Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244)

by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)

  So, if I felt lonesome in September 1956, it wasn’t because I was alone. It was because I felt that I was sitting apart from something I felt so much a part of. How much I would have wanted the impossible. For Emmett to see what had been born of his death. How much I would have wanted even to represent him there in the thick of it. How much I still wanted just to be there in the center of it.

  It was a season of transition. Back in Tallahatchie County, Gerald Chatham, the district attorney, died. Heart failure. I recalled his closing argument back in Sumner, how much heart he had put into that. The news of his death mentioned that he had tried the murder case against Bryant and Milam. It probably would have been enough to have said, quite simply, he tried.

  There were many things on my mind, so many things to ponder, as I made adjustments to the transition all around. It had been so long since I had been a student. Now, I had always done very well in school, the best, actually. So I had no reason to think that I wouldn’t do the same in college. I don’t know why I thought college would be as easy as grammar school and high school. Had no idea at all that instructors had so much freedom to do what they wanted to do, to talk about everything except the lesson, to give you too much to read with no explanation. I definitely had to make adjustments. It was quite a challenge at the beginning of my college career. For one thing, I was about fourteen or fifteen years older than my classmates. Many of them were fresh out of high school. I had been out of school sixteen years. So my skills were not quite as sharp as theirs, and they were not as rusty as I was, but I was ready to work hard at it. I wanted to learn as much as I could. I wanted to understand all the things that were happening in the world around me. I especially wanted to be well trained to work with children and teach them the important lessons of a lifetime.

  As much as anything else during that period, I wanted to stay busy. I still needed to do that. College, in a way, was like making my bed in the middle of a crisis, or taking notes to keep up a buffer, some protection from the pain. And, believe me, there would be enough notes to take, and still a great deal of need for just that kind of avoidance. I was going to dive into those books and keep my mind on my studies. As long as I was doing that, I figured, there would be no room for other things. I wouldn’t be able to think about other things—so many other things. Study for me would be like therapy. I would become absorbed in it.

  It was odd at first, being there in college around all those other people, yet not really around them at all. It seemed that people knew who I was—I mean, the way they were looking at me and all. But it was always at a distance early on, like they didn’t know how to approach me, like I was an untouchable. No one seemed to know what to make of me. It didn’t faze me, though. I was there to do what I had to do, and I focused on doing just that: trying to learn everything I could.

  Looked like I was going to need that kind of focus, too. Starting with the basics. On our first day in psychology, the instructor asked us what we thought psychology was. Trick question.

  I didn’t have a clue when he got to me. I shrugged. “The ability to read people’s minds?”

  Without a doubt, I had a lot to learn. A whole lot. But I was ready to do it, to work hard at it. So hard, in fact, that I would go from that low point at the beginning of psychology to getting an A in that course.

  That would help in a couple of ways. I wound up working for the psychology department earning thirty dollars a week. That was great, because I could buy my books and I could feed myself. I could buy gasoline to get to school and back home again. I didn’t have to pay rent. Mama and I had worked it all out. On top of that, Congressman Dawson had promised me fifty dollars a month, as long as I maintained a B average. I was determined to get that stipend.

  After an awkward beginning, it was good to start developing relationships, to interact with the kids. The students, I mean. There were so many people with such different backgrounds and experience, and that made it very exciting to me. I had quite a bit to learn inside and outside the classroom. I joined a study group. Actually, I put it together.

  There was a group of girls in my gym class, and they were very sweet to me. They only greeted me and smiled at first, but soon they just started gathering around me. There were seven. I was number eight. And we came together because we were all frustrated with the gym teacher, who was making that class so difficult. Impossible, really. We were taking square dancing, of all things. I don’t know what I was thinking about even enrolling in a class like that. I never had been able to dance. Emmett had told me that much when he laughed at me trying to do the Bunny Hop. Anyway, when I found out that we would have to learn all of those lyrics and calls to all those songs and the dance patterns, too, well, it just made sense that we work together. So, I gathered the girls one day and suggested that we form a square-dancing group. We could meet at my house every Saturday and go through the routines. I would type out the lyrics and duplicate them and everybody could have a copy to make it easier to follow everything. They agreed. And we wound up doing very well. So well, in fact, that we began studying other subjects together, too. We were in a number of classes together.

  Even outside of square-dancing class, those younger students really kept me on my toes. They helped me fill in what I couldn’t comprehend right away on my own, and they challenged me to get better at doing it on my own. I was learning from them how to learn from the teachers. I was absorbing it all like a sponge, adjusting, making up for all the time I had been away from school. I was so focused on what we were doing that I often would forget the basic things I needed to do just to take care of myself. Poor Gennie. I know he felt neglected back then, and he saw how I was neglecting myself. I was immersed in my books. Didn’t have time to eat, let alone talk. There were times when Gene would come over and I’d be there studying with the youngsters from Chicago Teachers College and, bless his heart, he would sit down right there beside me and put food in my mouth as we studied. Sometimes I would get irritated with him because his arm was coming between me and the written page. That’s how determined I was to try to learn what I had to learn. But he understood that. He never gave up on me. Never.

