Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (5 page)

In 1945, however, the money stopped coming. It was on July 13 of that year—just two weeks before Emmett’s fourth birthday—when I received the telegram. Louis Till was dead, killed in Italy. There wasn’t much of an explanation. In fact, the telegram raised more questions than it answered. Like the words “willful misconduct.” It was all too much. I collapsed when I read the news. Later, I considered the whole thing further and thought about the Louis Till I had known. “Willful misconduct.” What a fitting epitaph, it seemed. And that’s probably about all that would ever be said about Louis Till again, except that he left a very special gift, a remembrance. The army would return a few of his personal belongings to me. Among them was a plain silver ring. I learned that Louis bought the ring in Casablanca and had it engraved with his initials,
LT
, and the date
MAY 25 1943.
I would have to find just the right moment to share it with Emmett.

Over time, I would think about the sum total of Louis’s life as I’d gaze at the son we created, the beautiful life, the active little boy, stretching his arms and his legs, getting stronger all the time as he began to rush forward to explore his world. I realized that Emmett was the one thing that gave meaning to Louis’s life. He hadn’t been a good husband, hadn’t been a good father, and seemed to do his best to show the world that he wasn’t a good person. But Emmett was his singular achievement, his one accomplishment, and in the end, perhaps, his only reason for being.

 F
or Bo and me, life with Mama was as close to perfect as you could get, and as perfectly close as you would ever want. That’s not to say that it was quiet. My goodness, there were times when Mama’s house seemed like the intersection of State and Madison in downtown Chicago—one of the busiest, bustling blocks in the whole city. I read somewhere that more than two hundred thousand black people moved to Chicago between the 1920s and the 1950s. Mostly, they came from the South, and at least half of these Southerners came from one state, Mississippi. As I was growing up, it really seemed like almost everybody from Mississippi was coming through our house—the Ellis Island of Chicago. Actually, it was more like a terminal on the Underground Railroad. And Mama, well, Mama was kind of like Harriet Tubman. She took in relatives and friends of relatives and some people even our
relatives
didn’t know. But she also helped all these people settle into a new life, a life with a whole lot more promise than the one they had left behind. She took people around, either to Corn Products or to the homes she had cleaned, the homes of white people. Mama helped so many folks find jobs; she helped them readjust, gave them every reason to look forward, never back.

As a result, we came to call Argo “Little Mississippi,” but that description really only told half the story. For us, it meant the joy of the familiar, of family and friends, and, of course, runaway ambition. But there was that other half—the part that was more understood than talked about, and talked about mostly between the lines of other talk around our dinner table. It was the part that was dominated by what people knew they had fled. And, even though they thought they had put that part behind them,
it always seemed to be lurking there in those quiet spaces between the words, as a reminder, and as a warning.

No one knew that better than my mother, Alma Carthan. We had come to Argo from just outside Webb, Mississippi, where I was born, near Sumner. My daddy, Wiley Nash Carthan, had come up a couple of months ahead of us and found work at Corn Products. Mama and I joined him in January 1924, when I was just a little over two years old. As far as Mama was concerned, we didn’t come a moment too soon. All kinds of stories came out of Mississippi with the black people who were running for their lives. There had been talk of a lynching in Greenwood, Mississippi. It was the sort of horrible thing you only heard about in the areas nearby. But it seemed like that was the whole point: to send a signal, to make sure that black people in the area were kept under control. Maybe it was that Mama just knew she could never be controlled, or maybe she just knew that there had to be a better life for us somewhere else. And just about any place else would have been better than Mississippi in the 1920s.

