Sons of Mississippi

by Paul Hendrickson

  There seems to have been a lot of driving around in the Delta night. There are stories of pistol whippings. There are stories about screams overheard, coming from a toolshed behind Big Milam’s house. But there are also opposing stories—coming from Bryant and Milam themselves—about a victim’s failure to whimper enough, to grovel satisfactorily for their mercy. Did he even boast to his abductors about the white girls he’d had in his life? After the half brothers had been indicted for murder, they would claim they had wished only to scare the boy. They’d claim they had set him loose. But later, in the pages of Look magazine and then in a 1959 book called Wolf Whistle, they’d tell it all. Why not? According to their own self-justifying accounts—the first published in Look three months after their acquittal, for which they were paid roughly $4,000 of journalistic blood money by a reporter named William Bradford Huie—the two, though especially J. W. Milam, taunted Till at the last with lines such as “You still good as I am?” and “You’ve still ‘had’ white women?” Out of the courtroom, protected by the provisions of double jeopardy, Milam could remember he’d said, “Chicago boy, I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddamn you—I’m gonna make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.” Once he was free, Milam could explain to Huie, a Southerner himself: “Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.” So yes, it was acknowledged to the world, later, for the old lure of silver. They hadn’t intended to kill him. He’d given them no choice. He’d refused to repent.

  The body was found three days after the abduction. A young fisherman inspecting his trotlines in the river came on a partially submerged and nude thing hung in a drift with something heavy and very muddy tied to it. This was at Pecan Point, twelve to fifteen miles upriver from Money, in the neighboring county. It was August 31, 1955. The Greenwood Commonwealth, the only newspaper of size in that part of the Delta, ran a headline on page 1, opposite a story about comely Lucille Pillow getting crowned “Miss Teen Age Greenwood.” At 3 P.M. on the day Emmett Till was found, Chi Omega alumnae honored the upcoming year’s rushees with a swimming party at the home of Mrs. Charles S. Whittington of Greenwood, and on that day, too, the board of control of Leflore County met in the Confederate Memorial Building. And there was the gay Ladies’ Day luncheon at the Greenwood Country Club.

  Several days later, the body reached the IC railway terminal in Chicago, and thirty-three-year-old Mamie Bradley was awaiting it. Friends and family held her up. The casket sat on a Railway Express wagon. She studied the hairline and teeth and said she wanted an open-coffin funeral. She said she wanted the world to “see what they did to my boy.”

  Standing in front of the grocery, trying to conjure, it’s hard not to feel disconsolate. What is there to do after a while but leave? Departing Money, to the north, there are railroad tracks on a high roadbed on the right; the river is moving imperceptibly on the left. Out in the stubbled fields of early winter, there are little snowy pieces of cotton leavings from this season’s harvest. Those fields, impossibly fertile, are black and wet, waiting for spring and the first plowing. Spring in Mississippi is when the fields get “rowed up.” That’s how cotton men of the Delta say it, with such mellifluence: rowed up.

  The five-day trial was held in an adjoining county in the town of Sumner. The verdict was rendered by an all-white jury of neighbors in one hour and eight minutes. If the name “Money” has powerful resonance to anyone who’s ever attempted to understand the sins and racial sorrows of Mississippi, then “Sumner” will have resonance as well. It’s the place where, if you squint, you can see straw-bottom chairs in a second-floor courtroom, the lone overhead fan, the widening moons of sweat beneath the rows of armpits.

  During jury selection, Judge Curtis Swango, who was generally commended by observers for his sense of fairness in the trial, uncapped a Coca-Cola from the bench and sipped on it. Bailiffs passed pitchers of ice water and peddlers sold soft drinks to help wash down the box lunches folks had brought into the segregated courtroom. The small, restless children of the accused were allowed to sit now and then with their daddies at the defendants’ table. One of these quite handsome children pointed a water pistol at people on the other side of the spindled railing and kept shouting, “Boom, boom, boom.” Every morning the local head lawman—a fearsome three-hundred-pound sheriff in khakis and white short sleeves named Clarence Strider—came into court and acknowledged the black press table with a “Good morning, niggers.”

