Mississippi Trial, 1955

by Chris Crowe

  “I’m really sorry about Emmett, Ruthanne. Awful sorry.” I don’t know why, but I felt like crying then. I blinked the tears back. “I wish it had never happened. It should’ve never happened.”

  “I appreciate that, Mr. Hiram,” she said as she dabbed her eyes. “Ain’t nothing you could’ve done about it, I know, but I do appreciate your sympathies.”

  “But maybe I could have done something. Maybe I can now.”

  “What’s done is done. You couldn’t have stopped old Milam and Bryant anyway. The law and the good Lord’ll take care of those two and anyone else mixed up in their wickedness.”

  Somehow I felt mixed up in their wickedness, mixed up and not knowing how to get out of it.

  Ruthanne took a deep breath, ready to change the subject. “You heading outside?”

  “Thought I’d take a walk; I need to get out of the house for a while.”

  She pointed to the kitchen garbage pail next to the back door. “Why don’t you take that with you to the garbage on your way out? And, Mr. Hiram,” Ruthanne said, smiling, “don’t you be too late talking with that Naomi girl. You know how her daddy gets.”

  “I never said anything about Naomi; I just—”

  “Don’t ‘I just’ me, Hiram Hillburn. I got boys of my own back home. Now get this trash and yourself out of the house before that poor girl starts worrying about what happened to you.”

  It felt good to be outside. A few stars had edged over the dark tree-lined horizon. A light breeze stirred the humid night air, and the steady drone of frogs and crickets was the only sound as I emptied the trash into the garbage can behind the garage and walked along the driveway to the sidewalk in front of the house. As I walked through the shadows of the trees that lined the sidewalk, I felt like I was leaving the worries about R.C. and the trial behind.

  It didn’t take long to get to the bridge, and I felt better than I had all day when I saw Naomi leaning over the bridge railing, looking down into the dark water of the Yazoo. Her hair swayed in the night breeze, hiding her face. She didn’t move when I stood alongside her and leaned over the railing myself.

  “What’re you looking at?” My arm rested next to Naomi’s, barely touching.

  “The color of the river. During the day it looks so yellow-green, but soon as it’s dark, you’d never know it ever had a speck of color in it. Where’s all that color go, I wonder.”

  Without talking, we watched the dark currents of the Yazoo swirl under the bridge below us. Finally, Naomi turned and faced me. “Hey, Hiram.”

  “Hey, Naomi. You been here long?”

  “A while. Tonight wasn’t a good night to be home. Pa’s on a tear again.” She turned around and leaned against the railing. No bruises, at least none I could see. That meant she had gotten out in time.

  “Drinking?”

  “Always that. But the last couple days the sheriff’s come by looking for R.C., and Pa don’t know where he is. Sheriff thinks Pa’s lying and warned him that R.C.’s a fugitive, and if Pa’s hiding him, he’ll land himself in jail. Soon as the sheriff leaves, Pa cusses him, R.C., the NAACP, President Eisenhower, and anybody else he’s mad at. Then he starts up drinking again and slows down for a while—and that’s when I know I got to get out of there.”

  “What’s the sheriff want R.C. for?” I asked.

  “Says he just wants to ask him some questions ’bout that Negro boy got killed up in Money.”

  “He say why?”

  “The way R.C. talks, I s’pose; everybody knows he hates Negroes and how he treats them. He’s been in trouble with the law plenty of times before, but this time it galls Pa something awful. He rants and raves: ‘Never thought I’d live to see the day when a white lawman would bother a white citizen of the state of Mississippi ’bout nigger trouble. R.C. ain’t no saint, not by a long shot, but my boy’s white, and the law got no business worrying him ’bout some black boy floated up in the Tallahatchie.’ It makes him hateful, Hiram. Worse than drinking.”

  “You seen R.C. lately?”

  “Not since Sunday. I don’t know where he is, and I’m worried. I’m sure he knows the sheriff’s after him. Ain’t the first time he’s disappeared for a while.”

  “Do you think he had anything to do with that trouble in Money?”

  “R.C.’s done a lot of stupid things, but he’s my brother, Hiram; I don’t think he’d murder somebody.” She looked at me, a little unsure of herself.

  “I guess they’re planning on having a big trial up in Sumner,” I said.

  Naomi nodded.

  “Sheriff wants me to be ready to testify. I got a subpoena today.”

  “Testify for what? How could you know anything about that murder? You don’t even know anybody in Money.”

  “I know R.C.”

  “So what? Lots of people know R.C. Why do they want you?”

  I told her what R.C. had said the night before the kidnapping. “Next day Emmett Till was missing—and so was R.C.”

  Naomi’s face turned sad. “You think R.C. was with those men?”

  “I don’t know. That day R.C. and I went fishing, we met Emmett Till and some of his friends at the river. R.C. did something terrible to him.”

  “Did he hurt him?”

