Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (32 page)

That was Tuesday night. Being in that court on Wednesday morning, though, being invited into the judge’s chambers and still being an outsider in the presence of all those insiders—well, that was another thing altogether. But he was prepared to do what he had promised he was going to do. So he answered the questions about his testimony, about what he had seen, what he had heard very early in the morning on the fourth Sunday in August, about the two white men sitting there with their feet on Judge Swango’s desk. He was prepared to do what he had promised he was going to do, and he was approved as a witness to do just that.

That afternoon, the state called Chester Miller, the black undertaker from Greenwood; Robert Hodges, who discovered the body; and Sheriff Smith’s deputy, John Ed Cothran. Robert Hodges told about how he contacted Sheriff Strider after seeing Emmett’s foot rising above the surface of the river, and how the body was towed to shore. Chester Miller described the condition of the body he came to pick up in his ambulance. He also saw a hole above the right ear, probably the bullet hole. Part of Emmett’s head had been crushed and a piece of the skull had fallen off into the boat. He remembered that. Who could forget seeing something like that? He also described the gin fan and the several feet of barbed wire tied around Emmett’s neck. The fan had been brought into court, all seventy-five or eighty or ninety pounds of it, and it sat there, like a silent witness or an accomplice to the murder. Deputy Cothran had arrested J. W. Milam. He testified that Milam admitted taking Emmett and, just like Bryant, said he had let him go when they found he was not the right one. That was their story. That they had just released Emmett, let him walk back the three miles from the store in Money to Papa Mose’s home. That Emmett had simply disappeared into the early morning darkness.

Chick Nelson, the first witness on Thursday morning, seemed to blend into all the rest. He was the undertaker from Tutwiler, the white man who ultimately was the one who took the body from Chester Miller and turned it over to Uncle Crosby to bring back to Chicago. In fact, everything after Papa Mose’s testimony on Wednesday morning seemed to blend together. In that horrible compression chamber of heat and hate, it all seemed like one big transition from Papa Mose to me, the second witness called on Thursday.

The prosecutors hadn’t done very much to prepare me for the experience, but there probably wasn’t very much anyone could have done to
prepare me. As I walked forward to be sworn in and take my place in that old cane witness chair, I was overwhelmed by the mood. You could feel it, thick as the humidity.

You really can feel things like that. It’s in the air in most places. In church you can feel it. Even when nobody is around, you can feel what was brought there when everybody was around. People who want to connect with God bring a special kind of spiritual power to a place, and it stays there long after they have left. It’s the power of faith, the power of love. You can breathe it in. God is there. It is so uplifting. That was not the feeling I got as I walked to the front of the court. That place was not church. That crowd did not come to sing His praises. In fact, those white folks looked to me like a lynch mob.

For the first time, it seemed, I took a good look at the witness stand. That’s what it was, really. A stand, not a box. There was a chair, but no wall separating you from the lawyers, from the crowd. You would just have to sit there, facing out, up against that wall of hostility, all alone, exposed. So vulnerable.

Special Prosecutor Robert Smith called me “Mamie.” And I called him “sir.” We had already been through why we’d have to go through all that. In court, we worked our way through all the “how-do-you-do” kind of questions, the preliminary things I guess lawyers have to put on the record when they know a record is being made of what they say. That kind of stuff. And then he got right into it. The reason I was there. How did I know the body that was sent to me was my son?

I went through the scene at A. A. Rayner’s, how I had examined Emmett’s entire body, the legs, the torso, the face, mouth, teeth, eye, ear. Everything. And, as I explained it all, I turned from the prosecutor to the jurors. I wanted to talk to them, to reach them directly. I had to. If there was any chance at all that they might even consider a murder conviction, let alone hand one down, then they were going to have to get beyond some things. They had to see past the color of a witness’s skin, and feel the anguish of a mother’s loss.

The prosecutor asked if I could recognize the body.

