Writing to Save a Life

by John Edgar Wideman

  The train station in the video could be the same one where September 2, 1955, Mamie Till, dead Louis Till’s wife, dead Emmett Louis Till’s mother, accompanied by her father, an uncle, cousins, an undertaker, two preachers, one named Louis Henry Ford (the father of Willie Mae Ford?) wait for the train from Mississippi bringing her murdered son back home to Chicago. Same train, the City of New Orleans, Emmett had boarded alive to leave Chicago less than two weeks before. A large crowd congregated at the station on September 2 to support Mrs. Till and witness the terrible truth of a story read in the papers, passed by word of mouth, concerning one of theirs, a fourteen-year-old Chicago black boy on a summer visit to relatives in Money, Mississippi, a boy beaten, shot, his mutilated body wired by the neck to a seventy-pound cotton gin fan and tossed into the Tallahatchie River to punish him, his cousin’s story claims, for wolf-whistling a white woman.

  The tape plays on and I listen for the Till train’s entry into the station. Listening as I still listen some Sunday mornings for the scratchy music from my mother’s cracked black plastic radio tuned to WAMO at the end of the dial. My fair-skinned mother humming along as she spray-starches and irons one of my brown-skinned father’s white shirts for church. White shirts with collars and breasts ironed stiff, my father wears under his waiter’s jacket six days a week downtown in a dining room in Kaufmann’s department store in Pittsburgh, a restaurant that used to be barred by a gold rope across the entrance, by a hostess notoriously uncordial towards colored folk who dared to eat there. Louis Till must have owned a white shirt. My father’s white shirt for church Sunday morning was more perfectly white and gleaming than the perfect ones worn to work every weekday and Saturday. My father’s hardness and absence crackled in those white shirts he demanded be kept spotless, wrinkle-free. In a room rented after he left us for good, gospel plays on a radio while he removes a laundered white shirt from its cellophane wrapper. He turns his back to me to put it on. When he’s facing me again, I watch his thick, dark fingers button the shirt, tremble to work gold-rimmed cuff links into tiny holes.

  Even as a boy fourteen years old, Emmett Till’s age when Emmett Till was murdered, I understood my father hated those white shirts. Hated them and loved them, too. I also understood, boy or not, I was a large enough boy to get my ass out of bed and help my mother the night I heard a terrible crash in our living room. I knew my parents were fighting, but instead of rushing to save my mother, I lay petrified, pretending to sleep, afraid of a white shirt glowing in the darkness of the adjoining room. I held my breath, waited for my mother’s footsteps to prove she was alive and had managed to pick herself up from the floor.

  My father had been waiting for my mother. I knew this without spying on him. How could I sleep while my father sits out there waiting for my mother, waiting with the lights off in the other room, not a sound for hour after hour except music playing in my head and the snoring of my siblings. Rakhim in bed beside me was the worst. On good nights the other kids’ restlessness and nasty noises were quieted by sounds of my mother busy in the kitchen, scrubbing dirty pots, rinsing, drying, stacking dishes. The rasp of a crooked cupboard door that never shuts first try. The last thing every evening she runs water for a cool drink then washes her cup and puts it away for coffee next morning. Same cup she uses all day so she doesn’t make extra work. Plate, knife, fork and spoon set out for my father each night he’s not home for dinner so he knows there’s food in the fridge to warm up if he hasn’t eaten on the job or smuggled home fancy leftovers from late night private parties he works. Last final thing, she switches off the kitchen light, and the yellow bar under our bedroom door dims.

  Some nights I keep listening after my mother leaves the kitchen, crosses the living room, into the hall. Listen past the point she’s probably asleep in the tiny room squeezed into a corner of a landing at the top of stairs that go down to the Lemingtons’ apartment. My parents’ room is a room far enough away to muffle their whispers, their preparations for sleep on those rare nights they go to bed together. Though certain nights, I think I hear the blue crackle of a white shirt as my father pulls it off, or hear my mother alone in their bedroom humming gospel like she hums when she’s up very late waiting for my father to come home and he doesn’t, and she hums herself to sleep curled on the couch. Always gone when I jump up first thing next morning to check.

