Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (21 page)

Late August in a Mississippi cotton field is very hot and very humid. Mid-nineties hot. Sticky hot. Horseflies like vultures. No shade. No place to hide. Whole families would take to the fields under these conditions. The Wrights had to pick thirty acres, the largest field of any of the families’ on Grover Frederick’s place. But every family had large areas to pick. Even the youngest children might be pressed into duty, usually toting water out to the workers whenever they’d see someone wave a handkerchief in the air. All of Papa Mose’s boys picked with nine-foot sacks. Smaller children might carry only six-foot bags. The normal run of a day was about three sacks of cotton. Bo went out to the field on Monday, the first day of cotton-picking season. The bolls had started to open up like flowers. It was a good year for cotton and there was a large crop. The Wright boys showed Bo how to pull the cotton out of the boll. There’s a certain way you have to catch it, get right into the boll and pull it clean out so that you don’t get all the debris mixed in with it. Nobody wanted dirty cotton. But you also had to take care that you didn’t stick your hand on the ends of the bud. And if you didn’t get it just right, it
would
stick you. Your cuticles would get cracked, and then you might get sores and those bolls would hit those sores every time. That was not a good feeling. So the boys showed Bo how to do it, but they didn’t take very long with him. They had to get to it.

Now, you’d have to walk a row, carrying that nine-foot sack on your back, bending over to pick about ten bolls in succession—very quickly, but very carefully—before you could pause long enough to put the cotton in your bag. A handful at a time. Each boll was less than one ounce, so it took quite a few handfuls to fill up those bags. There were people who could pick four hundred pounds a day at the rate of two dollars for every hundred pounds. Some boys might earn up to twenty-five dollars in a week, which they mostly had to turn over to their parents. Many families worked it out so that kids got to keep all the pay from their Monday pickings. That wasn’t all that generous. After they had hung out until late on Sunday—their only day off—most boys weren’t worth much on Mondays. So they basically got to keep what they were worth: not much. Even though you picked a sack at a time and got paid by the pound, success was measured by the bale, roughly twelve hundred pounds or so.

Papa Mose surveyed his field and looked forward to about thirty bales that season. That was a lot of cotton. Bo picked about twenty-five pounds
that first day before he decided he had just about had enough. Twenty-five pounds meant an automatic whipping for any of the Wright boys. But this was Bo’s vacation and Papa Mose gave him a break. That sun was just too hot for Bo, even with a hat on.

Bo continued to work, he just did it around the house, where Aunt Lizzy was in need of some help. There was a full house and a lot of washing to do. She had a new Maytag wringer washing machine. We had the same type at home, so Bo knew how to operate Aunt Lizzy’s machine. Since he wasn’t going to go out to the field that much anymore, he would get up in the morning and do the wash before breakfast. Then after breakfast, he’d help clean up before going into the vegetable garden with Aunt Lizzy to pick the vegetables for afternoon dinner and supper later on.

The workdays were shorter at the beginning of the picking season. Usually, the pickers would weigh up around noon, eat dinner, and work again until four in the afternoon, when they’d weigh up again. At this time of the year, though, there wasn’t much point in working the whole afternoon. So the boys could have a little fun. The Wright boys had been so excited to hear that their Chicago relatives were coming. And, just as in Chicago, Emmett was the center of attention. They enjoyed hearing Emmett tell his stories. Oh, that boy was a talker. One of his Argo cousins said that if a dog could talk, Emmett would have a conversation with it. Emmett would tell his cousins about all the attractions of Chicago. There was the Lincoln Park Zoo and Bushman, the largest gorilla in captivity until he had died a few years before. There was Riverview Amusement Park with all the great rides and the roller coaster. Oh, Chicago had the biggest this and the best that, to hear Emmett tell it, and he told it in a way that made everyone believe it. His cousins were awestruck.

