The wrenching reaction to the Susan Smith case makes no sense, this perception of her as victim, America’s Victim, a lost and sad soul whose crime, torturing her two children to death by drowning, can be explained away, or perhaps even excused.
I am more than mystified. I am outraged. When I bring it up to friends and acquaintances, they think I am overreacting, as if I am the one whose moral center is out of whack. Where is my compassion? Can’t you see that the woman was crazy? Can’t you see that if you were subjected to divorce, sexual abuse and a Dear John letter from the town stud, you would probably drown your kids too?
I have looked for a dry-eyed explanation that isn’t wrapped up in the mint juleps and magnolia of the small-town South, or in the pseudopsychology that passes for real insight. In Time magazine, the headline above a column by Barbara Ehrenreich reads, “Susan Smith: Corrupted by Love?”
“None of this is to excuse Susan Smith’s crime,” she writes in the last paragraph, but of course, everything in the column that comes before does exactly that and we find, in Ehrenreich’s view, that Susan Smith “was an extremist in the cause of love and her sons, horribly enough, were human sacrifices to it.”
I would characterize Susan Smith as an extremist in the cause of death.
The Washington Post ran a story by Tamara Jones in the aftermath of the jury’s decision not to give Susan Smith the death penalty. It is about the secrets of the town where Susan Smith lived, Union, S.C., secrets about suicide and sex and sexual molestation. The implication of the article is that things like this just don’t happen in small American towns, which of course is ridiculous.
Paragraph after paragraph depicts souls in agony and conflict, every line dripping with a touch of sadness as subtle as the fetid smell of dead flowers. Patron saint of Southern atmosphere Faulkner gets thrown in there of course. So does Norman Rockwell. “The effect is like pentimento on a Norman Rockwell canvas,” she writes.
From what state of consciousness did Jones write this piece?
It is only when I study the face of Susan Smith that I find the explanation for why this case has been perceived the way that it has.
I see the clumps of hair falling below the jaw line with such studied blandness that I wonder if it is the work of a local hairdresser. I see the sweet and dopey face straight out of Mayberry, the kind of girl Don Knotts would spend an episode or two trying to marry. I see the glasses that always look like they are about to become crooked or fall off the face altogether. I see that faraway glance, as if she truly wishes she were dead.
When I look at Susan Smith I see an image as carefully constructed as the same one that went on national television with tears pouring out of her eyes claiming that not just a man, but a black man, had kidnapped her precious children. In this case I see the carefully constructed image of not just a pitiful woman, but a pitiful white woman.
The shameful and tragic secrets of the Susan Smith case have nothing to do with corrupted love or pentimento on Norman Rockwell or sexual abuse or the tranquility of a small town splintered apart by secrets. It has to do with perception, and more precisely racial perceptions and the circumstances under which we grant compassion and understanding.
These are blunt questions, but I challenge anyone to stare in the mirror and ask them:
Would there be the same outpouring of sympathy for Susan Smith if, instead of being a 23-year-old white woman from the sleepy South, she was a 23-year-old inner-city black woman from the South Side of Chicago or Harlem or North Philadelphia? Would we be as willing to accept the conflicted story of her life as some kind of explanation for what she did? Would Newsweek still be calling it “a story of heart-breaking human loss”?
It is true that Susan Smith did not walk away scot-free. She is serving life in prison, and given the way in which the death penalty in this country is meted out with no objective criteria, I am not advocating that Susan Smith should have received the death penalty. But I am also convinced that if Susan Smith had not been a rural Southern white with that look of dopey sadness, but a black from the inner city, the result would have been the death penalty.
We can dance along the edges of this, or we can be honest about it: When a rural white commits a horrible crime such as this, it’s perceived as a tragic aberration for which there must be some external reason-sexual abuse, suicide, rejection, the overwhelming weight of a bad life.
When an urban black commits a horrible crime such as this, it’s perceived as a self-fulfilling prophecy for which there cannot be any external reason other than irresponsibility, self-loathing or a penchant for violence.
As a society, we have clearly grown weary of the inner city and the people who occupy it. The compassion of the Great Society days of the 1960s has given way to the view that the real problem with welfare mothers is that they don’t do a damn thing to better themselves. We have little sympathy for their lives, and no sympathy when a horrible act of violence is committed against a child. When explanations are proffered-the despair of poverty, loneliness, the absenteeism of fathers, despair over the future, drug addiction, self-hatred-our eyes glaze over, we’ve heard all this junk before.
If we feel anything, it is outrage against the perpetrator, and given the fact that nothing in life is more hideous and unspeakable than a cruel act of violence against a child, it is hard to argue against such outrage.
But along comes Susan Smith, and suddenly the whole tone and perception changes. We somehow forget the fact that after drowning 14-month-old Alex and 3-year-old Michael in the John D. Long Lake, she didn’t come clean and admit to the crime, but duped an entire nation for nine days in a carefully constructed and racist story in which she blamed their disappearance on a black carjacker.
We listened with rapt attention and apology to the depressing story of Smith’s life as it unfolded at her trial. We listened to her stepfather admit to sexually molesting her since she had been 15. We listened to an ex-lover’s admission that he broke off the relationship shortly before the murders because, among other reasons, he wasn’t ready to be a father. We bought it all, so that at the end, Smith wasn’t thought of at all in terms of what she did-a woman who had tortured her two children to death-but, as Newsweek called her, “both perpetrator and victim.”
If a black woman from the inner-city had told such a story, the jury, in the privacy of their deliberations, would have yawned and asked the bailiff for a television set so they could catch the latest on the O.J. trial. If she had claimed molestation since the age of 15, they would have shrugged and wondered if the molestation was really that bad, how come charges weren’t filed with the police. If she had told the story about being jilted by the ex-lover as an explanation for what happened, they would have laughed.
Given the way the media works, clinging to superficial symbols the way barnacles cling to buoys, it is easy to see what happened. The fatal killing of children in the inner city is an old and tired tale. But with Susan Smith the tale took on a whole new twist.
There was a tragedy in what happened in the Susan Smith case, but it had nothing to do with her. It had to do with those two little boys, who in the media’s attempts to see who could do the worst spiritual reincarnation of Yoknapatawpha County, were reduced to the size of pencil points. They were the only victims, not their deranged and manipulative mother.
Think of those little boys as they ate pizza for dinner on that October night in 1994. Think of the softness of their cheeks and the expressiveness of their eyes. Think of the sweet gurgle of their voices. Now listen to the click of the seat belts around the carseats that became their straitjackets. See the maroon Mazda Protege roll into the lake and take six minutes to disappear. Watch their tiny fists press so desperately against the window as the reddish-brown water filled their lungs. Hear the screams that no one else, except those two little boys, ever heard.
Listen to that sound for as long as you can. Let it rattle around inside you. Don’t let go of it until you have to, and maybe then you will understand that Susan Smith wasn’t a victim, or “an extremist in the cause of love,” but a natural-born killer.
