can advance adequately until violence against women is extinguished and misogyny is extricated from our midst.
Belle Kinney’s Monument to the Women of the Confederacy, erected by the United Confederate Veterans on the south side of the Mississippi State Capitol in 1917, recognizes our daughters, our mothers, our sisters and our wives, a female in any one of those four categories could become a rape victim. Rape must stop.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider
