The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

  Someone going to Booker’s with the intention of having a quick meal alone could turn to their left and eat at the long, shiny mahogany bar that ran almost the entire length of the wall. If several friends wanted to gather together, they could use one of the spacious, built-in wooden booths on the right side of the restaurant. For those out on dates, there were the freestanding tables in the middle of the room. Each was covered with red Formica, with its own dimly lit lamp in the center. Then just beyond the tables was a small dance floor for anyone who wanted to move to the music that flowed out of the jukebox located to the right of the entrance.

  Booker even found a way to take care of those who needed a secret place to play illegal card games. There were two doors on the back wall, and the one on the right opened into the kitchen—a small space that didn’t have air-conditioning but did have a narrow door leading to the outside that was often left open to let heat escape. Somehow, in that tiny space, Booker managed to squeeze in a table that people used for poker and other games. To protect his card-playing clientele, he always had one man watching the front entrance and another keeping an eye out back, so Booker could be alerted if the police were coming.

  The other door on the back wall led to a short hallway that had a pay phone and a stool in it. The hallway ended with an entrance to a tiny bathroom containing a small mirror, a toilet, a sink, and just enough room to turn around in.

  Booker’s Place opened in the morning and offered breakfast to people before they went off to work or school. Midday he sold a sit-down lunch, and even offered a bagged meal for those who didn’t have the time to stay and eat. However, it was his dinners that helped solidify his place in Greenwood history. Chitlins, greens that had been cooking all day long, barbecue, corn muffins served with buttermilk, hamburgers, steak, chicken—the list of well-prepared offerings went on and on.

  Several nights a week, when the dinner rush was slowing down, the restaurant would turn into a club, and a DJ would bring in his turntable and spin records into the morning hours. The state of Mississippi was dry until 1966, so Booker didn’t have a liquor license, but that didn’t keep him from selling booze. He sold whiskey to those who wanted it or ice, cups, and sodas to the patrons who brought in their own.

  On a warm Saturday evening, the place was usually crowded with people spilling out onto the sidewalks or lining up just waiting for their chance to get in. The crowd itself was a colorful mix of young guys in brightly colored suits, older men in muted tones sporting fedoras, young girls in halter tops and cancan skirts that flared out at the bottom, and older women in dress suits or church clothes. Regardless of age or social status, everybody wanted to go to Booker’s Place.

  His success earned him resentment—not only from poor Whites who didn’t think he deserved to live that kind of a life but from poor Blacks as well who felt rebuffed by the way they were treated when they tried to enter Booker’s café. For many Blacks, it may have seemed that even Booker’s restaurant was not safe from the caste system Greenwood used to separate acceptable Blacks from the nonacceptable. But he didn’t turn down money. Blacks who wanted ice for the liquor they’d bought up the street were welcome to buy it at Booker’s Place. Blacks who’d saved up money and could purchase food were welcome there as well. However, if they didn’t have money the next week, they could be asked to leave.

  On the nights when Booker waited tables at Lusco’s, it was often his wife, Honey, who closed up for him. He worried about her because sometimes hungry, poverty-stricken Blacks who didn’t have any money to spend would try to enter the restaurant. They’d hang around, asking the paying customers to buy something for them. The penniless would-be patrons quickly found themselves up against Booker’s zero-tolerance policy for loitering, most of them leaving without argument.

  In spite of her own business acumen, Honey was small in stature and therefore ill-equipped to handle some of the rougher people who wanted to enter Booker’s Place. Given the restaurant’s location on McLaurin, there was always the danger that Honey could be overtaken in front of the restaurant on the way to her car. Not wanting her to take any chances, Booker insisted that Honey always carry a gun.

  She had to protect herself because calling the police wasn’t an option. Blacks never knew how an encounter with a local officer would turn out. Even someone like Booker, who had relatively close relationships in the White community, couldn’t count on receiving help from the Greenwood Police Force.

