Mississippi Trial, 1955

by Chris Crowe

  She walked right to me, took my hand, and sat down on the bench. “I’m glad I got here before you left, Hiram. I’ve been wanting to talk to you . . . but, well, things got complicated pretty fast.” Her hand felt warm, relaxed. She told me Sheriff Smith had found her a family to live with, a good family who’d take care of her; she’d finish high school, and then maybe go to secretarial school or even college. Naomi sounded full of hope.

  We sat on that bench and talked until my train came. When we hugged good-bye, I felt her tears on my cheek. “I hope you come back someday, Hiram,” she whispered. “Things, everything, will be better then.”

  I couldn’t answer because if I did, I knew I’d cry. I just hugged her tighter and prayed nothing but good would come her way for the rest of her life. She’d already had a lifetime share of the bad.

  The train whistled twice, and a conductor called, “All aboard!” I stood up and grabbed my bags. “Thanks, Naomi,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”

  I got on the train just before it started moving, and from my window seat, I watched Naomi standing alone on the platform until the train was out of sight.

  Naomi was all right, was going to be all right. It was nice leaving Greenwood knowing that.

  When I got back to Arizona, Dad, not Mom, met me at the station in Phoenix. That surprised me. Dad was always busy with something, stuff at work or church or with the little kids, so Mom usually had to deal with me.

  Then I remembered that he’d probably followed every minute of the trial, not because I might have been in it, but because it was about somebody like Emmett Till getting killed in Mississippi. Of course he’d follow a civil rights case, especially when it was in Mississippi, and he probably couldn’t wait to get my eyewitness account of the whole trial. Fine. If he wanted to know about the trial, I’d tell him—tell him almost everything.

  When I stepped off the train, he was alone, looking over the crowd trying to spot me. He didn’t see me at first and I didn’t wave or call to him, I just watched. He looked a little like my grandfather, not as heavy, but his face, the way his hair was graying, even the way he moved. At least in appearance, he definitely was his father’s son. After a minute or so, the crowd thinned enough for him to see me. He smiled, waved, and walked over to me.

  “Welcome home, son,” he said. We shook hands, and then he reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve missed you.”

  Dad and I stood facing each other awkwardly for a moment. I was almost as tall as he was. He looked a little older, tireder. For a second, our eyes met, and something passed between us, an understanding of some sort, from one Mississippi boy to another.

  Then Dad patted my shoulder and picked up my bags; I followed him out to the parking lot.

  It’s a good ten miles from the Phoenix train depot to our house in Tempe. Even in late September the weather was still hot, and Dad had all the car windows down as we headed home. The dry air swirled through the station wagon moving things around but not really cooling us off. For the first few minutes neither one of us said anything, but I wanted to at least try to talk to Dad to see if we could talk without ending up in a fight.

  “How’s everybody?” I asked.

  “Better, now that school’s started. The kids were getting pretty antsy the last couple weeks of summer. Too much time on their hands was not a good thing.” Dad cleared his throat, and while keeping his eyes on the road, said, “That trial, it really must have been something. I kept thinking of that poor boy’s mother, of his entire family, how awful it must have been for them to see and hear all that evidence and then to have that jury turn Bryant and Milam loose.” He sighed. “It’s been like that for too long down there, but maybe all the attention that trial got will put people on warning. Desegregation was already on its way, and then the trial. I can imagine how my dad’s taking it. Of course, nothing in the Delta’s going to change any time soon, but it’s a start, a step in the right direction.” He glanced at me as if he’d just remembered something and said, “Sorry, Hiram. Probably the last thing in the world you want to think about right now is that trial. Tell me about Greenwood. Are you glad you went?”

  “Sort of. Greenwood was exactly how I remembered it. The town and the house haven’t changed a bit. When I first got there, I thought I’d never want to leave; then stuff started happening, ugly kinds of stuff.”

  “The trial?” asked Dad.

  “And other things. Some people there were terrific, but a lot of them, I don’t know, they seemed to have a meanness in them. They were friendly and all that, but . . .”

  “They weren’t very nice to Negroes.”

  “Yeah, but it took me a while to notice that. I guess when I was a little kid, that was all going on over my head. At least it never registered with me.”

  “And what about Grampa?”

  “For a while it was like the old days when he and Gramma were taking care of me. We went fishing, went out to the fields, ate at the Riverside Café. It was a lot of fun.” Then I wondered something. “Dad, did you ever do stuff like that with him?”

  “All the time. Being the only child, I was pretty spoiled.”

  “When did it change?”

  “Dad never did change; he always wanted to do things with me, but gradually I stopped wanting to do things with him. I guess in a way, it was kind of like it was for you. I got older and started noticing some things I hadn’t noticed before. When I saw things I didn’t like, I wouldn’t shut up about them, and Dad didn’t like that at all. Any time I’d want to argue, he’d just tell me, ‘Children’ve got to learn to trust their elders,’ and figure that would shut me up. It did for a while, but when I got old enough to start thinking for myself, I learned that kids can’t always trust everything their elders do. And that was the beginning of the end for me and Dad.”

  “Did you stop loving him?” I asked.

  “For a long time I thought I did, but then I realized that no matter how wrong or bad or stubborn your father is, he’s still your father. I sure didn’t like the things he did and said, and frankly, lots of times I didn’t like him, but he’s my father, and he loved me, and for that I love him.” He glanced over at me. “What about you?”

  I didn’t answer right away. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to answer for a long time. I knew some things, some horrible things, about my grandfather. Dad probably did too. “I don’t know. Grampa’s pretty complicated. I guess I’m still working on it.”

  Dad reached over and patted my leg. He looked a little embarrassed. “I wasn’t asking about Grampa.”

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  While visiting his uncle in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955, Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was kidnapped and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in the Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market.

  Two men, Roy Bryant and his half brother J. W. Milam, were arrested and tried for the murder but were acquitted by an all-white jury after a brief trial that received intense national and international attention. In an interview published in Look magazine three months after their acquittal, Bryant and Milam described how they had kidnapped, tortured, and finally murdered Emmett Till. Milam died in 1983, Bryant in 1994. The third white man and the white woman involved in the kidnapping and subsequent events were never identified or apprehended.

  This novel is a work of historical fiction. Though Hiram Hillburn, R. C. Rydell, and many other characters in this story never existed, the events directly related to Emmett Till’s kidnapping, murder, and the trial of his killers are true, and the material from The Greenwood Commonwealth is presented as it actually appeared in 1955.

 

 

 
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