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LOUIS TILL
One of my grandfathers, John French, my mother’s father, taller, skin a shade lighter than many of the Italian immigrants he worked beside plastering and hanging wallpaper, used to ride me on his shoulders through the streets of our colored community Homewood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I loved to sit up there. Safe. King of the world. Entranced by my grandfather’s tales about the neighborhood, by his long silences, his humming, his rhymes and songs. His broad shoulders a sanctuary I would count on, even when my father disappeared periodically from various homes shared with my mother and me.
I have never forgotten how peaceful the world looked from up there. How one day while I rode on my grandfather’s shoulders, my hands, knees, careful not to tip his wide-brimmed, brown hat, we passed Clement, a smallish man who swept out Henderson’s Barbershop. But back then, at this precise moment in the Homewood streets, I knew nothing about Clement, except I could see he limped, dragging along one worrisome foot in an oversize boot, and see he had a big face ugly enough to seem scary, even from my perch, a face with distorted features I did know would loom in my nightmares for years afterward.
John French called out the name Clement and the man returned the greeting with a slowly forming but finally huge grin, openmouthed, few teeth, a lingering gaze that fixed upon us, then inside us, then wandered far, far past us. A look telling me that everything familiar to me could instantly be unsettled and dissolve.
In 1955, about nine years after that encounter on the Homewood streets, I was fourteen years old, and a photo of dead Emmett Till’s mutilated face entered my life with the same sudden, indelible truth as Clement.
Just in case you don’t recall, I’ll remind you that in 1955, Emmett Till, also age fourteen, boarded a train in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. A few weeks later a train brought his dead body back to Chicago. Emmett Louis Till had been murdered because he was a colored boy and had allegedly wolf-whistled a white lady.
Over half a century later, I’m still dealing wih the faces of Clement and Till. To provide background for a fiction I intended to write about Emmett Till, I saved excerpts from newspaper coverage of the trial of Till’s muderers.
Over sixty newspapers on hand in 1955 for the Sumner, Mississippi, trial. Thirty photographers popping flashbulbs, seventy reporters pecking away at truth on their typewriters. I was a bit surprised by how much national and international attention the trial had attracted. Not surprised to learn public interest had rapidly evaporated. Today Emmett Till is generally viewed as a civil rights martyr, but the shabby trial that exonerated his killers, and the crucial role played by Till’s father in the trial have largely disappeared from the public’s imagination. Silenced, the Till trial serves as an unacknowledged, abiding precedent. Again and again in courtrooms across America, killers are released as if colored lives they have snatched away do not matter.
. . . the day opened hot and humid, the heat rising to an almost unbearable 95 degrees. (Chicago Defender)
. . . townspeople of Sumner have never seen anything like it here—the crowds, the out-of-state newsmen and the excitement of a big trial—not even on Saturdays or when merchants conduct a drawing to give away an automobile . . . Citizens estimated as many as a thousand outsiders came, more than on the biggest trade days . . . a porter kept busy passing a pitcher of ice water to trial officials. Downstairs, a cold drink stand had its biggest day in history. (Memphis Commercial Appeal)
Twenty-two seats were provided inside the rail for white newsmen where they could easily hear the proceedings . . . Negro press . . . limited to four seats directly behind the rail where the public is seated. (Chicago Defender)
A lily-white jury overwhelmingly constituted of farmers, all of whom have sworn bare-faced against all their traditions that it will not affect their verdict that the accused are white men like themselves and the victim a Negro boy from Chicago. (New York Post)
. . . the judge laid down the rules . . . He stated that smoking would be allowed and suggested that the men take their coats off for comfort. (Chicago Defender)
. . . Defendants made a dramatic entrance with their attractive wives and children at 10:25 a.m., setting off a buzz of interest and lightning-like flashes from the combined action of thirty cameramen . . . Mrs. Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old brunette who is expected to be a key witness, was dressed in a simple dark gray dress with a high neckline. Bryant held his two sons, Lamar Bryant, 1, and Roy Bryant, 2, and Milam clutched his boys, Harvey Milam, 2, and Bill Milam, 4 . . . Milam said he has been a good friend of the Negroes he has known. He said five years ago he plunged into the Tallahatchie River, from which the body of Emmett Till was pulled, and saved the life of a drowning seven-year-old Negro girl. (Memphis Commercial Appeal)
Once, Bill Milam picked up a toy pistol . . . fired an imaginary shot at Roy Bryant Jr. . . . clambered over the rail and stomped down the aisle making little boy noises . . . ran his hand along courtroom railing pickets, apparently deriving great satisfaction from the machine-gun click-clack he produced. (Memphis Commercial Appeal)
Moses Wright pointed a knobby finger at J. W. Milam today and said, “There he is”—identifying him as one man who abducted the sharecropper’s nephew in the early morning hours of August 28. Then the 64-year-old farmer pointed out 24-year-old Roy Bryant, Milam’s half-brother, as the second man who roused the Wright family from bed at 2:00 a.m. and took Emmett Louis Till away . . . “I got up and opened the door . . . Mr. Milam was standing at the door with a pistol in his right hand and a flashlight in the other,” Wright declared. (Greenwood Commonwealth)
Q: What did Milam say when you let him in . . .
A: Mr. Milam said he wanted the boy who done the talking at Money . . . [Mr. Milam] told me if it was not the right boy he would bring him back and put him in bed . . .
Q: When was the next time you saw Emmett?
A: He was in a boat where they had taken him out of the river.
Q: Was he living or dead?
A: He was dead.
Q: Could you tell whose body it was?
A: It was Emmett Till.
Q: Did you notice a deputy sheriff taking the ring off his finger?
A: Yes. (Jackson State Times)
Chester Miller, Greenwood undertaker, took the stand for a second time and described Till’s body: “The whole top of the head was crushed in. A piece of the skull fell out in the boat,” he said, “. . . I saw a hole in his skull about one inch above the right ear.” . . . Sheriff H. C. Strider of Tallahatchie County has said a bullet caused the hole above Till’s ear. (Greenwood Commonwealth)
Sheriff Strider has said the body may not be that of Till. “The whole thing looks like a deal made by the NAACP.” (Jackson Daily News)
The judge allowed the defense to record Mrs. Bryant’s testimony with the jury out of the room.
Q: Who was in the store with you?
A: I was alone . . . At about eight o’clock a Negro man came in the store and went to the candy case. I walked up to the candy counter and asked what he wanted. I gave him the merchandise and held out my hand for the money.
Q: Did he give you the money?
A: No.
Q: What did he do?
A: He caught my hand in a strong grip and said, “How about a date, baby?”
Q: What did you do then?
A: I turned around and started to the back of the store, but he caught me at the cash register . . . He put both hands at my waist . . . He said, “What’s the matter, baby, can’t take it? . . . You needn’t be afraid.”
Q: Did he use words that you don’t use?
A: Yes.
Q: It was unprintable, wasn’t it?
A: Yes. He said that and added “with white women before” . . . Another Negro came in and dragged him out of the store by his arm. (Jackson State Times)
A young Negro mother returned today to her native Mississippi to fight to avenge the life of her fourteen-year-old son . . . Mrs. Mamie Bradley Till, 33, is a demure woman whose attractiveness was set off by a small black hat with a veil folded back, a black dress with a white collar. In the more than 99 degree heat of the courtroom, she fanned herself with a black silk fan with a red design . . . In a quiet voice she answered the questions of the newsmen . . . (Daily Worker)
Q: Where did you first see the body?
A: I saw it at the A. A. Rainier funeral home in a casket . . . I positively identified the body I saw in the casket as my son . . . I looked at his face carefully. I looked at him all over thoroughly. I was able to see that it was my son’s body without a shadow of a doubt.
Q: His father, Louis, was killed overseas in the armed forces, was he not?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Were his father’s personal effects sent to you after his death.
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Was there a ring in those personal effects.
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Did you give your son the ring that was returned?
A: Yes, but his hand was too small to wear it at the time. However, since he was twelve years old, he has worn the ring on occasions, using scotch tape or a string to help it from coming off. When he left Chicago, he was looking for some cuff-links in his jewelry box and found the ring and put it on his finger to show me that it fit and he didn’t have to wear tape anymore.
Q: And you say definitively that he left Chicago with the ring in his possession?
A: Yes, sir. (Jackson State Times)
Milam shook off his kids yesterday afternoon and stood up all by himself at adjournment and asked, “Where are our goddamned guards? We’ve got to get out of here.” (New York Post)
Up rose Sidney Carlton for the defense to point out the holes in the state’s case . . . He said of course Mamie Bradley, a mother, believes what she wants to believe. “The undisputed scientific facts are against her.” Then J. W. Kellum rose for the second defense summary . . . “I want you to tell me where under God’s shining sun is the land of the free and home of the brave if you don’t turn these boys loose . . . your forefathers will turn over in their graves.” (New York Post)
“What is your verdict,” inquired the court. “Not guilty,” said Mr. Shaw in a firm voice. The two defendants were all smiles as they received congratulations in the courtroom . . . lit up cigars after the verdict was announced. (Memphis Commercial Appeal)
Mississippi Jungle Law Frees Slayers of Child . . .
An all-white jury of sharecroppers demonstrated here Friday that the constitutional guarantees of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” do not apply to Negro citizens of the state. (Cleveland Call and Post)
Fair Trial Was Credit to Mississippi . . .
. . . Mississippi people rose to the occasion and proved to the world that this is a place where justice in the courts is given to all races, religions, classes. (Greenwood, Mississippi Morning Star)
In my notebook, the newspaper excerpts end with the words of Chester Himes, a colored novelist who chose not to reside in his segregated country and probably sent his letter to the Post from Paris, France:
The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop . . . So let us take the burden of all this guilt from these two pitiful crackers. They are but the guns we hired. (New York Post)
As I read more about the trial, I discovered that the jury had deliberated less than an hour—sorry it took so long, folks . . . we stopped for a little lunch—before it delivered a not guilty verdict. For an American government waging a propaganda war to convince the world of Democracy’s moral superiority over Communism, intense criticism of the verdict abroad and at home was an unacceptable embarassment. Federal officials pressured the state of Mississippi to convict Milam and Bryant of some crime. Since abundant sworn testimony recorded in the Sumner trial had established the fact that Milam and Bryant had forcibly abducted Emmett Till, the new charge would be kidnapping. Justice Department lawyers were confident both men would be found guilty.
Except, two weeks before a Mississippi grand jury was scheduled to convene and decide whether or not Milam and Bryant should be tried for kidnapping, Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till, was conjured like an evil black rabbit from an evil white hat. Information from Louis Till’s confidential army service file was leaked to the press: Emmett Till’s father, Mamie Till’s husband, Louis Till, was not the brave soldier portrayed in Northern newspapers during the Sumner trial who had sacrificed his life in defense of his country. Private Louis Till’s file revealed he had been hanged July 2, 1945, by the U.S. army for committing rape and murder in Italy.
With this fact about Emmett Till’s father in hand, the Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Milam and Bryant for kidnapping. Mrs. Mamie Till, her lawyers, advisers and supporters watched in dismay as news of her husband’s execution erased the possibility that killers of her fourteen-year-old son Emmett would be punished for any crime, whatsoever.
Revisiting trial testimony did not help me produce the Emmett Till fiction I wanted to write, but I did learn that his father’s ring was on Emmett’s finger when he was pulled dead out of the Tallahatchie River. The ring a reminder that Emmett Till, like me, possessed a father. A Till father I had never really considered. A colored father summoned from the dead to absolve white men who had tortured and shot his son.
While I gathered facts for an Emmett Till story never written, a second encounter with Louis Till occurred. In the mail I received an unsolicited galley of The Interpreter, a biography of the French novelist Louis Guilloux, author of OK, Joe!, a fictionalized account of his job as interpreter at trials of American GIs accused of capital crimes against French citizens during World War II. The Interpreter’s author, Alice Kaplan, used Guilloux’s experiences to examine the systematically unequal treatment of colored soldiers in United States military courts during World War II.
I found myself quite moved by Kaplan’s description of her pilgrimage to the grave of Private James Hendricks, hanged for murder by the U.S. Army in 1945, a colored soldier at whose trial Louis Guilloux had worked. Kaplan’s book took me 120 kilometers east of Paris, to a part of the countryside where the fiercest battles of World War I were fought—a gentle landscape of rivers, woods, and farmland, interrupted by an occasional modest village. I arrived with her at a massive World War I cemetery, with its iron gates and stone entry columns. Stood finally in a clearing enclosed by laurel bushes and pine trees reached by exiting the back door of the cemetery administrator’s quarters. The clearing contained Plot E, the officially designated “dishonorable” final resting place of ninety-six American servicemen executed by the U.S. military during World War II.
Situated across the road from Plots A–D, where 6,012 honorable American dead from World War I are buried in the main cemetery of Oise-Aisne, Plot E is quiet, secluded, seldom visited, meticulously groomed. A place unbearably quiet, I imagine, as I read Kaplan’s depiction of Plot E in The Interpreter and surveyed with her eyes an expanse of green lawn dotted with small white squares she discovers are flat stones embedded in the crew-cut grass. Four rows of stones, twenty-four stones per row, the rows about five feet apart, every white square engraved with a gray number, she writes.
I accompany her, moving slowly up and down the slight slope, between the rows, because when you stand still, Plot E’s quiet is too enveloping, too heavy, too sad. I need to animate my limbs, stop holding my breath in this almost forgotten site where ninety-six white squares mark the remains of men, eighty-three of them colored men. What color are the eighty-three colored men now. What color are the thirteen other men beneath their gray numbers. I think of numbers I wore on basketball and football jerseys. Numbers on license plates. Numbers tattooed on forearms. My phone number, social security number.
On page 173 in chapter 27, the final chapter of Kaplan’s book, she narrates in a footnote how she reaches number 73, the corner grave in row four that belongs to Louis Till. His story has such tragic historical resonance, she writes, then informs the reader of Private Louis Till’s execution by the army in 1945 for crimes of murder and rape in Italy, and that ten years later in 1955, Till’s fourteen-year-old son Emmett was beaten, shot, and thrown in a river in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman.
With research of Emmett Till’s murder fresh in my mind, I had wanted to inform page 173, inform Alice Kaplan the wolf whistle was only one of many stories, a myth as much as fact, though I didn’t speak to her then, in the shared quiet of Plot E whose silence I feared breaking even as I also understood I could not break it. Instead I raise my eyes from the page, my gaze from the photograph of a numbered white square of stone, and disappear, a ghost in the machine of a book, machine of my body. I do not speak to Alice Kaplan in Plot E. It’s not the time or place to discuss the wolf whistle’s problematic status. Not the time now to expand this anecdote about finding Louis Till in Kaplan’s book nor to talk about my own trip, years later, to the French cemetery. This is just a brief version of encountering Louis Till. Anyway, I believe the truth is more like he found me than I found him.
Dear Professor Kaplan,
In your account of a visit to Plot E of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial on Sunday afternoon in January 2004, you relate that the look-alike white grave-markers were engraved with gray numbers and not names. How could you identify the person buried beneath a particular stone. More specifically, how did you know Louis Till was under stone 73. Had you obtained a directory, a guidebook, some official document matching names with numbers. If you possess such a source, where did you discover it. Would you be willing to share it. Does it contain facts about the dead other than names and numbers. Did you have in hand a map of Plot E so that you anticipated finding Louis Till’s grave at the corner of row four. Were you touched equally by the Till grave and the grave, number thirteen, of Private James Hendricks, the colored soldier whose trial you feature in your book about French novelist Monsieur Louis Guilloux, the interpreter at James Hendricks’s court-martial. Were you struck, Professor Kaplan, by the coincidence that both Mr. Guilloux and Mr. Till bear the given name Louis or by the resemblance between Guilloux and guillotine. Did you feel on the Sunday afternoon you explored Plot E that the life of each one of us no matter how tightly we clutch it, is an unanchored thread that does not guide us out of the labyrinth. I thank you in advance for any information you’re able to offer about these matters. Your book The Interpreter led me to Plot E of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, and in a very real sense I have been wandering since in a limbo inhabited by shades of men buried there.
Several years after that letter—never sent—I was shaving and the TV news talking in another room announced a black father declared guilty of protecting his son. A carful of mad white boys rolls up to the black man’s suburban Long Island driveway and they demand he surrender his son to them because the son they say insulted the sister of one of the boys. A sexual, racial trespass, thus unforgivable, thus the son must pay. But the daddy, an old-time emigrant from the deep south, got a long memory, got him a little pistola cached away for just such emergencies. No. No. Never again. Get thee gone, ye whited sepulchers, he goes or says other words to provoke a predictable riposte such as, Nigger, you better move your scrawny old black nigger ass out of the way, boy, an exchange I imagine escalating rapidly to nastier imprecations and threatening gestures terminated abruptly by a single gunshot. One white boy down, bleeding on the black man’s driveway. The other boys in his crew rush him to the hospital, but it’s too late. He dies on the way, and this morning the breaking news: a judge has pronounced the black father guilty.
Familiar script. Offended white males go after black boy accused of molesting white female. Same ole, same ole Mississippi Till story repeating itself, but with the roles, the scenario sort of scrambled—north not south, day not night, black guy not white guy the one with a pistol in his hand, white accuser dies, accused black boy survives, and the court in this New York case declares black shooter guilty, not like Mississippi law declared the white shooter of Emmett Till innocent. This latest version of the script altered but not enough to obscure its resemblance to the original. Then the point would be lost, wouldn’t it. Just enough alike and different to appear as if festering ugliness between blacks and whites changes. Though it really doesn’t change, except maybe for the worse. This is what I heard from the TV in the other room as I shaved.
And getting even worse day by day it seems when I pay attention—one more colored victim declared guilty without a trial falls, fallen, falling dead, here, there, everywhere . . .
* * *
This text will not become the Emmett Till fiction I believed I was working on. All the words that follow are my yearning to make some sense out of the American darkness that disconnects colored fathers from sons, a darkness in which sons and fathers lose track of one another.
When I call the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the person, a specialist in military service records a friend suggested and whose extension I ask for, is unavailable. The phone of an alternative clerk, to whom I’m referred by a friendly human operator whose voice identifies him as alive and colored, picks up after three rings. A recorded message offers another extension that plunges me into a cycling menu of instructions, the product of Starquest Answering Service that’s either unintelligible by design or designed to make me pay for my sins—sins of age, of poor hearing and unnimble fingers, of unfamiliarity with the latest maneuvers necessary to wield control over recorded voices offering choices. Each set of options is so lengthy I forget them if I listen to the entire list. Or choose prematurely, always incorrectly, if I don’t listen to the bitter end. I feel like poor Ulysses roped to the mast, teased by a chorus of sirens or baffled, like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man by voices whose job is to keep me running. Voices that chirp, chatter, lecture, and sometimes, I’m sure, chortle at my efforts to steer through them and obtain information about Louis Till.
Turns out the backup person I seek is not available either, I learn later from the friendly colored operator. The alternate person’s mother died suddenly and he’s away burying her in Alabama. The toll mounts. Casualties jinxed perhaps by mere association with the grim subjects of my inquiry: kidnap, rape, murder, execution by hanging.
After weeks of calling and reaching no one, I complain again to the live voice. He offers yet a third number and bingo, persistence seems about to pay off. The original archivist who’d been reported gravely ill is either back at his desk or at a virtual desk in heaven where he’s able to receive calls. His voice is music to my ears even though it’s recorded music. He/it promises to return missed calls promptly, and sure enough my call’s returned. A recorded voice offers a number, recited twice to make sure I get it. I’m elated. Hang up immediately, punch in the twice-repeated number, and alas, find myself adrift in Starquest again.
Leghorn, Italy, a.k.a. Livorno, the site of Louis Till’s court-martial, say documents arriving at last, at last, after I put my request to the government in writing. The Louis Till file mailed to me also states that the executions of Till and his codefendant, Fred A. McMurray, occurred in Aversa, Italy, near Naples. I welcomed such facts though they only led to more questions. According to the death certificates of Privates Till and McMurray, the men were hanged the same day—July 2, 1945. Little else about the executions in Aversa appears in the copious file. Did Till and McMurray drop simultaneously, each through his own trapdoor, at the conclusion of the same . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 countdown. Who counted. One countdown or two. One double scaffold or two scaffolds, separate and equal. Were the condemned offered a last chance to speak. Did either avail himself of the opportunity. Who witnessed the ceremony. Did the U.S. Army invite townsfolk and town officials, as was occasionally the practice at executions of American soldiers in occupied France. In Brittany, for example, the public execution site of a colored G.I. is remembered in the Breton language as park an hini du, black man field.
Was a real doctor or army-trained medic assigned to listen for the absent pulses of dead Till and McMurray. Sunshine or rain that day. Did the condemned meet their fate resolutely or falter. What thoughts were they thinking on the gallows steps. How many steps. Were the steps wooden. Portable. Were photos taken of the living prisoners, dead prisoners. What archive holds them if they still exist. Much later I would find in a book, The Fifth Field, a few photos claiming to document the hangings of Till and McMurray. Are the photos authentic. Is Louis Till’s face truly one of the faces in the blurry snapshots.
A copy of a Battle Casualty Report (July 20, 1945) appears on an early page of the Till file and registers Louis Till’s death. The words “in Italy” are typed crookedly into the Place of casualty box. An asterisk occupies the box where Type of casualty is supposed to be recorded. At the bottom of this page, just beyond the Casualty Report’s edge, a footnote, indexed by the asterisk above, contains two phrases, “judicial asphyxiation” and “sol died in a non-battle status due to his own misconduct.” Mrs. Till asserted on numerous occasions that only the second phrase was included in the telegram of July 13, 1945, sent to inform her of her husband’s death.
Given many such willful or unavoidable or contested or careless or premeditated aporias in the official account, how could the most diligent researcher hope to accurately reconstruct a double hanging in Aversa, Italy, over a half century after it happened.
Where there’s life, there’s hope, my mom used to say, even though my father, if he happened to be around, would always interject: And for every tree, there’s a rope, a rejoinder that would have irritated Mom even more if she had known (and probably she did) it was the punch line of a joke making fun of a southern darky ha-ha-ha obsessed with copping him a taste of white pussy ha-ha before he dies.