  It didn’t take me long to adjust to the process. I was getting good grades. So good, in fact, that when I got my report card, I marched into my math instructor’s office and demanded to know why I’d only gotten a B. I mean, that was low for me. I’d been getting perfect scores in his class.

  “Well, Miss Bradley,” he explained, “you improved less than anybody. You only missed five at the beginning of the semester, and so you only made an improvement of five problems.”

  What? Okay, so now I knew. Performance was important, but improvement was the key. Learning, after all, was what I was there to do. Learning would be my strategy as well as my goal. I made sure that I would always show more than five problems’ worth of improvement.

  Still, even though I was doing exceptionally well, it was taking so much effort for me. I was not remembering things as well as I thought I should have been. Throughout grade school and high school, I had always marveled at the gift I felt I had for learning. Anything I read would be right there for me, entire chapters. I could close my eyes and the words would run before me like credits on a screen, whether someone else had written the words or whether I had written them. It wasn’t exactly a photographic memory. It was more like intense concentration. When I focused on something, I mean, when I really zeroed in on it, there was nothing else in the world at that moment. Once I knew I could do that, I would write everything down, all my notes, review them, concentrate, then close my eyes and read every one of those notes. In my mind. Or every word in a section of a book. Throughout school, I always had a funny feeling that I was cheating somehow, being dishonest. In fact, I was being diligent. I was working hard for everything I achieved. In college, though, the work was a lot harder and things at first seemed to slip away.

  One day, I talked with an English professor about it all. He heard me out, reflected on it a m
oment, picked up a raggedy piece of chalk, then drew a circle on the blackboard.

  “Now, this is your brain,” he said, before putting little dots in the circle. “And these are all the bits of accumulated knowledge you have.”

  After filling up the circle with those little dots, he explained that I had filled my brain up with everything I had accumulated and I was just going to have to make room for the new stuff. Well, that kind of made sense until I thought about something we’d learned in another course. We don’t use up all of our brain, so there was no way to fill it all up.

  That professor had a point, though. It wasn’t that I was filling up my brain physically. But I was filling it up, using so much space in another way. It was Emmett. As much as I might have tried to avoid being consumed by the memories, I had to realize that there are some things in life that cannot be pushed aside while you make your bed or take notes. No matter how much you might try to concentrate, they will be there, tapping on your shoulder, whispering in your ear, taking even the smallest bit of your attention. So I came to accept that and decided to work with it, to let Emmett and the whole experience of his loss guide me in my learning and eventually in my teaching. Somehow, I would find a way to make it all work together, even while I was adding more dots to the circle.

  In my second year of college, I would get my first chance, and I would learn so much more than the instructor ever could have taught me. It was a speech course, and that instructor was giving me such a hard time. Now, his speech was—well, his speech was letter perfect. It was as if he were holding a basket in one hand and picking out words with the other. He would regard each word he held there, sizing it up, giving it full measure. Every syllable. Every sound. Every single letter would get his complete attention and respect. And I would hang on to those words. And he would hang me on mine.

  Between Mama and Aunt Rose Taliafero, and all their attention, I had always spoken very distinctly. Mama would compliment me on my diction. But I guess I had gotten a little more relaxed in my years away from school. Well, this instructor made me feel anything but relaxed in his classroom. He pointed out every mistake, the smallest ones, when I spoke. He even criticized my Southern accent. I saw nothing wrong with that. After all, my whole family came from the South. Oh, I was determined to prove something to that man. We had to deliver a number of speeches in class for our grade. We came to one assignment that had special meaning to me. It was a eulogy.

  I talked about Emmett to the point where I think I took up most of that class period. I connected so much in his life from those first steps as a little boy to the time he climbed the steps onto that train platform. I talked about how he never let anything stand in his way, how nothing could stop him from moving forward. There was meaning in his life and I tried to draw it all together for the class. I brought props, pictures, playthings. By the time I finished, the class was completely silent. Some people were tearing up. Finally, someone asked the instructor what grade I was going to get. He had to admit that it was not possible to grade my speech. To grade it would be to diminish it.

  Gene was spending more and more time at my place, mostly looking out for me, but often just looking at television. Relaxing. I had bought Emmett a red lounging chair. It was a model that had just come out. I bought one with a separate ottoman and placed it in front of the television where Emmett liked to sit. That wound up being the place where Gene liked to sit, after coming from the barbershop, before going home for the night. I remember one evening he came over and he was sitting in Bobo’s red chair. Just stretched out right there, feet up, snoozing like, well, like he lived there. He was in another world, perfectly relaxed.

  Finally, I had to say something. “Gene, I think you’re kind of hanging around here a little too much. I mean, you really don’t have a legal right to hang around here like this. What will the neighbors think?” He was half-asleep and he looked so surprised, but I kept going. “I think it’s time for us to go downtown and get you a license to be here.”

  Well, he straightened up in that chair and just started smiling. The following Monday when he got off from work, he went home to take his bath, as usual, but he didn’t make his usual run to the barbershop. He picked me up and we went downtown to apply for a marriage license. That following Sunday, June 24, 1957, we went with my mother to the home of Bishop Isaiah Roberts, the host pastor for Emmett’s funeral, and Gene and I were married.