  “No, but he scared and shamed him. I don’t know, Naomi. If you’d seen how R.C. acted at the river, how cold-blooded he was. Then after he told me he was going to Money—”

  “You can’t talk about this in court, Hiram.” Naomi’s eyes opened wide. “You can’t say another thing about this.”

  “I know he’s your brother, and it’ll be bad for him if anything—”

  “Blast my brother. It’ll be bad for you. Do you think R.C. or any of his peckerwood friends will let you get away with speaking against white men for doing something to a Negro? And even if you get back to Arizona, do you know what they’ll do to your grampa? You can’t talk in court, Hiram, you just can’t. If anything happened to you, if R.C. did something to you”—her voice shook—“I just couldn’t stand it!” She grabbed my hand and squeezed it, hard. “You stay away from that trial, Hiram Hillburn. I don’t care if you have to sneak out of town and I never see you again, but you stay away from that trial. You just stay away, hear me?” Then she leaned into me and started to cry.

  I held her while she buried her face against my chest, and I wanted to stay with her like that for as long as I could. Holding her made me forget about everything else that had gone wrong that Mississippi summer. Right then the only thing I wanted to remember about my weeks in Greenwood was standing alone with Naomi Rydell on the Yazoo bridge thinking not about Emmett, or R.C., or Grampa, or Dad, but about Naomi and how I wanted to protect her.

  CHAPTER 13

  Naomi wouldn’t let me walk her home that night. “Who knows what kind of mood Pa’ll be in? And besides, R.C. might be around.”

  I sure didn’t want to run into R.C., but I didn’t want Naomi walking home alone either.

  “I can get home fine by myself, Hiram,” she insisted. “Been doing it for years and haven’t had a problem yet.”

  Before we said good-bye, she took my hand in both of hers and stared at me, her eyes glistening in the dark. “You remember what I told you about that trial. It won’t do nobody no good if you get up and talk, so decide right now you’ll have nothing to do with it.” She squeezed my hand. “Promise, Hiram. Promise you won’t go to the trial, won’t say anything about R.C. or anything else.”

  “Maybe they won’t even ask me to testify. Maybe I’ll go and just sit around at the trial and the lawyers will decide they don’t want to hear from me. There hasn’t been anything in the Commonwealth about the third man for a while, so maybe they’ve given up looking for R.C. Or maybe the district attorney decided just to go after Bryant and Milam because they’ve already confessed to kidnapping.”

  “And maybe you’re wrong. Don’t do it, Hiram. Don’t be stupid.”

  Time passed as slow as mud. Mom called every three or four days
to see how I was doing. We never talked long, and we never talked about Dad. Except once. “Your father and I want you to know that we’re very concerned about your safety, Hiram. Are you sure things are going to stay under control?”

  “Mom, it’s going to be all right. I don’t even know for sure if I’ll end up talking in the trial anyway.”

  “Still, we’d feel better if . . .” She paused. “Hiram, your father wants to speak to you.”

  Dad wanted to talk to me? I couldn’t believe it.

  “Hiram?”

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He cleared his throat. “Son, I want you to know that your mother or I will be out there immediately if you need us. We’ve even checked into one of us flying there if we have to. We’re worried about this trial mess you’ve gotten into.”

  “It’s going to be okay. Grampa told me—”

  “Your grandfather!” he said quickly and too loud. I heard him take a breath. “Your grandfather is not in any situation to make promises like that. Besides, I am your father, Hiram, and I’m the one who must ultimately be responsible for your safety.”

  It felt good to hear Dad say that. Very good. “Thanks, Dad, but I’ve even talked to the sheriff—”

  “George Smith?”

  “Yessir.”

  “George is all right. What did he tell you?”

  “That there’s no way out of the subpoena. I can’t leave Greenwood, but he’s got someone watching the house, and he promised he’d keep an eye out for anyone who might be looking for trouble. I believe him, Dad. And I’m not scared, honest.” That was a lie.

  “Well, you listen to me. Sheriff Smith is a good man, but you’re still in the heart of the Delta, son, and some people down there get crazy about anything they think’s going to threaten their Jim Crow ways. Things can get dangerous, fast. You’re a smart boy; I expect you to use your head.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “Good. And remember, you need me or your mother, you call us immediately. It’ll take some arranging—Mom’s got all the kids and I’ve got school just starting up—but if you need us, one of us will be out there just as fast as we can.”

  “Grandpa’s taking good care of things. I’ll be fine, Dad.”

  “Well, if you’re sure, Hiram, but you remember what I said.”

  I thanked Dad and said good-bye. Nothing he said changed a thing about what was going on in Greenwood, but almost everything he said made me feel better about him, about us.

  While I waited for the trial, school had started in Greenwood, and during the day when all the kids in town—including Naomi—were in class, I did what I could to keep from going stir-crazy. Some mornings I’d stay home and read library books or take Grampa’s truck and go for a drive in the country. Other times, Grampa and I went out to check his fields. A couple mornings a week we went fishing, but always on the Yazoo instead of the Tallahatchie. It was strange because Grampa never used to fish the Yazoo, but when I asked him about it, he just shrugged it off.