  A Testing Ground for Democracy

  In Sara Criss’s memoirs about her life in Greenwood, there’s a section that deals specifically with the civil rights movement. She begins it by saying, “The Civil Rights Era, though generally thought of as being the sixties, really began in Leflore County, Mississippi, in the late summer of 1955 with the brutal killing of a fourteen-year-old Chicago Negro, Emmett Till.”

  In the summer of 1955, a sixty-four-year-old part-time preacher and full-time sharecropper named Moses Wright was living with his wife and children in Money, Mississippi. During a visit to Chicago to spend time with his niece, Mamie, Moses told her and her son, Emmett, about the wide-open spaces and immense beauty of the Mississippi Delta. Emmett wanted to see it for himself, so he begged Mamie to let him go. After much consideration, she gave in and let her fourteen-year-old son head down to the Delta with Moses and two of Emmett’s cousins. Before Emmett left, she cautioned him to remember that life for Blacks in the South was very different than what it was like for Blacks in Chicago.

  Once he arrived in Money, Emmett spent his days playing with other kids and picking cotton. One afternoon, Emmett and one of his cousins went into a White-owned store called Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. The store was owned by Roy Bryant, but on that particular day, his wife, Carolyn, was in charge.

  Reports on what happened inside the store are conflicting. Some people claim Emmett whistled at Carolyn. Others say that he had a speech problem and would often whistle to keep himself from stuttering. His mother would later explain that Emmett had trouble pronouncing the “B” sound, and that maybe, if he was trying to ask for bubble gum, he may have whistled to avoid falling into a stutter. Still others said that Emmett spoke to Carolyn, saying something like “Bye, baby,” in order to win a bet he’d made with his cousins.

  What happened afterward is not in dispute. A few nights later, on Sunday, August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Moses Wright’s house, woke Emmett, and took him into the night. Till’s cousin, Curtis Jones, later explained, “I was awakened by a group of men in the house. I didn’t wake completely—youngsters, they sleep hard, you know. When they came, my grandfather answered the door and they asked him did he have three boys in there from Chicago. And he stated yes. So, they told him to get the one who did the talking. My grandmother was scared to death. She was trying to protect Bo [Jones’s nickname for Emmett]. They told her to get back to bed. One of the guys struck her on the side of the head with a shotgun. When I woke up the next morning, I thought it was a dream.”

  Four days would pass from the night Emmett was taken before Curtis would hear anything about his cousin. “Wednesday I was over at some relatives’ house. We was out there picking cotton. One of my uncles drove up there in that 1941 Ford. He said, ‘Curtis, they found Bo.’ I say, ‘Is he alive?’ He said, ‘No, he’s dead.’ ”

  Emmett’s body had surfaced in the Tallahatchie River. It was later discovered that when Emmett was taken from Moses Wright’s house, he was tortured through the night and well into the morning. The fourteen-year-old boy had been stripped naked, pistol-whipped, and had his eye gouged out, and was later shot in the head. Then Bryant and Milam used barbed wire to tie a two-hundred-pound cotton gin fan around his neck before tossing Emmett’s body into the Tallahatchie River.

  Mamie Till Bradley had already been alerted that her child was missing. It didn’t take long for her to learn why he was taken and, as she waited for news about her son, Mamie developed an awareness th
at she couldn’t name or say out loud. She knew deep down that he’d been murdered. Finally the call came, the one that confirmed her suspicions. She would later recall that “when I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found and how he was found, the whole house began to scream and cry.”

  Soon afterward, “. . . the order came from the sheriff’s office to bury that body just as soon as you can. And they didn’t even allow it to go to a funeral parlor and be dressed. He was in a pine box. Well, we got busy. We called the governor, we called the sheriff, we called Crosby, my mother’s brother. We called everybody we thought would be able to stop the burial of that body. I wanted that body. I demanded that body, because my thoughts were, I had to see it, to make sure, because I’d be wondering even now who was buried in Mississippi. I had to know that was Emmett.”

