by Paul Theroux
Emmett had lived for a week with Mose Wright in Wright’s small house in East Money, three miles from the crossroads. Wright was known locally as Preacher Wright (he was a part-time pastor at a small church nearby). Emmett had last visited there when he was nine. Known as Bobo or Bo, he had a slight speech impediment, a stammer, but was known for his practical jokes, his teasing, and his ability to amuse his friends. Popular with the other children, he had Chicago confidence in this rural and backward part of the Deep South.
Late one afternoon, after a day of picking cotton, Emmett and eight other youngsters, including a girl, went to Bryant’s Grocery for soft drinks and candy. The store was owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Roy had been a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division from 1950 to 1953 and was a big man, six feet, 190 pounds. He was then twenty-four years old. Carolyn was two years younger and clerked at the store when Roy was away, as he was on the fateful afternoon.
Emmett went into the store and asked for some bubble gum and paid for it.
“Till exited the store, and shortly thereafter Carolyn Bryant, the store owner’s wife, exited as well,” the FBI report reads. “Upon Carolyn Bryant’s exit, Till whistled. The relatives accompanying him knew his whistle would cause trouble, and they left in haste, taking Till with them.”
That was the version of the bystanders watching from outside the store, and there was a suggestion that perhaps it was to impress his friends with his big-city bravado that he whistled at Carolyn Bryant.
Carolyn Bryant’s version was different. She claimed that when Emmett paid for the bubble gum, he grabbed her hand and said, “How about a date, baby?” and then, when she pulled away, he followed her and used “one unprintable word.” Frightened, she hurried to her car to get her pistol from under the front seat, and as she did so, Emmett Till, who was lingering by the front porch, whistled at her and then got into a car and was driven away. The sun had set, and by then Money was in darkness.
Carolyn Bryant’s story was disputed by one of Till’s friends, who had gone into the store shortly after Till entered, and was with him when he paid for the gum. According to the friend, Till had not said the words attributed to him. But the wolf whistle was not in dispute. One of the friends said, “Everyone knew Till’s whistling was trouble.”
For a few days nothing happened. Then, four days after the event, on August 28, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, his thirty-six-year-old half-brother, met and conferred. Milam was a veteran of World War Two, having served in the 2nd Armored Division in Europe from 1941 to 1946. They decided to look for the boy Carolyn Bryant had described, and drove the roads near Money, where they found a black boy walking alone. They captured him and showed him to Carolyn, but she said he was not the one from the store.
The Southern white woman was central to the drama. Long before this incident, Frank Tannenbaum wrote, in Darker Phases of the South (1924), “The simple truth of the matter seems to be that the tremendous protection which the South throws about the white women is the compensation for the lack of protection which the colored women have to endure.” His prescient observation continues by conjuring up the images of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam: “The idealization of the white women in the South is thus partly the unconscious self-protection on the part of the white men from their own bad habits, notions, beliefs, attitudes, and practices.”
Suspecting that the children who’d come to the store were associated with Mose Wright, Bryant and Milam went to his house in East Money that night and made demands and threats. Milam had a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He said, “I want the boy who done the talking down at Money.”
Emmett was roused from his bed at the back of the house. As Emmett was putting his clothes on, Mose’s wife, Elizabeth, begged the men to leave Emmett alone, and said she’d pay them anything they asked if they would not take him away. How much money did they want?
They did not reply to that. Milam said, “We’re just going to take him up the road and just whip him.”
They dragged Emmett to their car. A woman’s voice said, “That’s the one.”
(“The amount of whipping usually depended on ‘the humor of the madam’ rather than the behavior of the slave,” Louis Hughes wrote in Thirty Years a Slave in 1897.)
Later that night, Bryant, Milam, and some others (possibly including Otha “Oso” Johnson and Levi “Too Tight” Collins, two black farm hands) drove Emmett in the back of a pickup truck to a barn in Glendora, where they brutally beat him, whipping him and smashing his skull. Milam described the beating to a friend, who later reported Milam saying, “During the beating Till was never respectful to the men and did not say ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir.’ Things got out of hand and Till stated something to the effect of ‘he was as good as they are.’”
