The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (35 page)

I asked him how he had felt about serving."Really and truly," he told me,"I can't remember how I felt about that. I reckon I felt the way I did about serving on any other jury. I wasn't crazy about serving on none of them…I needed to be on my job and on the farm."When I pressed him to tell me what else he remembered, he responded:"I don't want to pull it up. I want to leave it out there- it's just best to leave things alone."

"He just never did talk about that much," his wife, who was sitting next to him, explained.

I asked about the verdict. "I didn't think that they presented the case to prove it," he said of the prosecutors."I understand that them folks was pretty much outlaws, but I didn't know that. I heard it years later." He was quiet for a moment."I still don't know."

That truly surprised me. But he stood by it, insisting that the prosecution had not proven its case-otherwise, he said, "I'd never have voted the way I did."When I asked him what the jury deliberations had been like, he said, "I'm sure there was a good bit of discussion. I do remember that there were at least three votes on that thing." He must have anticipated my next question, because he quickly added,"And I voted to acquit all three times."

I was disappointed; somehow, I had hoped he might have been that lone dissenter. I asked if he still believed they had reached the right verdict.

"I still think they were innocent," he said. "I have no reason and no proof, and I don't judge people. I went and done my duty, left my duty where it was at and went on to other things."And no misgivings at all? "I served to the best of my ability, under my prayer to God for guidance and wisdom. And I stand by my decision…I still stand by it. I think I was right."

"I guess you know that an awful lot of people disagreed."

"I was surprised at all the fuss," he said. "I thought we deliberated that thing, came back with a decision and that should be it." I asked him if racial tensions were sharpened there afterward. "There wasn't as much tensions as there are now," he said.

"We've always had some good black friends," his wife added. "Very good."

"Go to Charleston," he told me, "talk to any of the blacks that was raised with me, and they'll tell you I was anything but a racist."

And I found that statement more disturbing than anything that Ray Tribble, or J. W. Kellum, or John Whitten had said to me. Because I believed him. I believed that Howard Armstrong was not a racist. I felt I had gotten to the point where I could spot a racist of almost any type in almost any circumstance, and he was not one. And yet he had voted-at least three times, by his own account-to acquit two men who were clearly guilty of a horrific, racist crime.

I have spent a lot of time contemplating that conundrum over the past ten years, and I have come to the conclusion that at least part of the problem is ours.We tend to think of racism, and racists, the way we think of most things-in binary terms. Someone is either a racist or he isn't. If he is a racist, he does racist things; if he isn't, he doesn't. But of course it's much more complicated than that, and in the Mississippi of 1955 it was more complicated still. Today, we can look back and say that Howard Armstrong should have voted to convict Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam of murdering Emmett Till; but for him to buck the established order like that would have actually required him to make at least four courageous decisions. First, he would have had to decide that the established order, the system in which he had lived his entire life, was wrong. Second, he would have had to decide that it should change. Third, he would have had to decide that it could change. And finally, he would have had to decide that he himself should do something to change it.

Howard Armstrong never made it to that final step. Another juror apparently did, and managed to stay there through two votes before backing down. It is frustrating to me that I will probably never know who that other juror was, where he found the courage that got him that far, and why, ultimately, he changed his mind. But it is even more frustrating to me to imagine that Howard Armstrong made it past Step l but got tripped up on 2 or 3.

I only wonder if it was frustrating for him too. In 1995, sitting with him in his living room, I took his answers, his unwavering declarations that he had no regrets, at face value; today, I'm not so sure. Rereading my notes after ten years, I can perceive a certain defensiveness in his words, an urge to keep the conversation short and narrow, perhaps cut off the next question before it could be asked. His insistence, like J.W. Kellum's, that this was just another trial feels flat now. And then there's his vacillation on the matter of whether or not the defendants were "outlaws." Did he really believe, in both 1955 and 1995, that Bryant and Milam were innocent, and that he himself had done the right thing in voting to set them free? Or was this merely something he repeatedly told him-self-and others-to get by? I do believe he was not a racist in 1995. But had he been one in 1955 and then grew, in subsequent decades, so ashamed of that fact that he did everything he could to defeat it in his own mind?

I don't know if Howard Armstrong could have answered those questions then, but I imagine he didn't want to try. It was easier on him, I'm sure, to believe that he had just forgotten all about it."I'm glad I can't remember those old days," he told me near the end of our visit. "You hear so much about 'the good old days.'The good old days weren't so good."

Richard Rubin has been a regular contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and has written for the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, New York magazine, and The Oxford American, among others. His most recent book, Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South (Atria, 2002), is in part a memoir of his experiences reporting for a daily newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1988-1989. He lives in New York, and is at work on a book about World War I.

I first heard the story of Emmett Till in 1987, as a junior at the University of Pennsylvania, while watching the documentary Eyes on the Prize as part of a seminar on the subject of Race in America. I was shocked, of course, by Till's story-most of Eyes on the Prize is shocking, really-and when the narrator recounted how an attorney for the killers said, at their trial, "I'm sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free," I remember, clearly, thinking:Why would anyone say such a thing? What could he have been thinking? In a general sense, my desire to find the answers to questions like those is what led me to take a job as a newspaper reporter in the small Delta town of Greenwood, Mississippi, after graduation, and to spend nearly five years living in the Deep South. I never imagined, though, that I would someday have the chance to pose those questions to the man who had inspired them in the first place.

