* * *
Then afterwards, they split up. Two of them, two drunk soldiers go shoot holes in somebody’s door who won’t give up no wine, no trim. Blam-blam-blam, you dead. Told you so. Shot that door good. Next time I tell them something they know I mean business. Blam-blam. Bet they some scared motherfuckers behind there.
* * *
Woman inside. Bullet in her belly. Crawls outside. Somebody drags her back inside. Dead.
* * *
I was not there. I am not Louis Till. Not Mamie Till. I’m guilty of imagining pictures, sounds, words. Mine. I make them up. They could or could not be the way. It happened. Truth.
* * *
Or you could say that it begins with sugar. Several colored soldiers had attempted to sell thirteen ten-pound bags of stolen sugar at La Cisterna, a.k.a. the Waterpoint, near Civitavecchia, on June 24, 1944. Investigation of the sugar theft eventually produced four suspects: Private William S. Hite 32113851, 176 Port Company; Private John (NMI) Kitchen 0877239, 175 Port Company; Private James Thomas, Jr. 16098325, 177 Port Company; and Private Louis (NMI) Till 3632273, 177 Port Company, all of 379th Port Battalion, APO 765. During interrogation Private Kitchen quickly turned, admitting his knowledge of the sugar theft scheme and implicating the other three suspects. Till, Thomas, and Hite chose to remain silent. They were released then reconfined in July to Military Police Headquarters while rapes and murder investigated.
* * *
In the course of investigating the theft of a .45 revolver from a U.S. Navy officer and the murder of an Italian woman, both occurring near La Cisterna aka Waterpoint on the same night of June 27–28, CID agents learned that two Italian women might have been raped that same night. CID prisoner William Hite, a suspect being held for the theft of thirteen bags of sugar, confessed his participation in the sugar deal but denied his involvement in the events of June 27–28. Agents indicated to Hite that reliable sources had informed them he was implicated in the crimes of June 27 and 28, and reminded him that death is the penalty for assaulting and robbing a naval officer, rape and murder of Italian citizens. Hite changed his story. He related his conversation with Private Thomas that occurred on the morning of June 28 in which Thomas bragged of stealing a .45 pistol from a “smart-guy-sailor” and “fucking” two Italian women the previous night. Hite said Thomas placed himself, Private Louis Till, Fred McMurray, and an unidentified British soldier in the vicinity of La Cisterna on the night of June 27. Finally, Hite reported that the day following his conversation with Thomas, Thomas pointed out to him a woman washing clothes outside one of the shacks clustered around the waterpoint. Thomas claimed he’d “fucked” her, Hite said. The house Thomas indicated to Hite and Hite indicated to investigating officers is the Mari residence, scene of the beatings and rapes. It sits a short walk from the dwelling where Anna Zanchi, an Italian civilian, was shot and killed.
Greetings:
Just to be sure it receives your attention, I’m forwarding directly to you a copy of the second statement from Private James Thomas, Jr., dated and sworn 18th July 1944, and attached as enclosure #1. Please include this statement with the first Thomas statement (5 July) sent to you in the packet of materials (CID report #41) from Lieutenants Rousseau and Herlihy, CID/RAAC, who took over the investigation of the crimes of 27/8 June near Civitavecchia. This statement corroborates circumstantial evidence gathered thus far by Rousseau and Herlihy.
The second Thomas statement is exactly what’s needed to hang Till and McMurray. We all know Till and McMurray guilty as hell. Vicious animals who deserve hanging. No doubt Thomas just as bad, a liar who would offer a third statement contradicting the first two if he believed it could save his black ass. However, if Thomas is charged as a codefendant, the value of his testimony at trial would be diminished. I suggest we remove Thomas from the indictment. Offer him clemency if he cooperates. No way we can totally clean up Thomas for the court, but if we don’t indict him, it will work better for our side.
I suggest also that neither Thomas statement be included in the materials you forward to defense attorneys. I haven’t heard yet who will be assigned the scummy job of defending Till and McMurray. Whoever it is doesn’t need a preview of the Thomas statements. This case is cut and dry. No reason to complicate matters by offering grist to the mill of some showboater or hotshot or bleeding heart who will use any excuse to prolong court-martial. A review board will be happy to confirm a guilty verdict even slightly in conformity with the law. Everybody’s aware we have a war to finish up. You read Ike’s memo, didn’t you? Why waste a minute on these animals.
