If I had been asleep at the switch and missed the telltale October date, it reappears two pages later on a memorandum addressed to the office of the judge advocate general (JAG). The cover page of the long memo names its subject as Louis Till, formerly Pvt. 36392273, and lists as its contents a series of enclosures, some of which are included, some not in my copy of the file. At the bottom of the memo a circular official seal certifies the memo’s date of dispatch, 14 Oct 1955, and above it, typed this time, the name of Ralph K. Johnson, Colonel, JAG chief, Military Justice Division, the officer who facilitated the release of classified documents. In response to some unnamed but very powerful person’s request, rules had been broken and the Louis Till File, buried ten years in an archive, had been disinterred, disturbed, the remains shipped by the judge advocate general’s office to the press and to lawyers defending Emmett Till’s killers.
But the October 14, 1955, date is not necessarily smoke curling from a guilty gun barrel. If Emmett Till’s murderers committed no crime, then no conspiracy to cover up a crime exists. What would be accomplished if I were to shout the October date from the rooftops of New York City or Money, Mississippi. A redneck senator’s vicious meddling (later, he proudly admitted his role in an interview), and an accommodating army officer’s betrayal of a fellow soldier’s privacy were minor trespasses, once I began to grasp the gravity of wrongdoing recorded in the Till file.
* * *
I’ve read the Louis Till file cover to cover many times now. I’m all too familiar with its frustrating discontinuities, helter-skelter chronology, bits and pieces of handwritten military dispatches and typed correspondence tossed in with no apparent rhyme or reason, one section interrupted or repeated by another, pages missing, pages playing hide-and-seek. The document I received from the government archives in Virginia is a hodgepodge of this and that, making sense sometimes, sometimes not. Like history. History in general or any individual life history in particular. Mine, for example. Yours. Ours. History a vanished city, erased by war or flood or fire or earthquake. Or many cities collapsed one atop another over the centuries, buried under miles and miles of sand.
However, each time I reach the end of the file—Louis Till and Fred McMurray hanged, Junior Thomas exonerated—the ironies are too bitter. Too final. I’m diminished by what I’ve learned. Common sense says step back, take a deep breath, a long view. But I can’t. Any peace of mind I try to cobble together is mocked by power. Power that controls the record. Displays and deploys the record. Power that smirks at me. Power putting words in Louis Till’s mouth. Power imprisoning, executing colored soldiers, young colored men cut down war or no war. Power importantly clearing its throat, Hrrrrhumph, as it delivers the last word on Louis Till.
The literal last word on the last page of the Till file is Confidential, stamped at the bottom of a letter written in February 1945 by a Brigadier General Oxx to the commanding officer of the infamous MTOUSA (Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army) Disciplinary Training Center. The letter releases Private James Thomas, Junior, from prison and transfers him, the snitch who doomed Till, from the company he served in with Till and McMurray to another company of the 379th. Someone drew lines through Confidential, but you can still see the word at the bottom of the file’s final page. The job of some enlisted men, probably, to make sure Confidential was crossed out on all two hundred plus pages just as on the file’s cover. Power transforming Confidential into a ghost word, dead and alive, invisible and present. An ironic word. A word meaning something and nothing. A word everywhere and nowhere in the file. Silenced and speaking like lynched Louis Till.
* * *
I close the last page and I’m certain again that nothing about the record is accidental. The Till file works the way any good, old-fashioned novel works. It may sprawl all over the known world, but by the final scene, the plot’s resolved, accounts settled, order restored, characters receive their just deserts. Which means somebody’s been telling a story. Somebody’s been in control. Then the story’s over. Ending the only way it could end, the way it was supposed to end from the first word, first page. The file irreversible. An unwavering witness. Story’s finished, and I’m left out. Take it or leave it. Nowhere to hide.
I compel myself to go back to the beginning. Resist the ugly story. Resist the reality these stapled-together documents construct. Even if my resistance only confirms a reality damaged beyond repair.
