Writing to Save a Life

by John Edgar Wideman

  Louis Till pulls hard on his oar, strokes slightly out of sync with the other rowers. Same ole, lost-in-space, pay no attention to nobody or nothing Till, if you listen to Peabo tell it. Peabo sitting on a cross-plank two planks behind Louis Till’s plank, out of Louis Till’s sight, but Till doesn’t need to see him to know fat lip, mutter-mouth Peabo is muttering. Peabo’s always busy muttering, googling his one good eye to catch anybody who listens to what he mutters, somebody to nod amen. Light hangs lazy as silk above the stillish water. Crimson blush fades from the horizon and Till recolors it red as Mary’s barrel-ass behind snuggled in a red silk dress yesterday morning sashshaying at sunup from the Big House back to the quarters.

  Louis Till likes music while he works. The others singing, him listening makes work go faster. But ain’t nobody ask him what he like. Boat quiet as a grave waiting for a body to be rolled in. After they damn niggers and shoo niggers out the way who ain’t in the way, clumsy boots rocking the boat and stepping on niggers’ bare toes. After they shove and damn niggers some more, same niggers spozed to catch them, pick them up if they fall in the boat or fall in the water. After all this these white men real quiet. Some business got them tongue-tied, tight-lipped this morning. White faces whiter, even the white face ruddy as a rutabaga and the white face yam colored. Not a word from the white men who stare at niggers working the oars like the niggers carrying them to market to sell.

  Most the time crackers don’t give a fuck what they say in front of niggers. Your average nigger dumb as a boll weevil what they think. But ole boll weevil hear what he hear and do what he got to do. White people trying they best every day to kill boll weevil but Mr. Weevil still going strong. Till wouldn’t say this shit out loud to Peabo or Fred McMurray. More like grin it, smirk it, cough it in the middle of somebody saying something else. Till good at signifying. Wrinkle up his nose. Wink. Wag his big head huh-uh while his mouth says yes. Till’s long eyelashes droop like he’s nodding off, then one eye pop wide open. Peep up at Peabo like it’s a whole nother world inside his head nobody but him and Peabo can see.

  Louis Till turns up his nose. Lets everybody know he’s trying not to smell the stink of stale meat inside a velvet-trimmed, gold-buttoned coat stretched tight as a sail full of wind across the wide back of the man in front of him. White man stiff as a board trying not to wobble as the boat pitches and wobbles. Till wonders do cows stink to cows. Pigs stink to pigs. Do pigs stink to cows. Cows to pigs. Stink of cow or pig say good eating to a wolf. If it’s your kind you don’t eat, ain’t no point sniffing round it. Forget about it. Row. Row this boat of white men worried stinking quiet about something.

  I sit invisible in the launch. We pitch more with more open water under us. I’m next to a delegate from Georgia, our cross-plank between Peabo’s and Till’s. I’m smiling at the naked joke of the South’s precarious ride on the shoulders of slave power. Not exactly news to me, of course, but until I came across the Smithsonian article I’d never entered this moment, savored this crystal-clear image, this epiphany: slaves rowing their masters to perdition. Never shared a boat with Louis Till and his crew, with solemn emissaries from the Confederacy who want to believe they’re slick and tough enough to divide a country and put a goodly portion of it in their pockets and think nobody in Washington will holler. Stop thief.

  A familiar figure posed tall in the launch’s prow. Looks like the noble silhouette of George Washington crossing the Delaware. But no, excuse me, it’s John Brown: I am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with blood.

  * * *

  June 27, 1944, near the Italian town of Civitavecchia, all hell broke loose. At approximately ten thirty that evening an air-raid alert sounded and searchlights leaped into the black sky. A thunderous barrage of forty-millimeter and ninety-millimeter antiaircraft cannons boomed. During the next hour and a half, while salvos of artillery continued to flash and rumble and searchlights comb the darkness and sirens wail in response to the false alarm of an enemy raid, two Italian women are allegedly raped, another woman shot in the belly and killed. American soldiers encamped in the vicinity would be accused of the crimes, and two colored privates, Louis (NMI) Till and Fred A. McMurray, were hanged, July 2, 1945, after a court-martial conducted by army officers found them guilty of the Civitavecchia rapes and murder.

  * * *

  Everybody’s dead and dirty, dirty and dead inside the copy of the record of trial of United States v. Louis Till (CMZ288642) arriving finally in the mail from the United States Court of Criminal Appeals, Arlington, Virginia, the file I have subsequently read and reread, mining it for facts, for whatever the substance might be that connects fact to fact, the sea upon which facts float, the sea that drowns facts.

  If I didn’t already know what to expect, the color of the file’s cover warns me that its contents, on over two hundred 81/2 x 14 inch, white-bordered pages of the same unsettling hue as the cover, will not be nice. The color of the photocopied pages is unnameable. Presumably, the original pages were entirely white once, white as only their edges are white today. White like a hopelessly soiled pillowcase might have been white once upon a time. The unpleasant color of the pages a history of what’s been done to the file, and I can’t help feeling a bit guilty and ashamed. Pages the color of my dried sweat and dirt and spit and snot. Color of my naked sleep, of where I sleep, who I sleep with, where sleep takes me and what my body leaves behind. I feel sorry for innocent pillowcases and for these pages of the Till file stained to the color of bandages wrapped around a mummy sealed thousands of years inside a dark, airless pyramid. The wrappings and dead skin indistinguishable. A dead, ugly color is what I see, and most everybody within the file probably dead, too, in the half century plus since daylight last touched it. Then suddenly the document exhumed, each page duplicated by the flashbulb glare of a copy machine. Old, dirty secrets exposed to anyone who requests a transcript. The dead startled awake from uneasy sleep. Sleep the color of the file’s pages.

  * * *

  After an initial tingle of anticipation as I leafed through it, I couldn’t bring myself to begin reading. Fear detoured me, fear and suspicion. Fear that too much is at stake. Or nothing at all. Suspicion of my motives. Fear of failure. So I delay, equivocate, postpone. Ancient habits, just in case I might not get what I want. Just in case I do. Why hurry. Disappointment will settle in soon enough. What would I be missing, after all, if the file sat an hour, a day, a year. If I never read a single word.

  Till file arrives. I had imagined many times how I’d feel with the file finally in my hands. None of my imaginings came close to what actually transpired. After I opened the envelope and peeked at the contents, I turn my back on the file. Go to another room. Plop down in a comfortable leather chair. A lot or a little time elapses before I hear a voice say, you have a funny name for a black dude. A familiar voice from a particular time and place, but I couldn’t recall when, where, who said those words to me. I drift off again. Found myself thinking about turkey. Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings. I watch my sister heap a plate with mashed potatoes, candied yams, string beans, stuffing, greens with fatty morsels of ham hock, jellied cranberries, a thick slice of breast, chunks of dark meat sprinkled with giblet gravy which she pours also into a crater of mashed potatoes and copiously over a mound of corn-bread stuffing, then she crosses the roomful of family, everybody too busy eating to do much talking. They grin at each other, quietly laugh at jokes nobody needs to tell out loud. Only a few real old folks are left who’d watched over me when I was a boy. Many new, fresh faces of kids. Nephews and nieces. Cousins’ kids, kids of kids, too many to keep track of names. Their foreign sounding, new age, space age, born yesterday, hip-hop names I try to keep straight in my mind but can’t. Sis remembers them all, nodding with the music of each one as she speaks it, passing by with that brimming plate and her brimming smile prettier, more stately and elegant, more beaming, more and more like our mother as Sis ages. My little sister
has grandkids of her own. Sis like Mom serves generations of family growing up, growing old, growing away. Sis well on her way to becoming the center, the glue now that Mom’s too old and infirm to be perpetually on duty. My sister grips the loaded platter in two hands like a steering wheel, maneuvers it around bodies, chairs, heavy old pieces of scarred, polished, mahogany-colored furniture crowding a room way too small for all the people in it if all the people here had not gathered in this smallish room or other small rooms with big furniture in small houses for the express purpose of crowding into one another’s way, glorying in the overabundance of flesh, of food, of noise they could generate together, up close, in the close quarters of bumping, of booming laughter, of call and response. When someone gets a good tale going, everybody listens or half listens or overhears, amens, yes, no, maybe, no way, you lie like a rug.