If we drop Thomas, I’m sure I can convince Till and McMurray to be tried jointly—saving the government and us lots of headaches. So let’s drop Thomas. His testimony will convict McMurray and Till, sure thing. Without a murder weapon and no positive ID from any of the victims, I’d say hanging two out of three guilty monkeys not a bad score. I’m still sweating McMurray. I’ll tell him Till is ratting on him. After I read McMurray the second Thomas statement, my guess is McMurray will blame everything on Till. Being scared will make McMurray more stupid than he already is, and McMurray’s story will cook his own goose, along with Till’s.
(P.S. Let’s have a drink when you’re in town.)
The letter quoted above is not in the Till file. Why would it be. It’s not the sort of letter that would be included in the official record of a court-martial, especially one whose result is a double hanging. Or perhaps the letter does exist, inscribed with invisible ink between the lines of letters the Till file treats as appropriately impartial, routine, fair. Letters forwarding the usual business of a court-martial. I include an agent’s fictional letter to animate a meaningful silence, fill in a significant space the file leaves blank. Army officers in charge of Louis Till’s case in 1944–45 wouldn’t need to write down what they thought of Till nor what they intended to do with him. Without putting a word on paper, each officer could communicate his sentiments quite accurately to his colleagues. A quick phone call, lunch in the officers’ club, a wink, a nod, a handshake would suffice. Till’s case was decided just as surely by what transpires off the record as by what’s on the record. What’s the difference. Written in stone. Written in the wind.
* * *
Louis Till understood officers and gentlemen. He understood the code whose uniforms and insignia they wore. Till’s silence in their presence is not ignorance or fear, but proof of his unspeakable clarity. He sees the DTC’s circle of stout poles bristling with coils of barbed wire, sees gun towers rimming the stockade. Beyond his cell he hears voices, barks, grunts, drums, whistles, bugles, whinnying horses, thwats of an officer’s big stick across some fool’s back. He hears the prophecy of his guilt drawing closer each day, as he never doubted it would.
Till knows that the language of officers and gentlemen asks for no response. Should I argue Till’s silence was a mistake. What can someone like me, a fence straddler, fence climber, scrambler-up of unsurmountable stone walls, teach Louis Till. So I forge a letter. As if I’ve made it over the top, as if I’m ensconced inside the circle of officers and gentlemen. Fair. Fair enough. Fair because sooner or later I will lose my grip, slide back down where I’m supposed to be. Next to Till. Me and Louis. Louis and me. Till death do us part.
* * *
Fair. When are facts fair. In a not fair world where facts are fictions, how could facts be fair. Why would they want to be. Even if they tried to be. In spite of such questions, I begin at the beginning. Read the file one more time. To be fair. To seek facts. To mix facts and fiction into something fairly believable.
* * *
Till’s crime is a crime of being, I decide after spending hours and hours one afternoon, poring through the file, an afternoon not unlike numerous others, asking myself how and why the law shifted gears in its treatment of colored soldiers during World War II. Asking why colored men continue to receive summary or no justice, a grossly disproportionate share of life sentences and death sentences today.
Whether or not Till breaks the law, his existence is viewed by law as a problem. Louis Till is an evil seed that sooner or later will burst and scatter more evil seeds. Till requires a preemptive strike.
A fair person might interject that Louis Till’s capital conviction was scrutinized by three separate boards of review, a process strictly adhering to army regulations. A vetting at least as thorough as most death penalty convictions receive today. Didn’t colored Louis Till enjoy every legal benefit of the doubt to which any citizen is entitled. In response to this fair interjection, I offer a phrase from one of my favorite novels, Sula, describing how a guy in the Ohio town of Medallion copulates with a woman he intends to abandon first thing next morning: with the steadiness and intensity of a man on his way to Akron. A funny, disturbing line even though I never could exactly figure out if the fucking was good or bad, fake or authentic. Probably all of the above, Ms. Morrison winks. In Till’s court-martial as in the case of that fuck in a bed in Ohio, all the details are managed scrupulously—every t crossed, every i dotted. But seamless, careful, by the book performance provides no evidence of what the spider’s thinking about the fly enmeshed in its web.