And here’s something else, just as unsettling as power’s smirk, as the ugliness the discolored, disorderly pages embody. While I read the file, so much fear and busyness stirred up around Private Louis Till, it’s easy to forget how young he was. Only a kid. Barely twenty-three years old minus two years, nine months stolen by war and prison. Till’s only chance for a life, his only story, only portion over quickly. Pages read and reread, renumbered or not, will not change this truth. Truth of how soon Louis Till’s life ends. A very young person cut down. Then his son Emmett, cut down at fourteen, gets nine years less of life than his father. Nothing I read or write will buy the Tills more time. Nothing stops the greedy, crazed old men who eat their children.
* * *
I’m wide awake. Grope for the phone on a night table beside the bed. Did its ringing wake me. Will it ring again. My hand overturns and recalls at the same instant a glassful of water I’d set beside the phone. Stillness and darkness amplified by the phone’s abrupt silence when it stops ringing. A glass shattering sounded like a dozen glasses. Too late, but I warn my arm anyway. Be careful. Remember the water I set out to keep me company. Suddenly the air conditioner thuds on, shuddering in its metal casing. Where were you when I needed you, motherfucker. Then I remember I’m in another country. Nothing here speaks English. It’s sultry Italian air bathing me in sweat. I need to pee. As I swing my legs over to what I hope is the safe side of the floor, a fist starts to bram on the door. Louder and louder. Then a voice from the other side. Dat boy from Chicago in dere. You got the one did the talking in dere.
* * *
One masked intruder carried a gun, the Till file informs me. After the men burst through the door, one of them lit a match. Match light was enough, victims claimed, to pick out a face’s color under a hood in the pitch-black shack. Three intruders. Three of them, three colored men . . . negroes . . . niggers, swore the inhabitants of the raided Mari residence in Civitavecchia. Four of us raided, swore the accused in their testimony. This major discrepancy—were there three or four assailants—is never questioned by defense attorneys during the court-martial of Louis Till and Fred McMurray.
The Mari shack or barracks or shanty, as it was variously identified in the file, consisted of two rooms, both opening onto a passageway or corridor that leads to the single entrance. The larger of the two small rooms was divided by a partition. Frieda Mari slept on one side of the partition, her parents, Ernetto Mari and Guila Persi, on the other. Benni Lucretzia and her daughter, Elena, refugees who’d just arrived in Civitavecchia from the bombed-out village of Allumiere, occupied a negligible space behind the Mari-Persi room. The cramped barracks (a crude diagram included in the file) afforded little or no privacy, depending on the sleeping area in which a bed was located.
Though no enemy planes transgressed the night skies above Civitavecchia on June 27, 1944, antiaircraft artillery rumbled and searchlights probed, frightening civilians, scrambling the American troops garrisoned at camps nearby. Frieda Mari, closely trailed by the girl Elena, had bolted from her bed to the shack’s door, flung it open to escape falling walls or to see for herself what new terror war was delivering. She never got beyond the door. Masked men shooed her and Elena back inside the darkness. Colored men she was sure, she said, because the intruders lit matches. One of them was tall, she said. Dark-skinned, five foot, ten inches. Another shorter, light-skinned, five foot, six inches, and the third, the shortest one, a mulatto, whitest of the three. Later, while the shortest, whitest one is on top of her, Frieda Mari testifies she lifts the hoodlike mask off his
face. The glimpse she steals leaves no doubt in her mind, she tells judges at the court-martial. Her attacker was a mulatto. Asked by a juror what color exactly she had seen in the darkness, Frieda Mari replies: He wasn’t very light. He was sort of a light dark or clear dark. The juror (looking around the courtroom where Till and McMurray sit) goes on to ask: Is there anyone in this room that would have the color of this person. Frieda Mari answers. There aren’t any.
No, all witnesses agree: Too dark to tell what color clothing the attackers wore. Yes, all witnesses agree: we could see the color of the invaders’ skin.
