by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
We found another spot. Deeper in Wisconsin. Much deeper. We went all the way to the Mississippi River, the place where Wisconsin and Minnesota are separated by the river. Close to the beginning of it all. The source. It was beautiful, standing there on a very high bluff. We laid all our stuff out and were arranging our rods and reels. Gene and I were closer to the edge than Lou and Wealthy were. So, while they were getting everything together, I decided to look over the edge. We had been in such a hurry, nobody had even taken time to check. My goodness, that was a long drop.
I turned around. “Oh, Gennie, we might not have enough line to get our hooks into the water.”
Gene came over to look. That’s when he lost his footing and fell over the cliff. I screamed and, as I did, I saw that Gene had fallen into a net. It was a big net, a fishing net we had. It broke his fall, scooped him up, and brought him back up to the bluff, where he very gently tumbled out onto the ground.
Gene just laughed as he picked himself up. The way he had done so many times before. “Well, I guess I’ve learned how to fall now.”
Then, I would awaken. Every night it would be the same thing. Always about fishing. There were variations. But it always was about fishing. The Lord had me dreaming about Gene, trying to tell me something.
When Gennie died, I reached such a low point in my life where, once again, death seemed more attractive to me than life. It was something I began to look forward to. I could see no purpose in going on. I had never stopped to think how much I had come to need Gene. When he was here, he’d never given me a chance to think about that. He just took care of everything. Things were done. And that’s all there was to it. But, more than that, there was the emotional connection. We were two people who had lived as one. And Gene had been my last direct link to Emmett. The best father figure Bo had ever known. When I lost Gene, it was like I was losing two people, like I was losing Bo all over again. I felt so alone. I just wanted to go where everybody else had gone. I was assuming, of course, that they all were in heaven.
I would talk about things like this with Lillian. She had lost her husband in 1989 and now she had lost her father. She could understand what I was feeling, just as I understood her feelings. So we could talk. Most of all, we could listen.
It was while I was in this frame of mind that I turned to the Lord and I cried, “Lord, why did you take Gennie? You know how much I loved him, how much I depended on him.” I prayed and I prayed. And soon the answer came: “I want you to depend on Me.”
It was a horrible discovery. Another mother’s son had been found dead in Mississippi. He was found on June 16, 2000, with a belt around his neck, a noose tied to the pecan tree in his front yard in Kokomo. Raynard Johnson was only seventeen years old. He had been friends with a white girl at school and it was believed that there were people who were very upset about that. The death was ruled a suicide. The belt around Raynard’s neck was not his belt. He was six feet tall and his legs were touching the ground. The branch on the tree was low enough and his legs were long enough to have stopped any strangulation. That would have been his natural impulse. Unless he was dead already when he was strapped up there.
The Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., was going down to Mississippi in July. He called on me. He wanted me to go with him. He told me there was a job to do. There was a great public uproar over the case. There was a great deal of tension. A mother was in need of comfort. And there were many people who needed to hear things that only could be spoken by someone who had traveled this road. A very long road, stretching back for many miles and many years. Although I had been to Mississippi on personal trips a few times since the Sumner trial, this would be the first time I would return for this kind of event. I agreed to go. Lillian would go with me. Reverend Jackson arranged for a Learjet to carry us all down there. As comfortable as it all was, it became a very uneasy flight for me. I had forgotten my insulin and there were urgent calls ahead to Mississippi from the plane.
Down on the ground in Jackson, Stephanie Parker-Weaver had everything in place. She’s the executive secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Mississippi and the go- to person when civil rights leaders come in for important events. So she had everything in place, but she got the call about the one thing nobody could have anticipated. The one thing I needed—insulin. And it was an emergency.
When I stepped off that plane onto the tarmac in Jackson, Mrs. Maria Johnson emerged from the delegation there to greet us. She and I hugged so strongly. Motherly hugs. Of course, we had never met before. Oh, but we knew each other. We knew each other in the way that two people know they share a bond. It was a connection only we could feel. We spoke a silent language only we could understand. For us, it needed no translation. So we hugged, and we communed. And then I made my way to the paramedics, who were waiting nearby. With that detail out of the way, we soon were on our way.
A busy schedule had been planned. A rally was set for the next day. There would be a march to Mrs. Johnson’s home in Kokomo and there would be speeches. On this day, there would be a meeting with the governor, Ronnie Musgrove, and a meeting at the John the Baptist Church.
At the meeting that had been arranged with the governor, Reverend Jackson was going to discuss the investigation of Raynard Johnson’s death and all the concerns about the findings and the suspicion that they were incomplete. And then there was me. I had to hold back. I was filled with so much emotion, anticipation. Oh, my God, I had waited forty-five years for such a moment. This would be the highest-ranking Mississippi official I had ever met. It would be the first time such an official would have the chance to talk to the mother of Emmett Till, to offer any promise at all that the murder investigation would be reopened, to offer an apology for all that had been done. For all that had not been done. We waited for that meeting. And waited. Finally, the wait was over. We were told that the governor would be unable to meet with us after all. There was a conflict.