Where there’s life, there’s hope
Did Louis Till ever cop a taste of leghorn. Some historians contend the city of Leghorn is named for chickens its earliest settlers found in residence when they arrived to erect a fortified town in the middle ages. Others argue leghorn chickens—a small, hardy domestic fowl noted for prolific egg production—are named for the city where they were originally bred. Though the city of Leghorn, near Genoa in northwestern Italy on the Ligurian Sea, played a prominent role in his short (twenty-three years) life, it’s probably safe to conjecture Louis Till could not have cared less whether chickens or city bore the name leghorn first. But did he ever sample the local bird. Louis Till probably knew chicken in the sense Charlie Parker (a.k.a. Bird for love of them) knew chicken, but whatever Louis Till thought about leghorns or the city of Leghorn is lost in the silence that confronted me when I sought his voice in documents from the file.
Malcolm (a.k.a. Malcolm X) who shares a family name Little with the famously paranoid bird Chicken Little, was not literally present at Louis Till’s trial and execution, but Malcolm informed the world in no uncertain terms why proverbial chickens on their way home to roost in America would have paused in Leghorn/ Livorno and clucked disapproval of the kangaroo court-martial conviction and hanging of colored privates Louis Till and Fred A. McMurray. Louis Till, my father and most other veterans of World War II, colored and not, are gone now and humankind is no closer to solving problems created by the conundrum of race than we are to figuring out whether leghorn chickens or their eggs came first. I attempt to smile and nod reassuringly as I promise Louis Till, Mamie Till, my father, brothers, sister, mother, Emmett Till, Malcolm, Martin, Mandela et cetera, that some of us are absolutely not satisfied by the prospect of remaining forever in the dark. Darkness as deep and sinister as the dark in which many colored soldiers, executed like Till and McMurray and James Hendricks, lie buried.
All stories are true. As far as I’ve been able to glean, Louis Till possessed no knowledge of that particular Igbo proverb, nor a general familiarity with the customs and folklore of the Igbo, a West African ethnic group whose homeland is southeastern Nigeria (a.k.a. Biafra). Even if Till had been a prolific reader, he would not have come across all stories are true in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, where I first read the proverb. Achebe’s novel, set in a traditional Igbo village at the beginning of the twentieth century, was not published until 1958, thirteen years after Louis Till’s death. Yet it seems that Till was privy to the wisdom of all stories are true. In the only direct quote attributed to him by army officers in the entire Till file, Louis Till articulates a very Igbo understanding of the predicament in which he found himself.
According to report #41 (Criminal Investigation Division/ Rome Allied Army Command, United States Army—7 August, 1944) filed by CID/RAAC agents I. H. Rousseau and J. J. Herlihy and included in the Till documents I received, Louis Till didn’t open up to any extent when Herlihy, posing as a fellow prisoner, confined himself (10 July 1944) in the brig with Till to gain information about the crimes—assault, rape, murder—of June 27–28 in Civitavecchia, Italy. Another attempt to secure a statement from Till on 23 July 1944, the report continues, also met with negative results. Till remained adamantly silent, offering no information about the crimes being investigated nor providing an alibi to establish his whereabouts on the night of June 27. A stubborn silence that must have puzzled and frustrated his army interrogators since all the other accused colored soldiers were busy accusing one another. Breaking his silence once in response to the agents’ repeated demands for a statement, Louis Till allegedly said to Rousseau, “There’s no use in me telling you one lie and then getting up in court and telling another one,” a remark that clearly conveys to me and should have conveyed to Rousseau, Till’s Igbo sophistication, his resignation, his Old World, ironic sense of humor about truth’s status in a universe where all truths are equal until power chooses one truth to serve its needs.
If not in Achebe’s book, where did Louis Till learn the proverb’s wisdom. Louis Till was probably not good at reading. Not a devourer of paperback westerns like my father. Different as they were, both men were the same deep brown color, I believe, and both boxed. Both men, like traditional Igbo wrestlers, honed their bodies to school their minds. Both were good enough with their fists to try amateur boxing. My father in Pittsburgh, Till in Chicago, according to Mamie Till’s autobiography.
I see Louis Till in a gym—bobbing, weaving, feinting, throwing punches. Hear him training as I turn pages of the Till file. Heavy bag—whomp, whomp. Speed bag—blippidity—blip—blippidity—blip—blip. Sugar Ray fast hands flick out quick, quicker. Till up on his toes, leans in, dips back, circling—blip—blip—blip—blippidity—the bag can’t get away quick enough. Till tags it. Stings it. Snaps his punches. Sweat flicks off his dark shoulders. Then hop-hop-hop-hop he’s skipping rope—arc of jump rope cuts slices of air, tongue-shaped, round-shouldered tombstone slices inscribed a thousand perfect times. They hiss over him, behind him, portals of frozen air which frame a snapshot of Louis Till each time the rope whips by. Only inches to spare. Top of Till’s head sliced clean off if he doesn’t duck, step, lean, hip-hop through the whizzing rope.
Been there, done a little boxing myself. Recall how a jump rope dies a split-second whap as each arc strikes the floor. Whap-whap-whap under Till’s feet. In canvas shoes, quick hop after little quick hop seems like the boy don’t hardly touch the ground—he’s flying—the spinning rope whaps the gym’s wood floor—whap—whap—like slaps in the face. Wooden handles of jump rope gripped in taped fists, Louis Till carves the shape—tombstone, tongue—one last time. Ducks under, ducks through. He’s winded. Sweat drips. He freezes. Still as stone a couple counts, then attacks the speed bag again, relentless until he’s finished and lets the bag wobble to a stop. Walks away wet head to toes. Skinny calves, thick thighs, thick torso, a pigeon-toed walk like they say the fastest runners walk. Till heavyset, but light on his feet, sneaky quick, a silent Indian kind of walk and isn’t that why she’s so quiet, Mamie Till so still, holding her breath, waiting for Louis to return.
Mamie Till is difficult to pick out in the apartment’s deepest shadowed corner where she’s slumped. She doesn’t want Louis Till to see her before she sees him. Quiet as a mouse so he won’t hear her before she hears him and launches her attack or counterattack, she tells herself, hiding from her husband in the darkness with a butcher knife and pot of boiled water with a lid to stay hot, scald his sorry ass, his mean soul. He hurt her first. Louis Till hurt her bad and she’s still hurting an hour later, back pushed against the wall, knees pulled up, chin resting on her swollen breasts, breasts resting on her big belly, the poor little child inside her made to go through all this ugly shit, too. Not even born yet but here’s her baby, his baby in the dark crying and hurting like she is, her poor baby inside her moaning like she’d moan out loud if the noise wouldn’t give away her hiding place. Mamie Till is all drawn up inside herself, quiet-quiet, hard-soft ball of herself, round and crowded up with the scared baby inside, she waits. Mamie righteous, fierce, because to save her child she must save herself. She must counterattack and drive Louis Till out the door.
Mamie Till told an interviewer Emmett almost missed his train to Mississippi. She said they had to hurry to get to the Twelfth Street Station on time. I believe I’ve seen that station, that it’s in the documentary I watched, Say Amen, Somebody, about the origins of gospel music, featuring Willie Mae Ford, legendary Chicago singer. I replay a scene in which the middle-aged daughter and son of Willie Mae Ford drive down a ramp into a train station’s underground parking lot. Stroll with them up to street level. Peer with them into a window near an unused entrance to the station. Our faces press close to the glass. With tissues from her purse, the daughter scrubs at a thick coat of grime. Boy, oh boy. Look at that. The camera meanwhile previews the station’s dark interior—an old-fashioned passenger coach abandoned on the tracks where it was uncoupled last, giant cylindrical metal containers stacked against a wall, unrecognizable debris scattered everywhere, gathering dust and rust in the gloom. Coming down here and seeing this decay, based on what it used to be, my, my, puts it all in one package, the man says to his sister, both of them standing inside the station now, eyes panning like the camera. My, my, the man sighs, close to tears. He recalls for his sister the station’s better days, a busy hub of activity when their mother was a star on the gospel music circuit, funny how every time those redcaps be knocking each other out the way to pick up Mama’s luggage. Not about tips. No, no. You know Daddy. Daddy didn’t believe in tips. Huh-uh. A dime sometimes maybe, most they gon get, if they got that.