He pulled all kinds of things out of his little bag of tricks. Of course, there was his father’s ring. He even let Simeon wear it a couple of days. But it kept getting in Simmy’s way when he had to work in the fields, or when the boys played ball. There were plenty of other things for Emmett to share as well. The music the boys heard most was the country music on the radio coming out of Memphis. Emmett shared a new tune. He tried to sing a little Bo Diddley. But there was no mistaking
my
Bo for the other Bo. Couldn’t sing a lick. But everybody got the idea. They had never heard of Frankenstein before Emmett showed them the comic book he had brought along, and talked about the movies he had seen. I can only imagine how those boys felt. The first Frankenstein movie was made when I was a little girl. Of course, I wasn’t able to go to the show to see it. But the kids would tell me all about it. And, oh, that just made it come alive to me. When I would go to bed at night, I would see Frankenstein
hanging on the nail that was holding the coat on my wall. Every time the house would creak, it would scare me to tears: I thought Frankenstein was coming after me. I really became ill from fear. So, I could imagine what effect that might have on kids who had never heard the stories before. Especially out in the country, on a dark Mississippi night, when you might be able to see every star in the sky, but nothing else around you.

Emmett’s cousins were impressed. But his cousins had a few things to show him, too. In the afternoons when they weren’t working the fields, the boys could swim in the lake directly across from the house. Or maybe down a little way through the woods, down to the Tallahatchie River. Of course, there were places where the boys wouldn’t dare swim without beating the water first, making enough commotion to drive the water moccasins out onto the banks on the other side. Someone had once told the boys that water moccasins don’t bite in the water. But they never took chances. That’s because somebody else said they once saw a man jump out of the water with a bunch of snakes hanging off him. Frankenstein might have been in the movies, but the snakes were right there in the Delta.

The fishing was everything Papa Mose had boasted about in his Chicago visit. Bass and bream and catfish. The boys had a special way they liked to fish. A very creative way. They didn’t have rods and reels and lines. They’d place their bait in a glass jar, leave it in the water. The next day, they’d come back and find the jar bobbing up and down, all around. You see, that fish couldn’t back out. Now, the trick was that to catch the fish, the boys would have to catch the jar.

In the early evening, Maurice might take the wheel of Papa Mose’s car. He loved that car, loved it so much he stripped the gears starting out in too much of a hurry, and had to take a little while now to pop it into second, to get it going. But they’d all pile into that car Maurice loved so much, maybe bring along the Crawford boys, Roosevelt and John, neighbors within hollering distance, and they’d drive the turning roads, the ones that go through the fields. Or they’d drive three miles uptown, into Money, for refreshments after a light supper. The nearby plantation store closed early and didn’t sell all the things the boys liked to buy anyway: bubble gum and ice cream and gingerbread cakes and soda pop. All those things they could find at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money. All those things and a checker game that seemed to go on forever on the store’s lazy front porch.

Most nights, everybody would wind up around the family’s Philco radio, listening to the popular shows. Robert was in charge of the dial. That meant everybody had to listen to what Robert liked best. But that was okay. They all liked it, too,
The Lone Ranger, Gangbusters, Mr. and Mrs.
North, Gunsmoke
. There was no television. But, somehow, that didn’t seem to matter. Emmett’s heart was beating to the rhythm of his adventure, his nose was filled with the earthy excitement of this new world, his eyes glowed with the reflection of a billion nighttime stars that could be seen only from this spot. His thoughts already were on the next summer, when he could come back. In a curious kind of way, a way that only makes sense to a fourteen-year-old boy, a boy away from home, away from the familiar world of a doting mother and grandmother, to that boy, Mississippi represented freedom.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t take it. I needed to talk to Bo. I needed to talk to Aunt Lizzy. Late in the week, I placed a call to one of the neighbors so that I could get Emmett and Aunt Lizzy on that phone. They both sounded so good to me, and they were surprised to hear from me, since they thought I was away on my vacation. Emmett said he was having a good time; Aunt Lizzy said he was a good boy. A fine boy. She told me about all the chores that he did and what a blessing he was to her, and I thought about all the things he had done for me. She told me I should be proud to have such a son. And, of course, I was. They had written letters and sent them to me, thinking I would get them when I got back from Omaha. Emmett told me he needed more money. More money? He had left home loaded, as far as I was concerned. I’d given him about twenty-five dollars and I knew Gene had slipped him something, knowing Gene. But Emmett said he was broke. What in the world was he doing with his money down there, in the middle of nowhere? He told me he was treating other kids to sweets when they’d go to the store in Money. He also asked me to get his bike fixed while he was down there. But he said he’d explained all that to me in the letter.