  Around the square, you can see Robin’s Cleaners (IN BUSINESS SINCE 1932), Mid-Delta Home Health, a sad-sack video store, a barber in his single barber chair with his face hidden behind a magazine. He’s holding up the magazine in both hands, his legs crossed, a shank of glossy shin showing. There are diagonal parking spaces in front of the Confederate monument next to the courthouse, most of them occupied by pickups.

  Something like seventy reporters descended on this town in September 1955. Preachers in Harlem and on the South Side of Chicago and probably in Europe, too, by then had made Bobo Till the subject of their ringing sermons. The Daily Worker sent a representative. The New York Times and radio reporters and three TV networks came to Sumner.

  In the circuit clerk’s office, you ask, as you did earlier, on the phone: What has happened to the Till court records? The clerk pauses in her work, smiling agreeably, which is what nearly everyone always does in Mississippi. “Let me call over to Charleston, our other county seat, and just make sure for you,” she says. A minute later: “Well, just like I thought. We just don’t know. Either stolen or misplaced or done away with. People keep asking and we just can’t find it.” She adds, “You could look the case up in the docket book for 1955 if you care to.”

  And then some luck. Not twenty yards from the clerk’s office, in a little redbrick building facing the western side of the square, is the law office of John W. Whitten, and sitting inside is John W. Whitten himself. From the circuit clerk’s window you can see his shingle: BRELAND & WHITTEN, LAWYERS. He was one of the five attorneys in Sumner (there were only five practicing) who defended the accused. He’s the one who warned the jury in the summation of the defense team’s case that “there are people in the United States who want to destroy the customs of southern people.… They would not be above putting a rotting, stinking body in the river in the hope he would be identified as Emmett Till.” He told the jurors he was “sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that pressure.”

  He’s eighty. He’s in a little wood-paneled office with louvered shutters. An old black electric fan about the size of a skillet is above his head. A pressed white hanky, folded into a triangle, is sticking out of the vest pocket of his sport coat. His high-waisted pants are being held up by a pair of webbed suspenders. He still has his full head of wavy hair. He’s a dapper and courtly man who’s been a country lawyer since 1940—that’s when he came out of Ole Miss Law, age twenty. Back then, you graduated, you were automatically in the bar, you didn’t have to take a test to prove you knew the law.

  He talks trip-hammer fast. He says he’s had Parkinson’s for the last twelve years. He doesn’t do much legal work anymore, though just yesterday he wrote a will.

  It’s a Friday afternoon in December. He’ll be going home soon. You want to know, of course, how he feels. You ease into it. “Did you ever regret it later, defending Milam and Bryant?”

  “It didn’t bother me at all,” he answers. There is no hostility in it. Pause. “I felt like we didn’t mistreat them in our own lives. Blacks, I mean.” Did he have any idea at the time what kind of altering event of history this might be? “I guess I didn’t.” This comes out a little slowly. He reaches into a cup on the top of his desk. The cup is full of pecans. He takes two or three out and squeezes them in his palm.

  In
1985, the thirtieth anniversary of the crime and the trial, a reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, the state’s largest daily, looked up Whitten. The lawyer said he’d never confronted Milam or Bryant to try to learn whether or not they’d done it. “If I went to the moral heart of every case that came to me, I’d starve to death,” he told the reporter.

  He’s remembering something. One day a while back, Roy Bryant came in the door. “I don’t think I’d seen him since the trial. He had to identify himself. He looked terrible. ‘I’m old,’ he said. ‘I’m sick. I can’t work.’ He said he was looking for some way to make some cash, and wondered if there was anything I could do for him. I told him, ‘I don’t know, only thing I can tell you, do what you did before: Trade with some of those who might want to write a book about you.’ He left and then about six months later he was dead.”

  Immediately after the trial, Big Milam and Roy Bryant had lit up cigars, embraced their children, kissed their wives, and mugged for news photographers. But after the Look article was on newsstands in January 1956, the two men found themselves inexplicably shunned in their native Mississippi. It’s as if the two didn’t quite get what they’d just done to themselves. All those who’d defended them—an entire state, you could say—were appalled, though perhaps not entirely for the right reasons.

