She’s my sweetheart.
His crime swells past rape, worse than murder. It spits in the face of creation. What the whites must do, they do—no rage to their motion, no hysteria, no lesson. They exterminate by deep reflex, a flinch that comes before even self-defense. They put a bullet through the fourteen-year-old’s brain, as they might kill a rabid animal. A desperate protection, the safeguard of their kind.
They tie the fan around the corpse’s neck with the hank of barbed wire. They drop the body into the current, where it will never again threaten anyone. Then they return home to their families, a safety they’ve spent this night preserving.
When the boy doesn’t come home, Mose Wright calls the indifferent authorities. But he calls the boy’s mother, too, who phones the Chicago police. Pressed from outside, the law of Money moves. The local police arrest the two men, who say only that they took the boy but let him go after putting the fear of God into him.
On the third day, the weighed-down body rises from the river. It snags on the hook of a white boy, fishing, who thinks he has snared some primordial water creature. Landing the carcass, the fishing child needs several moments to recognize his catch as human. Every inch has been bludgeoned beyond recognition. Even Mose Wright can’t identify his grand-nephew until he sees the signet ring belonging to Emmett’s dead father, a keepsake the son wore on his slender finger, always.
The sheriff tries to rush a burial. But Emmett’s mother fights the police to get her son’s body returned to Chicago. Against the odds, she beats all obstructions. The body goes back north by train. Although the authorities order the casket permanently sealed, Emmett’s mother must have a last look, even in the Chicago station. She breaks the law, glances inside the casket, and faints dead away. When she comes to, she decides that the whole world must look on what it has done to her boy.
The world wants to look away, but can’t. A photo runs in Jet magazine and is reprinted throughout the black press and beyond. The boy has his white Christmas shirt on again, starched smooth, with a black jacket pulled over the top. These clothes are the only clue that the photo shows a human being at all. That the undertaker survived the corpse’s dressing is itself miraculous. The face is a melted rubber model, a rotting vegetable, bloated and disfigured. Below the midline, there’s nothing but a single flattened bruise. The ear is singed off. The nose and eyes have been returned to the face by hesitant guess.
This is the photo my parents fight over at the end, those two who never fought over anything. To a child raised on concord, every cross word is holy terror. A boy our age is dead. The fact leaves me, at most, confused. But our parents are arguing. And hearing their fight pitches me into the abyss.
“I’m sorry,” the one whispers. “No boy their age should be allowed to see such a thing.”
“Allowed?” the other says. “Allowed? We have to make them look.”
Their voices whip back and forth like hushed scythes. These aren’t my parents, those two people who have trouble even singing the word hate in a chanson lyric.
Jonah hears it, too, the blade in their back-and-forth. Though he’ll remain a dutiful child for another year and a half, this crisis moves him to desperation. He ends their whispering the only way he knows how. While our parents argue over the photo, he goes to the magazine and looks.
So the fight sinks, weighted, underwater. We’re a family again, looking together, at least the four of us. Ruth, my parents agree, is too small to see. We’re all too small, even my father. But we look, together, anyway. That’s what the mother of the boy—the boy in the photo—wants.
“Is this real?” I ask. “Really real?” I would rather have them arguing again, anything but this. “A real human being?” I see only a macabre rubber mask, two months too early for Halloween. My mother won’t answer. She’s fixed by the image, petitioning the invisible, asking the same question. But she’s not asking about the boy.
My mother is crying. I can’t say anything, but I must say something. I need to keep her with us. “Are you related to him?” I ask. It’s just possible. I have much family on my mother’s side, whom she and Da say I’ll someday meet. But Mama won’t answer me. I try again. “Are you friends with—”
She waves me away, mute, broken, before I can find how to reach her.
I ask my father. “Do we know this boy or something?”
But he, too, gives only a distracted “Sha. Sei still, Junge.”