“The Negro, when addressing a white person, is expected to use a title such as ‘Sah,’ ‘Mistah,’ ‘Boss,’” observed the field researchers in the Harvard study Deep South (the 1941 sociological account of Natchez in the late 1930s), adding, “while the white must never use such titles of respect to the Negro but should address him by his first name or as ‘Boy.’”
Emmett Till broke all the rules. He defied his abductors, and even while being whipped he was not deferential or humble; he didn’t know his place; he was uppity. If he’d been good, he would have accepted and expressed his inferior social position. As the Deep South scholars described a white man’s account of a beating in Natchez, “They were bad niggers and were getting biggity.”
What happened to Emmett Till, brutal though it was, had happened many times before. In his confidence in the store, and his defiance afterward, he had broken “the strongest taboo of the system.” A white planter, quoted in Deep South, explained the penalty clearly: “We often have to whip one of them around here who gets too uppity or insolent or does something. We don’t run them off, because it usually does more good to let them come back to work, so the other niggers will know about it . . . We took [one man] out and whipped him and told him to be back at work the next day. Ever since then, whenever he sees me, he tips his hat and has been a good nigger ever since.”
AT LAST, AFTER beating Emmett Till until his skull was broken and his face smashed, the men shot him in the head and loaded his bleeding corpse into the pickup truck. (“It’s a deer,” Too Tight Collins explained to a man who pointed out the blood running from the truck bed to the ground at a stop the next day.) They drove to the Tallahatchie River and, using barbed wire as an attachment, weighted his body with a seventy-five-pound fan from a ginnery, then dropped the corpse into the water.
Within a day Bryant and Milam were arrested on suspicion—people had talked—and a few days later Emmett’s body, “hung up on a snag,” was sighted by a fisherman and dragged from the river at a place called Pecan Point, above Philipp, about ten miles north of Money. The decomposed corpse, the face crushed (“extensive trauma to the head”), was unrecognizable, but the ring with the initials “LT” on a bloated finger proved it was Emmett. A week later in Chicago, Emmett’s brutalized body was put on view. Thousands of people, over four days, filed past to see Emmett’s remains in (as his mother insisted) an open casket.
A month after the murder, Bryant and Milam went to trial at the Tallahatchie courthouse in Sumner. The evidence against them was irrefutable. Incriminating witnesses were called. Mose Wright testified and famously rose from the witness chair and pointed to the men, identifying them as Emmett’s abductors. A guilty verdict seemed certain. But after a brief deliberation by the white jury, Bryant and Milam were found not guilty of murder and were later cleared of kidnapping. They were photographed smoking cigars, hugging their wives, openly gloating outside the courthouse.
And, for a fee, the men cooperated with William Bradford Huie in his Look article, published four months after the trial. Huie paid the men $1,500 each for the interview, and their lawyer got $1,000. Milam, the most talkative, was unrepentant in describing how he’d kidnapped Emmett Till with Bryant’s help
, how they pistol-whipped him in a shed behind his home in Glendora, then shot him and disposed of his body.
Though many of Milam’s details of the killing were inconsistent with the evidence, and the time line was skewed, everything he said was incriminating. There was a general outcry in the North, and my brothers and I talked of little else for months. Yet there was no response from the authorities. The reaction by Southern blacks was momentous, and unusual because it was nonviolent. On December 1 of that same year of the Till trial, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. She was arrested for her act of disobedience, and she became a symbol of defiance. Her stubbornness and sense of justice made her a rallying point and an exemplar.