So we left, and Reverend Jackson said something about sorting it all out in future elections. For the governor, there had been a conflict, but nothing, it seemed, like the ones that lay ahead, nothing like the one that lay in my heart. The expectation, the disappointment.
There was too much ahead of us to dwell on what we left behind there at the meeting that would never be. We had to get to Hattiesburg, where we would stay overnight before the next day’s rally and march. Of course, we also had the church meeting, where I thought I still needed my wheelchair, until Reverend Jackson spoke up. “Oh, Mother, you don’t need a wheelchair. Let the spirit move you.” He took my arm and I realized that his call, the call to go with him down to Mississippi, that call had come at just the right time in my life. It was a call that pulled me out of my despair over losing Gene. Reverend Jackson had brought me back again, to Mississippi and to myself. He had given me a reason to move forward, and we did. We walked down the aisle of that church and I felt energized by all the love and support of the black people of Mississippi, by having the chance to meet them, to talk with them. The pain of loss, of children murdered, it just seemed to be felt by everyone. In a way, I suppose I represented the survival of such great loss. The hope that gets us through the things we might never imagine getting through.
My hope during that trip was that I might provide some comfort to Mrs. Johnson. I knew what she was feeling during this time, a time when even all the family love, all the public support couldn’t fill that hollow loneliness. I felt that, too. So deeply. We talked about that feeling. About that and the need for her to find peace within herself and with God. She had to accept God’s will even if she didn’t fully understand it right away. That was the first thing to do. Once she could reach that peace, she would receive spiritual guidance to handle everything else that she would have to handle: finding the truth, finding forgiveness. She would have to be strong to endure what lay ahead: the outside pressure, the inner turmoil. Oh, I knew those parts so well. I could see how difficult it was going to be. I knew that, as much as thin
gs in Mississippi had changed, they seemed to have changed so little in ways that are close to the heart. I felt that based on what I had heard about the way the Raynard Johnson case had been handled. And how we had been handled by a conflicted Mississippi governor. She would have to be strong to keep fighting, as I had kept fighting, as I would continue to fight for the rest of my life. So I talked about all that, and urged her never to give up. But most important of all, I listened.
There was so much pressure on Mrs. Johnson. And there was so much heat in Mississippi in July. People from Mississippi said they had never felt such heat. Mrs. Johnson suffered from it. She had to be rushed to the hospital to be treated for heat exhaustion. But there were other concerns, concerns that were not shared with everybody at the time. Only a few people would know where Mrs. Johnson had been taken. There was tension in the air that was hotter than the temperature and thicker than the humidity. There was a death threat. It was against Reverend Jackson, and no one knew how far hostile people might go. We all would have to be protected, secured against any possibility. As God would have it, the march and rally went on without incident. Mrs. Johnson’s doctor advised her to stay inside, to stay quiet. But she refused to follow the doctor’s orders. She wanted to appear at the rally. She said she could do it. And she did it, because she said she could do it, because she believed what she said. That was the kind of determination I knew would carry her beyond that weekend.
Things began to pick up again. There had been calls about the play after the Chicago and Aurora performances, and the Pegasus Players theater company served as the broker for deals for the work to be performed by the Unity Players in Los Angeles in September 2000, then for another run in San Diego that November, and by the Paul Robeson Theater Company in Buffalo in February 2001. I traveled to the opening of each run and spoke to the press and the audiences in each city and, oh, the reaction was just amazing to me. I mean, there were traffic jams around those theaters on opening night and, if you didn’t have tickets, you weren’t going to get them. Travel activities can wear a lot of people out. But I was energized by it all, and by hearing so many wonderful things from the producers, the directors, the actors, and all the people who came out to see the performances.
With all the new media attention, I began to hear from others as well. Two documentaries were being planned. Keith Beauchamp, a young man from New York who had been inspired by the Emmett Till story, had begun working on a treatment of the story that became a documentary project. He has a background in criminal justice and began his own investigation of the case as he interviewed people in the South. One day, he decided to call me and was amazed that he got through and that I talked so freely. Stanley Nelson got inspired to produce an Emmett Till documentary after he saw an interview I had done. His company already had produced an acclaimed documentary on the black press and he would go on to win a MacArthur Foundation grant. Stanley’s documentary would be included in the American Experience series on Public Broadcasting Service stations. Keith was in discussions with HBO and CourtTV. These would be the first documentaries for a national audience devoted entirely to Emmett Till. Of course, I was eager to tell my story, and to have it reach a national audience.
Despite the boost I was getting from all the activity, my health was in crisis. One night at home, I fell. This was not the first time. Once I had fallen and it took me hours to drag myself from my bedroom through my office and into my kitchen, where I finally was able to pull myself up by the banister at my basement stairs. But this time, I couldn’t even do that. I was home alone and I fell on the floor, on the side of the bed in my own room, where I had to stay until my cousin Abe Thomas came in to check on me the following morning.