In spite of darkness broken only by an occasional match or flashes from antiaircraft guns and searchlights penetrating the shack’s flimsy walls, in the file the victims provide uncannily consistent and precise physical descriptions of the intruders. Three witnesses identify one man’s height as five foot, ten inches, another man as five foot, six inches. At least that’s what statements prepared by Criminal Investigation Division investigators assert. Maybe CID agents simply reported what they heard during interviews. Maybe not. The statements are in English. Presumably the victims spoke Italian, so the statements have been translated. Measurements expressed in inches and feet are conversions from centimeters and meters. Spoken words have been reduced (CID agents’ term of art) to typed summaries. Translation. Conversion. Reduction. Each process transforms a witness’s words. Each creates a step away, further and further away, from the words of live encounters between CID agents and witnesses. I grant the agents the benefit of the doubt. Assume they did their best to render accurately the words of people they interviewed, and still—translation, conversion, reduction produce at best problematic, at worst unreliable, corrupted representations of conversations.
Suppose the English versions of interviews in the file were translated into Italian, the inches and feet converted to metrics. Would Italian witnesses recognize their original statements in these retranslations. Would they proclaim Sì, yes, those are my words.
My copy of the Till file begins with about thirty pages of miscellaneous correspondence, including notices certifying that Privates Louis (NMI) Till and Fred A. McMurray had been charged, tried, executed, and a newspaper clipping dated October 15, 1955, reporting that Louis Till had been hanged in 1945 for rapes and murder he committed in Italy. Then comes a long, detailed narrative, composed after the McMurray, Till court-martial, by an army board of review that describes the crimes of June 27–28 in Civitavecchia, Italy. Death certificates of Till and McMurray follow. Next comes the initial report of alleged Civitavecchia crimes compiled by Agents Herlihy and Rousseau of Criminal Investigation Division, Rome Allied Area Command (CID/RAAC #41) filed August 7, 1944. After snippets of administrative paperwork, two more postcourt-martial narratives of the crimes appear, both written like the initial narrative, by army officers whose job was to determine whether or not justice had been served. All three review board narratives tell the same story. Not surprising since they all depend solely, uncritically on information contained in the original investigative report (CID/RAAC #41) and testimony recorded in the court-martial transcript. Three repetitions of more or less the same story asserting violent details of who did what to whom have a chilling effect. Why would anyone reading the tale today challenge its impartiality.
No doubt about it. Some brutal, ugly shit went down in Civitavecchia. No counternarratives contest the accuracy, the veracity of what review boards report. Guilt of Till and McMurray a foregone conclusion when the court-martial transcript appears at the end of the Till file. Pretrial publicity with a vengeance. The court-martial transcript doesn’t serve the reader as an opportunity for unbiased weighing of evidence. A guilty verdict arrives as a kind of I-told-you-so. A tail positioned in the file to wag the dog. From one review board text to the next, alleged facts pick up speed and weight, become an irresistible avalanche.
Review board writers adopt the omniscient voice of certain kinds of fiction (and nonfiction) that seem to grant readers the privilege of being detached, objective observers of the action. As if a video cam hovers above scenes and characters, an objective eye and ear reporting truth and only the truth. It’s a convincing account unless a reader understands the scenarios presented by the words of review boards are not eyewitness reports of unbiased spectators present during the action, but reductions of reductions.
Testimony in the Till file may seem to come from many voices, but all voices are mediated by CID/RAAC agents. These agents, fellow officers of court-martial judges, gather evidence, take statements from witnesses and defendants, submit their finding to the prosecution (and sometimes to the defense). Conditions pertaining during the original CID interviews/interrogations—hour of night or day, duration, methods and incentives employed to extract information, who was present during questioning—remain unknown unless the agent preparing the reduction chooses to include such factors. This system provides agents ample, perhaps irresistible, opportunities for abuse.
Limited only by conscience and ingenuity, agents can manipulate, freelance, bypass entirely words of a witness. But witness statements enter the record and are treated as if they are taped depositions, the exact words of witnesses. The only authentication required is a second signature beneath the signature of the officer who files the reduction. Routinely this signature is supplied by a fellow agent.
