Читать книгу The Bernice L. McFadden Collection - Bernice L. McFadden - Страница 36
ОглавлениеThe coroner placed his body into a pine box and sealed it shut. When his mother arrived at the funeral home where they stored the body, they stopped her at the door and informed her that she could not see her dead son and that there was a law that required the body to be buried immediately.
Mamie Till pursed her lips, pulled the handles of her pocketbook up over her shoulder, and left.
Back at Moe’s house she called a cousin in Chicago.
“They killed my boy and now they telling me I can’t bring him home.”
The cousin said, “Sons of bitches! You wait right there by the phone. I’ma call you back.”
The cousin knew people in local authority in Illinois and those people knew people in the state legislature. When Moe Wright’s telephone rang again, Mamie Till answered. “Hello?”
“You don’t worry, Mamie, things have been set in motion.”
At the sheriff’s department and in the office of the undertaker, one call after another came in from people neither man had ever heard of.
Some of the callers were cordial; many others were downright nasty. One man threatened, “Heads will roll!” Another promised, “You and your family will be dead by dawn.”
When Mamie Till answered the phone early the following morning, it was the undertaker’s voice she heard.
“I done already made the arrangements. The casket will be placed on the next train headed to Chicago.”
Click.
In Chicago, Mrs. Till placed a call to John H. Johnson, the president and CEO of the Johnson Publishing Company. In 1955, Johnson’s Jet Magazine had a circulation in the black community that counted in the hundreds of thousands.
Mr. Johnson took the call, and offered his deep and sincere condolences. Mrs. Till thanked him and asked if he wouldn’t mind sending a couple of his Jet Magazine photographers to her son’s funeral.
Johnson was taken off guard by the request and politely asked, “Why would you want me to do that, Mrs. Till?”
There was a pause and then Mamie Till said, “So the world can see what those men down in Mississippi did to my boy.”
A broken heart would have been kind, mendable—but Tass’s heart was shattered so completely the pieces were small enough to fit through the eye of a needle.
A man leaving a woman was one thing—there was always the possibility of reconciliation. A woman could live months and years on that possibility.
But how does one wait for death to come to an end? Death is final, right? Wrong! Death is the end and the beginning. But I am getting ahead of myself.
* * *
Hemmingway and Padagonia didn’t know how to make Tass feel happy again, and so they just waited for the melancholy to drift away. But it never did—not really. It faded some, got washed out a bit and worn down in places, but if you looked real hard, you could always see it pulsing behind her eyes.
The September issue of Jet Magazine just made things worse. Of course, Bryant’s grocery store didn’t carry the magazine, so a few people went to Greenwood to buy copies. They brought them back here and passed them around amongst the residents. When folks saw that black-and-white photo of Emmett “Bobo” Till, laid out in a coffin with his face so battered it looked like a Halloween mask, the rage it elicited spread like fever.
Because Moe Wright and his family had witnessed J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant remove Emmett from their house, the law picked the two white men up and put them in jail to await their trial. When their defense attorney told them that they were being charged with murder in the first degree, Roy almost pissed on himself and J.W. laughed.
“Even if we did kill that boy—and we didn’t—ain’t no court in the land gonna convict two white men for killing a nigger.”
At the trial, Carolyn Bryant took the stand and placed her left hand on the Bible and raised her right hand into air and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The defense lawyer asked, “Did Emmett Till whistle at you?”
“Yes sir, he did.”
Tass, Hank, and Padagonia were called into testify.
“Did Emmett Till whistle at Carolyn Bryant? Yes or no?”
“He whistled, but—”
“Yes or no!”
“But sir, what I want to say—”
“Your Honor, please instruct this witness to respond to the question with a yes or no.”
“Respond to the question with a yes or no.”
“I’ll ask the question again: on the afternoon of August 24, 1955, did Emmett Till, a.k.a. Bobo, whistle at Carolyn Bryant?”
“Yes sir, he did.”
As if having an all-white jury didn’t already guarantee their acquittal, the defense went so far as to claim that the body pulled from the Tallahatchie wasn’t even Emmett Till, but some cadaver planted by the NAACP. To add insult to injury, they accused Mrs. Till of faking her son’s murder to collect a four hundred–dollar death benefit.
A white man who claimed to have seen the body before it was boxed and shipped out of the state said that he was more than sure that it wasn’t Emmett Till. When asked why he was so confident in his belief, the man threw his hands up in the air and declared: “’Cause that body had hair on its chest and everybody knows niggers don’t grow no hair on their chest until they’re twenty years old!”
On September 23, 1955, less than one month after the day Emmett Till was kidnapped, murdered, and mutilated, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were found not guilty and strolled out of the courthouse into the autumn sunshine, free men.
Some people called it one of the worst days in the history of the American judicial system. Others claimed that if Dwight D. Eishenhower, who was the sitting president at that time, had said something—anything that expressed his abhorrence at what those men had done to that boy—things might have turned out different. But Eisenhower didn’t say one thing—which led some to believe that maybe he was okay with what J.W. and Roy had done to Emmett Till.
Two months after the men were acquitted of murder, the grand jury declined to indict them on kidnapping charges.
Double jeopardy is a term most people who lived here had not been familiar with before the Till murder, but it became one they would remember for the rest of their lives. In 1956, Bryant and Milam sold their story to Look Magazine, wherein Milam unabashedly admitted that he had killed Emmett Till and didn’t feel one iota of remorse.
A confession, printed in black-and-white in a national publication, and there wasn’t anything any court in the land could do about it. Milam and Bryant had been found innocent of murder and could not be trialed for the same crime twice.
Double jeopardy.
Hemmingway took her distraught daughter into her arms. “That’s man’s law, baby. Man’s law don’t outweigh God’s law. Don’t you worry, they’ll get theirs.”
And they did.
Even the most racist of Mississippians didn’t condone what Milam and Bryant had done to Emmett.
The brothers were ostracized by black and white alike. Friendless, stigmatized, and unable to make a living, the brothers closed the store and moved their families to Texas to start new lives.
They could run, but they could not hide. Their photos had been splashed on the front pages of every major newspaper in the country, so they couldn’t go anywhere without being recognized.
In Texas, white people pointed and blared, “Look at the child killers!”
So misery became as much a part of their lives as oxygen.
A decade later, Milam moved back to Mississippi and took a job as a machinist. He arrived at work on time, performed his duties, and at the end of the day returned home to his whiskey and cigars.
He contemplated suicide, but never had the guts to do it. At night he closed his eyes and prayed for death, but always woke up to a brand-new day.
When they found the cancer in his liver, he refused all treatment that was available to him. He thought that untreated, the end would come quick.
He thought wrong.
J.W. languished in excruciating pain for years.
When he died in 1980, the autopsy revealed that he had tumors in every major organ of his body.
In 1994, at the age of sixty-three, Roy Bryant died of complications from diabetes and liver cancer.
At the telling of this story, Carolyn Bryant was still alive, but not so well.
