Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (39 page)

Throughout my life I have heard a great many stories about how people received the call to their life’s mission. I have to smile when I recall how I received mine. For me, the call came by phone, from a reporter.

 I
t had been a whole year, and only a moment, since my entire life changed. September was so much like the beginning of the year to me. Everything seemed to be running on that cycle. For the folks who stayed behind in Mississippi, there was a new cotton crop. For me up in Chicago, there was a new school term. Fall is a transitional season, and I sensed myself moving between the extremes of my life.

As lonesome as I felt at the time, I was not alone. Mama was always coming by to see about me, sorting my mail, checking my bills, making sure there was enough food in the place. And she had pulled Gene aside to urge him to do the same thing, to look after me, to stick around, to make sure I was going to be all right. She trusted that he would do all that. She knew how he felt about me, how we felt about each other. After his early-morning shift at Ford, Gene was still doing afternoons at Polk’s Barbershop, the place around the corner, the place where we met. He didn’t live as far away as Mama, so it all made sense, really, that he would come around. Besides, he wanted to be there. He wanted to be there with me. I wanted that too.

During a quiet moment some time later, he would tell me about that conversation with my mother, when she had asked him to do what she had. “You know,” he said, giving me one of those looks, “Mama didn’t have to tell me to do that. As long as I have breath, you’ll be protected.”

I believed that, I felt that. I felt it all the way through. Gene impressed me so much with the way he could take care of things, and the way he did take care. He would be a big help emotionally, just showing such care. But it was also good to know that he could handle any other problems that might arise. Besides, I mean, you just never know what might happen. So
it was good to know he could handle things. Gene was at least six feet tall and, my goodness, that man had the longest arms. Thirty-five sleeve length. A collar size around seventeen and a half, or eighteen. Oh, he was a good-sized man, all right. Such stature, he had. And just to look at him made me feel safe, secure.

So, while I might have felt lonesome at the time, I wasn’t alone. Not by a long shot. There were loving people around to tend to me. But there was something else going on. Quite a bit, in fact. The whole world was shifting, even as I was shifting. It felt like we were changing together in a way, the world and I, caught up in that transitional season, moving between the extremes. In Montgomery, Rosa Parks, a strong and determined black woman, had drawn a new line on a public bus, and had set things in motion. She took a stand by keeping her seat. The black folks of Montgomery stood with her, walked with her, and with a young minister, a powerful new voice rising above so many other voices. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., would guide this transition and, by December 1956, a little more than one year after it began, the Montgomery bus boycott would end in triumph. It wasn’t just that accommodations were made in Montgomery, as important as that might have been. People throughout the nation were moved to push for change.

The
Pittsburgh Courier
would look at so many events of that year following the murder trial and echo the words I had spoken during the days when Emmett lay in state. I had promised that Emmett’s death would not be in vain. The paper presented the evidence of a single year to show that my words had become prophecy. “Negro America had been aroused as it had never been,” the paper declared. NAACP membership and contributions were soaring, and the people of Montgomery were moved to the point where they could hold the bus boycott together and make it succeed.

The following year, in 1957, Congress would pass a civil rights act. Among other things, it would establish the new position of assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, and the Civil Rights Commission, with the power to investigate complaints. This was the first civil rights act passed by Congress since Reconstruction. But as significant as anything else was Emmett’s impact on the whole thing. According to scholars Hugh Whitaker and Stephen Whitfield, a number of witnesses came before Congress during the hearings for the new law and testified about Emmett, about the murder trial in Tallahatchie County, about the need for federal involvement to protect us from that kind of brutal injustice. This was to be the first step in a long march forward. It would be a difficult and painful and costly road to freedom. There would
be so many sacrifices along the way. And so many people would look back at Emmett as the first. Indeed, they would point to my son, Emmett Louis Till, as the sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement.

So, if I felt lonesome in September 1956, it wasn’t because I was alone. It was because I felt that I was sitting apart from something I felt so much a part of. How much I would have wanted the impossible. For Emmett to see what had been born of his death. How much I would have wanted even to represent him there in the thick of it. How much I still wanted just to be there in the center of it.

It was a season of transition. Back in Tallahatchie County, Gerald Chatham, the district attorney, died. Heart failure. I recalled his closing argument back in Sumner, how much heart he had put into that. The news of his death mentioned that he had tried the murder case against Bryant and Milam. It probably would have been enough to have said, quite simply, he tried.

There were many things on my mind, so many things to ponder, as I made adjustments to the transition all around. It had been so long since I had been a student. Now, I had always done very well in school, the best, actually. So I had no reason to think that I wouldn’t do the same in college. I don’t know why I thought college would be as easy as grammar school and high school. Had no idea at all that instructors had so much freedom to do what they wanted to do, to talk about everything except the lesson, to give you too much to read with no explanation. I definitely had to make adjustments. It was quite a challenge at the beginning of my college career. For one thing, I was about fourteen or fifteen years older than my classmates. Many of them were fresh out of high school. I had been out of school sixteen years. So my skills were not quite as sharp as theirs, and they were not as rusty as I was, but I was ready to work hard at it. I wanted to learn as much as I could. I wanted to understand all the things that were happening in the world around me. I especially wanted to be well trained to work with children and teach them the important lessons of a lifetime.

As much as anything else during that period, I wanted to stay busy. I still needed to do that. College, in a way, was like making my bed in the middle of a crisis, or taking notes to keep up a buffer, some protection from the pain. And, believe me, there would be enough notes to take, and still a great deal of need for just that kind of avoidance. I was going to dive into those books and keep my mind on my studies. As long as I was doing that, I figured, there would be no room for other things. I wouldn’t be able to think about other things—so many other things. Study for me would be like therapy. I would become absorbed in it.