* * *
Witness statements in the file establish minute details—an intruder’s exact height—and leave major issues unsettled—how many men raided the Mari residence, how many women were sexually assaulted. For army officers at court-martial or serving on review boards, the cumulative weight of victim statements establish, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Louis Till and Fred McMurray as perpetrators, even though each individual victim admits that darkness, hoods, masks, shock, confusion made it impossible to identify the men who attacked them. Seated across the court-martial chamber from Till and McMurray, no victim could identify or accuse either man. Including Ernetto Mari, Frieda Mari’s father, who had claimed in a previous statement recorded by CID agents that he had seen the three colored intruders outdoors, in broad daylight, near the Cisterna, a waterpoint in Civitavecchia, the afternoon following the night they’d raided his home and knocked him unconscious: I saw the three men—the same three—behind the house of a neighbor.
I was not present so I can’t claim to know what transpired in a specific interview or sequence of interviews, but no doubt CID officers determined which words formed the final shape and meaning of testimony presented at court-martial. Telltale signs of reduction are abundant in both structure and content of victim statements. In Agent Barnes’s version of what Benni Lucretzia and Frieda Mari said to him in their second recorded interviews (October 28, 1944) the last words of both statements deliver a punch line to remind the reader each woman was pregnant when assaulted. Both statements repeat identical phrases and words. Push must be one of Captain Barnes’s favorite words; it appears six times in the twelve lines of one woman’s statement, seven times in the other woman’s.
When a witness speaks to court-martial judges (or to a reader of the Till file), it’s fair to ask whose words issue from the witness’s mouth. Off-camera interrogations allow agents to plant information, coach, coax, censor, coerce. The original recorded statements of Lucretia and Mari are each less than two hundred words. At court-martial each woman’s testimony expands to include all the classic elements necessary for conviction of capital rape—violence, coercion, duration of the act, depth of vaginal penetration, sightings of the offender’s penis, assertion of the victim’s resistance, the aggravating presence of deadly weapons.
* * *
The fact that Till, McMurray, and the other alleged perpetrators were colored, plus the fact that Till and McMurray were reported in the vicinity of Civitavecchia the night the crimes occurred, is enough to convince army officers the accused are guilty. No further burden of proof is demanded from the prosecution. Privates Till and McMurray are sentenced to death on the basis
of being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong color, wrong place, wrong time, a mantra. A crime that over the course of our nation’s history has transformed countless innocent people of color into guilty people. The remainder of the case against Till and McMurray consists of conflicting, ambiguous hearsay evidence that for some reason, defense lawyers, except for a few timid objections, allowed to stand. On one rare occasion when defense lawyers did challenge the prosecution’s case (a defense contention that Fred McMurray’s written statement naming Louis Till as the ringleader of the fatal raid should be excluded because it was obtained by grilling McMurray for at least ten consecutive hours), court-martial judges quickly overruled the objection.
CID agents began their investigation of Anna Zanchi’s murder unaware that two Italian women had been assaulted near the Zanchi residence the same night Anna Zanchi had been shot. With no murder weapon recovered from the Zanchi shooting, no motive, no suspects, the investigation of the Zanchi homicide was floundering and probably would have languished indefinitely unless someone stepped forward to confess or accuse. However, once CID agents heard rumors of rape by colored men, rapes occurring the night of the Zanchi shooting, their murder investigation proceeded rapidly, on firm footing. Rape and color paved the way. Saved the day. All the investigating officers needed were colored suspects, and the segregated 379th, a battalion full, was handy. Even better, agents already had in custody a bunch of colored sugar thieves.
Rape victims could be persuaded, unlike dead Anna Zanchi, to confirm the color if not the individual faces of assailants. Energized by rape and color, the investigation bulldozed ahead, more mission than inquiry. Color and rape provided a motive. Explain and link crimes on the night of June 27 as a single, predictable outburst of the well-known lust and violence that seethes barely suppressed in the dark blood of colored soldiers. A drunken, murderous, spree. A riot of uncontrollable, atavistic impulses. Colored soldiers whom the army considered second-class citizens were suspects who possessed no rights investigators need respect. The logic of southern lynch law prevailed. All colored males are guilty of desiring to rape white women, so any colored soldier the agents hanged could not be innocent.
Writing to Save a Life Page 9