  At one point, Gene looked at me, remembering how he and Emmett used to play with each other about this event. “Do you think Bo would think we’re ready yet?”

  I closed my eyes. A blink, really, but just enough to consider it all in a flash. How my son had looked at me before he left for Mississippi. “Don’t you and GeGe run off and get married before I get back,” he had said. I looked up at Gene again, a tear in my eye, but so much joy in my heart. “I think he’s given us his blessing,” I said. And Gene agreed.

  As Bishop Roberts led us in prayer, we were asked to pull together in faith. We did, and I bowed my head believing that my life with Gene would be as blessed as that moment.

  By September, another cotton crop, another school term. There was a crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas. Nine children would integrate Central High School, but not before President Eisenhower reluctantly federalized the National Guard and sent in paratroopers from Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, where my cousin, Crosby Smith, Jr., had been stationed and where he had made his one last qualifying jump right after Emmett’s funeral. L. Alex Wilson was there in Little Rock, and so was Jimmy Hicks. They were in a group of black reporters who were chased by an angry white mob. Alex Wilson was hit in the head with a brick.

  Those poor children were threatened and harassed, too, just for doing what the law and what the courts finally said they could do, attend school with white children. Such anguish, such pain. Oh, who can forget the sight of little Elizabeth Eckford, who got separated from the other eight black kids that first day? How she was made to suffer so much emotional torture. How she kept her dignity. How she never let them see her cry.

  I have learned the importance of theme in writing and in public speaking. Taking an image that you can use to create a feeling, a reaction, to get across a message. Threading that imagery through all the words. The same thing applies to great social events in a way. I was a grieving mother. That was a universal theme the media could present, and the public could understand during the trial of my son’s murderers. Motherhood, children, would come to symbolize so many aspects of the movement that was growing out of our suffering. Children and the mothers of children would be there. They would be there on the line, marching. They would be there at the lunch counters, sitting-in. So many people have told me over the years how they were affected by the news of Emmett’s death or the sight of his body. But it seemed to affect children the most. Children who were Emmett’s age when he was murdered, and at a legal age when it came time to for them to act.

  A new generation of leaders ultimately would point our way. But it was their mothers who would nurture the movement. Mothers also would guide and they would lead. Too often, though, they would lead us in mourning.

  CHAPTER 24

  Family has always been important. It was important to Mama. She believed in keeping her family close to her, and she had done a great deal over the years to help so many of our folks get out of Mississippi to start a new life in the North. Family was important to Gene and me, too. He was always close to his four brothers. But the closest in every respect was his older brother Wealthy, who also worked at Ford. Wealthy and Gene were right next to each other in age, but they had a closeness that went beyond just the family head count. They were like twins, really, that kind of close. There would come a time when both Gene and Wealthy would have to be hospitalized at the same time for the same surgery. Wealthy was to be released first, while Gene would have to stay in for a second procedure. Wealthy insisted on staying in as well. If his brother was going to be in the hospital, then Wealthy would be there with him. That
’s how close they were. Wealthy had also been part of Emmett’s life. He went along with Gene and Bo to a lot of those ball games they all loved so much. And it was always such a joy to have Wealthy come by to visit us after we got married.

  One day in particular was kind of, well, sweet. I was taking a break from my studies and baking a cake. Now, with all the things Gene was doing for me, there were two things I always tried to do whenever I could. One was the laundry. Now, Gene was too clean. I thought Emmett was meticulous about his looks, but Gene always wanted to have his clothes just right. So I tried to give him a break from doing the laundry. I mean, I didn’t want dirty clothes in my house, either. I kept all the whites bleached and sparkling. I would tie his socks together at the top because he was color blind; as fussy as he was, I couldn’t have him put on a black sock and a blue sock or a brown sock. He was very, very pleased with the way I kept him dressed, kept him clean.

  The second thing I tried to do was bake. Gene was cooking all the time; it was the least I could do. So, one day, there I was in the kitchen, cake in the oven, and in walked Wealthy, who let the door slam. I just stood there for a moment. I really didn’t have to open the oven door to know what I would find.

  “Oh, look at that,” I said, as I gazed down at the fallen chocolate cake. “I can’t give this to my husband.”

  Wealthy looked at the cake, too. He wanted to know what I planned to do with it.

  “Throw it away,” I said. I mean, what else?

  He convinced me to give it to him and, don’t you know, he took that flat cake home, sliced it up, and carried it up to the Ford plant to share with all the boys. They must have had a good time, too, because he came back and told me they wanted him to slam the door every time he walked in our place. They just might get lucky again. We had a lot of fun together. Wealthy was so much like the brother I never had. That’s why he understood why I was going to start all over again to make a brand-new cake for Gene that day. Maybe the boys at the plant were right. Maybe even the bad ones I made were good. But good was not quite good enough. I wanted to give Gene the very best, because he always gave me the best. Of everything. I called him “Daddy.” He called me “Baby.” And that pretty much says it all.