I had called because I wanted to know how things were going, but mostly to find out that Emmett missed me as much as I missed him, that he wanted to come home as much as I wanted him to. He said he’d be home in a week. Now I knew. He was having too good a time to even think about returning sooner than that.

The mail from Mississippi came Saturday, August 27. Three-cent stamp. Two letters. One envelope. I think they were trying to save on postage. It had been a whole week since I had put Bo on that train and taken to my bed. I was so delighted to read the letters, sort of a summary of what Aunt Lizzy had told me on the phone. What a nice, obedient young man I had raised. Then there was Bo’s letter. He asked me to please have his bike fixed by the time he got home. Oh, he really needed that bike. Get his bike
fixed and he would pay me back when he got back the following week. On Sunday, Aunt Lizzy wanted to take Bo to visit Uncle Crosby, who had lived next door to us in Argo years ago, before returning to Mississippi.

Mama came by later that day. She also had gotten letters and was so pleased. But she was not happy with me at all. She scolded me for not getting ready to go on my trip. I hadn’t packed. She lost patience with me. She wanted me to get out of that bed, get myself ready to go. Then she began to lay out my suitcase. She wanted me to be all ready to get out of there on Monday. I just looked at her and thought, Gee, she doesn’t understand. I hadn’t been able to get ready to go or to do anything else, for that matter. In fact, I had a meeting of my club, Les Petite Femmes, at my place that night and didn’t have a clue about how I was going to get ready for that. I was doubtful that I was going to take the trip. In a way, I think I was really stalling, thinking Bo might still come home in time to go with Gene and me. I was hoping. But I didn’t tell her. Maybe I didn’t need to. Maybe she really did understand. Maybe she just wanted to help me work through it.

No one had ever seen Emmett cry before. So they didn’t know exactly what to do, except keep their eyes on the dark road ahead. It was Saturday night. They were coming back from Greenwood, about twelve miles away from home. Curtis Jones, Willie Mae’s son, had just arrived from Chicago earlier that day, and Maurice, Wheeler, and Emmett decided to take him for a ride. Curtis knew people over in Greenwood. But they had stayed too long and had to hurry to get back before Papa Mose laid into them. Maurice had been doing just fine on one of those dusty roads. He had been making good time. But then something had happened. Something had jumped out in front of the car too fast for Maurice to react. Everyone in the car had felt that bump. It was a dog. They had looked around, but couldn’t see anything anymore. The dog must have run off somewhere. Maybe it was okay. Maybe it was dying. Emmett had pleaded with Maurice to stop the car, to check on the dog. But Maurice wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t, really. Maurice knew things Bo didn’t know about life on the back roads of Mississippi in the dead of night. If somebody had run across them out there on that road on that night—four black boys in the dark—well, their lives might not have been worth as much as that dog’s. Emmett didn’t understand that. There was a lot he didn’t understand about this place. He had gone out on a limb to rescue a cat back in Argo. The least they could do now was to stop by the side of a Mississippi road to check on a dog. But they couldn’t do that and he began to cry. Nobody knew what to say. There wasn’t much they could say, really. Nothing that would
have made a difference. So Emmett just sat there crying. And everybody else was quiet.

Somehow, hosting our club meeting helped me to break out of my mood. There were about twelve of my friends there that night, including Ollie. And we talked and played cards and, for a moment, at least, I was able to distract myself. We were up so late, talking and laughing, that around one-thirty or two, I wound up making an early breakfast for everyone. I told them all about the letters I had gotten earlier from Aunt Lizzy and Bo and, oh, I just bragged about that son of mine. I told them that instead of making the trip to Detroit and Omaha, I really wanted to go down to Mississippi and bring my son back home.

Then I said something without really knowing why I said it. “If Bo could get his feet on Chicago soil, he would be one happy kid.”

Everything stopped for a heartbeat. Complete silence. Why had I said that? Then, just like that, everything started up again. The talking, the laughing, everything.