by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
That same year, my principal at Carter Elementary School had come to me with an urgent request. He wanted me to put the Black History School Assembly together. The whole thing. Organized, produced, and directed. It was a huge undertaking and I wasn’t sure at first what I would do. My mission was to teach, so anything I was involved in had to involve some kind of learning. I saw how much children really wanted to learn, wanted it as much as they needed it. So, for me, the real challenge always was to find the lesson to be learned. In developing a concept for the school assembly, I was able to find that lesson. I found it through my own experience, all the parts of my life coming together. I conceived a program built around speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., linked by a narrative that showed the kids the significance of it all.
Many students thought they would never be able to remember their speeches and then get up before an audience. It would be like that for many years. Kids can get so caught up in telling you what they can’t do. I’m sorry, but I just can’t accept “can’t.” I handed out multiple copies of their speeches. So they could. I told them to put a copy of the speech on the mirror of their dresser. Put one on the bedroom door. Another one on the bathroom door. The refrigerator door. I wanted them to have speeches everywhere. Even under the pillow. If they were going to have a dream, it would be a speech by Dr. King. Every spare minute was to be put on that speech. No time to giggle, no time to dawdle; they had a job to do. I told them that if I were to call and wake them up at three o’clock in the morning, they should be able to say that speech before they said “Hello.”
Something was triggered in their minds. I thought about how I would concentrate as a child, close my eyes, and remember things as if I were reading them all over again. It took discipline and a refusal to acknowledge that something could not be done. The kids would be concerned about standing up there in front of people, reciting. But I taught them to move beyond that. To focus on the words and the message, to become one with the message. As my children would learn, something is impossible only until you decide that it is not.
Well, I think they got the message, and, oh, I was so proud of them. People were moved by their presentation. Their knees didn’t knock and they didn’t stutter. Once they took that mic in their hands, they were transformed. They internalized. They became the message they were delivering. They became the Emmett Till Players.
Hundreds of children have learned so much about their history and about themselves, their ability, through participating in my programs, starting as annual assemblies at school, and becoming regular events sponsored by my church. I wanted the kids to know these things. More than just the words they would memorize, I wanted them to know the meaning of the words, the message behind them. More still, I wanted them to have the attributes they would need to excel in anything they chose to do: confidence, discipline, industry. They have developed those attributes that carry them on to success in so many fields. And they have learned their history, that so many sacrifices were made for the opportunities they enjoyed. That’s why I named the group in honor of my son. But I have learned something, too. I struggled for so long with my responsibility, questioning the role I would play sitting on the sidelines as great social changes unfolded. But I have come to realize that there was a message for me in the speeches of Dr. King. One of my favorites urges people to be the best they can be at whatever it is they have chosen to be, even if it is a street sweeper. I learned that our progress as a people would come in two steps. The first was to make sure our rights were secured, that opportunities were created. The second part was my part, and the part so many of us can play. To make sure young black kids were ready to take advantage of the opportunities that were created. One step would be no good without the other. So there was purpose in my life, as there is in every life. The blessing is discovering our purpose. The commitment is living it. I thank God that I have had both experiences.
Teaching never ended with me. It was my passion. Not even my family could escape. Of course, all the kids in our family would learn about Emmett, and develop a deep understanding of their own history as a result.
History wasn’t the only thing I shared with all the kids. I just couldn’t help myself. When my cousin Ollie Gordon let her baby Airickca stay with us while she worked during the week, I began working too—working on the baby. As soon as she started talking, she started asking questions, trying to define her little world.
“She’s ready to start learning,” I said to Mama. And I was ready to teach.
I used pop bottles to make bowling pins. I would papier-mâché the bottle just to mold it to the right shape, then cut the paper off, tape the two sides together, and paint on numbers. She used a beach ball to knock down the little papier-mâché pins. The first lesson was to count how many pins were knocked over. The second lesson was to learn how to read the numbers on each pin. The final lesson was to add the numbers on each pin knocked over. After we progressed through that game, we set up a little grocery store with a box and empty soup cans. I would put my own labels on with names and prices and we would do our shopping right there in the kitchen. Airickca became quite a little helper when we really did go to the store, too. She could call off items from the shelf and pick out the ones that were low enough. Oh, my, when that child finally went off to school, she already knew her ABC’s and her 1-2-3’s. Later she would become one of my Emmett Till Players, and add so much to our ensemble with her beautiful singing voice.
It is so important to make every experience a learning experience for children and to help them find the lesson in each experience they have. There are life lessons in everyday life. Kids who don’t get started until they attend school get off to a slow start. I know. I’ve seen the result. I have seen children with all the potential in the world who wind up getting written off, just because nobody worked with them early enough. There was one little boy just like that who came to my class. People told me he was learning disabled. A fourth grader who walked around with his fingers in his mouth all the time. He was not very expressive and, whenever his mother was around, he clung to her leg. Where so many others had seen hopelessness, I saw hope. I started teaching that little boy speeches. He began to excel. Even in class, when he stood to give his speech, all the other students stood with him, to get a good look at him, to flow with his rhythm. He was so happy to get the attention, to realize that he could do something no one ever expected him to do, and he began to move with so much confidence as a result. At one presentation, a Chicago alderman was so impressed, he presented the little fellow with a hundred dollars. I was overjoyed to learn years later that this little boy, the one who was headed for failure only because everyone expected that of him, this same little boy whose body wiggled with excitement as he recited his speeches and heard the sweet sound of approval—this little boy I believed in was awarded a full four-year scholarship to a state university.