  Sometimes I steal a precious momentary escape from family packed in the small room. Take a break to hear myself chew, think my own thoughts above the din. Absolutely alone for a necessary minute, before I sneak in a little private, half-whispered conference with somebody near my age I’ve not seen since last year’s gathering, and we remember together old secrets we share and won’t talk very much about now, probably never. But so good to see that other person still around in the flesh, still keeping alive secrets there’s no possibility anyone else on earth can ever share.

  This small room is more than big enough for everybody in the entire Pittsburgh family to squeeze in, squeeze out, if and when they choose. Everybody together, jammed up close for a lifetime, a minute in the room through which Sis guides a plate, deftly negotiating familiar traffic till she sets it down on the little folding stand beside Mom in her wheelchair. When Sis got up to fix her a plate, Mom said, Thank you, baby. Aren’t you a sweet daughter to your old, decrepit mother, and said, Just a little something, Sis, she said, Not much appetite anymore, but Sis knows as well as I know that Mom will lick the platter clean like she taught her children they always must do, and then she’ll say yes to just a smidgen of blueberry cobbler or a corner of her last remaining sister Aunt Geraldine’s butter pound cake or maybe just a tiny taste of both, Thank you, honey.

  The roomful of family is real enough to break my heart. Then the room dissolves. Gone. Just like daily specials listed on a blackboard at a restaurant across a cobbled terrace in an Italian city where I’m staying. Old specials wiped away. No turkey today. A swipe of wet rag and that ancient family dinner erased. A piece of chalk in the waiter’s hand poised to post today’s menu quick as the board dries.

  Mom gone. Small room empty. Smaller and smaller. Speck in my eye. Sis hobbling around on a cane now after her hip operation. How many nieces with babies before they finish high school, how many nephews or nephews’ sons on the streets dealing drugs or slammed up in the joint. Or dead in an alley. Stop. Been there, done that. Don’t start the count. The goddamn countdown. Lurid statistics a mantra of white noise. Nobody hears the appalling, shameful numbers anymore anyway. How many dead. How many trapped and dying. On principle I refuse to repeat the daunting statistics or say the word genocide. Suspicious of people who do and do nothing. The family’s young ones, whose names I’ve never truly learned, maimed already. The old ones too tough and stubborn to die, but can’t remember their own names. Silent in beds, wheelchairs, staring the whole damn day out windows of nursing homes.

  * * *

  A giant, golden, roasted Thanksgiving bird, pan juice crackling when I surreptitiously open the oven and peek in. Gleaming rivulets sweat down the turkey’s sides. Deep-breasted, plump thighs, splayed legs skewered together at the ankles. Nubs where feet used to be. Daydreaming a big bird. Open my eyes and see big bones picked clean. I remember the Till file sits on the desk where I left it. Waits patiently as if it had always been there. As if it had never been lost. Never disappeared.

  * * *

  I had expected more drama. More than a faint hiss, a whiff of staleness when I slit open the large yellow envelope and extracted the Till file. A long wait for its arrival. I’d been impatient, then anxious, finally convinced it wasn’t coming. There’s a certain comfort in waiting. Waiting in line, waiting for a subway. Waiting for freedom. For old age, death. Waiting lets you off the hook. You just wait. Waiting becomes a habit. Part reprieve, part hiding place. Waiting for the clock’s next tick. Waiting for something even when you’re sure it will never occur. Waiting concedes that what happens next is beyond your control. So wait. Wait and see. Or not see.

  * * *

  After my first few readings of the file, I was as suspicious of the order of pages as I’d been of their color. The pages of the Louis Till file are not numbered consecutively. Nor arranged chronologically, except perhaps by a confusing rule, broken often, a rule like Frantz Fanon’s that first is last and last first. The confusion may be terminal. Initial sections of the file contain events whose date (1955) make them closest to the reader’s present time, and since they stand at the front of the file, a reader begins at the end of the story the file narrates and reads towards its beginning, but events from the beginning of the file’s time sequence (1944) also appear in early sections so a reader begins at the story’s start and reads towards its end in this collection of reports, judicial reviews, letters, telegrams, death certificates, court orders, invoices, legal opinions, expense vouchers, postscripts, newspaper articles, et cetera attached to the transcript of the joint court-martial of Louis Till and Fred McMurray.

