On Green Dolphin Street (17 page)

It was the first time the northern press had sent reporters en masse into the South. After the Supreme Court had ruled against segregation in the case of
Brown
v.
Board of Education
the previous summer, the papers sensed a show trial of southern values, a test case of “separate but equal” development that would demonstrate what Negro lives were really worth in the Delta. The reporter who normally covered the South was temporarily on leave. Frank volunteered for the job, assuring the managing editor he would keep cool in the atmosphere of southern hatreds and, when there was still some doubt about his suitability, pointing out that he
had known dozens of children from the same school as the murdered boy, McCosh Elementary on the South Side.

The Greyhound bus dropped him two miles outside Sumner on Highway 49, leaving him to walk into town through a wall of September heat. The land was so flat that the horizon was visible all around, edging down into the cotton and soybean fields; the two-dimensional landscape made it hard to say how far it was to the scant farm buildings and bare rectangular dwellings that stood like cutouts in the middle ground beneath the low, pressing sky.

Frank pulled his notebook from his pocket to note the roadside sign, “
A GOOD PLACE TO RAISE A BOY
,” that welcomed the visitor to Sumner. He checked the words carefully, one by one (all capitals, above a Coca-Cola sign), as he had taught himself, to forestall the sub-editors’ surly inquiries. The journalists were assigned rooms in a boardinghouse, whose female owner sat outside, fanning herself in the thick air, watching with distaste the northern city men, their superior manners, their jostling for the house telephone.

Frank noticed that almost all the local men seemed to be armed. Good old boys in straw hats sitting out on the veranda had shotguns across their knees; twin barrels poked from farm debris in the back of a pickup truck; even in the gray brick courthouse, he saw more than one revolver handle sticking out from a straining waistband. When the film-crew cars went off to a nearby airfield in the late afternoon to get the footage on the plane to New York, there was no more noise in Sumner. The dense air blotted out sound: the crack of a door slamming was enough to make you start, and the people watched the incomers with silent, hostile eyes. At night, when he lay in the suffocating darkness of his narrow room and heard the distant baying of hounds, Frank wondered how many other black men and boys had been beaten, then thrown, like Emmett Till, into the Tallahatchie River.

Some of the reporters, who had been warned not to go out after dark, were afraid for their lives; some affected southern accents to try to blend in; but, as Frank explained to a nervous young man from Boston, they
were both white, and because of that were protected by law: that was what the case was about, after all, and whether a young Negro enjoyed the same legal safeguard. Yet despite what he said, Frank felt uneasy; he felt the hatred, which pressed into his skin like the airless heat.

It was different for the black reporters. “Hello, niggers,” said the sheriff, as he showed them to a segregated table in the courtroom. Though two thirds of the people in Tallahatchie County were black, the jury consisted of twelve white men, ten of them from the poorest, most backward hill section of the county. Frank grew to know their faces, their blank farmers’ features, impermeable to weather or to words. Only one wore spectacles, an older man with a pinched, beaten face; Frank wondered if the others had not tired their eyes. Perhaps the fact that they read nothing but only gazed over the interminable flatlands for indications of rain or darkness had kept their vision healthy. There was one younger man who wore a checked shirt and diamond-pattern socks; the others all wore white shirts, mostly short-sleeved, and loose cotton pants. Their black-banded straw hats hung on a line of hooks attached to the green plaster wall beside them.

The evidence presented to them was easy enough. Emmett Till had either wolf-whistled at, been verbally suggestive to or touched the waist of a young and desirable white woman named Carolyn Bryant in her husband’s store, Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in the small town of Money. The prosecution suggested he had done no such thing, but that he always made involuntary whistling noises when he spoke because of his stammer. It made little difference: Till was a lippy young man; and, as a city boy from Chicago, he had failed to understand the rules of the South, where male Negroes averted their eyes not just from white women but from representations of them in posters or photographs. Therefore he was murdered by Carolyn Bryant’s young husband, Roy, and his older half brother, a heavily built man named J. W. Milam.