  Amid pressure, the sheriff finally arranged to have Till’s body sent by train to Chicago. Mamie met the train and was accompanied by reporters and photographers. While still at the station, the box was opened for the mother to identify her son. A photo was taken that captured Mamie’s reaction to what she saw inside that box. In it, she appears to be crying, her hand is on her chest, and she’s falling, her body gone limp.

  The sight of her son’s mutilated body led Mamie to make a decision that would ultimately change the course of history. “I decided I wanted the whole world to see what I had seen. There was no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.” Mamie decided that her son’s funeral would include an open casket.

  Somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty thousand people attended the funeral and saw Emmett’s bloated body in the casket. Emmett’s face was puffy and misshapen beyond imagination. His skin had taken on colors varying from the whitest of whites to the darkest of browns. One could barely make out the child’s ears and nostrils. It was difficult to tell where his ripped-out eye had once been. Photos of his body, which for many came to symbolize all that was wrong in the Delta, were printed in Black magazines throughout the country.

  The trial took place in September 1955 and included testimony from local Blacks like Moses Wright, who identified J. W. Milam as one of the men who’d taken his nephew. Even before the trial was over, Moses’s family had moved north, and he followed soon after. The nation waited with bated breath to see what sentence the two men accused of the heinous crime would receive. The all-White jury took sixty-seven minutes to find them not guilty. One jury member even joked that it wouldn’t have taken so long if they hadn’t stopped to get a soda. Less than six months after being acquitted, a magazine article came out in which Milam and Bryant admitted the crime, detailed what they’d done, and expressed absolutely no remorse.

  Myrlie Evers, the widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, would later say that “The Emmett Till case was one that shook the foundations of Mississippi, both Black and White. With the white community because of the fact that it had become nationally publicized, with us blacks because it said that even a child was not safe from racism, bigotry, and death.”

  The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till served as a kind of throwing down of the gauntlet between people of decency everywhere and the insulated power structure that ruled in the segregated South. News coverage of the event ensured that it was hard to ignore. From places both far and wide, people were tuned in to the senseless murder of a child whose only crime was having brown skin.

  In a collective state of shock and rage, the nation turned its eyes to the Mississippi Delta, and to Greenwood in particular.

  Maybe if they’d been living in a different time, the Whites of Greenwood might have been able to better connect with the national conversation on race. Unfortunately, the message Greenwood Whites received from this national fervor was not one of compassion for Blacks and a concern for their civil rights. Instead, filtered through local leaders with segregationist agendas, the message impressed upon many Whites living in the Delta was that it was once again time to fight. Just like in the war for Southern Independence lost less than a century before, outsiders from the North were once again trying to change the South. Only this time, it was hippies and communists who were coming into their towns to recklessly rip away and destroy the sense of magic and community they’d labored to create.

  The members of these communities were, by and large, the direct descendants of the ones who’d braved the Delta when the land was still wild, who’d fought back the river to build their levees, who’d overcome the thick, entangled vines and hundred-foot-tall trees in order to build plantations and to forge a new way of life. When that way of life was challenged, the instinctual reaction of many Southern Whites was to dig in their heels, gather together their love of place, and defy any force that threatened their collective dream.

  * * *

  WITH THIS NEW, UNFLATTERING national attention, the White Citizens’ Council ramped up their efforts. Sara Criss recalled that “It was more or less expected of us to pay our $5 yearly dues to the Citizens’ Council and to stand behind them.” She explained that the director of a local bank was a Council member and he expected all of his employees to join as well.

  Greenwood’s newspaper was called the Commonwealth, and according to Sara, the owner’s wife was called into a meeting with the presidents of the three local banks and told that “if the local paper took any stand they did not agree with on the civil rights issue, they would not advertise again in the newspaper. Perhaps this was one reason that later on during all the racial strife the paper did not run any editorials to try to improve the situation or sometimes even to cover a racial disturbance.”

  Sara also mentioned an incident when one of the Council leaders warned her that if they tried to integrate Greenwood schools, it would lead to rioting. He also “visualized White girls marrying Negro boys if the schools were integrated.” It seems that Sara grasped the lunacy of that idea, but she also struggled to know what to do.

  She said she “was afraid of the Klan, afraid that if I wrote something they did not like, I would have a cross burned in my lawn, or be threatened, or be included in the hate sheets being distributed, but I was also afraid of the Citizens’ Council because their members were my friends and I did not want to incur their ill will, either.”

  The hate sheets Sara’s referring to were newsletters with names like A Delta Discussion, Truth Bulletin, and The Nocturnal Messenger. Their goal was to communicate their agenda and sway public opinion. These newsletters were left on lawns, on doorsteps, and under the windshields of cars for those living in communities all throughout Greenwood and the surrounding area. Black or White, someone in town wanted to make sure that every resident of Greenwood received warnings about what would happen to their world if they chose to integrate. In another entry, Criss reflects on what it was like for her to live through those early years of the movement:

  Even though it was exciting covering the news that was attracting national attention and seeing the top news folks in the country doing their job, it was very draining emotionally because we never knew from one day to the next what might happen to provoke a situation that would bring in Federal troops. Greenwood was so tense, and all of this was so new to us. It was springtime, and during that very difficult period the trees on Grand Boulevard turned to green and the azaleas and other flowering shrubs were in bloom, and it was definitely our prettiest time of year and my favorite time.

  I can remember on my 42nd birthday [April 1, 1963] riding down the Boulevard with tears in my eyes for what was happening to our town, saying a prayer that it would soon all be over and that all these agitators would leave town and let us go back to being the same old Greenwood. We did not know that it would never be the same and that many heartbreaking times lay ahead for us.

  Sara was right. Greenwood would never be the same. While she was looking upon her town with a sad spirit, longing for “the same old Greenwood,” civil rights workers were dreaming of a new one. “COFO leaders promised in the spring of 1963 to launch
a saturation campaign for black voting rights in the Greenwood area, which had ‘elected itself the testing ground for democracy.’ ”

  Part Five

  The Delta

  It takes a stranger driving through the Delta only an hour or two to see the human misery.

  Neal Peirce

  From the Cotton Fields to the Football Fields

  “I could snort a little coke and the pain would just go away,” my dad said one night when the two of us were on the phone. It was 2009 and he was living in Florida with his new wife. After the birth of my two sons, he’d transformed himself from a distant father into a stellar grandparent. Not only did he send gifts on birthdays and Christmas, he even sent silly cards to my kids on Halloween, Easter, and St. Patrick’s Day. He’d leave phone messages for them in a voice disguised to make himself sound scary or just plain goofy.

  In the two years since I’d first learned about Booker, my father had been diagnosed with cancer, declared cancer-free, and then diagnosed with an aortic aneurism. During those months of treatments and appointments, I made a request of him—one that would change our relationship forever. I asked him to tell me about growing up in Greenwood, explaining that it would help with my research into my grandfather’s life by enabling me to envision the time and place in which Booker lived.

  I was lying. I didn’t want to admit to my dad that I was growing increasingly fond of him and that I longed for better memories than the ones of him stumbling into the house late at night drunk, conning me out of my birthday money so he could use it to gamble, and making me pretend we weren’t home because he was hiding from people he owed money to. If he died before my sons were old enough to remember him, I wanted them to have a little more than that.

  My father was born in 1950 in a farming town called Money, Mississippi, the same town Emmett Till was visiting when he was murdered. Located ten miles north of Greenwood, Money had only a few stores, a post office, one school, and a cotton gin. It was deep in the woods, way off the beaten path, and in spite of its name, whether you were White or Black, if you were among the five hundred or so residents of Money, in 1950, you were probably poor. The only people who saw any significant cash in Money were the owners of the handful of plantations located there.