This was
my
moment. And I knew how closely everyone would be listening to my words, my voice, my delivery. They were going to measure it all, evaluate it, analyze it, pick it apart a thousand different ways. The strength, the certainty. I had to demonstrate these things just by the way I spoke.

“I positively identified it,” I said firmly. “It definitely was my boy. Beyond a shadow of a doubt.”

The prosecutor showed me the police photo of Emmett, the one taken
right after he was pulled from the river. My God. He looked even worse there than he did when I saw him, which was worse than he did when the rest of the world finally saw him. Oh, everything just washed over me again. The force of it rocked me in that old cane chair, back and forth. I bowed my head. I had to do that to collect myself. I mean, the tears were welling up and I wanted so much to hold them back. I wanted to hide them. No one should see them. I had to be strong up there. I couldn’t be weak. I had to be strong for Emmett.

I breathed deeply, worked through it, and, one more time, I made the identification. I nodded. “That was my son,” I said.

He turned to walk back to the table for more evidence. As he did, I took off my glasses, wiped my eyes. There was a job to do. Emmett.
We can do it
.

The prosecutor brought over another picture. This was one of the Christmas pictures and I said that, too, was Emmett. Next was the ring. I told him it was the ring I had given to Emmett before he left Chicago. I recognized it because of the inscription:
LT MAY 25, 1943
. I explained that the ring had been left by Emmett’s father, Louis Till. Louis had died July 2, 1945, in the service in Europe. He didn’t ask any more about that. I don’t know what else I would have been able to say, since that was about all I had ever known.

Next, J. J. Breland took his turn on me for Bryant and Milam. He was the oldest defense attorney. But that attack dog hadn’t lost his bite. In another setting, he might have been considered the dean. I saw him there as the ringleader. The first words he spoke were to the judge. He asked permission to keep his seat while he questioned me. He never asked my permission to call me “Mamie.” And that was just the beginning. But there was no way to turn back. I had come to testify, to cooperate, to help find some measure of justice. Whatever it took. I always knew I would be in the spotlight, on the stand. I always knew there would be pressure. But, still, even though I knew all these things and thought I had braced myself, I had no idea that a trial could be such an ordeal.

Breland wanted to know whether I had insurance on Emmett. It was so nasty. I knew the defense had already set the stage for what they were trying to do. They wanted to create the impression that I could have had something to do with the death of my own son. Maybe I had my son killed for the insurance money. Yes, I had insurance. Yes, it provided for double indemnity in the case of accidental death. Or murder. Breeland wanted to know if I had collected. Well, how could I? Sheriff Strider hadn’t released the death certificate yet. Okay then, so maybe I had worked with the NAACP, digging up a body in the cemetery, putting the ring on a finger, weighting it, and throwing it in the Tallahatchie River. Or, better yet,
wasn’t Emmett, at that very moment, walking around the streets of Detroit with my father? Well, my father was sitting just across the room. So how could that be? Breland was doing everything he could to play on the doubts and the suspicions he knew the white people of that community had. After all, he was one of them. Much better off, but no better, really.

Oh, it was like I had been tied up to a target and he was throwing darts at me. Even so, I kept my composure. I responded to every question, and always remembered to say “sir.” Well, almost always. I slipped once and just said “no,” and I hurried up and added “sir.” I mean, there was a gap between those words, but I tried to hook them up before anybody could notice. You didn’t want people to notice something like that. It felt like that place could erupt at any minute. I knew I had no protection. They could drag me off that stand and tar and feather me. Or worse.

Then Breeland shifted gears. “Do you read the
Chicago Defender
?”

Well, everybody knew where he was about to go with that. The
Defender
was about as bad as the NAACP to those people. He wanted to try to prejudice the jurors against me. As if they needed any more help with that. But Judge Swango ordered the jury out to see how far he would let this go.

I told him that I bought the paper and read it, even though I didn’t subscribe to it.

Now, to pursue this line, he finally had to stand, after all, and come to me. He handed me a copy of the paper, asked if I had seen it. When I told him that I had, in fact, seen the paper, he directed me to a picture and asked if I recognized it as a picture of Emmett’s body. I told him that I did, and it was Emmett’s body. The judge said there would be no further references to the newspaper or the photo during the trial. There obviously was no point to any of it, except to get people all excited.