  No matter how long I listen, sooner or later my vigil fails. I drop off and lose her. Worst nights, lying awake beside my youngest brother Rakhim, I worry and worry that everything I love and hate will be gone in the morning and never return. I listen long after my mother finishes her last little things, turns off the kitchen light and the bright inch under the door is replaced by faint illumination leaking in from a lamp by the front door she always leaves on for my father. I wonder if my mother’s sleeping or not in the bedroom, more closet than room, where she’s supposed to be. Wonder if she’s full of worries about my father. My siblings. Me.

  The night of the terrible crash came right after three days and nights my father never made it home. Not home late as usual. Not home early or late. Not ever. No father for three days. No warnings in the morning from my mother to the younger kids, Shhhh. Hush all that noise, youall. Shush and eat your cereal. You know your father’s sleeping. You know you better not wake up your father. No father’s snores when I pass the bedroom landing on my way to school.

  On the bad night my father returns early. Nine, ten o’clock. Very early for him, anyway, and he knocks softly then fumbles in his deep pockets for keys to let himself in. My mother’s out. Very late for her. A rare night she’s not home, and good boy me has performed his duties, bedded down the other kids at the exact hour, in the precise fashion, almost, my mother commanded. Don’t be mean to your little brothers and sister. Firm but nice with them. And don’t you dare sit up waiting for me like you think you’re my mother. Soon enough I’ll be sitting up all night worrying because you think you’re grown enough to run the streets till dawn, she said. But I couldn’t help staying awake.

  Music’s playing in my head, fast and slow, rhythms change, words change, Rakhim’s wheezing snores mixed in, blues mixed with gospel, mixed with R & B, the Dells and Diablos, Drifters and Spaniels and Midnighters singing my songs on WAMO. Love music mixed with worry music mixed with dance music mixed with desire and fear of things I didn’t know the names of yet. Worried maybe I never would. Worried it all might vanish.

  No light brightens the crack below the door. My father snapped it off when he came in and discovered my mother not at home. After three days gone, I’d begun to believe he’d left for good, but then I hear his key in the lock and he’s back home that night before my mother. Mother late. Father early. Strange turnabout. Me faking sleep. I wasn’t spying on my father, but I could hear his breathing, heartbeats, pounding of his thoughts, his big hands gripping his knees. I could hear his stillness in the overstuffed armchair everybody called Daddy’s Chair. His impatience and anger fill the silence with unthinkable acts, unspeakable words, hard and heavy as fists.

  I pretended not to know why I was scared, though if I had tried, I could have said why. I was old enough to understand nearly everything. It was all in the music. In the talk in Henderson’s Barbershop. Woman who’s a wife and mother got no damned business out in the street, don’t care whatever goddamned sister you say you with, no goddamned business out in the street this goddamn time of night. Did I hear those particular words that night or are they blues words, gospel words, barbershop words dreamed, heard before the fact or after the fact of my mother’s body striking the floor, a sound that would have awakened me even if I’d been asleep as far away as the place old thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone Reverend Felder of Homewood AME Zion promised God would pitch bad black boys.

  * * *

  The singer’s daughter tells her brother she overheard one of the church young folk ask: Willie Mae Ford Smith. Who that? Then Say Amen, Somebody’s camera retreats for a long shot to frame the once-upon-a
-time gospel queen’s children within the airplane hangar immensity of an empty steel shell with steel girders holding up a steel groined, vaulted ceiling, the section of a Chicago train station they reached by driving earlier in the video down a ramp at whose entrance light blazed in a checkerboard pattern from overhead grates, shafts of smoking brilliance pouring into the obscurity below, obscurity only slightly relieved here, inside the station, by illumination from begrimed panels in a ceiling miles away it seems from where the brother and sister stand now after they have parked underground, exited outdoors, then entered the station. They instinctively huddle closer together as they talk in whispers, as any two people or small group of persons likely would talk in a gloomy space that dwarfs them, dwarfs their voices whether they speak softly or shout. Big-boned, wide-hipped, large brown people whispering small things, simple, deep things, a call-and-response of reminiscence, holding on, letting go until there is no bottom, no sides, no ceiling to the station, no secrets, no down or up or come or go.