Grainy clips earlier in the documentary had shown Willie Mae Ford, gospel queen in furs and feathered hats, departing or returning home to Chicago. Freedom trains full of colored emigrants from the south used to land many times a day in Chicago, trains whose sounds are embodied in the old, new music Willie Mae Ford sings, music baptized “gospel” by Reverend Thomas Dorsey, a.k.a. Georgia Tom, a blues troubadour in his younger days. Dorsey’s gospel music too bluesy for some folks. Too much Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Ida Smith hip-shaking, home-breaking in it, explains Say Amen, Somebody, and not everybody ready to hear it inside their churches. I remember when lots of them wouldn’t have Mama to sing let alone preach, the sister says to her brother.
The train station in the video could be the same one where September 2, 1955, Mamie Till, dead Louis Till’s wife, dead Emmett Louis Till’s mother, accompanied by her father, an uncle, cousins, an undertaker, two preachers, one named Louis Henry Ford (the father of Willie Mae Ford?) wait for the train from Mississippi bringing her murdered son back home to Chicago. Same train, the City of New Orleans, Emmett had boarded alive to leave Chicago less than two weeks before. A large crowd congregated at the station on September 2 to support Mrs. Till and witness the terrible truth of a story read in the papers, passed by word of mouth, concerning one of theirs, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black boy on a summer visit to relatives in Money, Mississippi, a boy beaten, shot, his mutilated body wired by the neck to a seventy-pound cotton gin fan and tossed into the Tallahatchie River to punish him, his cousin’s story claims, for wolf-whistling a white woman.
The tape plays on and I listen for the Till train’s entry into the station. Listening as I still listen some Sunday mornings for the scratchy music from my mother’s cracked black plastic radio tuned to WAMO at the end of the dial. My fair-skinned mother humming along as she spray-starches and irons one of my brown-skinned father’s white shirts for church. White shirts with collars and breasts ironed stiff, my father wears under his waiter’s jacket six days a week downtown in a dining room in Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh, a restaurant that used to be barred by a gold rope across the entrance, by a hostess notoriously uncordial towards colored folk who dared to eat there. Louis Till must have owned a white shirt. My father’s white shirt for church Sunday morning was more perfectly white and gleaming than the perfect ones worn to work every weekday and Saturday. My father’s hardness and absence crackled in those white shirts he demanded be kept spotless, wrinkle-free. In a room rented after he left us for good, gospel plays on a radio while he removes a laundered white shirt from its cellophane wrapper. He turns his back to me to put it on. When he’s facing me again, I watch his thick, dark fingers button the shirt, tremble to work gold-rimmed cuff links into tiny holes.
Even as a boy fourteen years old, Emmett Till’s age when Emmett Till was murdered, I understood my father hated those white shirts. Hated them and loved them, too. I also understood, boy or not, I was a large enough boy to get my ass out of bed and help my mother the night I heard a terrible crash in our living room. I knew my parents were fighting, but instead of rushing to save my mother, I lay petrified, pretending to sleep, afraid of a white shirt glowing in the darkness of the adjoining room. I held my breath, waited for my mother’s footsteps to prove she was alive and had managed to pick herself up from the floor.
My father had been waiting for my mother. I knew this without spying on him. How could I sleep while my father sits out there waiting for my mother, waiting with the lights off in the other room, not a sound for hour after hour except music playing in my head and the snoring of my siblings. Rakhim in bed beside me was the worst. On good nights the other kids’ restlessness and nasty noises were quieted by sounds of my mother busy in the kitchen, scrubbing dirty pots, rinsing, drying, stacking dishes. The rasp of a crooked cupboard door that never shuts first try. The last thing every evening she runs water for a cool drink then washes her cup and puts it away for coffee next morning. Same cup she uses all day so she doesn’t make extra work. Plate, knife, fork and spoon set out for my father each night he’s not home for dinner so he knows there’s food in the fridge to warm up if he hasn’t eaten on the job or smuggled home fancy leftovers from late night private parties he works. Last final thing, she switches off the kitchen light, and the yellow bar under our bedroom door dims.
Some nights I keep listening after my mother leaves the kitchen, crosses the living room, into the hall. Listen past the point she’s probably asleep in the tiny room squeezed into a corner of a landing at the top of stairs that go down to the Lemingtons’ apartment. My parents’ room is a room far enough away to muffle their whispers, their preparations for sleep on those rare nights they go to bed together. Though certain nights, I think I hear the blue crackle of a white shirt as my father pulls it off, or hear my mother alone in their bedroom humming gospel like she hums when she’s up very late waiting for my father to come home and he doesn’t, and she hums herself to sleep curled on the couch. Always gone when I jump up first thing next morning to check.
No matter how long I listen, sooner or later my vigil fails. I drop off and lose her. Worst nights, lying awake beside my youngest brother Rakhim, I worry and worry that everything I love and hate will be gone in the morning and never return. I listen long after my mother finishes her last little things, turns off the kitchen light and the bright inch under the door is replaced by faint illumination leaking in from a lamp by the front door she always leaves on for my father. I wonder if my mother’s sleeping or not in the bedroom, more closet than room, where she’s supposed to be. Wonder if she’s full of worries about my father. My siblings. Me.
The night of the terrible crash came right after three days and nights my father never made it home. Not home late as usual. Not home early or late. Not ever. No father for three days. No warnings in the morning from my mother to the younger kids, Shhhh. Hush all that noise, youall. Shush and eat your cereal. You know your father’s sleeping. You know you better not wake up your father. No father’s snores when I pass the bedroom landing on my way to school.
On the bad night my father returns early. Nine, ten o’clock. Very early for him, anyway, and he knocks softly then fumbles in his deep pockets for keys to let himself in. My mother’s out. Very late for her. A rare night she’s not home, and good boy me has performed his duties, bedded down the other kids at the exact hour, in the precise fashion, almost, my mother commanded. Don’t be mean to your little brothers and sister. Firm but nice with them. And don’t you dare sit up waiting for me like you think you’re my mother. Soon enough I’ll be sitting up all night worrying because you think you’re grown enough to run the streets till dawn, she said. But I couldn’t help staying awake.
Music’s playing in my head, fast and slow, rhythms change, words change, Rakhim’s wheezing snores mixed in, blues mixed with gospel, mixed with R & B, the Dells and Diablos, Drifters and Spaniels and Midnighters singing my songs on WAMO. Love music mixed with worry music mixed with dance music mixed with desire and fear of things I didn’t know the names of yet. Worried maybe I never would. Worried it all might vanish.
No light brightens the crack below the door. My father snapped it off when he came in and discovered my mother not at home. After three days gone, I’d begun to believe he’d left for good, but then I hear his key in the lock and he’s back home that night before my mother. Mother late. Father early. Strange turnabout. Me faking sleep. I wasn’t spying on my father, but I could hear his breathing, heartbeats, pounding of his thoughts, his big hands gripping his knees. I could hear his stillness in the overstuffed armchair everybody called Daddy’s Chair. His impatience and anger fill the silence with unthinkable acts, unspeakable words, hard and heavy as fists.
I pretended not to know why I was scared, though if I had tried, I could have said why. I was old enough to understand nearly everything. It was all in the music. In the talk in Henderson’s Barbershop. Woman who’s a wife and mother got no damned business out in the street, don’t care whatever goddamned sister you say you with, no goddamned business out in the street this goddamn time of night. Did I hear those particular words that night or are they blues words, gospel words, barbershop words dreamed, heard before the fact or after the fact of my mother’s body striking the floor, a sound that would have awakened me even if I’d been asleep as far away as the place old thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone Reverend Felder of Homewood AME Zion promised God would pitch bad black boys.
The singer’s daughter tells her brother she overheard one of the church young folk ask: Willie Mae Ford Smith. Who that? Then Say Amen, Somebody’s camera retreats for a long shot to frame the once-upon-a-time gospel queen’s children within the airplane hangar immensity of an empty steel shell with steel girders holding up a steel groined, vaulted ceiling, the section of a Chicago train station they reached by driving earlier in the video down a ramp at whose entrance light blazed in a checkerboard pattern from overhead grates, shafts of smoking brilliance pouring into the obscurity below, obscurity only slightly relieved here, inside the station, by illumination from begrimed panels in a ceiling miles away it seems from where the brother and sister stand now after they have parked underground, exited outdoors, then entered the station. They instinctively huddle closer together as they talk in whispers, as any two people or small group of persons likely would talk in a gloomy space that dwarfs them, dwarfs their voices whether they speak softly or shout. Big-boned, wide-hipped, large brown people whispering small things, simple, deep things, a call-and-response of reminiscence, holding on, letting go until there is no bottom, no sides, no ceiling to the station, no secrets, no down or up or come or go.
I pause the tape. Is it the Twelfth Street Station. What does it remember. Is a train station able to gaze at itself, revive the past, double it, a double as quiet as the face, the moving lips of my reflection within a mirror. Quiet as silences within the silences of Thelonious Monk’s piano. During the Twelfth Street Station’s heyday did people’s dreams truly float above the platform upon which I picture myself waiting for an Illinois Central train to arrive or depart, a platform lined with cardboard suitcases, ancient steamer trunks, duffel bags, shopping bags, string-tied bundles and cartons, colored girls carrying everything they own in a warm package they cradle in their arms, all of that dreaming and waiting, waiting, every shadow and echo and breath of those lives dust and grit somebody brooms away each morning from the station’s concrete floor.
I remember Chicago at night, a tapestry of winking, blinking lights out the windows of an elevated train, lights which are pinpricks in a black winding sheet draped over a snowbound city. And once in a taxi, approaching the city in daytime from O’Hare, I stared at the stark verticality of church steeples, minarets, smokestacks, waves of skyscrapers, a gray backdrop that recedes and draws nearer, both at once, skeletal towers trussed by power lines, sheaves of dirt poor dirty row after ramshackle row of houses, blocks of low-rise apartment buildings, public housing warrens twenty stories high, acres of demolished blocks, blocks and succeeding blocks of concrete, brick, stone-faced canyons the hawk rules in winter and no matter how much you bundle up or hoody-up humping through alleys, wind-tunnel streets, body slanted at a forty-five-degree angle like a character in a cartoon, your eyes tear, teeth chatter, no mama to wipe your snotty nose.
I also remember Chicago in a photo tucked in an old family album. Who had scribbled Chicago and people’s names on the photo’s yellowed backing. Faded, indecipherable names. Names of dressed-up folks maybe on their way to a splendid party. Chicago was a surprise in the Pittsburgh family album. Who are these strangers floating past, fancy people, handsome people in furs and expensive overcoats, my sturdy brown people light on their feet as ghosts. Do they live on another planet inhabiting the planet I inhabit. One scene, one photo, many universes dissolve, splash, one into the other always. I still possess Emmett Till’s photo from September 1955 on a page torn out of Jet magazine that Aunt Geraldine saved and gave me thirty years later.
I was fourteen the first time I saw the photo in Jet. Emmett Till’s age that summer they murdered him. Him colored, me colored. Him a boy, me too. Him so absolutely dead he’s my death, too. Fuzzy replicas of the photo appeared in colored newspapers—Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News—the image circulating, recycled decades later in Eyes on the Prize, a documentary history of the civil rights movement in which I saw the horrific picture of dead Emmett Till’s face staring back from my TV screen and freeze-framed it. Courage mustered finally, half a century after the fact. I did not look away. Hoped if I stared hard maybe the photo would wither, wrinkle, flames curl its edges, consume it. No screams, no agony, no sputtering frying chicken crackle like you’d think you’d hear.
I push play and Say Amen, Somebody resumes. More quiet exchanges between brother and sister, their voices barely audible to one another above the stillness. Are they afraid words might disturb sleeping ghosts. Delay the Till train’s slide into the station or its glide away. As if words could stop a train. Stop time. No. Not even words a brother and sister keep inside themselves, will you bury me or will I bury you, not even those unsayable words shouted out loud could waken their mother, stop the Till train.
Willie Mae Ford Smith’s grown-up children under the steel arc of roof remember fine clothes, fine cars, taxis. Black limos rolling up to the curb. So much glitter and glamour. The brother recalls veteran redcaps as well as neophytes shaking their heads in wonder, Who that. Where they going. Where they coming from. Boy oh boy. Their mother, Willie Mae Ford, sang church music thick with blues, ready or not, like it or not, you get blues licked up in gospel. Didn’t want Mama when she young and just starting out, and before long they standing in line in bitter cold and snow paying good money to hear Mama and now the young folks see her in church every Sunday forgot her name.
Later, leaving the station, one sibling frowns, the other grins in response. Whole lifetimes flicker on the TV screen compressed into a single glance they exchange. One expression scrubbed away instantaneously by the next, light to dark to light, too fast to follow, he’s your brother, you’re his sister, we’ve done that, been there, no need to go back, to linger or regret or hope. Here we are, here it is, this quiet moment in the station Samboing into every other moment and the black boy chases the tiger fast as the tiger chases him.
Mamie Till listens harder than anyone else for the Till train. Looks closer than anyone else at her dead son’s body, I looked at the ears, the forehead, the lips, the nose, she wrote. She knows the train’s due, perhaps in the station already, the same City of Orleans that carried her live Emmett away two weeks ago, returns today with his corpse, enters the Twelfth Street Station, enters silence sealed under a high, arching ceiling. Silence of dark, swollen thunderclouds, quiet of a storm ready to burst.
ARGO
Nothing closer to truth than truth—but the truth is—not even truth is close to truth. So we create fiction. As a writer searching for Louis Till, I choose to assume certain prerogatives—license might be a more accurate word. I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people’s true stories. And to be fair, I let other people’s stories trespass the truth of mine.
I go with Mamie Till back home to Chicago. It’s a week or two after the Mississippi murder trial and its ugly aftermath. No kidnapping charges filed against the two men who abducted and killed her son. Why Mamie Till is asking herself. Mrs. Till, dead Emmett’s mother, dead Louis Till’s wife, must be thinking that terror never ends. Terror is truth and truth is terror and it never ends, she thinks. Truth of that big stinking crate with a box inside with Emmett’s dead body inside the box. Terror of the box closed, truth of the undertaker prying it open with hammer claws. Terror of not looking, truth of looking. She must bear both for Emmett, for love, for justice, a look inside the box she cannot dare until she prays hard and a voice whispers, your heart will be encased in glass and no arrow can pierce it. Truth of listening to herself say, I want the world to see what they did to my baby. Terror of standing beside Bo’s open casket at the funeral while she sees in the eyes of mourners who file past the terror and truth of what they see. Terror of lost Emmett. Truth of how he returns. There’s my heart underneath that glass lid. Terror of sleepless sleep, sleep, sleep, sleeping all day, never truly asleep. Truth of being wide awake forever, day and night. Terror and truth of nightmares sleepless sleep brings . . .
She talks to herself. After the ceaseless terror and truth and terror, she’s still alive in her mother’s apartment in Argo and must decide to live or die, and decide again the moment after this one. Yes or no again. Her eyes rest on a man who sits on a chair Albert carried in from the kitchen. This man, the half brother of her lover Albert, has the strange name, Wealthy, and she thinks maybe he might have been sent by God, to help her. She needs to believe, needs help. Too many nights alone, too much wandering and fumbling around here in these rooms alone day after day, bone tired, going crazy, if truth be told. No sleep, then more tired and nervous fumbling around here after Mama goes off to work in the morning. I’m all alone with my own self, she thinks, but keep bumping into Bo, my sweet Bo, everywhere and then it’s not him I hear, I smell, I follow. I reach out to touch him, but Bo’s gone, gone, and I drop down on the sofa or armchair, try to nap, to forget and can’t. Wear myself out trying to make up some person who will tell me what to do next, tell me to stop holding my breath, tell me how to breathe again, tell me not to wait for the worst thing on earth to be over because it’s never over, always more terror and truth and then more.
Mr. Wealthy looks like a nice man and I surely do need somebody nice, a nice somebody to say words I can’t say to myself. Say breathe. Say the thing you must do next, Mamie Till, is this. The voice of a new somebody. Not you, Mama. Not nice Albert. Somebody I don’t know who says words I need to hear. No face, no color, no man or woman I can imagine, though I think it should have to be a man because a woman’s too much like me, she would try to make me feel better because she’s a woman, a mother who understands bleeding inside for her child and moaning inside and watching how everything outside minute by minute pays you no mind, gets no better, gets worse and you’re more scared every minute for your child but nothing you can do, just watch and hurt and bleed and try to tell yourself it’s not as bad as it seems, everything going to be all right like the songs say, by and by, but that lie don’t fly, you are just talking to your own dumb self, you need another person to tell you the truth. It could be a woman or a man who tells it to me but harder, Mama, to believe a woman and nobody, no man or woman or chicken with a talking mouth can bring back my child. My sweet Bo gone. They killed my baby.
They said Emmett bad, Mama, and say that’s why he’s dead. Bad like his bad daddy, like father like son they said and I need someone to talk to me, hold my hand. I need kind words doesn’t matter who says them, and when this half brother or cousin or friend or whatever of my Albert, this Wealthy, his odd name, comes to the door, I ask myself is he the answer to a prayer I only halfway allowed myself to pray, prayed so softly under my breath, couldn’t hear myself praying it was so quiet and so deep down inside me because I wasn’t sure I wanted God to hear either, maybe just overhear, didn’t want God to get the wrong idea that maybe I blame Him or always expect nice things from Him or like I know better than Him what’s right or wrong for me or think I deserve His special attention when I don’t because this whole wide world like you say Mama ain’t nothing but a stool for Him to rest His feet on. Just bear the burdens the Good Lord give you to bear, girl, Mama says. He ain’t never gon burden you with more’n you can handle, she says. And sure enough here comes this man Wealthy. He doesn’t know me, never knew Louis, never met Bo. Here he is out the goodness of his heart in my mama’s apartment in a polka dot tie and a nice gray suit he wears like he’s in the army, all buttoned up, pressed and starched soldier sharp like Louis grins picture perfect clean in his army photo. This Mr. Wealthy not a strapping man like Louis or Albert. A smallish, tight fist kind of man, iron creases in his clothes and straight-backed as an arrow and proper the way he took a seat on the chair Albert carried in from the kitchen and Mr. Wealthy straightens his neat little self, tugs his silver tie, as if one too few polka dots showing. Tugs a pant leg straight after he crosses a short leg over his knee.
No ma’am. No thank you, ma’am. Nothing to drink for me, thank you, Mrs. Till, the first thing he says after he said, Pleased to meet you, ma’am, though I’m truly sorry we are meeting under these unhappy circumstances, Mrs. Till. Same words she heard from the lemon-colored undertaker, Mr. A. A. Rainier, who buried Emmett, undertaker smiling his sad, droop-mouth smile at people so he gets that check when they’re grieving for somebody or somebody grieving for them. Mr. Rainier says pleased to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. So and So, sorry it’s under these circumstances, fresh graveyard mud on the wingtips of his shoes, spit-shined like Mr. Wealthy’s shoes, Mr. Wealthy with one narrow foot standing at attention in the air, the other foot patting Mama’s living room rug after he crosses his little leg over his knee and begins to speak.
Don’t you believe a word those dogs say, Mrs. Till. Excuse my language, please, ma’am. Albert told me many times what a fine young man you were raising. Albert very fond of your son, Emmett. You all have my deepest sympathy, Mrs. Till. You and your family and Albert, too. Wished I could do something to help and thought to myself it’s not much but it’s the least you can do, Wealthy, go on over there with Albert and tell Mrs. Till about the army. Army something I know, Mrs. Till. I’m a veteran. I know the army and I can tell you from experience. Army lies. Tell a person every kind of lie there is. Bad business they put in the newspaper about your late husband, best not believe a word of it.
Army and the government lie. Lie, lie, lie all the time. When the sneaky Japs bomb Pearl Harbor, plenty of us colored men in a hurry to join the army. We want to enlist because it’s our country, too. Only country we got, and it’s a man’s duty defend his country. Signed up like Old Uncle Sam pointing his crooked finger at everybody said sign up. But the army lies. They don’t want colored soldiers.
Treat us like slaves. Like animals. Yes they did. And nothing we could do about it. Behave like they say you better behave or they lock you in the stockade. Beat you, kill you quick as they kill the enemy we all spozed to be together in the U.S. Army to fight. Treat us colored soldiers like they own us, like they got the God-given right to kick us, spit on us and the only right we got is salute and say, Yes, sir. Here’s my behind, sir. Kick it again, sir. Dirty dog duty or days we’re mules and horses and elephants carrying Uncle Sam’s war on our backs.
Don’t you believe a word they putting out about Mr. Till, God rest his soul. Any the fellows went through the war, tell you what I’m telling you, Mrs. Till. Say just exactly what I’m saying. No different for colored over there in the war than things here today, in this United States of America. This Chicago. White man lie and say you’re guilty—you’re guilty. Case closed.
Now I’m not saying terrible things didn’t happen in the war. But not just colored boys doing wrong. All the lies they put in the newspaper you’d think it was just us doing wrong. Just colored soldiers guilty. Not the truth, Mrs. Till. Never met your husband, but he was a soldier in the same colored army I served in, Mrs. Till. So the bad they say he did, maybe he did, maybe he didn’t, but if the army say he did bad things, your husband finished. Never had a chance. Nothing a colored soldier can do about it. Nothing, Mrs. Till. Not until God rises up off His throne and stomps down those golden stairs and stops the lies.
Mamie Till wrote an autobiography. Didn’t give Louis Till much space in it. According to Mrs. Till, Louis was often brutal with her. Put his hands on her. Then absent. Then dead. Then he turned up ten years later at a very inconvenient time, an embarrassing boogeyman from Mamie’s past to haunt the trial of their son’s murderers. Mamie wrote that Emmett was Louis Till’s only accomplishment and in the end his only reason for being on earth. Must have been a bit more to her relationship with Louis than that, I believe. Probably adored the cute, mischievous little boy inside her handsome, mean man Louis. Maybe a tough guy was attractive to her. Maybe she thought she could stick her head in the lion’s jaws without getting hurt. Mamie also a down home, practical country girl. What sorts of men available in Argo, Illinois. What choices did she have. Most colored men and women newly arrived immigrants from the south, people marginalized economically, socially, in segregated enclaves. Mamie Carthan took a chance with Louis Till. Hoped she could tame him, mother him into a decent, dependable man. A project that was failing, she wrote. Then the army took Louis. Mamie Till probably lavished all her love on Emmett while she waited for Louis to return. After a telegram from the army said Louis Till dead, she could fall in love with him again in the person of his son. And this time love him without the worry of getting mauled.
Of course Mamie Till a lion, too. Like my mother she did not derive her sense of self-worth solely from her relationship with a son, though she would do anything in her power to protect him and demonstrate her love. If the Till offspring had been a daughter, Mamie Till would have loved her as much as she loved a Louis Till son. Like my mom, Mamie Till worked hard to maintain her integrity, dignity, honesty, her consistency in how she viewed herself, how she treated other people and expected them to treat her. Once I grew smart enough to appreciate my mother’s example, I attempted to emulate her but fell far short of her standards.
Mamie Till, a lion and a warrior. She risked her life in September of 1955 when she traveled from Chicago to Mississippi. Her son Emmett’s blood still fresh on the hands of the murderers she confronted at the trial in Sumner. Threats, harassment, disrespect did not chase her back to Chicago, though she admitted in her memoir she was deeply frightened each day by the ordeal of the trial, by cars that trailed the car she rode in from the courtroom to her motel, by bullets she lay in bed at night waiting to hear crash through the windows of her room. Soon after she returned home from Mississippi, she became a public spokesperson, a relentless witness who told her story to anyone willing to listen. First with NAACP officials sharing the podium as her sponsors, then alone, on her own two feet, traveling to welcoming cities or hostile cities across the country. She persisted in this work, until her death—speaker, writer, activist, dedicated crusader for civil rights, determined not to allow her fellow Americans to forget the terror, the injustice inflicted upon her son Emmett. Upon many, many other colored children of colored mothers.
Mamie Till remembers fixing Louis a sandwich. She wraps it in waxed paper, folds the edges like you gift wrap so edges even and neat. She’s out of rubber bands. Rubber bands not around like before the war. Hopes the sandwich will hold together. Tucks it into a brown paper bag, adds an apple, creases the bag’s top tightly shut. What kind damn sammich dat. She does not respond What the hell damn kind do you think, Louis Till. A T-bone steak sammich, hands ready to fly up to protect her face. No. Don’t start. She is Louis Till’s wife. Her mother’s good daughter. Her daddy’s sweet girl. Raised in Argo Temple Church of God in Christ. Baloney, she answers. A baloney sandwich for your lunch today, Louis. Thank goodness Louis not listening for an answer, not looking for a fight this morning. Brown bag in hand he’s out the door. Slams it behind him. She can allow her arms to relax, her fists to drop to her sides. Wipe her fingers on her apron. Finish her thought. A baloney sandwich for your lunch break at Argo Corn Products, Louis, with my daddy and all the other colored men carrying sammiches fixed by wives, mothers, women who buy cold cuts from the A & P with money from Corn Products paychecks.
Baloney. Three paper-thin, pink slices between four slices of white bread. I wish like you wish Louis it could be country ham or turkey or roast beef or half a fried chicken with potato salad, greens and biscuits Louis but you know good and well Louis you only give me baloney money and plenty of times I don’t even see baloney money. Do my best. Spread margarine on bread then mustard and mayonnaise, some ketchup if we have ketchup in the house. When I press the slices together, careful not to press too hard, and get the crusts messy. Wipe stuff from the knife back inside the bread so I don’t waste. It’s baloney today Louis not one of those mustard and mayonnaise days, so consider yourself lucky today, man, and yes I know you work hard Louis and I know you want more and I truly believe you deserve more and I know you think the only way you can get more is card playing and shooting dice Louis and you lose the little bit we have and you don’t bother to come home at night like there’s nothing here to come home to I guess you think Louis with the cupboard bare and my tired, bare face up in your face, my tears, my mouth all twisted up to holler at you when you come in here empty-handed and maybe you’re shamed, maybe my tired body not enough for you, just good for scrubbing floors, washing your clothes, and even with everything I do around here to make a decent home Louis sometimes I believe it means nothing to you, home no place special in your mind, slinking in here with your hands empty when the money’s gone and you can’t even give me the little bit I need to feed you and feed myself so my body can feed my child, your child, Louis, our baby I carry every day God sends here and when you’re not home I’m here day and night carrying your child Louis and today it’s a baloney and bread sammich Louis and roll your big eyes at me if you need to but what else you think it’s going to be.
I can hear you mock me down at Corn Products, see you ball up the paper I take my time to fold to make nice for you and hear you fuss at the sandwich I made and I wish wish maybe just once Louis you could try not to tear the wax paper, not crumple it up and toss it in the trash at work. I wish one day you would save wax paper I wrap your sandwich in. Why can’t you for once just fold the wax paper up neatly like a person folds a nice letter to slip in an envelope and bring it back home in the bag and I could use bag and paper again and it would save a little money, Louis, but that’s not the only reason why.
Little Mississippi. Mamie Till say it like she proud. Argo, Illinois, but we call it Little Mississippi, she say. So many of us from down there come up here to live. On Mama’s street lots of family. Aunt Marie. Uncle Kid. June Bug. Uncle Crosby. Then next block it’s Aunt Babe and Uncle Emmett and Great-Uncle Lee Greene. Mama and them started up Argo Temple Church of God in Christ and Sunday morning it’s Webb, Mississippi, all over again right here in Argo.
Louis Till shuts his eyes to hide from her, hide what he’s thinking. He ain’t no country ass Webb ass Mississippi ass goddamn Negro. He shadowboxes. Speed bag blippety-blip-blip. Fists a blur. He’s from Missouri not no goddamn lynch niggers Mississippi. Ain’t no damn cotton fields out where he come from. Day he leaves New Madrid he looks through a dirty bus window at fields of something growing and truth is he don’t know what the fuck it supposed to be. Maybe corn for Corn Products. Alagra syrup and Mazola cooking oil and margarine. Argo starch with that green and yellow Indian man on the box look like he a ear of corn. They make every damned thing from corn. Corn they grow out west and he sees flying green fields, flying Indian man boxes, flying speed bag. Opens his eyes, nods at this Mamie and hopes she’s done talking that dumb country ass shit she’s talking. Asks his self why Mississippi Negroes never get enough of other Mississippi Negroes night or day. Sure won’t ask her.
Everybody white as snow out in Missouri, Louis Till would like to say to Mamie if he could. But there are some Negroes out there because here he is black in Argo, Illinois, so got to be some black like me back in Missouri. She know the name of her people come up here, names of her people down there, all her people names and he don’t know one, not one of his people. No names. Only Louis Till. Orphan. No middle initial. No people. What I’m spozed to do, girl, with all those names you saying. Not my names. Not my church. Not my people. Got none. Got one name, Till. Louis Till. Me. My people. My name.
Alma, my mama’s name. Alma Gaines Carthan, Mrs. Till explains in her book, raised me close up under her so when I met Louis I was innocent about the world. Mama never talked to me about female things. Once a boy stole a kiss when we were playing in the school yard. Shook me up so much I ran straight to Mama when I got home from school. Mama, I’m pregnant, Mama. She’s shook up, too, hugs me, both us crying. Then I tell her about the boy kiss me and she look at me like I’m crazy. Smacks me hard. Whap. Girl, you ain’t pregnant. I don’t stay dumb long but the way Mama raises me keeps me dumb long enough to think Louis Till real smart. Louis good looking and been out in the world on his own two feet his whole life so Louis seem to a girl like me like he knew just about everything. Swept me off my feet, you could say. Mama surprise me when she say Yes you may go with Louis Till to get ice cream. My first date with Louis. First date with anybody. A walk over to Kline’s Deli and Ice Cream Parlor.