Over the years, I developed such a reputation that I would be given the most difficult students to try to turn around, particularly at the Scanlon School, where I taught for a number of years. Some only needed to find a reason to apply themselves. Odel Sterling was always a very bright student, but he was a cutup in class. He also had a stuttering problem. I reached out to him and gave him Dr. King’s “Mountaintop” speech to learn, figuring he might get inspiration from that. But Odel heard the “I Have a Dream” speech and wanted to do that one. He wanted to do it so badly that he struck a bargain with me on a Monday morning. I told him I’d let him have the “Dream” speech, if he learned both speeches by that Friday’s rehearsal time. Every day that week, every time Odel would see me, in the hall or anywhere in the school, he would recite a line of the “Dream” speech just to show me his progress. Oh, he was so proud of himself.
“We’ll see,” I would always say. “Just know ‘every village and every hamlet’ by Friday.”
At Friday’s rehearsal, I announced to all the students that we would have a special treat. Odel would do two speeches. I ask
ed him to do “Mountaintop” first. He did it perfectly. Now, for the real test. The “Dream” speech. And that one was just as good as the first.
I saw his anxious glance at me when he finished, and I finally spoke. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Do it again,” I said.
He was puzzled. It showed. But he did it again.
“Did you hear that?” I asked him again.
He shrugged.
“Do it again,” I said.
Well, this time, he put so much power into what already had been two fine performances that everyone in the rehearsal was moved. But that wasn’t my point. He had delivered a flawless performance the very first time. And that was the point.
“Did you hear that?”
He was so frustrated with me. “Hear what?”
“You didn’t stutter,” I told him, touched by the moment, a moment that reminded me so much of one I’d had so many years before. Another moment, another boy, another stutter. A once-upon-a-time moment with Emmett.
As I look back on those years after Emmett’s death, I realize that I was filling the empty places in my life with work. And I couldn’t seem to get enough of it. Even in the middle of all the work as a teacher, leading the Emmett Till Players, and helping to get our new little church started, I was working on another degree. My dear friend Ann Brickel, Mother Goodman’s daughter, had convinced me to register for the graduate program at Loyola University in Chicago. She wanted to have a companion as she went through the program. We both earned master’s degrees, and I earned additional hours toward a doctorate, while Dr. Brickel went all the way. But, even with all that, and with all the children in my family, who were so much like children of my own, there still was something missing: I couldn’t help but think at times what my grandchildren would have been like.
At Scanlon, there was an attractive young kindergarten teacher I had seen for years. One day she approached me, and said something very special.
“You know,” she began, “I could have been your daughter-in-law.”
She had been in school with Emmett and it seems he’d had a crush on her. It never developed into anything, probably because he really was too young to know how to express those feelings to a little girl. But she knew, the way a girl would know such things. And I knew what she meant, the way a girl knows how a girl would know such things. I looked at her as she was telling me this story and I saw what I missed so much. I saw children. Beautiful children who might have called me “Nana” or “Mimi.” Or maybe just “Grandma.”
There was something in our blood. I always knew family was important. More than knowing it, though, I felt it. It was clear to me in the way Mama always embraced our whole family. Oh, we have so many cousins that we just stopped counting years ago. Family for us has never been paint-by-numbers. So it doesn’t matter whether it’s a first, second, third, fourth, or fifth cousin. To us, it’s just “Cuddin’ So-and-So.” There was a powerful reason why relationship was always so important—something we felt. It was in the blood. We were getting ready for a huge family reunion in 1975, and Mama wanted to do a family tree. Now, Mama being Mama, she put in all the branches, all the stems and the fruit of that tree. But that still wasn’t enough. She dug all the way down to the roots.
There had been stories handed down for generations. Stories about five sisters who were taken from Africa, brought to America. Five sisters who somehow were able to hold tight, stay close, pleading with the flesh merchants and the slave owners to keep them together. For these five sisters, family wasn’t just important, it was life itself. Our lifeline to Africa, as well as the life forced upon us here. Betty Alexander, my great-great-grandmother, held on to her family and some of her family ways she remembered from Africa. But there was a price. She was married to the master’s son, Hilliard Tolliver, another slave, but her firstborn was by the master himself. My great-grandmother Laura. Mama knew the story of Betty Alexander Tolliver, and shared it with everyone. It must have been the reason she always felt it was so important to protect her own family. To keep us close. She had done her best and now I was all she had left, the last of her line. It would be some time before I would learn how much she had done to keep me close, to keep me safe.