  The shunned left the state and went to the Southwest for a number of years. The Bryants eventually divorced. So did the Milams. Big Milam died of cancer of the backbone on New Year’s Eve 1981. Roy Bryant, who, after the trial, had taken work at seventy-five cents a day, lived for a long while in Orange, Texas. He got a job as a boilermaker. He lost a lot of his eyesight and complained he was legally blind. He came back to Mississippi and took over a store in a different county that belonged to family members and catered mostly to blacks. He seemed to have folded into the small print of history. At the Delta grocery where he was now the proprietor, he stood on stools and used a thick magnifying glass to read price tags. The Clarion-Ledger tracked him down there in the mid-eighties, and, while the acquitted man tried to deny the deed, he also said: “You mean do I wish I might wouldn’t have done it? I’m just sorry that it happened.” He said he feared retaliation. Bryant died of cancer in September 1994. The obituary in his local paper called him a “retired merchant.” The obituary said, “He was an Army veteran and a Baptist.”

  To discern the afterlives of these two men, even epigrammatically, is to know what Faulkner meant about the killing of Joe Christmas in Light in August. That’s the novel in which Joe is castrated and then Percy Grimm flings the bloody butcher knife behind him as one of his accomplices falls against a wall and begins to vomit. “Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell,” Grimm says. But you can’t get rid of sins like that, is Faulkner’s point—even if you walk. Because the thing will just be there inside you, lodged between memory and forgetting, “musing, quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant.” James Baldwin explained it lyrically, too, in Notes of a Native Son. He was talking about his father’s tragic life, which had known so much bitterness of spirit against the white man, and how that bitterness seemed in such danger of passing to the son. At his father’s funeral, Baldwin is moved to say: “All of my father’s texts and songs, which I had decided were meaningless, were arranged before me at his death like empty bottles, waiting to hold the meaning which life would give them for me. This was his legacy: nothing is ever escaped.”

  They’ve horribly modernized the Sumner courtroom, where attorney Whitten orated. The shrine has been tampered with. Where are the green plastered walls and the yellowed pull shades with their little string loops? It was in this room, close to half a century ago, that an epiphany occurred for black America. A sixty-four-year-old unlettered Mississippian named Moses Wright, who was dressed up as though for church, rose from the witness stand and stuck out his trembling arm. Emmett Till’s great-uncle pointed at J. W. Milam, and said: “Thar he.” Columnist Murray Kempton described the moment the next morning for the readers of the New York Post. The witness “pointed his black, workworn finger straight at the huge and stormy head of J. W. Milam and swore that this was the man who dragged fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till out of his cottonfield cabin.” When he was done, the old man, who’d soon get on a train and go up north and leave Mississippi forever, “sat down hard against the chair-back with a lurch which told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done. He was a field Negro who had dared try to send two white men to the gas chamber for murdering a Negro.” Moses Wright, said Kempton, “had come to the end of the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States.”

  But the killers got off, of course. Except they didn’t. Nothing is ever escaped.

  As I said, nearly every Mississippi story sooner or later touches this one, including mine. Mine is about legacies—family legacies, essentially, and about a single photograph and about seven sheriffs in that photograph, sheriffs in the years of civil rights, and about the kinds of things they bequeathed. The photograph was taken in late September 1962, seven years after the killing of Emmett Till. The photograph, which isn’t an icon image of the sixties—but should be—was recorded a few days before an all-night riot in Mississippi in which two died and hundreds were injured. It was made by an uncommonly brave and gifted white freelance photographer from Alabama named Charles Moore, on a Thursday afternoon, in a grove of elms and oaks and fine old catalpa trees, at Oxford, Mississippi, on the campus of a place known lovingly as Ole Miss. A week later, this document was published in a double-truck spread in Life magazine with this small headline down in the left-hand corner: “Local Lawmen, Getting Ready to Block the Law.” There were a lot of other pictures in the story, but this was the one that stole your eyes. The caption that followed said: “The official upholders of law and order in Oxford, a group of Mississippi plain-clothesmen chortle as one of their number takes practice swings with a billy and another ties on an identifying armband. They are on the campus not to put down a riot but to take part in one of the incidents which led up to it. They mobilized earlier in the week to back up Lieut. Governor Paul Johnson when he turned [James] Meredith and U.S. marshals away from the enrolling office. But when the riot broke out, all local and state cops made themselves scarce.”