It was odd at first, being there in college around all those other people,
yet not really around them at all. It seemed that people knew who I was—I mean, the way they were looking at me and all. But it was always at a distance early on, like they didn’t know how to approach me, like I was an untouchable. No one seemed to know what to make of me. It didn’t faze me, though. I was there to do what I had to do, and I focused on doing just that: trying to learn everything I could.

Looked like I was going to need that kind of focus, too. Starting with the basics. On our first day in psychology, the instructor asked us what we thought psychology was. Trick question.

I didn’t have a clue when he got to me. I shrugged. “The ability to read people’s minds?”

Without a doubt, I had a lot to learn. A whole lot. But I was ready to do it, to work hard at it. So hard, in fact, that I would go from that low point at the beginning of psychology to getting an A in that course.

That would help in a couple of ways. I wound up working for the psychology department earning thirty dollars a week. That was great, because I could buy my books and I could feed myself. I could buy gasoline to get to school and back home again. I didn’t have to pay rent. Mama and I had worked it all out. On top of that, Congressman Dawson had promised me fifty dollars a month, as long as I maintained a B average. I was determined to get that stipend.

After an awkward beginning, it was good to start developing relationships, to interact with the kids. The students, I mean. There were so many people with such different backgrounds and experience, and that made it very exciting to me. I had quite a bit to learn inside and outside the classroom. I joined a study group. Actually, I put it together.

There was a group of girls in my gym class, and they were very sweet to me. They only greeted me and smiled at first, but soon they just started gathering around me. There were seven. I was number eight. And we came together because we were all frustrated with the gym teacher, who was making that class so difficult. Impossible, really. We were taking square dancing, of all things. I don’t know what I was thinking about even enrolling in a class like that. I never had been able to dance. Emmett had told me that much when he laughed at me trying to do the Bunny Hop. Anyway, when I found out that we would have to learn all of those lyrics and calls to all those songs and the dance patterns, too, well, it just made sense that we work together. So, I gathered the girls one day and suggested that we form a square-dancing group. We could meet at my house every Saturday and go through the routines. I would type out the lyrics and duplicate them and everybody could have a copy to make it easier to follow everything. They agreed. And we wound up doing very well. So well, in
fact, that we began studying other subjects together, too. We were in a number of classes together.

Even outside of square-dancing class, those younger students really kept me on my toes. They helped me fill in what I couldn’t comprehend right away on my own, and they challenged me to get better at doing it on my own. I was learning from them how to learn from the teachers. I was absorbing it all like a sponge, adjusting, making up for all the time I had been away from school. I was so focused on what we were doing that I often would forget the basic things I needed to do just to take care of myself. Poor Gennie. I know he felt neglected back then, and he saw how I was neglecting myself. I was immersed in my books. Didn’t have time to eat, let alone talk. There were times when Gene would come over and I’d be there studying with the youngsters from Chicago Teachers College and, bless his heart, he would sit down right there beside me and put food in my mouth as we studied. Sometimes I would get irritated with him because his arm was coming between me and the written page. That’s how determined I was to try to learn what I had to learn. But he understood that. He never gave up on me. Never.

It didn’t take me long to adjust to the process. I was getting good grades. So good, in fact, that when I got my report card, I marched into my math instructor’s office and demanded to know why I’d only gotten a B. I mean, that was low for me. I’d been getting perfect scores in his class.

“Well, Miss Bradley,” he explained, “you improved less than anybody. You only missed five at the beginning of the semester, and so you only made an improvement of five problems.”

What? Okay, so now I knew. Performance was important, but improvement was the key. Learning, after all, was what I was there to do. Learning would be my strategy as well as my goal. I made sure that I would always show more than five problems’ worth of improvement.

Still, even though I was doing exceptionally well, it was taking so much effort for me. I was not remembering things as well as I thought I should have been. Throughout grade school and high school, I had always marveled at the gift I felt I had for learning. Anything I read would be right there for me, entire chapters. I could close my eyes and the words would run before me like credits on a screen, whether someone else had written the words or whether I had written them. It wasn’t exactly a photographic memory. It was more like intense concentration. When I focused on something, I mean, when I really zeroed in on it, there was nothing else in the world at that moment. Once I knew I could do that, I would write everything down, all my notes, review them, concentrate, then close my eyes and read every one of those notes. In my mind. Or every word in a
section of a book. Throughout school, I always had a funny feeling that I was cheating somehow, being dishonest. In fact, I was being diligent. I was working hard for everything I achieved. In college, though, the work was a lot harder and things at first seemed to slip away.

One day, I talked with an English professor about it all. He heard me out, reflected on it a moment, picked up a raggedy piece of chalk, then drew a circle on the blackboard.

“Now, this is your brain,” he said, before putting little dots in the circle. “And these are all the bits of accumulated knowledge you have.”

After filling up the circle with those little dots, he explained that I had filled my brain up with everything I had accumulated and I was just going to have to make room for the new stuff. Well, that kind of made sense until I thought about something we’d learned in another course. We don’t use up all of our brain, so there was no way to fill it all up.

That professor had a point, though. It wasn’t that I was filling up my brain physically. But I was filling it up, using so much space in another way. It was Emmett. As much as I might have tried to avoid being consumed by the memories, I had to realize that there are some things in life that cannot be pushed aside while you make your bed or take notes. No matter how much you might try to concentrate, they will be there, tapping on your shoulder, whispering in your ear, taking even the smallest bit of your attention. So I came to accept that and decided to work with it, to let Emmett and the whole experience of his loss guide me in my learning and eventually in my teaching. Somehow, I would find a way to make it all work together, even while I was adding more dots to the circle.