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Dedicated to prisoners
Looking through steel bars at a guard, the prisoner said: I am sad to see how unhappy you are in your cage
all stories are true . . .
CHINUA ACHEBE, THINGS FALL APART
I
* * *
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 h
eld 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.
Writing to Save a Life Page 1