by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
We ordered Chinese food and reminded each other of things some people might have wanted to forget. Things people can never forget no matter how much they might want to do so. Things about the trial and all that hostility, and how we both knew the way things would turn out, and how we kept moving forward anyway. And, oh, yes, how we couldn’t wait to get out of Mississippi. I thanked Willie for his courage. He had put so much on the line in agreeing to testify. He would forever give up his life in Mississippi. Yet, he told me, he would do it all over again, if the situation presented itself. He thought about it, he said, practically every day. To get to work, he would drive down Emmett Till Road. And he would think about it all. How there came to be an Emmett Till Road. Willie felt a kinship with Emmett. For one thing, they were close in age. Willie was eighteen at the time and Emmett was fourteen. Willie was an only child and he knew Emmett was an only child. He said that if what happened to Emmett had happened to him, he would have wanted somebody to come forward for him.
It occurred to me after Willie left that I had never asked him what prompted him to call me. But, then, I guess there are some things you really don’t have to ask.
For years, I have hoped to have the investigation of the murder of my son reopened. There still are so many unanswered questions. Even though Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam could never be convicted of murder once they were acquitted, there were other reasons to take a fresh look at this case. We knew what reporters like Jimmy Hicks and witnesses like Willie Reed had told us years ago. This crime was not committed by two people alone. Others were there. Others participated on one level or another. Until we know, this case is unresolved. I have said repeatedly that I was determined to work until my dying day to search for answers and to make sure that the story of Emmett Louis Till would never be buried. I have my own determination, but I also have been able to draw on inspiration from others. I have seen how Coretta Scott King would never let the dream die, how Myrlie Evers continued to pursue Medgar’s assassin.
Mine is not just the passion of an aggrieved mother. This should be the sentiment of an entire nation. As long as the Emmett Till murder is unresolved, this case will sit there like a thorn in the side of our sense of justice and fair play. It will continue to poke at us, to prick our conscience and irritate. Without a resolution, we can never be at ease.
There have been many others who have shared this feeling. For years, Keith Beauchamp has wanted to find answers, too. His documentary was the first step. The first screening was scheduled for November 2002 in New York, co-sponsored by the Africana Studies Department at New York University in connection with the release of the University of Virginia Press book The Lynching of Emmett Till edited by Christopher Metress. The reaction was incredible. An extra screening had to be added and people lined up in the rain to get into both sessions. The press would take the story of renewed interest in Emmett Till all over the country. The New York Times (including an opinion piece by Brent Staples), The Washington Post, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, ABC News—everyone, it seemed, wanted to talk about a quest for justice that would not die.
Later, Keith teamed up with Alvin Sykes and Donald Burger of the Justice Campaign of America to present information to the attorney general of Mississippi and to the U.S. Justice Department to try to reopen the investigation into Emmett’s murder. Eyewitnesses are still around. Maybe even a few accomplices. It has been difficult sorting through the technicalities of the law to show that the state has cause, or that the federal government has jurisdiction. But the effort continues.
Although I have lived so much of my life without Emmett, I have lived my entire life because of him. Everything leading up to his birth, everything following his death was for a purpose. Unfortunately, so much of that time, I have suppressed the horrible feeling that only a mother can have when a child is lost. Was there something I could have done? Was Emmett’s death something I could have prevented? Emmett was a good boy, a good son, and I know that I was a good mother. But you can’t help but wonder about such things.
I think about that dreadful day at A. A. Rayner’s when I had to examine Emmett’s horribly disfigured body. How could I ever forget that? I remember how I thought about Emmett in that shed, how no one had answered his call. I know now that I was wrong about that. God answered the call when He embraced Emmett and showed the world what race hatred could do, how much better we should be than what we had become. So much good has come of that. And I have answered the call in all my life’s work, nurturing young minds, providing much-needed guidance. And in that, there is redemption.
The work is not done. So many of our young people still need so much guidance. There is much they don’t know and we must take responsibility for that. We can see it in the recent debate about the movie Barbershop, where a character jokingly questions whether Rosa Parks did anything worth honoring by refusing to give up her seat. Rosa Parks is a friend I have come to love very much. We have talked about that historic day when she would not be moved. She was tired. But not physically tired. She was tired of the indignities that we as a people were made to suffer. It was an act of courage. I know from experience just how much people put on the line during the civil rights movement. People risked their lives. People sacrificed their lives. And they did it so that our young people now can enjoy certain rights without having to think about it. But we should think about it. Young people must be taught to think about it. They should know, as they say, that freedom is never free. Lord knows, as much as I speak out, I am not in favor of censorship. But there are some things that are so precious, they become sacred. It just should never even occur to us to joke about sacred things.
There still is much that needs to be done to educate white people, too. The fact that we still have to debate whether more needs to be done to repair the damage left by so many years of racial discrimination shows that much. The fact that a U.S. senator could fantasize about the presidency of an arch-segregationist shows that much. White people need a lot of guidance in matters of race. Just as they did in the 1950s, they deserve leaders who will enlighten rather than incite. We all deserve that.