There were other stories. I don’t really know when I first heard this one. Maybe it was around the table, in one of the many dinner conversations we would have with family and friends at our house. Maybe it’s just one of those stories that grows and is cultivated, like cotton in the Mississippi sun. It seems as if it was always there in my awareness. But there was a black woman who brought her little girl to work with her when she cleaned, cooked, and did laundry for a white family in the South. The little girl became a playmate of the daughter of this white family. One day something happened that upset the little white girl and she ran to her daddy as he came down the drive after work. The man listened to his daughter, then confronted the little black girl, and became so angry with her that he pushed her hard against a tree. Just slammed her. Now, that girl’s mother had to finish her day’s work before she could even look after her daughter, who was left there writhing in pain the rest of the day. Eventually, the little girl died from her injuries. That story left a mark on me, because I could see myself in that kind of situation. For black people, every generation has a cautionary tale like this. A story based on events, on shared experiences that teaches us something important. Was this a true story? I don’t know. But I do know this: Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.

Despite the stories and the warnings, I was to get a small taste of what my family wanted to spare me. It was when I returned to Mississippi as a confident little twelve-year-old to spend time with relatives. I was so excited to see my grandparents. Now, the town of Webb was really not much of a town at all. To tell the truth, it was more like a commercial strip in
search of a town. There was a white side of the main street—the
only
street, really—and there was a black side, just about a block and a half long. If you walked down the street, turned the corner, walked another half block, well, that was pretty much it. You were at the edge of town. I remember that at the end of that walk, there was a diner with a jukebox that really caught my attention. There was no way to ignore it. That was the
loudest
jukebox I had ever heard in my life and I really believe you could have heard it all over that little town. That probably would have been about the only point of interest in Webb for a curious youngster like me, but it wasn’t music that I was looking for on this particular trip into town with my grandfather. What I was looking for was in the drugstore, the only one in town, the one on the
other
side of the street.

Now, my grandfather had let me wander a bit while he took care of something or other, and I had the bright idea to be helpful, to do what I thought might be a good deed with the little bit of money I had. When I had seen how my grandparents were using the pages out of the Sears, Roebuck catalog, well, I thought they had just run out of toilet paper. No one could possibly
choose
to use that slick, uncomfortable catalog paper that way. I mean, you really had to work with it. So I figured they must have run out and just didn’t have time to run down to the store to get some more. I was always trying to help with one thing or another, so I headed across to that drugstore on the other side. I was going to buy some toilet paper. That, and an ice cream cone, because, after all, every good deed deserves a reward.

When I walked into the store, I got a whole lot of attention. Now, I was used to getting a lot of attention, but this, this was different. Very different. A mean-looking white man came up to me right away, but not in the right way, more like an aggressive kind of way.

He looked down on me. “What do
you
want?”

Even with that sharp, nasty tone, I really thought he was asking me what I wanted, not “How did you have the nerve to walk across the street and come into my store?” Which I think is what he really meant. But, I proceeded to answer the question I thought he was asking me. Politely, because that’s the way I was taught to speak to everyone.

“I want two rolls of toilet paper,” I said, “and an ice cream cone.”

He kind of narrowed his eyes as if he were playing my voice back in his head, evaluating, the way a wild animal might size you up just before he pounces. “Where y’all from?”

I know my chest must have swelled. “I’m from
Chicago
,” I said. That always seemed to impress people when my grandparents would take me around and introduce me. And I was very proud that I was from Chicago.
But apparently pride wasn’t a good thing for a little black girl to have in the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s.

Well, he just looked like he was about to spit as he collected himself. “You know what? I’m gonna give you that ice cream cone,” he said. “But I’m
not
going to sell you no toilet paper.” He turned his back on me, but he kept talking. “You go on home, use corncobs like everybody else.”

What? Now, really. Those glossy catalog pages were bad enough, but
corncobs?
I drew my breath, preparing to say something I
know
I would have regretted, some smart remark, because, I mean, what did I know? I must have thought I was still in Chicago or something. But at that moment, I was made aware of just where I stood. My grandfather walked through the door.

John Carthan, my daddy’s daddy, was a well-respected man. He actually had his own land, with sharecroppers working for
him
. And there was a “plantation” store he owned, where people could come and get whatever they needed, from cloth to grits to candy. Everything, of course, except toilet paper. So, when Papa Carr came in, the white man recognized him.