The Emmett Till case seems so straightforward, and has become so iconic, that people often mistakenly believe they know the whole story. One thing you won't hear in Eyes on the Prize, or just about anywhere else, is that it was extremely unusual that Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were even tried for murder in the first place. In fact, no one I've asked in Mississippi can recall another such trial happening before then. There were a great many lynch-ings before then, of course, most of them now long-forgotten, but despite the fact that many of them were public events-and there are plenty of pictures to document them-no white man had ever been tried in Mississippi for lynching a black man before September l955.What's more, the trial of Milam and Bryant was widely regarded, at the time, to have been eminently fair (unlike the verdict).This was a universal conclusion-even the black press, outraged though they were over the verdict, devoted a lot of ink to how hard the prosecutors worked for a conviction, and how fair the judge was in presiding over the trial, the latter going so far as to exclude the testimony of Carolyn Bryant, which, he determined, served no purpose other than to inflame the jurors' racial prejudices. James L. Hicks, the legendary pioneer black journalist, was there in Sumner and wrote:

I had come here almost with a preconceived idea that I would jeer a mockery ofjustice from the first day of the trial. But, as the state spun its web around the two men in five days, I stayed up late and long each night, waiting and getting ready to cheer a state which I felt was coming over to the side of decency and fair play when the rest of the world was saying that it couldn't be done.

And up to the very moment that the jury of white sharecroppers came out of the jury room to announce their verdict, I was inwardly cheering and rooting for the people of Mississippi as loud and long as I root for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

For in the five days' conduct of the trial, Mississippi just didn't follow the script written for her by the rest of the world.

After my article was published, I was contacted by the son of one of those prosecutors; he later shared with me a large cache of letters his late father had received during and after the trial. There were two basic types: the first from a black or white correspondent thanking him for his courageous stand in the name of justice; the seond from a white correspondent condemning him, often obscenely, for betraying his race.

As I said, I never imagined, in 1987, that I would someday have the opportunity to confront some of the men involved in the Emmett Till case, if for no other reason than that the whole affair seemed so bizarre and archaic and otherworldly that I just assumed everyone involved in it was long dead.They were not, though most are now.J.W Kellum died at eighty-four, less than a year after I met him. Ray Tribble died of cancer in 1998, at the age of seventy-one; a senior center in Greenwood is now named for him. John W. Whitten, Jr., succumbed to Parkinson's in 2003, a week shy of his eighty-fourth birthday. Three years earlier, he and his wife gave a million dollars to their alma mater, Ole Miss, to build a new student golf center. Howard Armstrong died of heart failure on August 25, 2003; he was eighty-four years old. The road that leads to the cemetery where he is buried is named for him.

Roy Bryant died of cancer in 1994 at the age of sixty-three. So did his half brother, J.W. Milam, at the age of sixty in 1981. I am told that Milam's cancer was spinal, and particularly painful.The hotel in Sumner where the jurors were sequestered has long since closed, and now looks as if it is being devoured by trees; parts of it appear to have been swatted to the ground by some giant hand. Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market continues to deteriorate; when I last saw it, in the fall of 2004, the roof, windows, interior walls, and floors were entirely gone, and trees were growing inside it.The second-story porch had been reduced to some dangling weather-beaten timbers, and the front doors had vanished; someone had already put them up for sale on eBay, with an opening bid price of five hundred dollars.There were no takers.

For much more on the subject, including an account of my 1989 encounter with Roy Bryant, see Confederacy of Silence.

Murder, Madness, and Betrayal in the NOPD

from New Orleans magazine

Antoinette Frank stood in the cramped kitchen of the Kim Anh restaurant, a 9mm pistol clutched in her hand. Kneeling on the dirty floor at Frank's feet were seventeen-year-old Cuong Vu and his twenty-four-year-old sister, Ha.

Cuong was an altar boy at St. Brigid Catholic Church. He played high school football and wanted to be a priest. Ha was considering becoming a nun. Both worked long hours at their parents' restaurant.

Frank fired nine bullets into them.

Ha Vu died instantly.When detectives found her, she was still on her knees, her forehead resting on the floor.

Cuong took longer to die. Frank shot him repeatedly in the chest and back, but his young athlete's heart continued to beat. Frank heard him trying to talk, so she shot him again, this time firing two bullets into Cuong's head.

Frank and her partner in crime, an eighteen-year-old named Rogers LaCaze, ransacked the Bullard Avenue restaurant until they found what they were looking for-money.

Frank and LaCaze bolted through the dining room. On their way to the front door they passed Ronnie Williams. Williams was a twenty-five-year-old New Orleans police officer assigned to the Seventh District. He had gotten off work at 11:00 p.m. and had gone straight to the restaurant to work a security detail. Williams needed the extra money the detail paid. Ten days earlier, his wife had given birth to the couple's second son, Patrick.

Still in his police uniform, Williams would be found face down behind the bar in a pool of blood. He had been shot twice in the head and once in the back.

LaCaze took Ronnie Williams's gun and wallet.

Outside, Frank and LaCaze piled into a battered 1977 Ford Torino. As the car screeched out of the parking lot, a sun-yellowed cardboard sign fluttered on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. Printed on either end of the foot-wide rectangular placard was the star-and-crescent symbol of the New Orleans Police Department. In the center of the sign, between the symbols, were the words new Orleans police officer on duty.

The sign and the car belonged to officer Antoinette Frank, a New Orleans cop who worked out of the Seventh District. She, too, had just gotten off at 11 o'clock. Frank was on the same platoon and worked the same shift as Ronnie Williams.The two officers had worked together every day for more than a year.

Few would argue that by the time 1995 rolled around, the New Orleans Police Department was in sad shape. The department was losing about one hundred officers per year-many of them fired or arrested-and hiring only half that many. In 1994, two officers had been arrested for murder, one for killing a man the officer suspected of having broken into his apartment; the other for ordering the execution of a woman who had filed a brutality complaint against him.Then in December 1994, the FBI arrested ten New Orleans cops on federal drug-trafficking charges.