Oh, God, how blessed I have been to have taken part in something as significant as our national debate. I have come to realize that we are all here for a purpose and we have unique gifts to share with the rest of the world. I have enjoyed a full, rich, meaningful life because I was able to discover my reason for being and to perfect my gifts in fulfilling my purpose, touching so many lives in the process. Hopefully, I have left each one just a little better than I found it. Hopefully, I have made a difference. That is, after all, how our lives are measured. By how many other lives we touch and inspire. By how much of life we embrace, not by what we reject. By what we accept, not by what we judge. Still, even with this understanding of a lifetime, the tears do flow from time to time. But I see much more clearly now through my tears, and that is a good thing. Rainy days always help us appreciate the sunny ones so much more, don’t they? Besides, it is in crying that we are able to let go. In letting go, I have experienced what it is like to bring hope from despair, joy from anguish, forgiveness from anger, love from hate. And if I can do it, I know anyone can. And if everyone does it, just imagine how much better we all can be.
With each day, I give thanks for the blessings of life—the blessings of another day and the chance to do something with it. Something good. Something significant. Something helpful. No matter how small it might seem. I want to keep making a difference. Although I am much more aware now of the limits of my own life, I am not afraid. My son has taught me so much about facing all aspects of life with courage. I have planned for the end of my life as carefully as I planned so much of the life I have lived recently. We have made arrangements with Mrs. Slivy Edmonds Cotton, president of Perpetua, Inc., the owners of Burr Oak Cemetery, for the establishment of a mausoleum and museum at the cemetery. Emmett, Gene, and I will be there together with pictures and other remembrances of our lives in a setting that will enable children to l
earn. Not just about our history, but also about the transition in store for every life. The cemetery is for the living, after all, not the dead. And I want children to be able to touch my life and Bo’s life and Gene’s in ways that I hope we have touched everyone else’s.
I just want to make sure now that I tie up all the loose ends, finish the work God put me here to do, see Mama again in the still peace of the riverbank, and prepare to live in eternal bliss with Emmett and Gennie once again, finally as family.
And, Bo, I do think we’re ready now.
AFTERWORD
Every now and then, you have the good fortune to meet someone who changes your life. When you consider the impact a life-altering experience can have, every now and then is plenty. Mamie Till-Mobley became such a person for me. One day this past December, I sat in her kitchen and watched her in action. Now, getting to that kitchen had been a two-step process. The first time we met, we sat in the dining room. There had been a certain formality to that, proving myself worthy of crossing a threshold in our relationship, moving into the kitchen. Much cozier, that kitchen, the nerve center of her home. As in the dining room, there was a table to bring us together. That was a big part of her life. A table, and all that it represented: business, as well as food, nurturing. The table was where she did her work, and where she said her blessings.
So one December day we sat at the kitchen table, in the middle of one of our many interview sessions for this book. She was involved in so many other things at the same time. To know Mother Mobley was to know that there always would be so many other things. There were constant phone calls, from schedulers for upcoming events, out-of-town events that would force her to change her three-day-a-week dialysis schedule, and there were media inquiries. At times she would just hand the phone to me. She knew I could say no. Wait for the book, I would say. It’s only ten months away. She couldn’t say those things, couldn’t hold back. She had been waiting too long already. “I’m like a glass of champagne that keeps bubbling up,” she’d say. Vintage Mamie, consumed by the moment. So, ten more months seemed like a lifetime to her.
There was all that, and then there was the food. The chicken and dumplings, the yeast rolls, the banana pudding, and so much more sustenance that Mother Mobley and her family friend and nurse, Earlene Greer, always were so eager to provide. On this one day, at the height of just that kind of activity—the calls, the conversation, the cooking—she did something that really amazed me. She walked. Just stood on her own and walked from the kitchen to her adjacent office and back again, without her walker, without her cane, without even an arm to lean on. I waited for her to take her seat again before calling all this to her attention. It just seemed like a good idea to wait.
She hadn’t even noticed that she had done this thing that had amazed me, this thing I hadn’t seen her do before. But then she gave me a wink of a glance. “Well,” she said, “I have to be able to get around if I’m going to go out on the road and talk about my book.”
Indeed. And I wanted that for her. I wanted that very much. For her to be strong and healthy, to be able to go out, tell the story she had waited so long to tell. When you care about somebody, you want them to have what they want. Everyone who knew Mother Mobley cared about her. People who only knew about her cared about her. She once jammed the aisles in a local grocery store when her cousin Abriel Thomas told only a couple of people that Emmett Till’s mother was there shopping. Word spread. People knew her story, parts of it, anyway, and they wanted to tell her how it had changed their lives. It was like that wherever she went. But there was much more than the pieces of a story. There was Mother Mobley herself. She was Everymother. She had an aura, a smile like the sunrise, and a way of making you want to make her smile just to get warmed by it. There was a magnetism, a way she had of drawing you in like a loving embrace. It would make you just want to do things for her. It made me want to call ahead of time, every time I’d come over, to see if she needed anything, anything at all, from the store. Of course, she needed that, the attention, the care, the help. Just as other people, especially the family members who looked after her, needed her to be pleased. She was that special person who said the things we always want to hear: I missed you. God bless you. I love you, too.
