Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (46 page)

The dedication was held on July 25, 1991. It was Emmett’s fiftieth birthday. And it was a beautiful day for a party. There were so many people there. My family, of course, as well as Mayor Richard M. Daley, whose father had been moved to help us with appeals to the state of Mississippi and the federal government when Emmett was taken. Rosa Parks came down from Detroit to be there with me, and tell reporters what Emmett’s death had meant to her and to black people in Montgomery during the bus boycott. Privately, she would tell me how she felt that history should remember Emmett as a hero. I thought about it all in the motorcade as we made our way down Emmett Till Road from the dedication ceremony to another press function at the South Shore Country Club, where I would call for a reopening of the investigation into Emmett’s murder.

What an appropriate choice Seventy-first Street had been, as the street renamed for Emmett. It connected so many communities, both black and white. It also was a street that ran as a sort of time line, linking so much history. A. A. Rayner’s funeral home was located there. It was the street where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was heckled and stoned by angry whites when he marched in Chicago. It also was the street that bordered the cemetery where Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor, had been buried. There was so much to think about as we sped along. I thought about the connections. Those, and a motorcade of dignitaries honoring my son, and a motorcycle cop who could have been my son. If Emmett had lived to become the motorcycle cop he had wanted to be.

There would be continuing interest in Emmett Till in the coming years, partly because our story would connect to so many other recent events that showed how far we still had to go in getting beyond hatred. I would be invited to participate in events along with so many activists, like the Reverend Al Sharpton and, of course, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr.,
who had become a good family friend. Regrettably, there were still too many incidents of racial hatred that would remind people so much of Emmett’s death. I was always willing to lend my support, and try in some way to help people understand through my personal experiences.

In October 1992, I shared that experience with a national audience on the
Oprah Winfrey Show
. It was a show devoted to hate crimes, and Myrlie Evers also was a guest. The producers sent me down to the Delta for part of my segment. It was like being transported back in time. So many things were brought back to me, yet so many new things came down on me. I looked out at the Tallahatchie River from the spot where Emmett’s body was brought to shore. I was sickened by the memory of the police picture that was taken of his body. The one that had been shown to me in that blazing-hot Sumner courtroom. I gazed upon the dilapidated store in Money and could hear the echoes of the black kids who had gathered in front there that Wednesday evening, August 24, 1955. I could see the porch where they had watched a checkers game and talked about the treats they had bought inside the store. Emmett had bought two cents’ worth of bubble gum. I thought about his stutter and how I had taught him to whistle when he got stuck on a word like “bubble gum.” I thought about a possibility, a horrible possibility that would plague any mother. The possibility that something I had suggested as a way to help my son could have hurt him so badly.

There would be so many calls following my appearance on the
Oprah Winfrey Show
, and even more requests for other interviews. One caller would stand out. A radio talk show host contacted me to discuss the case. Like so many people, he had been moved by Emmett’s death. He had spent a great deal of time looking into it himself and had actually located Roy Bryant, who was living in Ruleville, Mississippi. Somewhere in our conversation, this man asked me if I wanted to listen in while he interviewed Bryant. The very thought stopped me for a distressing moment. Then, in the next moment, I heard myself agreeing to do it. So, he set up a three-way call and Roy Bryant never knew that I was listening in.

Bryant didn’t want to talk at first. But the man on the other end kept at it. Bryant had been getting a lot of calls about Emmett Till. He said that Emmett Till had ruined his life.
His
life? He began using a lot of vulgarity, and saying so many hateful things. “Emmett Till is dead,” he said. “I don’t know why he can’t just stay dead.” Oh, it was all I could do to keep my breathing steady and not make a sound. But that man was very belligerent. Oh, my God, his language was so filthy, you could almost
feel
the dirt. When he was asked if he had any remorse, he said he didn’t. If he had it to do all over again, he would. When the phone call ended, well, I was just
shaking. That man had lived his whole life filled with so much hatred. How could he have enjoyed anything?

I knew his story. I had kept up with him and J. W. Milam in the articles I had read over the years. They were abandoned by all their supporters after the trial. I guess the white folks of the Delta didn’t appreciate having all that attention that Bryant and Milam had attracted down there. Bryant and Milam had trouble getting credit, blacks boycotted the stores their families had run, and eventually they had to pack up and leave. Things never really worked out for them after that. Their wives left them. Bryant lost a lot of his vision when his eyes were damaged while training as a welder. Milam died of cancer in 1983, and Bryant would die in 1994. Legally blind.

Not long after that phone call, I had a dream. It wasn’t the first time I had it, but this time the dream would have new meaning to me. I was on a high bridge, sort of like the Golden Gate. And there were thick clouds all around me, a fog. I was walking, but couldn’t even see where my feet were stepping. All of a sudden, the clouds parted and I could see that the water was black. Not muddy, just black, and roiling. I heard a voice in this dream. “I have suspended you high above the troubled waters. Keep moving forward. You are headed in the right direction.”

When I awakened from the dream, I had such a sense of peace. I knew that the troubled waters had been hatred and God had guided me over it and away from it. I would not take that plunge, and I was so thankful. Hatred is a self-inflicted wound. And it is so destructive. I never felt any hatred for Bryant and Milam. And I didn’t want them to be executed. I wanted justice. I wanted them to be sorry. I wanted the state of Mississippi to be sorry. I want it still.

My great disappointment in listening to Bryant was not in what I heard him say, the insults, the obscenities. No, the disappointment was with what I didn’t hear him say. He spoke no words of remorse. Bryant and Milam left a lot of people damaged. But as horrible a crime as they committed against my little boy, against me, against society, their true crime was against God. They were given enough time to redeem themselves, to show remorse, to beg forgiveness. And it seems that they refused to do it. As I taught my kids, life is all about choices. Bryant and Milam made a terrible choice, the most expensive one of their lives. It cost them their eternal souls. I feel so very sorry for them. In this world, they only had Mamie to deal with.

In February 1993, Uncle Crosby died. I had always felt a special closeness to him. For one thing, he was my mother’s favorite brother, and she always
looked out for him, for his kids and his grandchildren. Not long after he moved to Argo—right next door to us—Mama even handled his money for a while. When I was younger, I never really understood why Uncle Crosby moved back to Mississippi, since everyone else seemed to be coming the other way. But there are some things you don’t understand until it’s time for you to understand. That time would come. Uncle Crosby was there in Mississippi when we needed him the most. He brought Emmett home. There was no amount of intimidation that could have stopped him from doing that, or from returning to Mississippi to live out his life. I have been blessed to have known quite a few heroes in my life. Ordinary people who are moved by nothing more than a sense of moral obligation. They don’t get headlines or parades or medals. Like Uncle Crosby, they don’t expect any of those things. Like Uncle Crosby, they just do what they can’t help doing. They rise to the occasion.

 S
o many people drew so much inspiration from Emmett Till over the years. Of course, there were those who were moved to action. People took stands they had never taken before, spoke out in ways they had never imagined before, got involved in ways they might never have considered before. But Emmett inspired art as well as activism. Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes wrote poems, Bob Dylan, a song. Rod Serling wove themes of Emmett’s story into several teleplays. In fact, I was invited once to serve on a panel to discuss these themes in his work. I was struck by words that hit so close to home, words Serling wrote at the conclusion of a 1958
Twilight Zone
episode, defying network censors and national sensibilities to tell us that “prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And the thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children and the children yet unborn.…”

There was more to come. Bebe Moore Campbell’s novel
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine
explores, in part, how people live with the memory of such horrors as the murder of a child. And there were several plays, including one written by Toni Morrison and, of course, James Baldwin’s
Blues for Mister Charlie
, which he dedicated to Medgar Evers, to Myrlie, and to their children, as well as the children who were murdered in Birmingham. The attention to children certainly has very special meaning. James Baldwin wrote in his “Notes for
Blues
” that we all have a special responsibility to try to save the most wretched man among us, and if we can’t do that, at least we should “begin working toward the liberation of his children.”