What was the reaction to the Emmett Till murder in the nation’s capital? Mississippi senator John C. Stennis released to the press the details of Louis Till’s court-martial and his hanging in Italy for rape and murder. This was intended to taint the case and sway public opinion against Emmett. Immediately after the trial, Mamie Bradley sent a telegram to President Eisenhower, begging for justice: “I the mother of Emmett Louis still am pleading that you personally see that justice is meted out to all persons involved in the beastly lynching of my son in Money Miss. Awaiting a direct reply from you.”
She got no reply, but her telegram eventually generated an interoffice memo. Among the many documents in the Till file is that White House memo, dated October 23, 1956, from Max Rabb, Eisenhower’s secretary of the cabinet and his adviser on minorities, to James C. Hagerty, the White House press secretary. Mamie Bradley was a tool of the Communists, the memo began; the woman was “a ‘phoney’.” Rabb went on, “Any recognition of her would have been used to further Communist causes in this country . . . Mrs. Bradley was discredited for using her son’s death as a means of making a living.”
“Practically all the evidence against the defendants was circumstantial evidence” was the opinion in an editorial in the Jackson Daily News on September 25, 1955. “It is best for all concerned that the Bryant-Milam case be forgotten as quickly as possible.”
But the Jackson paper published a more robust piece by William Faulkner. The crime itself was like a dark Faulkner story, with all the Southern small-town elements, even the cast: the young white shopkeeping wife, the boastful peckerwood murderers, the panicky black children, the intimidated black preacher. It was one of the most damning and gloomiest accusations Faulkner ever wrote—and he normally resisted the simplifications of newspaper essays. His anguish shows in the scathing broadside, written hurriedly in Rome while he was on a State Department speaking junket. The piece was released through the United States Information Service and published in the Jackson Daily News when the two men were acquitted of Till’s murder.
Faulkner first spoke about the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the hypocrisy of boasting of our values to our enemies “after we have taught them (as we are now doing) that when we talk of freedom and liberty, we not only mean neither, we don’t even mean security and justice and even not the preservation of life for people whose pigmentation is not the same as ours.” He went on to say that if Americans are to survive, we will have to show the world that we are not racists, “to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front.” Yet this might be a test we will fail: “Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive.” And his damning conclusion: “Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.”
Nowhere in the piece did Faulkner use Emmett Till’s name, yet anyone who read it knew whom he was speaking about.
“Don’t Be Fourteen (in Mississippi),” a poem by the Mississippi writer Jerry W. Ward Jr., was a direct response to the killing, and a powerful one. Ward, who is black, was close to Emmett Till’s age when the murder occurred and, as a teacher, is still resident in the state. “Racism is a permanent feature of life in Mississippi,” he said, “and that produces its own set of headaches.”
Forget Emmett Till, the Jackson paper had said in its editorial, but the case was not forgotten. On the contrary, it became a remembered infamy and a celebrated injustice, and Emmett Till was eulogized as a hero and a martyr. Suppression of the truth is not merely futile but almost a guarantee of something wonderful and revelatory emerging from it, creating an opposing and more powerful and ultimately overwhelming force, sunlight breaking in, as the Till case proved.
I never forgot it. And that was why, late that afternoon in Money, Mississippi, I parked near the ghostly ruin of Bryant’s store and noted the sentiments on the sign in front. I walked around in the chill air—no one outside on this winter day. Just walls, and not strong ones; it was hard to imagine how the building was still standing. Enclosed in a tangle of vines and the roots of parasitic trees, like a cracked structure of rusticated stone in Angkor Wat, the store was perhaps held together for the same reason, by the clinging claws of roots and vignettes.
Not a soul stirred at this crossroads, no one near the bleak cotton sheds of corrugated tin, an ancient cotton gin behind it, a faded sign, MONEY, coated in red dust above a loading dock. No one on the road or near the tracks of the north-south railway line that passed the level crossing by the front of Bryant’s store, where I stood in the failing light.
