Wolfish, page 19
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The shepherd in Aesop’s fable is lucky. When he cries, someone runs. When he cries again, they run again. His fear is heard; his voice is too. For so long his lies are met with belief. Imagine another version of Little Red’s attack. In the woods or in her house. A wolf or a woodcutter. Her father’s old friend, a schoolteacher, an uncle. When the girl decides to speak up, or is finally able to speak up, her mother tells her to stop reading so many books. Her grandmother hugs and hushes her and tells her the worst things are best forgotten. Her father rages. How dare she suggest he did not protect his own daughter—as if he was not a man!
Little Red, that canonical victim, could so easily be cast as liar. The wolf she reports just evidence of her fantasy. Victimhood withheld; reputation tainted. The red cape now a symbol of the spark that has caught the grass and grown. In opening her mouth, Little Red would become dangerous. Not feared but hated. Someone who slanders the man who cuts the wood to keep the people warm. She just wants attention, the townspeople might say. She’s crying wolf.
When I think of “crying wolf,” I think of those whose lies are believed, but also of those who tell the truth and are thought to be lying. It would be nice if these people existed in two camps, but the former harms the cause of the latter, and they teeter-totter together. Both fates are tied up in audience. Sometimes “crying wolf” is less about the wolf or the crier than who it is cried to and how they respond.
“What is the value of proof?” writes Carmen Maria Machado in her memoir In the Dream House. “What does it mean for something to be true? If a tree falls in the woods and pins a wood thrush to the earth, and she shrieks and shrieks but no one hears her, did she make a sound? Did she suffer? Who’s to say?”
Every storyteller has an audience; every audience is a jury. I cannot look at those whose truths are doubted while ignoring the ones who disbelieve them, just as I cannot look at the liars without looking at those who choose to believe.
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A woman goes jogging alone in Central Park on a clear, moonlit night. The path is sparse of streetlights and shadowed with trees. It’s April 1989, just after nine p.m. The woman is white, twenty-eight years old, a financial advisor. She does this often, “relishing the solitude and a feeling of ownership,” feeling, as she will later write in her memoir, “indestructible, omnipotent.” Her headphones are on and it is thought unlikely she hears the man behind her as he brings the branch to the back of her head. She falls, bleeding. Though the attack is not at all like Candice’s, there is an eerie echo of choreography: each time, the lone jogger’s headphones hit the road as her body is dragged into the trees. When two passersby find her a few hours later, she has lost between seventy-five and eighty percent of her blood. At the hospital, she is given last rites, and her attack is treated as a probable homicide, later found to have included a rape as well. Twelve days later, her eyes blink open from the coma. She remembers nothing.
Two days after the attack, on April 21, the New York Daily News prints a cover story headlined “WOLF PACK’S PREY: Female Jogger Near Death After Savage Attack by Roving Gang.” These wolves, according to the lede, are “more than a dozen young teenagers … at the end of an escalating crime spree.” The next day, the headline reads: “Park Marauders Call It ‘Wilding’: And It’s Street Slang for Going Berserk.” “Going berserk,” that old shorthand for those ancient Norwegian warriors who draped themselves in wolf skins before they killed.
Deputies soon apprehended five boys: four Black and one Hispanic, all found in Central Park around the same time. I say boys because they were on the cusp of high school. They could not legally drink alcohol or vote. They were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. There was no DNA evidence to indict them, no witness evidence, just their bodies in the woods at a similar time, and, later, confessions now known to be essentially forced. At first they were given no legal representation, with some of their parents not even allowed in the rooms where they spoke, a baseline when apprehending anyone under sixteen. “Whose boys get to be boys?” wrote Claudia Rankine. The male students who surrounded me on my college campus, white T-shirts masking their heads with holes sliced for their eyes: they had been allowed to roam the night as a pack of boys.
“[One officer] told me the others admitted raping the woman and said I was there and that if I didn’t admit it, he couldn’t help me,” a police report quotes one of the Central Park Five as saying. “So I made up the story you see on the tape to satisfy them.” He lies because he is trapped, because he wants to save himself.