Bryant and Milam had called at the house of Emmett Till’s great-uncle in the night and asked if this was where the boy who had made advances to the white woman was hiding. The great-uncle, an elderly sharecropper called Mose Wright, apologized for any misunderstanding, but the two
men took Till and drove him to the river, beat him till his facial bones were crushed and one of his eyes was hanging out, shot him once, tied a seventy-pound fan from a cotton gin around his neck with barbed wire and threw him in the water.

Mose Wright went to the stand and was asked by the prosecution to identify the two men who had taken his great-nephew in the night. Milam leaned forward in his chair, took a cigarette in his fist and gazed with intense fury into Wright’s face, as though challenging him to risk his own life. Under the fire of hundreds of white people’s eyes, Wright slowly raised his hand and pointed. He said, “Thar he.” Trembling, he moved his hand and pointed at the other defendant: “And there’s Mr. Bryant.” After a half-hour cross-examination by the defense, who called him “Mose,” Wright was allowed to leave the stand. He returned to his seat and collapsed into his chair with a lurch as the nerve went out of him.

The defense had no trick, no absence of a smoking gun or last-minute alibi. They began by suggesting that Emmett Till’s mother had wrongly identified the body of her own son. Till’s mother, a city woman in a print dress, black bolero and a small black hat with a piece of veil, replied that if it had not been Emmett she would not now be in the courtroom but would be out looking for him. Defense counsel, a man named Breland, remained seated as he cross-examined Till’s mother, occasionally slicing the air with rigid motions of his hands. He referred to her as “Mamie” and maintained that a body had been planted in the river by a mischievous civil rights group looking to make trouble; the sheriff of the county speculated in the witness box that the “real” Emmett Till was living somewhere in Detroit.

At the lunchtime recess Frank would go outside and watch the crowds press up to the sandwich and soft-drink concession. Milam and Bryant sat on the steps of the courthouse, handing out ice-cream cones to their children and laughing; old white men sat along a bench, while black people gathered at the foot of a Confederate statue inscribed “
THE CAUSE THAT NEVER FAILED
” (all capitals). Mose Wright walked across the lawn to them, his blue pants hoisted high by brown suspenders over his clean white shirt. He looked pleased to see his friends, but crushed by the gravity
of what he had done. In an effort to escape the heat, Frank went into a drugstore where a large fan was churning the air; on the counter was a jar for donations to the defense fund of Milam and Bryant.

Afterward, back inside the courtroom, the mother of Bryant and Milam massaged their shoulders and bathed their temples with a damp white cloth: this truly was a case, Frank thought, about mothers and sons. The members of the jury smoked and crossed their legs; the man with the tie ran his finger around inside his damp collar. Bailiffs came and went with pitchers of ice water.

Frank wondered what was going on in these men’s minds. Their loyalty to local tradition was greater than their respect for federal law; they would not have phrased it in such a way, but the truth was that, to them, disrespect was a crime worse than murder. Therefore they were not listening; they were not open to argument. A young man named Willie Reed, eighteen years old and barely articulate, testified that he had seen Emmett Till in the back of a pickup belonging to Milam and that he had heard the sound of someone being beaten up. It made no difference.

That night Frank paid ten dollars to borrow a car and drove to the little town of Money, where Emmett Till had made the mistake of being too forward with Carolyn Bryant. The town had one paved road, along which were ranged a school, a post office, a place for ginning cotton and three stores. The headlights of the car picked out one with a large Coca-Cola sign at the front; this was Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, which, they had been told in court, specialized in selling snuff and fatback to the black field hands who lived in the tar-paper shacks along the dirt roads nearby.

Frank did not know what he had come to find, except that he wanted to have a clearer picture of where the thing had happened. People in the courtroom talked with drawling familiarity of Bryant’s store; the strategy of the defense was to stress the normality of the two men, how regular they were, how easy to understand and how representative of the place from which they came.

