Darren Wilson’s Demon

Officer Darren Wilson is pictured in evidence photos released on November 24th.
Officer Darren Wilson is pictured in evidence photos released on November 24th.Photograph courtesy St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorneys

About midway through the 1933 film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's "The Emperor Jones," the black leader of an unnamed Caribbean island orders his guards to shoot a fugitive named Brutus Jones, played by Paul Robeson. As the bullet seems to hit him in the chest, he puts his hands on his hips and laughs. The guard shoots twice more.

Jones: Fire again, empty your guns!

[another volley]

Don't you all know that I've got a charm? Takes a silver bullet to kill Brutus Jones!

As the people in the room bow, he tells them, "I'm boss here now!" (He'd put blanks in their guns.) It ends badly, about a half an hour later, with an excursion into megalomania and a feverish trek through a swamp, during which Jones fires his gun at visions of a chain-gang boss ("I'll kill you, white devil!) and a sort of voodoo priest ("Mercy, Lawd!"), while working in a gospel number ("I done repent!). He staggers on for a while, even after being fatally shot multiple times by insurgent islanders, whose leader has saved his money to make silver bullets. Robeson's extraordinary performance complicates, but only partially redeems, the film's pageant of racial caricatures. As Hilton Als has written, “Often, an artist finds himself living in a strange home.” (Robeson, in his later life, certainly did.) There are scenes, Als notes, in which Robeson "struggles with O’Neill’s fantastical, overwrought language as though it were an ill-fitting mask."

"The Emperor Jones" comes to mind when one reads Officer Darren Wilson's testimony before a grand jury, and listens to his interview with George Stephanopoulos, about his fatal shooting of Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old, in Ferguson, Missouri. Wilson, by his account, fired four separate volleys of bullets, but found that the first three of them did nothing to abash Brown; in his telling, they seemed almost to excite him. Wilson said that Brown started the altercation by going for his gun through his patrol car's window. After the first shot, Wilson, then still in his car, looked out at Brown, who

had the most intense, aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked.... I just saw his hands up, I don't know if they were closed yet, on the way to going closed—I saw this and that face coming at me again, and I just went like this and I shielded my face.

Wilson, after pausing to make sure that the chamber of his gun was loaded ("I racked it"), fired again in Brown's "general direction." Brown ran away, conjuring up "a cloud of dust behind him" on the asphalt, but the retreat did not last long. When Wilson pursued him on foot, Brown, who had already been shot at and hit at least once, "turns, and when he looked at me, he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound and he starts, he turns and he's coming back towards me," Wilson said.

As he is coming toward me, I tell, keep telling him to get on the ground, he doesn't. I shoot a series of shots. I don't know how many I shot, I just know I shot it.

Wilson said that he experienced "tunnel vision," and that he was looking only at Brown's right hand, which was "under his shirt in his waistband"—not up in the air, as some witnesses recall. "I remember seeing the smoke from the gun and I kind of looked at him and he's still coming at me, he hadn't slowed down," Wilson said. There was more smoke, and a strangely dark reflection, before the third volley:

At this point I start backpedalling and again, I tell him to get on the ground, get on the ground, he doesn't. I shoot another round of shots. Again, I don't recall how many it was or if I hit him every time. I know at least once because he flinched again.

Brown had now been hit more than once, but somehow couldn't get enough of the bullets—“he was almost bulking up to run through the shots.” He, Brown, might as well have been a ghost in the swamp: "the face that he had was looking straight through me, like I wasn't even there, I wasn't even anything in his way," Wilson said. Wilson was by then "backing up pretty rapidly," he said—“because I know if he reaches me, he'll kill me”—until he was eight to ten feet away. Then Wilson shot the final bullets in Brown's head.

"Is there anything you could have done differently that would have prevented that killing from taking place?" George Stephanopoulos asked.

"No," Wilson replied. He said that he thought that Brown might kill him: "I just felt the immense power that he had." Wilson told the grand jury that he was just shy of six foot four and weighed two hundred and ten pounds—not small. But Wilson presents himself as having been overwhelmed by Brown's physicality—when they scuffled through the car window, he said, "the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan." Brown comes across as a big, mad genie. The first thing that Wilson did when he returned to the station was to go in the bathroom and scrub Brown's blood off of his hands. ("I still had it in my cuticles and stuff, so I washed my hands again.") In his grand-jury testimony, Wilson described Brown's power as having an almost hypnotic, or totemic aspect: "He was just staring at me, almost like to intimidate me or to overpower me. The intense face he had was just not what I expected from any of this."

Michael Brown's face, almost as much as his body, was what Wilson cited when he talked about control of the situation being taken away from him. Brown kept looking angry—still like “a demon,” as Wilson called him—his discontent making him presumptively dangerous: scary. The legal question, for the grand jury, was whether Wilson reasonably felt that his life was threatened each time that he fired at Brown, not just during the confrontation in the car. In declining to indict him on any charges, the jurors, in effect, deferred to the persistence of his fear.

In the transcript, there is not really a cross-examination, or any interrogation of the portrait of a young man who would run, enraged and magically indifferent, toward a volley of bullets, as if this were somehow a familiar, easily recognizable character. (Various witness accounts conflicted with each other.) The cruder images that “The Emperor Jones” plays with—superstition, boastfulness, wildness—are neither distinct to that film nor entirely confined to the past. An actor like Robeson could make the movie watchable, conveying that the problem with those masks was not only their fit on him but their construction. Brown was just an eighteen-year-old man, and, it seems, an imprudent one—carrying some stolen cigarillos. It's worth asking if he had a chance.

Wilson told the jurors that he remembered looking through the sight on his gun before firing the final shots, seeing only the top of Brown's head, and sending a bullet there. "And then when it went into him, the demeanor on his face went blank—the aggression was gone, I mean, I knew he stopped, the threat was stopped."