Two weeks later, then-real-estate-mogul Donald Trump paid $85,000 to buy full-page ads in four New York newspapers. The headline: “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE.” Beneath it, he wrote of a place where “roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods,” adding, “I want to hate these murderers and I always will. I am not looking to psychoanalyze them or understand them, I am looking to punish them.… How can our great society tolerate the continued brutalization of its citizens by crazed misfits?”
Eight years earlier, at the annual meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, President Ronald Reagan had evoked the idea of a superpredator, conjuring the image of someone “stark, staring … a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time—the face of a human predator.” A wolf mapped onto a man. In describing the political creation of the American victim, Rachel Monroe pinpoints a “radical ideological shift” in the 1980s and ’90s, where victims and criminals were sorted into two distinct categories of beings. There were no blurry lines, just those who were helpless and those who were irredeemably bad, a delineation often determined by racism, with zero-concession policies and a ramped-up carceral system seen as the only way to protect the former.
And the “wolf pack” who were accused, arrested, convicted, charged, jailed, and vilified? They were unilaterally exonerated in 2002 and paid $41 million for wrongful prosecution in 2014. The woman’s real attacker was outed by confession and confirmed by DNA, a serial rapist and murderer already incarcerated for killing another woman.
In both “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and the Central Park Five case, a canine predator is conjured—one by a shepherd, another by a newspaper—and made to be a threat. A chase ensues. In each case, the word “wolf” is a flare thrown to gather attention. There are no real wolves. With the Central Park Five, one lie told is that the boys are guilty and bloodthirsty criminals. Another says they are a wolf pack, and that a wolf pack equals rape and murder. Neither is true. The press, politicians, cops, and courts indicted the Central Park Five as if they had been caught red-handed, when in fact the boys were framed through bias. Did all who cried wolf that spring know they were lying about the boys’ involvement? It seems unlikely. I imagine many just failed to recognize that the stories they had so long been told—about who would be a “predator,” and what that even meant—were askew. You cannot trust a “gut impulse” if it rings from a system wired with prejudice. Ignorance of the wiring, of course, is no excuse. When those with institutional power cry wolf, the accusation becomes a bigger comet. The claim of “wolf” blazes longer, moving farther and faster. In the folktale, the shepherd is punished for his lie, but in the case of the Central Park Five, the victims and those who look like them suffer far more. Those who lie barely take a hit.
A year before I went to the self-defense class, Vibe, a music-and-entertainment publication owned by Billboard and aimed at millennial hip-hop fans, featured a year-end slideshow of “The Women Who Cried Wolf in 2016.” The introduction cited the wrongful accusation, and subsequent lynching, of Emmett Till. All the women in the slideshow were white, those often presumed to be telling the truth by both police and a majority-white public. One slide told the story of a twenty-five-year-old Michigan mother who testified that she was forced into a car trunk by four Black men. She claimed to be held for days, beaten and raped, and she sent photos to her boyfriend as part of a supposed ransom: her own body bound and gagged, her head bloody. A few days later, she confessed to fabricating it all. She gave no motive. The price of her lie? A year in jail and a $1,158 fine.
“Much of social programming is an education in fear,” wrote Alice Bolin in Dead Girls, an essay collection that investigates the title trope. The white woman who cries wolf is not innocent, but neither has she acted alone. She, like her audience, has absorbed the fears she has been taught, fears handed down to her through centuries, often articulated to consolidate white power. Up until the mid-nineteenth century, white people used the term “Black Peril” to describe the specter of Black male desire for white women, a fear acknowledged as being so wildly disproportionate to real threat that it is now considered a form of psychopathology.