Most journalists, in Frank’s experience, were frightened of being caught out, exposed as naive or ignorant. They were afraid of being telephoned
by an editor the following day and asked why their story did not match that of their competitors. They therefore accepted with earnest nods and without question what they were told; they wanted to get the labyrinthine story and all its bizarre details into one of the simply labeled boxes that their editors would understand. There were numerous familiar categories from which to choose: Jim Crow lives; southern test case; miscarriage of justice; the world watches. Bryant and Milam were “World War Two vets,” Bryant a “much-decorated” one, while his wife was a “former beauty queen”; the difficulty was only in knowing which angle was the most comfortable. Beneath the hard male banter, each reporter was frightened of being found out; most of them therefore compared notes and stories, particularly where two papers came from the same city. The most obvious rivals were therefore, for reasons of common self-interest, the most ardent collaborators. The aim of each of them, in the end, was to report on events in such a way as to render them comprehensible, to remove the strangeness by using recognized and reassuring phrases. In New York Frank had frequently discussed this tendency with Billy Foy, who, in the course of a long evening in Herlihy’s Saloon, had once defined the ultimate aim of such reporters: to write about extraordinary new events in such a way as to render them
already familiar
. Frank could remember the emphatic movement of the hands with which Foy had gleefully italicized the last two words.

Yet even the peripheral details of the Till case were outlandish. As a Chicago man, Frank did not know what a tar-paper shack was until his headlights picked one out; having worked in the stockyards he knew which part of the hog provided fatback, but some of the city men did not know if it was something you ate or smoked or used to wash the automobile. He felt as though he was in a foreign country, and in his reports he tried to make the Emmett Till story sound almost incomprehensibly strange.

He wondered how many men the gross and unrepentant Milam had killed in Europe during the war, and whether his service had made it easier for him to murder Till. The unit in which he fought would certainly
have been segregated and if he had shot Germans who looked like he did without compunction, the idea of firing a gun into Till’s dark head might have been untroubling to him.

Frank drove back to Sumner in the darkness, the windows of the car wound down, letting in the swampy night air. He thought of a sentry he had himself killed on a bridge in the Rhineland during the advance into Germany of 1945. As the lieutenant in charge of his platoon, Frank thought it unreasonable to give the task to anyone else. It was a moonlit night and he had a clear shot on the young German’s back; despite the fact that the safety of all his men was at risk, some scruple made him wait until the sentry was facing him. The bullet went through the neck, and when Frank and his sergeant reached the body the tongue had been uprooted and was lolling out of his mouth like an ox’s tongue ready to be rolled and pressed. He was heavy to shift, and Frank pulled a sacroiliac muscle as they heaved him to the edge of the bridge; it was a familiar, domestic pain, a version of a football injury, quite out of place at this moment of killing and emergency. They dropped the German in the river; unlike Bryant and Milam, they had no concern about whether the body floated.

The next day the jury took one hour and seven minutes to acquit Milam and Bryant; one juror later said they could have done in it ten minutes, but an officer of the court sent in cold sodas and told them it would look better if they could spin it out for a while. There was an intake of breath in court when the foreman gave the verdict; for a moment there was a silence of shame. Then Milam stood up, lit a cigar and grabbed his wife. The defendants each had two small boys, who ran into their fathers’ arms to celebrate; photographers climbed on desks and tables. Within a few minutes the courtroom was empty except for the paper cups, piles of cigarette butts and a few abandoned spectator chairs that the American Legion had rented out at two dollars a time.

After he had returned to New York, Frank continued to write about the case. In Mississippi the verdict was well received, but almost every newspaper
outside the South was shocked: their reactions varied from disappointment to outrage. Some writers praised the impartiality of the judge; they saw some hope in the fact that the jury had reportedly not been unanimous at the first count. Then they turned away, because there was only so much wringing of hands that could be done over a state that was still part of a union.

Frank was so troubled by what he saw in Sumner that he turned to the foreign press. With the aid of a dictionary, he translated articles from
Le Figaro
(“scandalous … worldwide indignation”) and
France Observateur
, which thought the trial more outrageous than that of the Rosenbergs, who had been electrocuted for unsubstantiated treason two summers earlier. The paper’s German correspondent put into English for him a piece that claimed the trial showed that “the life of a Negro in the Delta is not worth a whistle.” Combining the European response with his own reactions to the trial, Frank wrote an article for his newspaper that began: “When something happens to unite various observers into moral outrage, a reporter’s first instinct is to suspect that they are all wrong. A few days on the case will reveal what has been neglected or overlooked—the shades and details that make a more interesting truth. But the case of Emmett Till looks like an exception …”