  * * *

  To impose a bit of order on the unwieldy contents I penciled numbers on the file’s pages. Most bore typed numbers designating their place within a section, but no running count connected the sections. The court-martial transcript, for instance, by far the longest consecutively numbered segment, comes near the file’s end, but it is numbered 1–96. After the court-martial section, I stopped my numbering project because only a few pages followed its last page. Stopped also because by then I understood my numbers simply reaffirmed, without challenging or clarifying, the order of the file’s contents when it arrived in my mailbox.

  The Till file’s pages are bound by a strip of metal that functions like a giant, reusable staple passing through two holes punched in the top of every sheet. Staple’s grooved ends slide together and lock. A snake devouring itself. Who determined the sequence into which the pages had been bound. Perhaps the copy I received retained the order in which pages had originally been filed. Or had a clerk taken the file’s first page, duplicated it, placed it face-up, then stacked other pages face-up as they emerged from the copier, thus exactly reversing the original order. But in the government’s Virginia archive the process would be high-tech not manual, wouldn’t it. Feed an original into the mouth of a machine. Punch buttons. Presto. Original scanned, digitized, replicated, paginated, stapled, bound et cetera. Choice of size and color.

  Determining whether or not a machine had assembled the file wouldn’t answer questions I needed answered. Had someone rigged the file to be read in a particular fashion. Who. When. Why. Were the trial transcript and its accompanying documents organized sixty years ago or just yesterday in response to my Freedom of Information (FOI) request. Had anyone alive or dead ever bothered to read, let alone attempt to manipulate, the Till file pages. Was the person (yesterday or six decades previously) who unearthed, organized, and dispatched the file, following orders. What orders. Whose orders. Like Emmett Till in the box bringing him home to Chicago from Mississippi, Louis Till’s story in the file is damaged almost beyond recognition. Lost and found and lost.

  * * *

  A perfunctory note on a half sheet of U.S. Army letterhead stationery paper-clipped to the file’s cover page identifies the name and number of the document and informs the recipient no fee is owed since the number of pages required to fulfill the FOI petition falls within the automatic waiver threshold and supplied to U.S. citizens by the government free of charge. This note signed by a woman whose name I tell myself each time I see it I should write down in my notebook fo
r safekeeping. To thank. To pester for more. To hold responsible. To flirt. To forget.

  On the cover a command printed in huge black letters is formatted like a poem:

  THIS FILE TO BE

  RETURNED

  TO

  J.A.G.O.

  COURT-MARTIAL RECORDS

  ROOM 3A 346 PENTAGON BUILDING

  At the top of the cover a request is printed in small, underlined capital letters, PLEASE DO NOT WRITE ON THIS BACKER. This admonition had been ignored by numerous people who penciled numbers and dates here and there, many dark slashes censoring whatever’s beneath them. Slanting across the left middle of the cover a dotted line bears a handwritten date, 14 October 1955, followed by initials RK, then a scribbled surname difficult to decipher, and finally the signer’s rank. Near the cover’s bottom edge a serial number, 288642. Just above it a smudge that almost but not quite hides the word CONFIDENTIAL.

  CONFIDENTIAL stamped in large letters on the top and bottom of the file’s second page. Lines drawn through confidential again. This second page is stamped, CLASSIFICATION CANCELLED BY AUTHORITY OF TJAG, and after the stamp comes a handwritten signature authorizing the cancellation. Date, name and rank of signer more legible this time than the scrawl on the dotted line slanting across the file’s cover.

  Each time the October 14 date appeared, I wondered if I had discovered a smoking gun. Doesn’t a conspiracy to violate Private Louis Till’s right to privacy originate there, on that day in October 1955, just after the Sumner trial when Till’s confidential military service record is declassified and the way cleared for the file’s contents to be leaked to the press. Just in time to sabotage any likelihood a Mississippi grand jury might convene in November and decide to try Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges.