Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (48 page)

I began to just talk. I told him how hard he had squeezed my hand when I asked him if he knew me. He sure knew me, all right. He kind of laughed at that. With his eyes. We went on like that for a while before he started getting restless. Like he wanted to get up. I got him to settle down, told him I’d have to leave if he didn’t. He seemed to relax again. So I started talking again. I just went on about things we had done, things that had made us laugh in the past.

All of a sudden, Gene sat up in that bed. I thought at first that he was trying to get up again. I was wrong. He was having a seizure. I yelled and Airickca ran to the door to call for the nurse.

By the time the nurse rushed in, he had fallen back but he was still breathing. The nurse told us to clear the room. What was happening? What was wrong? I was his wife, shouldn’t I be told something? The nurse just had somebody turn me around in the chair and take me out of the room. As we left, Abe heard them call the code.

Oh, my God. I was losing Gennie. What was I going to do? I had never prepared myself for that. In fact, I had been preparing
him
to lose
me
. We had talked about it. I had walked him through it. I knew he’d be strong enough to survive me, but how on earth could I live without Gennie?

It wasn’t long before they came to the waiting room to get us. They asked us to go to the family room. Not back to Gene’s room. I knew what that meant. They said they had done all they could do. They said they were sorry. I said nothing. I just screamed, and thought about all that I had lost when I lost Gene.

“As long as I have breath,” he had once told me, “you’ll be protected.” Oh, God. Who would be there for me now? Who would protect me?

Only much later, as I thought about that painful moment, I realized that I had been saying a prayer. God answered. God was there to protect me. God was always there. And Gene? He was my angel.

 W
e were always fishing. Oh, how we loved to fish. We often thought about Emmett and how much he would have loved to be there with us. We talked about him. Sometimes Gene would give me a wink. “Do you think Bo would think we’re ready yet?”

We were in Wisconsin. It was such a great spot. My goodness, there were so many fish there. I could see them in the water, all around, just waiting to be caught. And Reverend Mobley and Sister Lou, they were just catching those fish. But I couldn’t get my pole in the water. The line kept getting tangled and Gene would have to help me out. Or he would be trying to get the bait on, or trying to get the hook on before that. There was always something that kept me from getting that line in the water.

We found another spot. Deeper in Wisconsin. Much deeper. We went all the way to the Mississippi River, the place where Wisconsin and Minnesota are separated by the river. Close to the beginning of it all. The source. It was beautiful, standing there on a very high bluff. We laid all our stuff out and were arranging our rods and reels. Gene and I were closer to the edge than Lou and Wealthy were. So, while they were getting everything together, I decided to look over the edge. We had been in such a hurry, nobody had even taken time to check. My goodness, that was a long drop.

I turned around. “Oh, Gennie, we might not have enough line to get our hooks into the water.”

Gene came over to look. That’s when he lost his footing and fell over the cliff. I screamed and, as I did, I saw that Gene had fallen into a net. It was a big net, a fishing net we had. It broke his fall, scooped him up, and
brought him back up to the bluff, where he very gently tumbled out onto the ground.

Gene just laughed as he picked himself up. The way he had done so many times before. “Well, I guess I’ve learned how to fall now.”

Then, I would awaken. Every night it would be the same thing. Always about fishing. There were variations. But it always was about fishing. The Lord had me dreaming about Gene, trying to tell me something.

When Gennie died, I reached such a low point in my life where, once again, death seemed more attractive to me than life. It was something I began to look forward to. I could see no purpose in going on. I had never stopped to think how much I had come to need Gene. When he was here, he’d never given me a chance to think about that. He just took care of everything. Things were done. And that’s all there was to it. But, more than that, there was the emotional connection. We were two people who had lived as one. And Gene had been my last direct link to Emmett. The best father figure Bo had ever known. When I lost Gene, it was like I was losing two people, like I was losing Bo all over again. I felt so alone. I just wanted to go where everybody else had gone. I was assuming, of course, that they all were in heaven.

I would talk about things like this with Lillian. She had lost her husband in 1989 and now she had lost her father. She could understand what I was feeling, just as I understood her feelings. So we could talk. Most of all, we could listen.

It was while I was in this frame of mind that I turned to the Lord and I cried, “Lord, why did you take Gennie? You know how much I loved him, how much I depended on him.” I prayed and I prayed. And soon the answer came: “I want you to depend on Me.”

It was a horrible discovery. Another mother’s son had been found dead in Mississippi. He was found on June 16, 2000, with a belt around his neck, a noose tied to the pecan tree in his front yard in Kokomo. Raynard Johnson was only seventeen years old. He had been friends with a white girl at school and it was believed that there were people who were very upset about that. The death was ruled a suicide. The belt around Raynard’s neck was not his belt. He was six feet tall and his legs were touching the ground. The branch on the tree was low enough and his legs were long enough to have stopped any strangulation. That would have been his natural impulse. Unless he was dead already when he was strapped up there.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., was going down to Mississippi in July. He called on me. He wanted me to go with him. He told me there was a job to do. There was a great public uproar over the case. There was a great
deal of tension. A mother was in need of comfort. And there were many people who needed to hear things that only could be spoken by someone who had traveled this road. A very long road, stretching back for many miles and many years. Although I had been to Mississippi on personal trips a few times since the Sumner trial, this would be the first time I would return for this kind of event. I agreed to go. Lillian would go with me. Reverend Jackson arranged for a Learjet to carry us all down there. As comfortable as it all was, it became a very uneasy flight for me. I had forgotten my insulin and there were urgent calls ahead to Mississippi from the plane.

Down on the ground in Jackson, Stephanie Parker-Weaver had everything in place. She’s the executive secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Mississippi and the go- to person when civil rights leaders come in for important events. So she had everything in place, but she got the call about the one thing nobody could have anticipated. The one thing I needed—insulin. And it was an emergency.

When I stepped off that plane onto the tarmac in Jackson, Mrs. Maria Johnson emerged from the delegation there to greet us. She and I hugged so strongly. Motherly hugs. Of course, we had never met before. Oh, but we knew each other. We knew each other in the way that two people know they share a bond. It was a connection only we could feel. We spoke a silent language only we could understand. For us, it needed no translation. So we hugged, and we communed. And then I made my way to the paramedics, who were waiting nearby. With that detail out of the way, we soon were on our way.

A busy schedule had been planned. A rally was set for the next day. There would be a march to Mrs. Johnson’s home in Kokomo and there would be speeches. On this day, there would be a meeting with the governor, Ronnie Musgrove, and a meeting at the John the Baptist Church.

At the meeting that had been arranged with the governor, Reverend Jackson was going to discuss the investigation of Raynard Johnson’s death and all the concerns about the findings and the suspicion that they were incomplete. And then there was me. I had to hold back. I was filled with so much emotion, anticipation. Oh, my God, I had waited forty-five years for such a moment. This would be the highest-ranking Mississippi official I had ever met. It would be the first time such an official would have the chance to talk to the mother of Emmett Till, to offer any promise at all that the murder investigation would be reopened, to offer an apology for all that had been done. For all that had not been done. We waited for that meeting. And waited. Finally, the wait was over. We were told that the governor would be unable to meet with us after all. There was a conflict.

So we left, and Reverend Jackson said something about sorting it all out in future elections. For the governor, there had been a conflict, but nothing, it seemed, like the ones that lay ahead, nothing like the one that lay in my heart. The expectation, the disappointment.

