A LIE
All people tell lies. Some are necessary, most are not. There are a host of reasons why people lie. One of the most common reasons is to impress others, to enhance one’s standing in the public vision. Most people are never quite satisfied with who they are or what they have, so they lie to embellish their standing in the group.
Lying has become a new social art in America. We have the “Big Lie,” which can be attached to any given social, political or even individual situation we choose. One prominent news outlet clocked a former president as telling more than 30,000 big and little lies in a four-year period.
Lying has become so socially and politically acceptable that fiction has become fact and fact is now fiction.
You could very well be sitting in a public park eating an apple when someone walks up and says, “That looks like a good orange.”
“It’s not an orange,” you say. “It’s an apple.”
“Oh, that’s what they want you to believe,” orange man replies. “That’s an orange. Everybody knows it’s an orange. You must be some kind of apple-loving liberal.”
Who knows?
What I do know is that an apple is an apple; and like everyone else in this world, I know a liar. His name is Wilbert Rideau. Google his name or visit his Wikipedia page and you will know who he is as well.
In a recent New Yorker Magazine interview dealing with his prison literary accomplishments, Rideau had this exchange with interviewer John J. Lennon:
“What was the first book you read on death row?
“‘Fairoaks’ by Frank Yerby—a plantation novel. I was totally shocked that something like this existed, because, you have to understand, the world I came from didn’t teach slavery to the students.
“The first time you learned about slavery was reading Frank Yerby on death row?
“On death row!”
That’s a barefaced lie.
Rideau went to the racially segregated Second Ward Elementary School and W.O. Boston High School in the late 1940s into the 1950s in Lake Charles, Louisiana. The schools may not have taught “slavery to the students” as part of their curriculum, but every black student, either elementary or high school, knew they were in segregated schools, not “white schools,” because they were descendants of slaves.
One of the first things every Black child learned in an African-American household in the Deep South in the 1940s and 1950s was “slavery.” Rideau came from a good, decent, smart family. He was taught the dos and don’ts by his family about how to live in a white imposed segregated world. The word “slavery” was woven into the fabric of Black existence in America at that time.
Rideau dropped out of high school in the 9th grade. He got a job working at a downtown haberdashery.
There was a very tall statue of a Confederate soldier on the courthouse lawn in downtown Lake Charles. The “Johnny Reb” statue had stood there since 1915 in honor of the Confederacy that fought to preserve the brutal institution of slavery.
While working downtown, Rideau saw the “Johnny Reb” statue every day. He knew exactly why the statue was there and what it stood for as did every Black man, woman and child in the city.
To say that he did not know slavery even existed until he read Yerby’s “Fairoaks” on Louisiana’s death row in 1962 at age 20 is simply not true. Every time he was forced to sit at the back of the bus, or drink from a “Colored Only” water fountain, or attend a segregated school he knew “slavery” was the reason.
So why tell such a trivial lie?
It feeds into Rideau’s personal narrative he created more than four decades ago with media outlets that he was a poor, deprived, uneducated Black kid who had never read a book, much less having being taught about slavery, until he picked up Yerby’s “Fairoaks” and had an educational epiphany about the plight of African-American people in America.
It was a neat little fabrication that made him exceptional: a Fairoaks’ racial enlightment that launched him into a fight to improve the penal existence for Black inmates. And in many ways through a 44-year incarceration he accomplished that objective.
But, more often than not, Wilbert Rideau prefers a lie to the truth. It allows him to fuel the mystique he has created around himself. It’s like a man saying he fought in the war but never joined the military yet he comes to believe he actually fought in the war. The lie makes him exceptional.
The problem with lies is that they are so easily believed. Most, if not all, of The New Yorker readers will believe that Rideau never knew about slavery—never even heard the word—until he read “Fairoaks” on death row. It’s such a casual, easy thing to believe—until you take a moment or two to apply just a touch of logic and the lie collapses.
Now back to that damn apple and orange.
It’s sorta like this folks: Gov. Kristi Noem is now trying to lie her way out of why she killed little Cricket. She has transformed a mischievous 14-month-old puppy into a man-eating Cujo on steroids. And many people will believe that lie. Why? Because it sounds better than the truth.