A whistle sounded, the two-note moan of an oncoming train, whoo-eee, a lonely cry, especially so in this haunted place, a crossroads in the dark plowed land in the flat heart of Mississippi. Banging on the rails, the train went past, the anvil-clang echo vibrating on the skeletal walls of Bryant’s store and the tin of the cotton sheds and the gin. It was a wonder to me that in the fifty-nine years since the crime, the indifferent thunder of this passing train had not shaken down the walls of this old store.
I drove east down Whaley Road, past Money Bayou and some narrow ponds, hoping to find Dark Ferry Road and the farm of Grover C. Washington, where Mose Wright’s little house had stood, where he’d worked as a sharecropper. My map didn’t help, and there was no one to ask, and some parts of the past had been erased, but negligible parts. It was dusk when I drove back to Money, the same sort of darkness into which Emmett Till had been dragged.
Traveling up the empty road out of Money (renamed the Emmett Till Memorial Highway in 2005), I passed a sign, GLENDORA. I turned off and even in the failing light saw that Glendora, unlike Money, was an actual town with a main street, or it had been before the decay had set in. Near these mean huts and trailers and bankrupt shops, Emmett Till had been beaten to death, in J. W. Milam’s barn, and where Milam had lived, a free man, until he died in 1980.
On a later sunny day I returned to Glendora. Sunshine can be cruel; pitiless light can turn a sad place into something awful. Glendora was worse than a ruin. It was shocking, a hideous street of shacks and hovels, a poor grocery store, the porch of a bar where men in rags, with glazed dog-like eyes, sipped from bottles and cans. The squalor of Glendora made it seem a living museum of Southern poverty—drunks, stumblers in broken shoes, some of them supine and snoring in the grass, idle men in the middle of the sunny day, near the plot of land and the house the murderer J. W. Milam had once owned—the house torn down, a sign indicating where it had stood. These black Glendora men and dazed defiant boys were the inheritors.
In more than a year of travel in the Deep South, I never felt menaced or sensed that I was in the presence of danger from anyone. I did not feel endangered here, but the vibration of hostility on this potholed road of Glendora was something that made me feel like an intruder and caused me to be watchful. Perhaps it was something simple, the shame of poor people, suddenly self-conscious in the presence of a stranger, drunks feeling conspicuous in their jostling among someone sober, the poor rooted in the
ir decrepitude, hating to be observed, resenting me for having arrived, resenting me for so easily being able to depart.
Down this Glendora lane I saw a former cotton gin, a plain, two-story, looming structure of corrugated metal sections—tin walls, tin roof—with the additional horror of having no windows. This obsolete building, on its own in the middle of fields at the edge of Glendora, housed the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (ETHIC) and the museum associated with his name.
Outside the building, a woman walking to her car smiled at me. I said hello, and then, to engage her, “What did you think of the museum?”
“You have to see it,” she said. She was dressed formally, as though for church or a social, in a red dress, wearing a white hat, and carrying a substantial handbag. “This is a very important place. Everyone should see it.”
Her name, she said, was Cherraye Oats. She was probably in her late forties, and in her dignified clothes looked unlike any other person I’d seen in Glendora.
I said, “I remember when it happened.”
“I’m too young for that,” she said. “But it deeply affected my aunt”—and she paused, then added—“who was Fannie Lou Hamer.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the bravest and most outspoken of the activists in voter registration in the Freedom Summer of 1963, founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party the following year as a response (which proved contentious) to the all-white state delegation to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Severely beaten, imprisoned, and fired from her job for her views, Fannie Lou Hamer became one of the memorable voices of the civil rights movement and was politically and socially active until her death, at the age of sixty, in 1977. Her gravestone is inscribed with one of her remarks about segregation: “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Cherraye Oats and her daughter Courtney were organizers at the Fannie Lou Hamer Center for Change in Eupora. Cherraye had been raised in Ruleville and now lived in Eupora, small towns not far from Glendora. The daughter of a sharecropper named Townsend, one of twenty children, Fannie Lou must have had many nieces and nephews, but in her passion and presence Cherraye was in the Hamer mold. We talked awhile—she asked how I happened to be there and where I was headed.