He comes for me at night, the thing they say is a boy. This happens more nights running than I can count. He lies decked out in that black suit, that perfect starched shirt, topped by the grotesque mushroom that ought to be his face. Then he sits up. His body pinches in the middle and he flips forward, his face zooming up to mine. He springs up to get me, the pulped mouth smiling, trying to befriend me, to speak. I try to scream, but my own mouth melts into another rubber mask as fused as his. I wake up wet, a moan leaking out of me, more cowlike than human. The moan wakes my brother, on the bunk above me. “Go back to bed,” he snaps at me. He doesn’t bother to ask what’s wrong.
The child’s funeral in Chicago becomes a national event. Da asks if Mama wants to go. “We could go together. I have not been out to the University of Chicago since Fermi died. I could get an invitation. We would be right there, on the South Side.”
My mother says no. The funeral of a stranger? She has her students, and there’s Ruth’s day school to think of. But even at thirteen, I know: She can’t go to this funeral, not this one, on the arm of a man my father’s color.
Ten thousand people turn out to mourn a boy only a hundred of them knew. Each shows up locked in a private eulogy, humming a whole hymnal of explanations. Unlucky boy, backwoods regional madness, the relic of a nightmare history: This is the funeral white America thinks it attends. But black Chicago, black Mississippi, friends of the boy’s mother, or last week’s mother, or next week’s, grab the mourning suit out of the closet—haven’t even had time to iron it—and go to the mountain again.
The coffin stands open throughout the service. The public files by for a last look, or a next-to-last, a second-to-next. The crowds show up again, back in Mississippi, for Bryant and Milam’s trial. All three infant television networks are there, and the newsreels, too, holding their audience repulsed but mesmerized.
A northern black member of the House of Representatives comes down in person to the county courthouse in Sumner. The bailiff refuses to let him in the room. Nigger says he’s a Congressman. At last they admit him but restrict him to the back, with the press and the handful of colored witnesses the law requires.
The courtroom is an oven. Even the judge strips down to his shirtsleeves. The case prosecutes itself. The grooves in a cotton gin are unique, cut by only one fan. The fan tied with barbed wire to Emmett Till’s neck belongs to the gin still sitting in J. W Milam’s barn. The prosecutor asks Mose Wright if he can see anyone in the courtroom involved in his grand-nephew’s abduction. The sixty-four-year-old preacher rises up alone against the world’s collected power and points at Milam. His finger arcs up and out, like the hand of God whose awful indictment created the first man. “Dar he.” Two words start up the irreversible future.
Where the prosecution is direct, the defense is ingenious. The body floating up out of the river is too disfigured to recognize, too decomposed to have lain submerged for just three days. Perhaps the signet ring was placed on the mangled body by some northern colored-loving group, eager to raise trouble where they don’t belong. Perhaps the boy is still alive, hiding up in Chicago, part of a conspiracy against a couple of men who wanted only to protect their womenfolk. Throughout, the defendants sit by their family, smoking cigars, their faces edged with defiant smiles.
If Bryant and Milam are found guilty, the defense attorney asks the jury, where, under the shining sun, is the land of the free and the home of the brave?
The jury is out for only an hour and seven minutes. They wouldn’t have taken even that long, one juror tells a report
er, if the twelve whites hadn’t lingered to drink a soda pop. The verdict comes down: Innocent on all counts. Milam and Bryant have done no wrong. They go free, back to their women and families. The whole trial is over in four days. The magazines run another picture: the killers and their mates, cheering their victory in the courtroom.
Jonah and I don’t hear this outcome. We’re back at our private conservatory, growing into our new voices, learning the lower lines in a vast choral fantasy about how all men are brothers. We’re deep in our own improvised lives, carrying snapshots around in our own wallets. We set aside the nightmare boy, the unforgettable photo, too disfigured to be anything but a ruined clay model. We never ask our parents what happened at the trial, and they never tell us. For if there’s one thing we need protection from, even more than this crime, it’s this verdict.
I do not learn the final verdict until adulthood, the adulthood Emmett Till never reaches. One child dies, and another survives only by not looking. What other protection could they offer us, our parents, who stripped us of all protection when they chose to make us? For after this country, there is no safety.