“Does she belong to you?” the man asked.

My grandfather smiled, gently placed his arm on my shoulder. “Yes, sir, that’s my baby.”

I did get my ice cream cone, as well as a tongue-lashing from my grandfather once he got me on the other side of the street. He warned me never again to cross over by myself, and how I should never lose sight of him, and how I should always let him know when I moved away from him. He told me about the great danger that I had just faced, how I simply could have disappeared. And then what? He made me think about what Mama and Daddy would have thought, what they would have felt. Oh, that really shook me up. I mean, he just pounded the fear of every black person in the state of Mississippi into me. I would never forget that incident, and, my goodness, that talk with Papa Carr. The lessons of that moment would always stay with me. In Mississippi, there were certain things that black people were denied by white people. The freedom of movement. The luxury of choice. And a roll of toilet paper.

So Mama must have felt she had every reason in the world to help people get out of that place. I do believe that she must have single-handedly contributed to the growth of Argo, Illinois, in the process. Our whole neighborhood was like an extended family. Aunt Marie and Uncle Kid and June Bug lived west of us. Uncle Crosby and his family lived to the east of us. In back of us were Aunt Babe and Uncle Emmett, and in front of us was Bo’s great-uncle Lee Green. It was a place of open arms and open doors. In fact, whenever we had to go away for a while, my mother would
lock the door behind us, but she would put the key under the front doormat. That was so people could let themselves in while we were away. You see, we were among the few people in the neighborhood who had a telephone back then and we shared everything with everyone. Some people didn’t, but Mama always wanted to be there for everyone, even when she wasn’t there. So she would leave the key and a little container next to the phone. She asked only that people remember to leave the key under the mat behind them and, well, to leave a nickel in the container for the phone call. It was an honor system. We never bothered to question people. And sometimes we would find nickels underneath the phone weeks later. There were people who must have believed that was the safer thing to do.

Mama was constantly doing something for somebody. Like cooking. People came over for dinner all the time, but especially on Sundays, which I have to admit didn’t always make me happy as a child. There were just so many people. Our house was the meetinghouse, the gathering place, the center of the community. It was the place where Mama had helped to found the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, and where she recruited new church members with practically each new Mississippi migrant. So, I guess it shouldn’t have been much of a surprise when each Sunday Mama would host dinner for at least four ministers. The funny thing about it was that all these preachers lived outside Argo. And they were Baptists and Methodists. We were neither. I couldn’t understand that one at first. I mean, those Baptist women were very good cooks. Maybe we could have switched up a bit. But every Sunday, it was dinner at Alma’s. At least one of those four ministers was someone my mother and father knew from Mississippi. His name was C. J. Rogers, but they called him “One-Eyed” Rogers. That was because, well, because he had one eye. But, oh, that man could preach. And he would punctuate his sermons with a little hop and a squeak that would get everybody moving and filled with the holy spirit. Goodness gracious, the women would just throw their pocketbooks and everything. I never thought of One-Eyed Rogers as disabled. He kind of made me realize that there are people in this world who are able in a different way. That when God takes something away from you, He gives you so much in return. Anyway, that’s the way it was on Sundays. Four ministers, Mama, Daddy, family, friends, strangers, and little Mamie Elizabeth Carthan, who almost couldn’t make a way to the table.

Besides all that, I was the one who had to do the shopping much of the time. I don’t know how my mother could afford all those chickens. They were more than a dollar apiece. And she would make me walk forever to save three cents on a stick of butter, seven blocks out of the way to buy butter at seven cents a stick, and to get three pounds of neck bones for a
dime. Of course, this was Argo, and since just about everybody worked at the Corn Products plant, that meant just about everybody stocked the products they made at Corn Products. I once heard they made more than a hundred items from a grain of corn at that place. Sugar, starch for your clothes, Mazola corn oil, Karo syrup, and, oh, I just loved the lemon meringue pies Mama made with that Argo cornstarch.