Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (23 page)

Everyone agreed not to tell Papa Mose about the incident. Everyone agreed that would be the best thing. Nothing had happened. They didn’t get in trouble, and Bo didn’t want to make trouble for himself by making Papa Mose angry with him. By the end of the week, the kids weren’t really thinking about that incident anymore. They even drove into Money again and nothing more was said about any of it. Then there was the night they drove to Greenwood and got back home very late. Saturday night.

That’s when it happened. Somewhere around two in the morning, there was a violent beating on the front door of the Wright home, and a call from the front porch.

“Preacher. This is Mr. Bryant.”

Papa Mose opened the door, stepped out onto the screened-in porch. He saw two white men standing there, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. “Big” Milam, towering over Papa Mose at six-foot-two and 235 pounds, balding. Papa Mose thought he could make out one other man standing outside, a black man, it seemed, who held his head down, probably so he couldn’t be recognized. It was hard to get a good look at any of them, really. There was that flashlight beam that kept jumping in his face. Papa Mose had no trouble at all making out what else the big man was holding in his other hand. A Colt .45 automatic. Papa Mose knew what it meant when white men came banging on the door at two in the morning carrying guns. This was a terrorist assault, a surprise attack, and these men were moving quickly to take control of the Wright house. Bryant and Milam moved inside. It almost seemed darker inside than it was outside. The lights had gone out. So Milam flashed his light in Papa Mose’s face. He asked Papa Mose if he had a couple of boys from Chicago there. Papa Mose said he did. The men told him that was why they were there. They had come for the boy from Chicago, the one who had done the talking.

Wheeler awakened. He was in the first bedroom with Maurice. He could hear the loud, angry voices coming from the front of the house. He heard “boys from Chicago.” He was horrified. The two men were yelling and cursing by this time, and they were demanding to see Emmett. Aunt Lizzy came out and pleaded with the men to do no harm to the boy.

“Get back in bed,” Milam told her. “I want to hear them springs squeak.”

Papa Mose still didn’t understand what they wanted from Emmett. But
even though the boys had kept their promise not to tell, he had heard some mumblings about some talk a few days before in Money that didn’t seem to amount to much. If Emmett had done something wrong, Papa Mose could take care of it, even whip him, if need be. Milam kept waving the gun around, the threat heavy in his hand. He demanded that Papa Mose take them to Emmett right then. All the yelling and cursing kept things off balance. Papa Mose had a shotgun in the house, but he didn’t know how far this was going to go, who that was outside, how many more there might be, what they might be prepared to do. He thought he might still be able to reason with these men. And he would keep trying.

Bryant and Milam moved through that house like animals stalking their prey. There was nothing, it seemed, that could stop them. Wheeler knew from the tone of the voices that this was about as bad as it could get. He looked toward Maurice, who was still asleep. He said a prayer. He asked to be delivered from that place, from that night of terror. Then they came in. Milam flashed the light at Wheeler, and held it for a moment. They moved on, the only light in the house that night coming from the flashlight that jumped and jerked from one spot to the next. The second room was the one Robert was sharing with Curtis. The men kept going, finally down to the room where Emmett and Simeon were. Simmy looked up at them and they told him to go back to sleep. He lay back, but didn’t close his eyes. They woke Emmett, lying next to Simmy, and told him to put on his clothes and his shoes. He was still half-asleep. Every time he tried to speak, he forgot the rule. He forgot to say “sir.” Milam became violent, yelling and cursing and threatening Emmett about it.

Emmett wanted to put on his socks. They told him he didn’t need socks. But he stopped. He said he didn’t wear shoes without socks. To everyone, he seemed so calm about it all, standing there at the center of all the tension. He couldn’t possibly have known what it meant for white men to come for you late in the night in Mississippi. Maybe it was the sleep in his eyes. Maybe he thought something would be done about this. Someone would call the police, the sheriff. Somebody. That’s what I had told him to do. Call somebody when there’s trouble. Don’t try to handle it yourself. Maybe he thought he’d be able to talk his way out of it, as he had done with so many other problems he had encountered. Maybe it was his faith that, somehow, he would be okay. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem nervous. And everyone remembered that. Aunt Lizzy, though, was frantic. She even offered to pay Bryant and Milam if they would leave Emmett. But they hadn’t come for money. They continued to march Emmett out. Uncle Moses asked where they were taking him. Nowhere, they said, if he was not the right one.