But here is the part I can’t get past. It’s twelve years later, 1967. Jonah and I are in a room on the eleventh floor of the Drake, in Chicago, in town a dozen years too late for the funeral. I’m at our window, trying unsuccessfully to peer past the fire escapes to something the map calls the Magnificent Mile. My brother lies on one of the double beds, paralyzed with agitation. We’re here for his Orchestra Hall debut, that night.
We’ve at last broken free from the wilds of Saskatchewan and the rainleaking concert barns of Kansas. Jonah is streaking like a meteor across what is left of classical music’s sky. High Fidelity has named him one of their “ten singers under thirty who will change the way you listen to lieder.” And the Detroit Free Press has called him “a tenor who sings like a planet-scouting angel carrying back word of a place rich and strange.” He has recorded a successful disk with a small label and is about to do another. There’s talk of his signing a long-term contract with a larger house, perhaps even Columbia. He has only to keep from smoking and a triumphant life is all but guaranteed.
But triumph shows its first catch. A leading intellectual, whom Jonah has never heard of, has just ambushed him in print. It’s only a passing line, in Harper’s, not a venue likely to cause his career much lasting harm. Jonah keeps reading the line out to me until we both have it memorized. “Yet there are amazingly talented young black men out there still trying to play the white culture game, even while their brothers are dying in the streets.” And the intellectual goes on to name a famous modern dancer, an internationally acclaimed pianist, and Jonah Strom. The piece, of course, makes no mention of me, nor any of the thousands of lesser-skilled but loyal little brothers.
Everything in the accusation is true. People are dying, and the streets are on fire. Newark is an inferno. A river of flame runs through downtown Detroit. From the eleventh floor of the Drake, it doesn’t yet feel like civil war. But the evidence is everywhere, and my indicted brother has become addicted to it. In each new city we barnstorm through, in every pastel hotel room, we watch the bewildered news recaps—riots with the sound turned down—as Jonah runs through his scales and I tap out pantomime finger warm-ups on the tabletops.
It’s August, as it was for Till, only twelve years later. The nation again looks on, wanting to believe that the worst has passed. Everything has changed, but nothing is different. A black man sits on the Supreme Court. The rest are in prison, trapped in burning cities, or dying in Asia’s jungles. On the television in the Drake, a camera tracks down an avenue of commercial buildings, block after block of gutted brick. My brother stops in midarpeggio, three tones shy of the top of his usual workout range.
“You remember that boy?”
We’ve almost doubled in age since that day. Since my nightmares, we’ve never once spoken about the photo. Nor can I remember thinking about it. But the thing our parents fought over, the false hope of protection, has worked away inside us. I know in a beat who he means.
“Till,” my brother says, just as I say, “Emmett.” My brother falls quiet, calculating. He can be thinking only one thing. Once upon a time, I was this boy’s age. But now I’m twenty-six, and he’s still fourteen.
The dozen years since the boy’s death open in front of us, like an empty concert hall ten minutes before curtain. I look on that year, the one I couldn’t see when I lived there. Twelve years too late, I hear what our parents argued about that night. I hear our mother crying for this boy she didn’t know. On the muted hotel TV, the camera pans across men shivering in doorways along what might as well be Lenox, a handful of blocks from the house we grew up in.
“She didn’t want us to see. She didn’t want us to know.”
My brother stares at me. The first time he has looked me in the eye in over a week. “What do you mean?”
“The picture.” I wave at the screen, where club-swinging police and their white-fanged German shepherds wade into a screaming crowd. “She thought it might damage us, to see what … they did to him.” I snort. “I guess it did.” Jonah looks at me as if I’m another species. I can’t believe the idea has never occurred to him. “She was a mother, first, before … anything. We were her babies.” My brother is shaking his head, denying. I start to gutter, so I press on, harder. “But your father, the scientist: ‘What do you mean, too young? If it’s a physical fact, they have to know.’”
“Your memory has totally fucked this up.”
My face swells as if beaten. I’m ready to wheedle with him, to beg. At the same time, my fists clench. I’ve devoted myself to accompanying him, spent my whole life making sure that the real world won’t defeat him. I’ve carried my brother for a quarter of a century. I’m only twenty-five. “Me? My memory? You’re full of shit, Jonah. You don’t remember them—”
“Don’t try to swear, Mule. It’s even less convincing than your Chopin.”