I was taken to Christ Hospital. It was my blood sugar, and there was excess fluid building up. The doctors told me they were going to release me after a few days. But I didn’t feel comfortable going home alone. Not after that latest episode. So they sent me to a rehab center where I stayed for almost a week. There, I started having shortness of breath and had to be rushed back to Christ Hospital. I saw a different group of doctors from the ones who had treated me before. Immediately, they said I had to go on dialysis. There was way too much fluid for my own good. I went through a couple of sessions a day for a while and wound up losing eighty-five pounds from the excess fluid. It was a real miracle. Had they sent me home when they’d planned to do so, who knows what might have happened?
This had been a terrifying episode and we had a family meeting about it. The time had come for me to decide how I was going to go on living the way I had been living. Alone. Or whether I even could anymore. A few plans were put on the table. One possibility that was suggested was to have me check into an assisted living facility. As it turned out, that plan was not a workable one for me. My assets would have to be turned over to the facility, and I just couldn’t have that.
We finally worked it out so that I could stay at home with virtually my whole family looking out for me. A longtime family friend and nurse, Earlene Greer, had been coming in to help me with personal needs. Now she’d be there every day during the week. Abe would drive me to dialysis three days a week, and he and Shep Gordon would help with shopping and general household repairs. Ollie and Airickca would also be part of the emergency check-in list. And either Abe’s sister Bertha Thomas or Lillian would be my travel companions. Bertha also was a big help with business matters, especially the Emmett Till Foundation, which raises money for college scholarships and the Emmett Till Players. Bertha is a paralegal and very good at these things. I also would have an emergency notice system, a lifeline button I could push to call a neighbor right away in an emergency.
Although my health situation was still fragile, losing all that water weight was a tremendous help to me. And the arrangements we worked out gave me peace of mind and made it possible for me to continue to be active, to do all the work I still felt I needed to do.
So many issues would become important to me over the years as I increased my awareness of them through their close connection to the one issue that has always been central to my life. No matter what condition I’ve been in, I’ve been ready to lend my support to the causes I believe in. Capital punishment is one of those. As the mother of a murder victim, I feel that I have been victimized, too. But we have seen so many people on death row who also are victims. They have been wrongly accused. Too many times, they are black. I’ve spent too much of my life speaking out against injustice against black people to be able to live with that. Besides, it seems that even guilty people should be given a chance for redemption. I would hope that a life sentence would give people that chance. That was my hope even with Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. That at some point before they closed their eyes for good, even if it had only been a whisper, or a flash of a thought, they would have been sorry for what they did. That was my hope, and one very important reason why I would call on Illinois Governor George Ryan to abolish the death penalty.
The call for reparations has caused a lot of controversy. And I don’t think everybody sees all the aspects of it. It is not a simple matter. The more it is debated, the better chance we might have to reach an understanding about a very serious and unsettled part of our history. So, when I got the call from Chicago Alderman Dorothy Tillman to travel to Mississippi again for a conference on reparations in May 2002, I was very happy to take part. I arranged to have dialysis in Jackson, and I was ready to go.
The first day of the two-day conference was conducted as a hearing by the Jackson City Council at City Hall, a building that had been constructed with slave labor. There was a huge turnout. My goodness, I never imagined that there were so many people who were involved in so many different aspects of the fight for justice. And everyone had stories to tell about injustices they had suffered. There were people who talked about the need to make up for slavery itself. Some talked about the effects of slavery. Others, like me, talked about the brutality and the need to address the needs of the families of victims. But it r
eally wasn’t about money. The focus was on repairing the damage left by so many years of discrimination. Ways that go beyond money. After all, when it comes to victims of brutality, there is no way to provide enough money to make up for the loss of a loved one. But there is a need for counseling and other help for people who have lost family members to hate crimes.
I was moved by the stories people told, people like Mrs. Maria Johnson, whose son’s death was not reinvestigated. Although the file was reviewed, the original finding was not reversed. The official cause of death was still listed as suicide. Mrs. Johnson is determined to keep pushing for an answer her heart can accept. There were so many people at the hearings who had to live with great anguish. People who never even got so much as an apology. That had always been so important to me, for some official of the state of Mississippi to do even that much. In a way, that is what the reparations debate represents. An apology, an admission. After all, things can’t be set right until we face up to what’s been done wrong.
There was a surprise in store for me on the first day of the hearings. Jackson City Councilman Kenneth Stokes issued an apology to me, speaking with the authority he had earned with the rights that had been gained as a result of so much sacrifice that had been made. It wasn’t surprising to me that a black elected official in Mississippi had done what a white elected official could never bring himself to do. But it touched me so deeply to know that in 2002, quite unlike 1955, there was a black man in Mississippi who had the power to do it.
Willie Reed called me. Out of the blue, he just called and then came by to visit. We hadn’t seen each other in years and it was so good to sit down and talk. Willie was working at Jackson Park Hospital in Chicago.