* * *
Justice defeated and denied each time it goes through the motions and mistreats Louis Till. Equal Justice for all a coin, and I flip it. For an instant, airborne and spinning, the coin indeterminately heads and tails, simultaneously both and neither. A shining emblem of fairness. Then the coin lands, one face displayed. Unimpeachable, impartial. You win or lose. Sunny-side up. Or down. Justice may be cruel, but amen—same Justice for all. Then I turn the coin over, see its hidden face is the twin of the face that came up on top, the face that buries Till’s face beneath its serene smile.
* * *
I continue to experience a kind of vertigo as I read and reread the trial record sent by the Virginia archive. Its contents shift, deny mastery of even simple matters—who said what, when, where. Each reading slightly twists the kaleidoscope, tumbles colors and shapes into new configurations, scrambling, erasing patterns, I’ve observed. Paginating my copy of the file—a penciled number at the bottom center of each white-bordered, yellowish gray sheet had not helped. Meaning expressed by the sequence of pages is as elusive as the page’s color. The color I’d call gray if I had to choose a name for it today. The color I’d once imagined as parchment, then mummy-wrap in my flights of fancy. The original pages had simply grayed as they aged in the archive—grayed like me—like gray fuzzing my noggin before the barber crops it, like my gray, stubbled cheeks in the morning, gray like the wrinkled scrotal sac I lift to examine a suspicious, itchy pimple while I sit on the toilet, bathed in the merciless glare of fluorescent tubes above a mirror above the sink.
* * *
Because I’m hopelessly superstitious, afflicted by a kind of old school supernatural respect and yearning for authenticity, for purity, I don’t try to resolve my quarrel with the sequence of pages by the obvious expedient of removing the supersize flat staple which binds the file, freeing the pages, reordering them however I see fit. I wouldn’t attempt to explain to any rational human being just exactly what it is about the present state of my copy of the file that makes it special. Nor why tampering with the copy I received would be evil.
Yes. I could duplicate my copy and store the original somewhere safe to preserve whatever precious qualities I believe it possesses. But duplication would require dismantling the original and a careless clerk or my clumsy hands or a berserk machine might alter the sequence of pages or eat one or double one or forget one. Once disturbed, the authentic copy would cease to exist, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men couldn’t put it back together again.
* * *
Frustration of a different sort dogs my efforts. No matter how efficiently I maneuver through the file, I won’t find Louis Till. Till is not asleep in there, waiting for my magic wand. Why would he break his silence, even if I discover his hiding place in the document’s layers and layers of words. He’s lost like his son Emmett returning to Chicago inside boxes of metal and wood. Like remains of colored American soldiers boxed, transported to dishonorable holes in France. Father like son like father. Till ghosts coming and going, and I’m helpless as Mrs. Till who stands in the Twelfth Street Station. Mamie Till deep within the profound quiet inside herself, listens, waits, hopes to pick out from the muted roar of trains arriving, trains departing, the whistle of the engine that brings her murdered boy back to life.
* * *
On the file’s last page, in a clean space below typed words and above the canceled confidential stamp, I tag the file with fragments from the locked-up poet’s cantos.
and Till was hung yesterday
for murder and rape with trimmings
. . . thought he was Zeus ram or another one
“St. Louis Till” as Green called him. Latin!
and those negroes by the clothes-line are extraordinarily like the figures del Cossa
III
* * *
GRAVES
Even in death, no rest for Emmett Till, the Associated Press headline announces. As part of yet another investigation of his murder, Emmett Till’s body had been exhumed four years previously to verify through DNA testing that the corpse returned from Mississippi to Chicago in 1955 was indeed Till’s. Turns out Till’s body (now scientifically certified as his) may not have been properly reinterred. The glass-topped casket ordered by Mamie Till—so the world can see what they did to my baby—was discovered “in a rusty shed at a suburban cemetery where workers are accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies in a scheme to resell burial plots. The casket, which was seen by mourners around the world in 1955, was surrounded by garbage and old headstones. When authorities opened it, a family of possums scampered out . . .”