Outside, they brought Emmett over to the truck, a green Chevy pickup with a white top. Uncle Moses could hear a voice from inside that truck. It was a light voice, a female voice.

“Yeah,” came the voice from the shadows of that cab. “That’s the one.”

Emmett was put in the back of the truck, where it looked like that third man was holding him down. Then Milam turned back to Uncle Moses and warned him not to tell anyone. “Preacher,” he added, “do you know any of us?”

“No, sir,” he said. He had never seen these men before.

Milam had a second question. “How old are you?”

“Sixty-four.”

“Well, if you know any of us tomorrow, you won’t live to be sixty-five.”

The men got in, drove down the path to the road out front, with the truck lights off.

Papa Mose stood there, frozen in place, watching the road. Aunt Lizzy ran right away to the home of some white neighbors nearby. The woman of the house was concerned about Aunt Lizzy. But the man of the house was slow to respond. That seemed to explain everything. Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy figured the man must have known something about what had happened, even before it ever happened. There was panic. The whole family could be threatened and people nearby could be a part of that threat. Finally, Aunt Lizzy couldn’t take it anymore. She insisted that Papa Mose drive her to her brother, Uncle Crosby, and he did. Back at their home, there was no more sleep for Simeon or Wheeler. Simeon waited up, watching every car that drove past their house, believing his cousin Emmett would be brought back. Wheeler waited up, too. He got dressed just in case the men did come back. Looking for him. He would be ready, if need be, to run out the back and into the woods.

“There is going to be hell to pay in Mississippi.” Dr. T.R.M. Howard had stopped to talk to reporters, including the
Chicago Defender
, at Chicago’s Midway Airport before he went back to his Mississippi home in Mound Bayou, not far from Money. It was Wednesday, August 31, and Dr. Howard, a wealthy and influential black leader in Mississippi, had been in Chicago as part of his organizing work. He stopped long enough to talk to reporters about Emmett’s disappearance and about other things, horrible things. It was these other things that caused so much concern about what might be happening to Emmett. Two murders had been committed not long before Emmett’s disappearance, and not far from Money. There were things going on in Mississippi I had never known about. In Belzoni, the Reverend George Lee had been organizing blacks to register to vote before
he was shot to death that May. In August, only two weeks before Emmett left for Mississippi, Lamar Smith was shot to death on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven—in broad daylight—for his political organizing work. Dr. Howard spoke about threats that had been received by his organization, threats that “blood would pave the streets of Mississippi before Negroes would be permitted to vote.” Blood for something so basic, something we had come to take for granted in Chicago. This was the environment Emmett had walked into when he stepped off that train. It wasn’t clear why Dr. Howard was tying Emmett’s disappearance to these murders, but it was chilling to hear it.

Just the day before, Tuesday, August 30, I had to leave Mama’s place to take money out of the bank to send to Uncle Crosby. I also had to talk to Attorney Huff, who gave me an update on his progress and showed me the telegrams he had sent to Illinois Governor Stratton and to Mississippi Governor Hugh White. Things were moving, people were on top of this, two men were in jail, and we were being heard. At least that.

When I got back to Mama’s, there was something strange in the air. It was—I don’t know, a sense of relief. It struck me as so odd. Then Mama told me that Bo was coming home. He was on his way home. That was incredible to me. How could that be? My heart wanted to believe, but my head wouldn’t accept it. I had just met with Attorney Huff. He had shown me the telegrams. Surely he would have known if something, if anything, had developed. Especially this. I called the police and got referred to the criminal investigations branch and to people handling missing persons investigations. No one knew anything about it. It was a hoax. We had to accept that. And that was going to be only the first phase in discovering the full measure of human cruelty. It was like torture to us.