Then Breeland shifted again. He asked first if I was from the South. I told him I was born in Webb, not that far from Sumner. He wanted to know what I had told Emmett to prepare him for his trip to the South. How to act around white folks. I said that I had done just that. He wanted to know what I had said.

I repeated a summary of what I had told Emmett, to be very careful how he spoke and to say “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am” and not to hesitate to humble himself, “if you have to get down on your knees.” That’s what I told him.

All the while I was on the stand, I never looked at Bryant and Milam. Never even glanced in their direction. A part of me wanted to do it. Wanted to look into the eyes of my baby’s killers. But I didn’t. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid to do it. Oh, I was very anxious just being there, on the spot, in the spotlight. But, as for Bryant and Milam—well, there was
nothing more they could have done to me. Nothing at all. They already had done as much as anyone possibly could have done. Still, I knew that I had to keep it all together, maintain a delicate balance in that courtroom. If I had any chance at all to appeal to that jury, to reach out to them, then I could not let them see me challenge those two monsters. And that’s how it would have been interpreted if I had been seen looking at them. So I looked only at the lawyers who interrogated me and the jurors who evaluated me. And I answered all questions as directly as I could, until my hour was up, and I was dismissed.

As I stepped off the stand, though, I felt, I don’t know, like I really hadn’t connected at all. Like I didn’t matter at all. Like they had blocked out everything I had said. I felt that my words didn’t mean any more to those people than a piece of paper, like trash, blowing down the street. On top of that, I had to walk past all those angry white folks on my way out. There were daggers in their eyes. So I had to stop making eye contact to avoid the cutting looks. I had to start looking ahead to the door, where I was happy to see Daddy waiting to escort me out. It was so good that I had somebody in the courtroom just to be with me at that moment. But then I realized I wouldn’t have been alone in any event. I had faced the cruel stares and the hostile questions with the strength of someone who knew that she was not alone. I had prayed for that strength.

That place was not church. Far from it. But, in the end, God was there for me.

 H
e was the first of the surprise witnesses called by the state that Thursday. And Willie Reed looked so nervous about it. He should have been. There was a lot at stake for him. There was a lot at stake for the trial. A whole lot. Of all the witnesses who would testify that day, he was the one who held the link that would connect all the other stories. And, with all the threats and intimidation that had surrounded this whole event, it was going to take a special kind of courage for Willie to take the stand. To tell the story. He looked nervous, but somewhere deep down inside him, Willie Reed had that courage.

Seeing Congressman Diggs there helped. The black congressman represented so much to Willie. Something he had never imagined before. In Diggs, Willie saw power, the power of possibility. He drew on that power source. It was the encouragement he needed to get through. He saw me and was reminded of why this had been something that he felt he had to do. He was just eighteen. Emmett had only been fourteen. As far as Willie was concerned, it could have been him. And he would have wanted somebody to come forward for him, even at such a great risk.

He spoke softly, so softly the judge had to ask him to speak up several times. But Willie Reed would be heard on this day, loud and clear.

About six in the morning on Sunday, August 28, Willie was sent to the store by his grandfather to buy some meat for Sunday dinner. He took a shortcut walking across the Sheridan Plantation near Drew in Sunflower County, where he lived. He hit the road just about the time a pickup truck passed. He noticed the truck because it was so early in the morning. It was a green fifty-five Chevy with a white top. There were four white men riding in the front. In the back of the truck, there were three blacks, two men
and a young man, a teenager. The two black men were sitting up on the sides of the truck in back. The teenager was sitting on the bottom. On his way back from the store, Willie cut across the plantation again and saw the truck parked outside a tractor shed attached to a red barn. No one was inside the truck at this time, but there was something unusual about the whole scene. Something caught Willie’s attention and just would not let it go. So, he walked near the shed, and as he did, he heard sounds.