  I pause the tape. Is it the Twelfth Street Station. What does it remember. Is a train station able to gaze at itself, revive the past, double it, a double as quiet as the face, the moving lips of my reflection within a mirror. Quiet as silences within the silences of Thelonious Monk’s piano. During the Twelfth Street Station’s heyday did people’s dreams truly float above the platform upon which I picture myself waiting for an Illinois Central train to arrive or depart, a platform lined with cardboard suitcases, ancient steamer trunks, duffel bags, shopping bags, string-tied bundles and cartons, colored girls carrying everything they own in a warm package they cradle in their arms, all of that dreaming and waiting, waiting, every shadow and echo and breath of those lives dust and grit somebody brooms away each morning from the station’s concrete floor.

  * * *

  I remember Chicago at night, a tapestry of winking, blinking lights out the windows of an elevated train, lights which are pinpricks in a black winding sheet draped over a snowbound city. And once in a taxi, approaching the city in daytime from O’Hare, I stared at the stark verticality of church steeples, minarets, smokestacks, waves of skyscrapers, a gray backdrop that recedes and draws nearer, both at once, skeletal towers trussed by power lines, sheaves of dirt poor dirty row after ramshackle row of houses, blocks of low-rise apartment buildings, public housing warrens twenty stories high, acres of demolished blocks, blocks and succeeding blocks of concrete, brick, stone-faced canyons the hawk rules in winter and no matter how much you bundle up or hoody-up humping through alleys, wind-tunnel streets, body slanted at a forty-five-degree angle like a character in a cartoon, your eyes tear, teeth chatter, no mama to wipe your snotty nose.

  I also remember Chicago in a photo tucked in an old family album. Who had scribbled Chicago and people’s names on the photo’s yellowed backing. Faded, indecipherable names. Names of dressed-up folks maybe on their way to a splendid party. Chicago was a surprise in the Pittsburgh family album. Who are these strangers floating past, fancy people, handsome people in furs and expensive overcoats, my sturdy brown people light on their feet as ghosts. Do they live on another planet inhabiting the planet I inhabit. One scene, one photo, many universes dissolve, splash, one into the other always. I still possess Emmett Till’s photo from September 1955 on a page torn out of Jet magazine that Aunt Geraldine saved and gave me thirty years later.

  I was fourteen the first time I saw the photo in Jet. Emmett Till’s age that summer they murdered him. Him colored, me colored. Him a boy, me too. Him so absolutely dead he’s my death, too. Fuzzy replicas of the photo appeared in colored newspapers—Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News—the image circulating, recycled decades later in Eyes on the Prize, a documentary history of the civil rights movement in which I saw the horrific picture of dead Emmett Till’s face staring back from my TV screen and freeze-framed it. Courage mustered finally, half a century after the fact. I did not look away. Hoped if I stared hard maybe the photo would wither, wrinkle, flames curl its edges, consume it. No screams, no agony, no sputtering frying chicken crackle like you’d think you’d hear.

  * * *

  I push play and Say Amen, Somebody resumes. More quiet exchanges between brother and sister, their voices barely audible to one another above the stillness. Are they afraid words might disturb sleeping ghosts. Delay the Till train’s slide into the station or its glide away. As if words could stop a train. Stop time. No. Not even words a brother and sister keep inside themselves, will you bury me or will I bury you, not even those unsayable words shouted out loud could waken their mother, stop the Till train.

  Willie Mae Ford Smith’s grown-up children under the steel arc of roof remember fine clothes, fine cars, taxis. Black limos rolling up to the curb. So much glitter and glamour. The brother recalls veteran redcaps as well as neophytes shaking their heads in wonder, Who that. Where they going. Where they coming from. Boy oh boy. Their mother, Willie Mae Ford, sang church music thick with blues, ready or not, like it or not, you get blues licked up in gospel. Didn’t want Mama when she young and just starting out, and before long they standing in line in bitter cold and snow paying good money to hear Mama and now the young folks see her in church every Sunday forgot her name.

  Later, leaving the station, one sibling frowns, the other grins in response. Whole lifetimes flicker on the TV screen compressed into a single glance they exchange. One expression scrubbed away instantaneously by the next, light to dark to light, too fast to follow, he’s your brother, you’re his sister, we’ve done that, been there, no need to go back, to linger or regret or hope. Here we are, here it is, this quiet moment in the station Samboing into every other moment and the black boy chases the tiger fast as the tiger chases him.