“What are you saying? You think she had some other reason? You think she was—”
“You’ve got it backward. Da was the one. Didn’t want us even to hear them arguing. Wanted to keep our dreams musical and clean. Wanted to think the boy was a fluke; deviant history. Never going to happen anymore. You and me and Rootie? Our generation? We’d be the fresh start. Don’t tell us, and there’d be no scars.”
I shake my head, short wipes of denial. He might as well be telling me we’re adopted.
“I’ll tell you what. Mama was furious. Said he didn’t have the first idea in hell what was going on. I remember her wailing. ‘Whatever you think these boys are, the world is going to see them as a couple of black boys.’ We had to get ready. Had to know what people wanted to do to us.” Jonah gazes at the TV, at the Harper’s article, there, as always, on his bed stand, within reach. “Da tried to tell her it was just the South, just a couple of death-deserving animals. He’s the one who said it would only fuck us up to look at it.”
I can’t wrap my head around his words. The people he describes: I don’t know them. My mother couldn’t have said those things to my father. My father couldn’t have thought such stupidity.
“You know what happened? You know how things turned out?” Jonah looks up at me, smiles, and waves his hands in the air. “I mean, with the killers?”
My brother, the near illiterate, has been reading, behind my back. Or he’s learned the facts on some civil rights documentary, the kind of show that airs at a harmless hour late at night, on educational TV, when all good citizens, like me, are safe in bed.
“The whites. The murderers. They sell their confession to some picture magazine a few months after their acquittal. The trial’s barely over, and they’re telling the whole country exactly how they killed the kid. Make a quick couple of bucks, pocket money. The kid forced them to do it, apparently. Of course, they can’t be tried twice for the same crime.” Jonah’s face, in the hotel room light, looks almost white. “Did it do anything to you? T
hat picture?”
“Nightmares for weeks. You don’t remember? I used to wake you up, with the moaning. You used to scream at me to shut up.”
“Did I?” He shrugs and waves, forgiving me for angering him. “Only weeks? I was seeing him for years. Fourteen, you see. That’s what was going to happen. They were coming for me. I was going to be next.”
I look at him and can’t see. My fearless brother, who wrapped the world around his little finger. My brother lies back on the bed. He splays both palms as if to break his fall. He closes his eyes. The bed rushes up beneath him. “A little trouble breathing, here, Mule. I think I might be having an attack.”
“Jonah! No. Not tonight. Get up.” I talk to him like he’s a small child, a puppy on the furniture. I walk him around in slow, relaxed circles, all the while rubbing his back. “Breathe normally. Nice and easy.”
I walk him over to the window. The noise of the Loop, the lazy tangle of commerce below, helps ease him a little. Jonah collects himself. His shoulders drop. He starts to breathe again. He tries to smirk at me, his neck pulled back: “What the hell’s your problem, buddy? What’s with all the physical contact all of a sudden?”
He tweezers my hand off his shoulder, twisting my wrist to steal a look at my watch. He, of course, doesn’t wear one. Nothing distracting or weighty allowed to touch his body. “Jesus Christ. We’re late,” he says, as if I’m the one who has been malingering. “Our big night, remember?”
He flashes a performer’s bitter smile and heads toward the bathroom, where his tux has been hanging in steam. He goes through the whole ritual: hot towels around the neck, eucalyptus rub and lemon wedges, vocalizing as he ties his white tie. I pull the curtains and dress out in the room, between the two beds. Jonah calls downstairs for his concert shoes, which come up to the room reflecting light like a pair of obsidian mirrors. He tips the bellhop obscenely, and the man beats an apologetic, resentful retreat.
We go take our debut turn at Orchestra Hall, the songs of Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and Brahms. The white culture game. Nerves and overlearning get us through in a splash of color. There’s an edge to Jonah tonight, the radiant glow of a tubercular patient about to die. The Chicago crowd—all North Siders and suburbans—feels present at the birth of a wondrous discovery.
The Time of Our Singing Page 14