Even as I had sat there listening to Bryant spewing all that hatred on the three-way telephone hookup, I thought again about his children. His and
Milam’s. I thought about them with love. Their wives had left Bryant and Milam, and I wondered whether the children had been saved from the terribly ironic burden of earning their fathers’ love by adopting their fathers’ hatred.

Saving children, serving children is what my life has been about. That is why I wanted for so many years to join all those who had written about Emmett. I wanted to tell the story myself. I had come close. But only close. I had cooperated with scholar Clenora Hudson-Weems, and was pleased to share my recollections for the research for her dissertation on Emmett, which was later published. Still, I wanted to do my own book, my own story. There were other writers who wanted to do a slick Hollywood version with an Emmett Till his own mother wouldn’t recognize. And there were book authors, collaborators, who would fail to deliver. Oh, I was so very disappointed by the false starts and the people who would remove documents from my files on the promise that my story would be written. It was heartbreaking for me to have so many promises broken, and so many documents never returned.

So I was more than a little wary when I was approached by a writer in 1997 who said he wanted to tell my story. He wanted to tell it in a play. Well, I had never really considered that before. But this young man was quite insistent. He had grown up in Hampton, Virginia, and like so many young people I have met over the years, he told me he had been shocked by the pictures and story of Emmett his grandfather had shared with him as a little boy. It had all been burned into his consciousness. I was impressed by his sincerity. But I also took a little time to read the reviews of his work. It took a couple of months for us to discuss how things would work. He thought it should be my story, my recollection and his dramatic presentation. It would be a collaboration. The speech I delivered at the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial would drive the drama. Finally, everything was presented to my lawyer, former student and Emmett Till Player Lester Barclay. Lester worked it all out, and David Barr and I began to write my story in a way I had never imagined before, as a play.

This would be a difficult time for me and for Gene. Our health was failing. Our health plan was failing even more. We both were having such difficulty getting around. Thank God for the relatives who were there for us, like my cousins Abriel Thomas and Shafter Gordon. Abe and Shep were always willing to help us with the driving. My problems were serious enough. I had diabetes. I was taking insulin. I was swelling from water gain, and slowed by the constant pain. But Gene’s problems were worse. He had suffered a stroke in 1987 and had slowed down quite a bit with a
limp that would forever mark that distinctive walk that had always impressed me so. Gene would go to prayer meeting every Wednesday night. One Wednesday night, Gene’s daughter Lillian was visiting. She had started spending a lot more time with us after her husband died in 1989. She and I were sitting around talking and waiting for Gene to come home from prayer meeting, but it was getting so late and we hadn’t heard anything.

Lillian had been concerned for a while. “Daddy, do you have to go to prayer meeting every Wednesday night?” she had asked.

Gene laughed, the way he always would. “Oh yes,” he’d said. “Especially now.”

So we waited this one Wednesday night, waited and worried about where he could be. And it grew later and later, until finally, he walked in and we were relieved.

Until he told us what had happened. He had fallen on the way from the garage to the house. He was out there, on the ground, helpless, not fifty feet from the back door as we sat on the other side of that door, in the kitchen, totally unaware that he couldn’t reach us.

“Well,” he said with a laugh, “I guess I’ve learned how to fall now.”

This was no laughing matter.

In 1999, we traveled to the Mayo Clinic, more than once. Lillian went with us. We would pay for the treatment ourselves, out of our own pockets. We had no patience for haggling with an HMO. All the fluid gain was difficult for me. I mean, my legs were as tight as a drum. It would hurt me to reach for a phone or shake hands with people, and I was doing a lot of both. But the treatments at the clinic would help. At least for a while.