To feel you are under threat when you are safe can be to tell a lie. To believe so fully in one’s own victimhood that you do not realize you are lying is no excuse. Ignorance in white women is often read as innocence, but as Afro-Surinamese Dutch scholar Gloria Wekker writes in her book White Innocence: “The claim of innocence is a double-edged sword: it contains not-knowing, but also not wanting to know.” Of choosing to look away from the truth, or from the tunnel one must travel to get there.
I once envied the techniques behind a good lie—the flair, courage, spunk—more than the skills required to unearth something true. I now see the bravery in trying. Not just in digging for the truth but owning what you find there.
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Why do we lie? A liar knows the truth, weaves an alternate possibility, and sells their new version of reality to the world. This takes a certain gall. “Lying is related to intelligence,” explains Dr. Victoria Talwar, one of the world’s leading experts on children’s lying behavior, to science journalists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman in their book NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. They chronicle an experiment Talwar and her team of researchers did where they read either “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or “George Washington and the Cherry Tree” to young students. The latter is rooted in the myth of a young Washington damaging his father’s beloved cherry tree with a new hatchet. When his father confronts him, asking if he knows who has cut the tree’s bark, Washington breaks down with confession on the spot.
All the kids who heard the George Washington tale in Talwar’s study subsequently lied less in tests (boys by seventy-five percent, girls by fifty percent), but those who read “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” lied more. Why? In the version Talwar read, the boy and his sheep both end up dead, fluff and blood along the hillside. There is no reward. George Washington, in contrast, has tasted the frosting of his father’s praise. “Glad am I, George, that you killed my tree; for you have paid me for it a thousand fold. Such an act of heroism in my son, is more worth than a thousand trees…” his father says in one version of the anecdote, detailed in a Washington biography in 1809. Perfection does not make the boy a hero, but truth does. Admiration, the researchers found, was a better motivator than fear. In the absence of validation—or the absence of its prospect—kids will lie to stay afloat. “Lying,” concluded Talwar, “is a symptom.”
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The summer OR-7 became the only known gray wolf in California since 1924, the land around him began to burn. This was not uncommon—by August there was often lightning, dryness, low humidity, wind—but the scale of those 2012 fires was unprecedented, and a harbinger of what would come. That year the amount of ground burned in the United States broke a record: 7.72 million acres, an area about the size of Massachusetts plus Connecticut. Though animals have long existed beside wildfires, scientists are now studying how heightened burn patterns affect wolf populations. Researchers in Portugal have found that in burned areas with limited refuge, wolves have become more vulnerable to human persecution.
But that comes later. First there was OR-7, his collar showing him walking extremely close to the Chips Fire, a blaze that began in a steep canyon in the remote, rugged northern Sierra Nevada. What was the calculus that played out in the wolf’s head as he entered the smoke? His fur would have been good insulation, providing armor against the heat. Unlike small mammals, whose bodies heat up quickly, his bulk would have bought him extra time. Biologists speculated he approached the fire because he was looking for prey.
At first the possibility surprised me. I had sold him short, never imagining he could be so opportunistic. How smart to wait in the smoke for prey who thinks she has escaped. How brave to flirt with flame. I now wonder if the wolf’s bravery was not choice, as I know it, but body instinct. A sign of how hungry and desperate he might have been. A body will move toward danger if it feels like the best way to stay alive. True with fires, but also, perhaps, with lies.
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In her international 1997 bestseller Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, Monique “Misha” Defonseca compares her Jewish identity to that of Canis lupus. “I was like the wolves, a hunted animal, one that would be killed on sight,” Defonseca writes. Her story begins when she is a young Jewish girl living in Brussels, sent to live undercover with a Christian family after her own parents are taken to Auschwitz. Defonseca knows only her parents have gone east, so one day the six-year-old sets out to find them. Cutting her hair to try to look like a boy, she punches a hole in a loaf of bread and strings it around her neck, brings a compass embedded in a cowrie shell, and tucks a knife into her jacket. Thus begins her journey on foot across Belgium, then Germany, then Poland.
