Death and the Maiden
When I heard Kobe Bryant had died, after a wave of sadness for the lives lost, and for his family, my thoughts, selfishly, went to my sons. Both play basketball, both regularly use the adjective “Kobe!” when they make a halfway decent shot. Their white boy hoop dreams are nothing but fantasy fodder, but they, like so many, admire the lofty heights Bryant achieved, both on and off the court.
The next place my thoughts went was much darker. All the way back to 2003 and the rape charges Bryant faced. 2003 was a long time ago. It was before he became an outspoken advocate for Black Lives. It was before he became a supporter of women athletes and the WNBA. It was before my own sons were born, before his own daughter Gianna, who perished with him, was.
As I watched my own children grow to love the sport and admire the icon, I held onto that piece of information from 2003.
I never told them about that part his story.
****
I could lie and say the rape charges slipped my mind. More likely of course is this: I wasn’t strong enough to bear the eye rolls. I wasn’t strong enough to listen to the chorus of “but”. I wasn’t strong enough to deal with the never-ending parsing of nuance or the constant weighing of good and bad and all the things which lay in between. I didn’t want to face the responsibility for those decisions. I wasn’t strong enough to face my children, to whom the world is cut evenly into hemispheres of right and wrong, having to choose.
I wasn’t strong enough to face the idea that they might choose to ignore the information, to decide it was no big deal after all.
I feel a deep shame at that betrayal — because of course it IS a betrayal: of my ideals, my own rhetoric, of victims, of women. And it a shame steeped in privilege. My ability to forget, erase, excuse, or otherwise bury — is privilege. My erasure of HER in order to avoid my own discomfort, wading through difficult conversations, or just the head against the wall repetitiveness of talking about consent and rape? That’s wrong.
It’s wrong.
****
The Egyptian God Anubis was responsible for weighing the hearts of men at death. The God Thoth recorded the measurement and Ammut, the crocodile God, decided if the dead had passed the test.
The test, named after the Goddess Maat, was based on a jumble of abstracts: truth, harmony, law, morality, and justice.
A trio of male Gods deciding the fate of men based on the concepts of women. The irony is almost too heavy to bear at times.
****
There is no denying Bryant was a giant. The accolades are not lies. He was an inspiration, an incredible athlete who pushed his body and his talent upward and outward. By all accounts he was a tremendous father. By other accounts he was a man who learned from his mistakes, who grew, and who, as he matured, strove to do right.
He was also, if you believe the women who came forward, a rapist.
I do.
And so the two must co-exist. We can’t forget one because it is inconvenient to reconcile the two. It is messy. It is complex.
Just like humans. Just like life.
****
How did Ammut decide?
How much good outweighs the bad?
Do we measure in deeds? In lives? Do we measure in minutes? Does a five minute rape negate a lifetime of achievements?
But of course it’s not just twenty minutes of action, as was famously uttered in the case of Brock Turner. Those minutes spiral outward. They become hours and then days. They become a weight which a victim carries with them throughout their own lives, affecting not just them, but everyone they meet, radiating upward and outward.
It’s messy.
For many in the black community, Bryant was a literal and figurative giant, standing above the rest. As a white woman, wading into that to pick through my own feelings is nothing short of a fucking mess. And yet, when white women were silent in their support of the victims of R. Kelley, afraid of shifting out of their lane too far, afraid accusations of misunderstanding the role of successful black figures in black communities, we were rightly chastised. As someone pointed out, is it more uncomfortable to be called a racist or is it more important to stand up for the survivors of sexual assault?
It’s messy.
****
Women are erased every day. Their lives are deemed, by the whole, to be less worthy than the accomplishments of a man. History is littered with those stories, too many to count. And not just history, current events. Brent Kavanaugh. Roman Polanski. Casey Affleck. Harvey Weinstein. Men who have done harmful things to women and yet have been rewarded. In their Wikipedia entires their accomplishments are listed before their crimes. Their good above their bad.
And once again women are placed in an untenable position. Will we be rigid, unforgiving bitches, who can’t look beyond one bad deed? Or, by forgetting, do we accept complicity in a system which, without fail, chews us up and spits us out. This system which continues to reward men for the shitty things they do to women.
****
If we squint at just the right angle, here’s the direction it heads in: A hotel room, a star, a star-struck young woman. A flirtation. An escalation. A woman who becomes fearful and afraid. Squint some more: Perhaps she didn’t say ‘no’ loudly enough or forcefully enough. Perhaps she went limp to avoid being hurt. Perhaps she did the risk calculations in her head, as women do every fucking day of their lives, and thought, I need to do what I need to do to get out of here alive.
And so in the mind of her rapist, that absence, or the absence of repeated negatives, or forceful enough negatives becomes, as if by magic, consent. And he is thereby absolved, in his own mind as well as others. He cannot believe he’s been accused of something so horrible. Something so heinous.
And something very, very dark suddenly becomes murkier in our minds. Something that should be so black and white hovers and becomes borderless and gray. If we tell ourselves this squinted story it becomes a little bit less messy, right? And it gets buried under the achievements and the firsts and the records and the athleticism or the brilliance or the artistry or the good. And there is almost always good. That’s what makes it so hard.
What should be dark stain fades to a shadow fades to nothing more than a forgotten footnote at the bottom of a life cut short.
****
I can’t stop thinking about the minutes of that woman’s life. The ones that radiated outward into hours, into days and months and years.
I can’t stop thinking about the minutes of Vanessa Bryant’s life, the ones which will radiate outward into hours, days, and months and years, or the un-lived minutes of the daughter she lost.
****
Who weighs our hearts at the end of our lives?
Who decides?
How do we reconcile the right with the wrong? How do we wade through the mess? Because we must.
Because we must.