I talked with Uncle Crosby again and he advised me to wait another day before trying to make a trip to Mississippi. He was working with the sheriff. I started making plans to catch the
City of New Orleans
, the same train I had rushed Emmett to catch only eleven days earlier. Now it was Wednesday and there was a warning of “blood in the streets” and so much uncertainty. I don’t remember sleeping at all between Sunday and Wednesday. There was no way I could rest until I knew where my baby was, until I knew what was happening to him, until I knew what had happened to him.

Then the reporter called.

I answered, but he didn’t want to talk to me. He wanted the telephone number of someone else he could talk to. He really didn’t have to say any more than that, but I gave him Ollie’s number. And when I saw her later standing in the door, I had confirmation. Her being there said most of it.
Her look said the rest. It felt like an arrow had been shot through my heart as she approached me and Mama and pulled us aside, took our hands, told us what she really didn’t have to tell us anymore. Emmett was dead. They had pulled his body from the Tallahatchie River, about twelve miles from Money. A fisherman, a white teenager, had found him there. His body was weighted down by a heavy gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Mama broke down. I started taking notes. I had to get everything down. I had to get everything right. All the details. I was the one who was going to have to explain to people. Oh, God, how would I be able to do that? Please, tell me how? What was I supposed to do now? A moment from now? All I could do right then was write it down. It was like making up my bed all over again. Trying not to let it take me. Writing, keeping busy, would keep it from me. Over the weeks and months to come, I would try to keep busy, to keep it from me. But there really was no way to keep it from me. It kept hitting and hitting in waves. The reality was overwhelming. I began to cry. Oh, my poor sweet baby. Gone. What had they done to him? How was I going to live without my baby? I looked at Mama, and she was in even worse condition than I was. I moved over to try to comfort her. Other people started doing the same thing. And then I began to feel something, like a transfer of strength. It was coming from her to me. I was afraid at that moment of what might be happening, that I might draw too much from her. Oh, God, I couldn’t lose Mama. I moved back and I told everybody else to move back, to give her room, to give her air. People cried and prayed.

Slowly, I began to pull myself together. I saw that Mama was in no condition to talk to anyone. It was going to fall on me. I could see it all around me: Everyone in the place was falling apart emotionally. The whole house was crying. I had to do what Mama had always been there to do for me. I had to take charge.

In a way, life had been too easy for me. Always someone there to look out for me, to take care of the hard things. Even Bo. I could see that things were about to get very hard, more difficult than they had ever been. Impossible, really. And the only one I could count on would be myself.

 I
t seemed to take forever to get to a day that seemed to come much too quickly. Friday, September 2. I had to face it and I wondered if I would have the strength to get through it. I prayed for the strength, and I prayed for the courage. I prayed hard. I was staying with my mother. There were so many people around during those days while we waited for word on Bo. It must have been the sheer energy from all of them that sustained me in that time. I seemed to be drawing on it, as I had begun to draw on my mother’s strength when we got the news about Bo. I can’t recall whether I was eating much, although I must have been eating something. I really can’t recall whether I was up early on this particular day or whether I had even slept at all the night before, but I do remember selecting the dress I would wear to Central Station at Twelfth Street. It was one of only a couple I had there at Mama’s. It was a black sleeveless dress with beige figures, little geometric animals, one I had bought for myself. Mama was still making some of my dresses, even then. Black seemed like the appropriate thing to wear. I liked that dress, but I’m not sure whether Bo liked it. He never really told me whether he liked the clothes I wore. He wasn’t big on compliments, but he certainly made it clear when he disapproved.

“Don’t you want to go back and put something else on,” he might say when I made the wrong choice. So, I thought about that—about making the right choice—and how I didn’t want to disappoint Bo, how much I wanted to look nice for him. But then I stopped, and took a long, hard look at myself in the bathroom mirror, as if things were becoming clear to me for the first time. Not quite a week before, I had told my girlfriends
how much I wanted to bring Emmett home from Mississippi. But not like this. He would arrive on this day on the
City of New Orleans
, the same train that two weeks before had carried him away from me down to Mississippi for the adventure of a lifetime, one he had so looked forward to having. But I wasn’t greeting Emmett at the station; I wasn’t welcoming him home from his Mississippi vacation. I was going to claim his body.