From the beginning when we formed the Emmett Till Players in 1973, I would work with students from my school and with members of my church. We would travel across the country over the coming years, performing before family members of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta, and even folks in Mississippi. One trip would have such special meaning to me.
For years I had hoped that there would be a memorial to Emmett, something to reflect his memory and his connection to everything that followed. By the mid-seventies, I received notice that such a memorial was being planned. And what a fitting one. In Denver, a statue was to be dedicated in honor of Dr. King and Emmett. I was overwhelmed by the tribute. This was the first official recognition that Emmett had not died in vain, that something had been gained by my tragic loss, that there was a link between Emmett’s death and the push for change.
So many family members and church members and, of course, Emmett Till Players went with us to share in this joyous event in 1976. And then there was the unveiling itself in Denver’s City Park. The statue of Dr. King looking out, with his hand on the shoulder of the statue of Emmett. I was speechless. I mean, I was unable to say anything. But everyone was waiting for me to say something. Say something was what I was there to do. Oh, but the weight of that statue just came down on me, knocked me out of the box. Mama was there for me. She always was there, like the statue, looking over my shoulder. I was listed as the first speaker and she was to follow. But she didn’t hesitate for a moment. That woman saved the day. She just walked forward and took the podium, allowing me to catch my breath, regain my composure, and take the baton back from her. My mother. That lady was simply awesome. And her influence ran deep and wide.
The year after the Denver dedication, Wheeler Parker, Jr., became a minister. He had prayed for deliverance in the darkness of Papa Mose’s home when those men came to take Emmett. Wheeler had made a promise for that deliverance. And in 1977, Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr., kept his promise. By 1993, he would become pastor of the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ. My mother would have been so proud to see Reverend Parker as pastor of the first church she had helped to establish, the one that had been founded in our home.
By April 1981, Mama had to be hospitalized. It was her heart. Although she was released, this was a very anxious time for me. As it turns out, there was reason for me to be concerned. Mama had to return to the hospital that August. Gene and I were there every night of the week, often together, sometimes in shifts. No matter how tired we might have been after work, we were there, all the time she was hospitalized, from August to November.
We did our best to make her feel comfortable, but that was not always easy to do. They had these tubes going down her throat. She was in and out of consciousness.
There were times when she was alert and I would step out to talk to the doctor or the nurse, leaving Gene to talk to Mama, keep her company. But when I’d walk back into the room, she would stop talking. Strange. I didn’t understand that. So one night, after we left, I asked Gene what that was all about. He looked at me long and hard and finally revealed what Mama had been telling him, what she had been urging him, what she had been hoping and praying he would do. She wanted him to take care of “Baby.” That was me. Hearing that was the end of me.
“You’re all she’s got now,” Mama had told Gene. She wanted him to look after me. And to be good to me. Oh, God. I couldn’t bear it. I started crying so much Gene needed a mop and pail to clean up after me.
The next time we were there together with Mama at Michael Reese Hospital, she looked at me and must have known that Gene had told me. A look is all it would have taken for a mother to read a daughter, a daughter who was her best friend in the whole world. Finally, she turned to Gene.
“Son,” she said.
“Yes, Mama.”
“I want to go home.”
Gene turned to me, and then back to her. “Well, Mama, we can’t take care of you at home like they’re doing here.” He knew there were so many things Mama needed that we could never provide at our place.
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I want to go home.”
That’s when I broke down. That’s when I broke in: “No, Mama! You’re not going anywhere. We need you. I need you.” She had taught me to be a fighter and I was ready to fight even her if that’s what it took to keep her.
Mother didn’t try to talk to me any more after that. Everything she had left to say, she would say to Gene.
On November 11, 1981, I was there in the room by myself with Mama. Everything was quiet at first. Then she began to have seizures. Violent seizures. It terrified me to see her whole body jerk up into a full sitting position then fall back again. I called the doctor. He had to do something. I couldn’t take it, seeing her like that.
The doctor called a nurse, told her to give Mama an injection. Just as the nurse came back in ready to follow the doctor’s order, my mother fell back to the pillow. She never moved again. In the end, I was thankful that they didn’t give her that injection. I would be left forever to wonder if it was the needle that killed her. God simply answered her prayer. He took her home.
Oh, my God. I had lost Mama. What was I going to do? I felt life would be impossible without her. I cried so hard I was in pain. I stood there, alone, after the doctor and nurse left. Someone came in later and said I was just standing there gazing down at Mama in the bed, my arms outstretched, my fingers spread wide. They said it looked like I had released her. Finally.
I couldn’t remember a time when my mother wasn’t there for me. Now she would be there no more. She was seventy-nine years old and had so much wisdom. What is it worth to gain so much knowledge if you can’t stay around for others to benefit? Then again, maybe that was the selfish reaction. Mama had been able to influence a great many people in the years she had been given. Without question, she had left a mark, an impression on the people she met. She was a strong, determined woman other women wanted to emulate. Yvonne, Gene’s youngest daughter, named her oldest daughter Alma.