  That was more or less accurate.

  They had gathered, these seven faces of Deep South apartheid, along with a swelling mob of others (who aren’t visible but are everywhere about), along with their pridefulness and paranoia and potentially lethal rages, to do what they could to keep another American and fellow Mississippian, a black man, from forcibly integrating (with federal troops and marshals) the halls and grounds of their sacrosanct state university. That history has already been much chronicled. The saga of twenty-nine-year-old Meredith heroically and almost messianically bringing down the color barriers at the University of Mississippi is only a backdrop to the story I am going to tell, a kind of stage set and thematic clothesline for a different narrative to move against. I have been occupied with something else, and I suppose it could be termed—to borrow the poet Mark Strand’s phrase in describing the paintings of Edward Hopper—“the nature of continuousness.”

  From the start, I wanted to know: How did these seven white Southerners get to be this way, and how did it all end, or how is it still going on, and was there no eventual shame here, and what happened to their progeny, especially their progeny, and was it all just ineluctable? To state it in another way: Where did the hatred and the sorrow go that flowed out of this moment—and out of a lot of other moments like it in seven particular lives that didn’t get captured by a camera and reproduced on a photosensitive surface and then printed across two pages in a national magazine that, back then, possessed a kind of religious communicative power in America? How did a gene of intolerance and racial fear mutate as it passed sinuously through time and family bloodstreams? How has that g
ene reshaped itself, and possibly for the better? The picture, which was in an anthology of Charles Moore’s work entitled Powerful Days, triggered all these questions. There was something about the angles of cigarettes, and middle-aged men in white shirts and ties, and an armband that almost could have been a tourniquet. Something about a strange-looking priest (he had a club) and his profane deacons (they were laughing so nastily), semicircled around an altar or maybe it was the lid of a gleaming coffin (actually, it was the barely visible hood of a squad car), as they readied for their satanic rites.

  Even now, after years of looking at it, examining it, carrying it, I can’t precisely say what it was about the image that so took hold of me. It had an overwhelming storytelling clarity—and simultaneous confusion. It was only much later, with the research and reporting and interviews unfolding before me, that I found a certain corroboration for all I must have been imagining the first time I came across it. I stress the word “certain,” as in provisional. I found it in old FBI records, in Department of Justice files, in declassified state governmental records in Mississippi, in numerous civil rights archives and repositories around the country. I found it in interviews with people who had known these men in their prime. I found it in lengthy talks with the two sheriffs in the photograph who were alive when I began the search for all of them. For at least one of the lawmen in this picture—he was more than a decade dead by the time I’d begun, and his name was Grimsley, which to me was an almost perfect name—I would obtain both an FBI record and a Justice Department file consisting of hundreds of partially blacked-out pages. In these pages, I would find suggestions and allegations and accusations of many dark things: attempted rape of female prisoners in the county jail, for instance, and the apparent intention to commit murder, or at least to sponsor it, on behalf of the thugs in his county to whom he was an inebriated local hero. There were memos in the file about this sheriff from J. Edgar Hoover to the assistant attorney general of the United States for civil rights, Burke Marshall. And for all of that, the documents were maddeningly inconclusive. No indictments were ever filed, not even for far lesser alleged offenses, such as taking payoffs from local whorehouses and illicit gambling joints. It was as if the powers that be in Washington decided to look the other way. Trying to fill in the words and phrases and sentences that had been “redacted” by the government censors chilled me. Reading through this file so many years later was like the journey itself back into the photograph: There was always something incomplete, hedgy, obscured, left to my imagination.