  * * *

  Mamie Till listens harder than anyone else for the Till train. Looks closer than anyone else at her dead son’s body, I looked at the ears, the forehead, the lips, the nose, she wrote. She knows the train’s due, perhaps in the station already, the same City of Orleans that carried her live Emmett away two weeks ago, returns today with his corpse, enters the Twelfth Street Station, enters silence sealed under a high, arching ceiling. Silence of dark, swollen thunderclouds, quiet of a storm ready to burst.

  ARGO

  * * *

  Nothing closer to truth than truth—but the truth is—not even truth is close to truth. So we create fiction. As a writer searching for Louis Till, I choose to assume certain prerogatives—license might be a more accurate word. I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people’s true stories. And to be fair, I let other people’s stories trespass the truth of mine.

  I go with Mamie Till back home to Chicago. It’s a week or two after the Mississippi murder trial and its ugly aftermath. No kidnapping charges filed against the two men who abducted and killed her son. Why Mamie Till is asking herself. Mrs. Till, dead Emmett’s mother, dead Louis Till’s wife, must be thinking that terror never ends. Terror is truth and truth is terror and it never ends, she thinks. Truth of that big stinking crate with a box inside with Emmett’s dead body inside the box. Terror of the box closed, truth of the undertaker prying it open with hammer claws. Terror of not looking, truth of looking. She must bear both for Emmett, for love, for justice, a look inside the box she cannot dare until she prays hard and a voice whispers, your heart will be encased in glass and no arrow can pierce it. Truth of listening to herself say, I want the world to see what they did to my baby. Terror of standing beside Bo’s open casket at the funeral while she sees in the eyes of mourners who file past the terror and truth of what they see. Terror of lost Emmett. Truth of how he returns. There’s my heart underneath that glass lid. Terror of sleepless sleep, sleep, sleep, sleeping all day, never truly asleep. Truth of being wide awake forever, day and night. Terror and truth of nightmares sleepless sleep brings . . .

  She talks to herself. After the ceaseless terror and truth and terror, she’s still alive in her mother’s apartment in Argo and must decide to live or die, and
decide again the moment after this one. Yes or no again. Her eyes rest on a man who sits on a chair Albert carried in from the kitchen. This man, the half brother of her lover Albert, has the strange name, Wealthy, and she thinks maybe he might have been sent by God, to help her. She needs to believe, needs help. Too many nights alone, too much wandering and fumbling around here in these rooms alone day after day, bone tired, going crazy, if truth be told. No sleep, then more tired and nervous fumbling around here after Mama goes off to work in the morning. I’m all alone with my own self, she thinks, but keep bumping into Bo, my sweet Bo, everywhere and then it’s not him I hear, I smell, I follow. I reach out to touch him, but Bo’s gone, gone, and I drop down on the sofa or armchair, try to nap, to forget and can’t. Wear myself out trying to make up some person who will tell me what to do next, tell me to stop holding my breath, tell me how to breathe again, tell me not to wait for the worst thing on earth to be over because it’s never over, always more terror and truth and then more.

  * * *

  Mr. Wealthy looks like a nice man and I surely do need somebody nice, a nice somebody to say words I can’t say to myself. Say breathe. Say the thing you must do next, Mamie Till, is this. The voice of a new somebody. Not you, Mama. Not nice Albert. Somebody I don’t know who says words I need to hear. No face, no color, no man or woman I can imagine, though I think it should have to be a man because a woman’s too much like me, she would try to make me feel better because she’s a woman, a mother who understands bleeding inside for her child and moaning inside and watching how everything outside minute by minute pays you no mind, gets no better, gets worse and you’re more scared every minute for your child but nothing you can do, just watch and hurt and bleed and try to tell yourself it’s not as bad as it seems, everything going to be all right like the songs say, by and by, but that lie don’t fly, you are just talking to your own dumb self, you need another person to tell you the truth. It could be a woman or a man who tells it to me but harder, Mama, to believe a woman and nobody, no man or woman or chicken with a talking mouth can bring back my child. My sweet Bo gone. They killed my baby.