She was the teacher we’d always remember. You know, the one who changed our lives. She might have retired from teaching twenty years ago, but for Mother Mobley that was a minor administrative detail. She continued to teach in her own way. She teaches us still. She teaches as a mother would, warming our hearts, nurturing our minds. She teaches about the importance of living a committed life, a purposeful life. Of squeezing every ounce of enrichment out of every moment we are given. To live on purpose. She taught me these things, as I sat there in her kitchen, as I listened to her, watched her on the move. She taught me the best way you can teach anybody anything: by example.
On January 6 of this year, Mother Mobley died. She suffered a heart attack. She had just started walking again, or trying to. She was on the move that day, on her way to another accelerated dialysis session so she could make an early-morning flight to Atlanta the next day. She was scheduled to speak at Ebenezer Baptist Church in connection with the exhibition “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America” at the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site. Abe and Earlene were with her on that last ride, one so much like others she had experienced, like the one the morning she got the news about Emmett’s disappearance, and when she heard about Gene in the hospital, racing the speed limit, hoping against hope that the outcome would be different from the expectation.
Maybe it all makes sense, that she would die as she had lived: on the move. At eighty-one, she showed just how short life really is, how important it is to seize the moment, to push beyond our limitations. She did that, stayed active, kept moving forward, knowing the great risk to her personal health. She did it because she wanted so much to tell the story, the story she had lived.
Her story was very important to her. She recognized the power of her message was in its simplicity. A boy was brutally murdered, the confessed killers were set free, an aggrieved mother found no justice, and race hatred was at the very heart of it all. It is a story that clawed at our conscience like fingernails on a blackboard. It challenged a nation in the most fundamental way. We looked at the tortured face of Emmett Till and saw what a nightmare the American dream had become for so many of us. One newspaper headline got it exactly right when it noted quite simply that Mother Mobley had opened a casket and opened our eyes. She made us face what we all must experience at some point in a full and complete life: a move away from our own naïveté, our own ignorance; an increase in our awareness. For it is only in the sacrifice of our innocence that we can achieve absolute understanding.
Mother Mobley’s message is political, it is spiritual. And people get it. Mother Mobley made sure of that. In fact, she became her own message. In the example of her life, we were able to see so much more than individual despair. She was a metaphor for the community she represented. Not just the abuse, the injustice we had suffered, but also the hope for a better day, the courage to fight for it, the faith that it eventually would come. She taught us that and she inspired us to put the lesson to work.
She also inspired us in the way she continued to live her life without bitterness. Her last public appearance came at the special request of Renny Cushing, executive director of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation. On December 8, 2002, she participated in Victims’ Voices, a Loyola University forum in Chicago, sponsored by Cushing’s Cambridge-based group, which is opposed to the death penalty. Mother Mobley explained that she had never wanted to be consumed by hatred—the same destructive force that had driven Emmett’s killers—as she used the platform of the event to call upon Illinois Governor George Ryan to abolish the death penalty.
“For her, speaking against the death penalty was life affirming,” Cushing told me. “It was a way of keeping Emmett alive.”
On Janu
ary 11, 2003, the day Mother Mobley was buried, Governor Ryan commuted 164 Illinois death sentences to life in prison without parole. Among so many other things, among so many other names, Mamie Till-Mobley was on the governor’s mind at the time, and in the speech he delivered when he cleared Death Row: “Mamie’s strength and grace not only ignited the civil rights movement—including inspiring Rosa Parks to refuse to go to the back of the bus—but inspired murder victims’ families until her dying day.”
There seemed to be so much left for Mother Mobley to do, events to attend, business to attend to. The State of Mississippi v. Emmett Till was scheduled for a January reprise in Aurora, Illinois, where Mayor David Stover had been so moved by the first production and by meeting Mother Mobley that he had insisted on a return engagement. There would be a full run in the fall by the Pegasus Players in Chicago. Artistic Director Arlene Crewdson had chosen the play to lead off the twenty-fifth anniversary season of the best works the organization had ever mounted. There was the annual prayer breakfast in Chicago in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., where Mayor Daley would honor Mother Mobley, telling the capacity crowd that she deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in leading us to a better place. There was the Chicago screening of Stanley Nelson’s Emmett Till documentary, to which I was to escort her. There was discussion about other joint appearances with Emmett Till documentarian Keith Beauchamp, including a screening and panel discussion at the United Nations. And, of course, there was the book.
So much left to do. Mother Mobley wanted to live. But she was ready to die, emboldened by her unwavering faith. She wanted to be able to do much more than she already had done, but she had done so much already. In the end, God decided that she had done enough. As Dr. King might have said in one of her favorite speeches, she had swept her job so well.