In an October 12 article the Kansas City Star uncovered new details about the public prosecutor who failed to press charges in the case of a 14-year-old Maryville girl who was raped at a party and then left unconscious on her lawn in sub-freezing weather. Bad though this was, the crime was compounded when the town turned on the family rather than on the perpetrator, finally driving them out of town. As a final straw, someone then burned down their house. A recent article in The Washington Monthly uses Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery to understand the entire episode.
First of all, here is the Star’s summary of what happened:
Few dispute the basic facts of what happened in the early morning hours of Jan. 8, 2012: A high school senior had sex with Coleman’s 14-year-old daughter, another boy did the same with her daughter’s 13-year-old friend, and a third student video-recorded one of the bedding scenes. Interviews and evidence initially supported the felony and misdemeanor charges that followed.
Yet, two months later, the Nodaway County prosecutor dropped the felony cases against the youths, one the grandson of a longtime area political figure.
The incident sparked outrage in the community, though the worst of it was directed not at the accused perpetrators but at a victim and her family. In the months that followed, Coleman lost her job, and her children were routinely harassed. When it became too much, they left, retreating east to Albany.
An article in The New Republic meditated on how small towns do not live up to the idyllic vision we have of them, which in turn prompted Kathleen Geier to invoke Jackson’s short story in her Washington Monthly post:
[I]t’s all but compulsory for reporters writing about small town life to glop on the pious cliches about the honest, pure-hearted folk who allegedly populate these places, with their supposedly unwavering fidelity to family values, tradition, and the simpler things in life. These sepia-toned journalistic portraits of small-town life can be so treacly they run the risk of sending you into a diabetic coma.
But in reality, small towns are no simpler than anywhere else. And as anyone who grew up in such a place can tell you, small towns have their dark side. They can be vicious, bigoted, hateful places, and every bit as corrupt as cities. There’s a reason why Shirley Jackson set her chilling short story “The Lottery” in a small town. The town in the story was based on the place she was living in at the time; she and her family experienced ugly acts of ostracism and anti-Semitism there.
You probably know the story—one of the most controversial ever published by The New Yorker—in which a small town every year engages in a scapegoat execution to cleanse itself of its sins. The story begins in bucolic bliss and ends in horror. Here’s the opening paragraph:
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2nd. But in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.
And here’s the horrific conclusion:
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head. Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
Yesterday I wrote about how race hatred for the president was proving to be a unifying sentiment for people seeking a target for their fears and frustrations in 21st century America. I suspect something similar occurred in Maryville. Perhaps people felt fear and shock over how teens were behaving. Their fury may stem in part from their feeling of impotence in the face of such behavior.
Easier to blame the victim than to grapple seriously with the problem.