There was too much ahead of us to dwell on what we left behind there at the meeting that would never be. We had to get to Hattiesburg, where we would stay overnight before the next day’s rally and march. Of course, we also had the church meeting, where I thought I still needed my wheelchair, until Reverend Jackson spoke up. “Oh, Mother, you don’t need a wheelchair. Let the spirit move you.” He took my arm and I realized that his call, the call to go with him down to Mississippi, that call had come at just the right time in my life. It was a call that pulled me out of my despair over losing Gene. Reverend Jackson had brought me back again, to Mississippi and to myself. He had given me a reason to move forward, and we did. We walked down the aisle of that church and I felt energized by all the love and support of the black people of Mississippi, by having the chance to meet them, to talk with them. The pain of loss, of children murdered, it just seemed to be felt by everyone. In a way, I suppose I represented the survival of such great loss. The hope that gets us through the things we might never imagine getting through.

My hope during that trip was that I might provide some comfort to Mrs. Johnson. I knew what she was feeling during this time, a time when even all the family love, all the public support couldn’t fill that hollow loneliness. I felt that, too. So deeply. We talked about that feeling. About that and the need for her to find peace within herself and with God. She had to accept God’s will even if she didn’t fully understand it right away. That was the first thing to do. Once she could reach that peace, she would receive spiritual guidance to handle everything else that she would have to handle: finding the truth, finding forgiveness. She would have to be strong to endure what lay ahead: the outside pressure, the inner turmoil. Oh, I knew those parts so well. I could see how difficult it was going to be. I knew that, as much as things in Mississippi had changed, they seemed to have changed so little in ways that are close to the heart. I felt that based on what I had heard about the way the Raynard Johnson case had been handled. And how we had been handled by a conflicted Mississippi governor. She would have to be strong to keep fighting, as I had kept fighting, as I would continue to fight for the rest of my life. So I talked about all that, and urged her never to give up. But most important of all, I listened.

There was so much pressure on Mrs. Johnson. And there was so much heat in Mississippi in July. People from Mississippi said they had never felt such heat. Mrs. Johnson suffered from it. She had to be rushed to the hospital
to be treated for heat exhaustion. But there were other concerns, concerns that were not shared with everybody at the time. Only a few people would know where Mrs. Johnson had been taken. There was tension in the air that was hotter than the temperature and thicker than the humidity. There was a death threat. It was against Reverend Jackson, and no one knew how far hostile people might go. We all would have to be protected, secured against any possibility. As God would have it, the march and rally went on without incident. Mrs. Johnson’s doctor advised her to stay inside, to stay quiet. But she refused to follow the doctor’s orders. She wanted to appear at the rally. She said she could do it. And she did it, because she said she could do it, because she believed what she said. That was the kind of determination I knew would carry her beyond that weekend.

Things began to pick up again. There had been calls about the play after the Chicago and Aurora performances, and the Pegasus Players theater company served as the broker for deals for the work to be performed by the Unity Players in Los Angeles in September 2000, then for another run in San Diego that November, and by the Paul Robeson Theater Company in Buffalo in February 2001. I traveled to the opening of each run and spoke to the press and the audiences in each city and, oh, the reaction was just amazing to me. I mean, there were traffic jams around those theaters on opening night and, if you didn’t have tickets, you weren’t going to get them. Travel activities can wear a lot of people out. But I was energized by it all, and by hearing so many wonderful things from the producers, the directors, the actors, and all the people who came out to see the performances.

With all the new media attention, I began to hear from others as well. Two documentaries were being planned. Keith Beauchamp, a young man from New York who had been inspired by the Emmett Till story, had begun working on a treatment of the story that became a documentary project. He has a background in criminal justice and began his own investigation of the case as he interviewed people in the South. One day, he decided to call me and was amazed that he got through and that I talked so freely. Stanley Nelson got inspired to produce an Emmett Till documentary after he saw an interview I had done. His company already had produced an acclaimed documentary on the black press and he would go on to win a MacArthur Foundation grant. Stanley’s documentary would be included in the
American Experience
series on Public Broadcasting Service stations. Keith was in discussions with HBO and CourtTV. These would be the first documentaries for a national audience devoted entirely to Emmett
Till. Of course, I was eager to tell my story, and to have it reach a national audience.