The article reports that according to cemetery officials, Emmett Till’s original, glass-lidded casket had been stored in a shed because it was being saved to become part of a national civil rights memorial. Officials also claim that Till’s body was placed in a new casket that lies buried in a section of the cemetery undisturbed by the perpetrators of the grave-robbing, grave-selling scam. Till family members are said to be considering another exhumation in order to be sure the body in the new casket is Till’s.
* * *
In 1941 when I was inside her belly, my mother, because her skin was very light in color, could sneak me into the more comfortable, cleaner, whites only section of Washington, D.C., movie theaters. She said she was scared each time she smuggled us in but tied a scarf around her nappy hair and risked it, she said, on those infrequent occasions a spare dime was available to take in a matinee. She believes my father on one of his rare afternoons off from his government job, could have performed the same trick by walking up boldly, confidently, dressed in an African-looking robe and turban to a movie house ticket window and requesting a reserved seat. A colored D.C. man she’d read about in Jet had gotten away with it, so why not my father, she insisted, even with his brown skin and mine colored like his if it happened to show through whatever my father wrapped me in to carry me in his arms. Years later, after our family had migrated north from D.C., my mother recounted the sneaking into a movie scenario and I offered no comment, though I was dead certain the masquerade she had proposed, successful or not, would have given no satisfaction to the man I knew my father was.
* * *
I put Louis Till in my father’s place in my mother’s story. Louis Till carrying Emmett, father and son both African regal in bright swirls of colorful cloth. Stealing my father’s very polite waiter’s voice a minute, Louis Till requests a seat on the reserved ground floor, please. Flashes a smile at the young white woman in the ticket booth. She doesn’t meet the gaze of the turbaned, robed man. Instead, her eyes drop to supervise fingers invisible to Louis Till, below the barred oval of window in the yellowish lit booth, fingers that should be punching an order into the ticket machine but don’t. While she hesitates, the attendant raises her
eyes to peek at the face, dark as my father’s or mine, a face she’s certain does not belong in the section where whites only are supposed to sit and view the screen. Hesitation lasts long enough for her to recall yes, she did get a good look at the face before she averted her eyes, and yes she had seen a color that warned her fingers hold it, not so fast, look again, and yes she did pause, look again and see dark color again. Now the white smile splitting very brown skin has vanished, replaced by something not quite a snarl, more like a warning low in an animal’s throat, less an audible noise than a silence vibrating in her guts as the creature’s eyes regard her across a chilling distance that’s also chilling proximity. How does he stay a step ahead of her. How does she sense in advance what he will do. Her eyes fall quickly to the level of her hands once more. Watch the machine dispense the reserved ticket the man has demanded. She anticipates a smile, though a different kind this time, will reappear when she lifts her eyes and she will ignore it. Just push the ticket through the slot into which his dark hand pushes money, and then it will be all over. She will have kept her eyes to herself, not on the stolen ticket, not on brown fingers raking in change the machine owes. Coins clink down the chute, clink, clink, clink, landing in a metal dish half outside the booth. Half safe inside.
* * *
I flew to France to find Louis Till’s grave. My French wife was jealous but it was impossible just then on short notice for her to accompany me. Bought my ticket the last day before a special round-trip offer expired. I’d noticed the cheap fare in a newspaper, cut out the ad and taped it conspicuously on the fridge, tempting myself for weeks, right up to the day before the offer’s deadline. A last-minute decision to go left almost no time to warn old friends I needed a place to stay and hoped they could put me up a few days in their Paris apartment. Starting day after tomorrow, I apologized over the phone and Chantal laughed. Of course, no problem, always happy to see you, et cetera, saying in her impeccable English all the nice things good friends are supposed to say. She also informed me that Antoine was preparing for an important show and they both would travel soon to Nice for the opening. My second day in Paris, in spite of his hectic schedule, the tension of exhibiting new work, Antoine drove me one hundred–plus kilometers to Oise-Ainse and back for a quick visit to the American Cemetery and Memorial where I expected to find Louis Till’s grave. We found it and returned to Paris in time for a late dinner in a restaurant with Chantal.
Writing to Save a Life Page 11