  Most afternoons, Grampa dropped in on his friends in the courthouse; like Grampa, they’d all taken a sharp interest in the trial and agreed that they needed to make sure that the NAACP and the outside agitators from the North didn’t keep the Mississippi court from doing its job. Most of them worried that the school integration law had started things going in a bad way, and that Northern rabble-rousers would use the trial to force other changes in the South. “We’ve kept the races separated for a long time and we don’t intend to change now,” was what Grampa or one of his friends usually ended up saying.

  The Commonwealth said Sheriff Smith had lots of threatening letters and phone calls from people in Chicago and Mississippi. Somebody even said a caravan of one thousand Negroes was on its way down from Chicago to go after Milam and Bryant, and that worried the sheriff enough that he called in the National Guard to protect the county jail. On Tuesday, the same day they had a huge funeral for Emmett up in Chicago, the big news around Greenwood, news that surprised most everybody, including Grampa, was that the grand jury had indicted Milam and Bryant for murder and kidnapping. Even though they’d already admitted to kidnapping Emmet Till, they pleaded innocent to both charges.

  Because the trial was going to be held up in Tallahatchie County and probably because Sheriff Smith was worrying about keeping the peace, on Wednesday Bryant and Milam got moved to the Tallahatchie County jail up in Charleston. For a while, no one was sure how long they’d be there because no one knew when they’d have the trial—some said it could be all the way in March 1956—but on Friday the Commonwealth announced the trial would begin on September 19.

  Nine days. Only nine days to decide whether or not I’d tell the truth if I had to sit in the witness chair.

  Even if I hadn’t been sweating what I’d say if I had to testify, I would have been thinking about the trial most of the time anyway. Almost every day the paper had something about the case, and even if you didn’t read the paper, anywhere you went in the county, you’d hear people talking about it. This was the biggest thing ever to hit Greenwood, maybe ever to hit Mississippi.

  On a Monday afternoon a week before the trial was supposed to start, Grampa and I were at the courthouse and he was talking with a friend about their White Citizens’ Council. I could tell he didn’t want me hanging around while they talked, and to be honest, I didn’t want to be there either, so I walked down to the lobby to get a Coke from Mr. Paul.

  He opened the bottle and set it on the counter. “So, Hiram, you got your wish to stick around in Greenwood a little longer. You been enjoying the extra summer vacation?”

  “You know, I used to think I’d love a longer summer vacation, but I’m kind of missing school.”

  He smiled. “Sometimes when we get what we’ve always wanted, we realize it’s not what we thought it was. When I was your age, I wanted more than anything to get away from Greenwood for a while and find out what the rest of the world was like. Then World War Two came along and gave me my wish. I saw plenty of the world, until this, of course.” He pointed to his eyes. “And the whole time I was gone, the only place I could think of was little old Greenwood, Mississippi. Life sure has a funny way of teaching us lessons, don’t it?”

  “Yessir,” I said, “but it seems like some people never learn any of those lessons no matter how many times they’re taught.”

  “Oh, they learn ’em, Hiram, they just don’t know it. Sometimes it takes a change of scenery or a good whack in the head to help you recognize the lessons you’ve learned.”

  “This change of scenery’s sure made me realize that Greenwood, well, it’s different. Lots different from what I thought it was.”

  “You’re not the only person these days wondering about Mississippi. From what I hear, people up north—Negro and white—are pretty hot about that boy’s death. For all the trouble this has caused, some folks down here are wishing that boy’s body would’ve stayed at the bottom of the Tallahatchie. And that trial next week’s going to heat things up more than anything.”

  “Do you think the trial will change anything around here?”

  “You know anything about the South,” Mr. Paul said, “you know we change slower than a tombstone. Oh, it might be a little step forward, but that Negro boy ain’t the first to be murdered down here, and I’m afraid he won’t be the last.”

  “Mr. Paul, if you had a chance to be in the trial, you know, like a witness or something, what would you do?”

  “If I knew something that proved those two didn’t kill that boy, I’d feel obliged to testify, and if I had something that would convict ’em, well, I’d have to plan on closing my shop and heading somewhere far away from Mississippi. But I’d speak up.”

  “Wouldn’t you be scared?”

  “You bet I’d be scared. I’d be branded a nigger-lover as soon as I showed up in court, and I suppose I’d be lucky if all I got was a few shot-out windows and a burning cross in my front yard.”

  “But you’d do it?”
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  “Other than making the decision harder, being scared wouldn’t matter one way or the other.” He patted the counter. “You stewing about something serious, Hiram?”

  “I guess so. It’s just that when things are scary or dangerous, it’s hard to see clear what to do.”

  “Well, the best way to work your way through it is to size up both sides of something, then use all the brains you’ve got to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, and make yourself do the right thing. Do that and no matter what happens, no matter what people say, you’ll have no regrets.”