One day, stumbling famished into a shady glen, Defonseca lets out a howl, “a long involuntary cry of distress.” While she sits on the ground, cradling her head in her arms, a female wolf appears. Through the coming days their paths zigzag until they eventually overlap. Soon the wolf lets Defonseca sleep back-to-back in hollowed ground with her, nudging raw meat in her direction. When a male wolf appears, the child becomes their surrogate pup, rolling onto her back to welcome them home from the hunt, and naming the female Rita after her own grandmother. When Rita is shot and killed by a hunter, a devastated Misha batters him with a metal pipe, tossing his rifle in a well as she travels once again east. Stumbling into another cluster of wolf pups in Ukraine, she finds another ad hoc home. Her trek has been unimaginably cruel, and life with the animals is a relief. “Transformed by injustice, I was reborn in a form I understood and respected,” she wrote. “No longer human, I became in my heart an animal, a wolf.”
Eventually World War II passes, and Misha traverses back across Ukraine, Romania, and Italy to Belgium. Defonseca will never see her parents again. The memoir ends with a flash forward into her move to Boston, forty years later, accompanied by her husband, son, and a menagerie of pets. Though Defonseca’s first name was Monique—from monos, she notes, the Greek word for “alone”—she went by “Misha” in America. Her family bought a house in the suburbs and joined a conservative synagogue, where Defonseca identified herself as a survivor, and where, when a few years later, a rabbi asked her about her past, she said she had been “saved by animals.” When Holocaust Remembrance Day came, the rabbi invited Defonseca to ascend to the platform where the Torah was read to bear public witness. Defonseca agreed, requesting that one of the six memorial candles be devoted to animals. Her gesture warmed the congregation. Locally, she gave talks about her wartime past.
Photographs show Defonseca with a deep tan, hair the color of September straw, and blue eyes stalked by a swash of aquamarine eyeshadow. When she met Jane Daniel, a Newton mother who had launched the publishing imprint Mt. Ivy Press out of her house, Defonseca said she had no plans for a memoir. But Daniel was hooked on the commercial glitter of the saved-by-wolves lore, and after repeated visits, she managed to sell Defonseca on the idea too.
When Misha came out in 1997, the memoir was blurbed by Elie Wiesel, who called it “very moving.” Working with a Boston literary agency, the independent press sold a film option to Disney and foreign rights to several countries, including a reported six-figure deal for a German translation. In America, the book sold some 5,000 copies, but in France, where it was titled Survivre avec les Loups, it sold over 30,000; in Italy, over 37,000. “Her statement that the Nazis killed like humans not animals was so profound and true,” wrote one Amazon reviewer the year it was published. “Animals would never kill in masses as the Nazis did.” “Will be read and reread in 1,000 years,” wrote someone else.
Even before publication, the memoir raised doubts. Before its release, Daniel typed a wary note on the Mt. Ivy website. “Is Misha’s story fact or invention? Without hard evidence one way or the other, questions will always remain,” she wrote, after listing all the reasons why she held faith. Interviewed for the Boston Globe a few years after publication, she said, “I have no idea whether it is true or not. My experience is that all Holocaust stories are far-fetched. All survivor stories are miracles.” At the end of the piece, the Globe reporter weighed in with his own belief. “Misha Defonseca makes a compelling impression, and does not sound like an untruthful person,” he wrote. When he asked Defonseca why she thought people were voicing skepticism about her story, she told him it was because her survival story featured animals. “People are afraid of animals,” she said.
In the prologue to Misha, Defonseca herself addresses the question of belief. “Who can believe that so many could become killers without a conscience and so many, victims without a protest? Who can believe the Holocaust?” she writes. “And yet it happened. I believe, because I am a witness.”
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In detailing the clinical phenomenon of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf Effect,” Psychology Today notes that in real life, “shepherds” are “mostly women” who “aren’t acting out of boredom.” Instead, these “damsels in distress are very often motivated by an intense desire for attention and may feel unfairly neglected by those close to them, often romantic partners. Others are simply crying out to a world they feel ignores them.”
