by John Ridley
Three days later that bloated, fish-eaten body was found floating in the Tallahatchie River. It was missing one eye. Its head had been crushed. A seventy-four-pound cotton gin fan had been necklaced around the body's throat with barbed wire. The olive to the cocktail: a bullet to the boy's head.
Bryant and Milam were arrested. Bryant and Milam were put on trial. A jury of twelve white men spent a long and labored hour and seven minutes deciding the two defendants were innocent despite what a parade of eyewitnesses had to say otherwise.
An hour and seven minutes. That included lunch.
The only punishment Bryant and Milam came close to receiving were the paper cuts they might have gotten from counting the four thousand dollars they were paid to recite the crime in Look magazine. Recite without fear of further prosecution. Double jeopardy. They were free to say what they pleased. What pleased them was to describe how on a muggy summer night they took Emmett Till down to the river, told him to beg forgiveness for whatever he'd supposedly done to the white woman.
He wouldn't.
Emmett told the two men that he hadn't done anything. He told them: So what if he'd talked to a white woman? Talked? In Chicago he'd kissed plenty of white girls, and he'd kiss plenty more if he felt like it. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, alone in the night, told two white, Southern men that he was just as good as they were.
So the two white, Southern men stripped Emmett, beat Emmett, made Emmett carry the gin fan to the river. One of the two men shot Emmett in the head.
“What else could we do?” “Big” Milam recounted. “He was hopeless”
In the middle 1950s, in America, for most black people, a lot of things seemed hopeless.
March of 1956 to July of 1957
There was no other thing. No other way. I was going to be—I had to be—famous. I decided that. More rightly, the circumstances of life decided it for me. I turned eighteen, graduated high school, got a job with Li'l Mo at a moving company because it was the only job either of us could get, and I needed something more regular and better paying than the piece work I'd been doing. I worked the job almost a year, carrying other people's belongings down from one apartment, piling them into a truck, hauling them across town, then up into another apartment. Dressers. Beds. Tables. Boxes loaded with dishes and books and knickknacks—heavy like they were full of bricks. Heavy until you could barely lift them. But you did. You lifted them because moving them was the only way to get paid. You lifted, you got your money, and you wore the ache of the job long after it was done. You went home, slept a little, you woke up too early, you went out into the day and did it all over again.
At the end of that first three hundred some days I took a look at my future. I didn't see much waiting for me, and what I did see wasn't much good. The prospects for a black man in the fifties were limited to being famous or to being nothing. To be something other than one of those two, a doctor or lawyer … not that it couldn't happen. It could. It did. For some blacks. But to want to wear a white collar was little better than wanting to walk on the moon. Beyond that, without higher education that I couldn't afford if I wanted, couldn't get if I could afford, I was looking at a life sentence of manual and menial labor: sweeping floors and shining shoes and polishing cars and stocking warehouses. Moving furniture. I was looking at a future that looked just like my past.
But to be famous …
You'd see famous blacks on TV and in the movies, out on the playing fields: Harry Belafonte, Dizzy Gillespie, Ms. Lena Horne. Jackie Robinson and Sugar Ray Robinson and Bill Bojangles Robinson and … And famous blacks got to go where they pleased, do as they pleased and got treated just about as if they were white. You saw their pictures in the paper or a magazine, saw them at this party or that in fine clothes, drink in one hand and the other draped around a white, and the white didn't have any problem being near— being touching-close to—a famous black. Sure they didn't. I'd learned that a good time ago: You've got money or status and real suddenly no one gives a thought about being around you. And the more I saw of rich blacks and famous blacks, the more it filled me with ambition. Ambition that burned hot, burned away all else and left only what mattered: want. I wanted to be rich. I wanted to be famous. Not such a crazy dream. Althea Gibson had emancipated herself right out of this very Harlem. So had Dizzy. So had Sammy D. So could I.
With absolutely no other skills, and based solely on having made schoolkids and fellow tree cutters laugh, I figured—brashly, desperately—comedy was my best chance for mating my twin desires. Best, only. Neverminding the fact that I could list the truly famous black comedians of the world on a three-fingered hand, I blindly started a road.
First: I needed an act. Easy. I stole one. I watched Toast of the Town. Different from before, just sitting and enjoying the show, I studied it, the comedians, their style and mannerisms. The best bits I borrowed. Re-borrowed. Most of the jokes were already public domain—common in form, old in existence. It's the way comedy was: generic lines presented by pleasant guys with good timing whose suits were more unique than their acts. Using the jokes, I bargained with myself, was just temporary. Once I got going I'd work up an act of my own. As I'd done when I was teaching myself to be “well spoken,” I did time in front of the mirror in my room. I watched myself as I mimicked Will Jordan, Myron Cohen, and Alan King. Lots of Alan King. Thirty-seven times he was on Sullivan. His act I got to know real well.
Thing number two I needed was a club where I could perform. Easy. There was one joint in all of New York that was the joint: the Copacabana. I'd never once been in it. I'd barely been near its neighborhood—tony Midtown—but I knew it was the joint because whenever Sullivan would ask one of his in-from-Hollywood-between-pictures guests where they might be seen around town, when he asked a name comic or an even bigger name singer where they might be found doing a drop-in, the answer was most always the same: the Copa.
So one afternoon I took my ignorant self down to Fifty-ninth and Madison, knocked on the locked front door of the club. Waited. Knocked. Waited. Pounded. Waited. Pretty soon a tired-looking white fellow opened up, tie down, sleeves rolled high, and hair combed over a bald spot that just made it more noticeable rather than less.
“What?” he wanted to know.
“I'd like to speak with the manager, please.”
“What?”
“Are you the mana—”
“What!”
“I'd like to work here, sir.”
“Doing?” His body held a position that was half out/half in the doorway, like he was just itching to get back to whatever he'd been doing before I'd come around. If I'd burst into flames I figured there was only a fifty-fifty chance I could hold his attention.
“I want to perform,” I said, as if it should be obvious. “I want to go onstage.” Adding to it: “I'm a comic.”
The guy with the comb-over made a whole lot of comments regarding my intelligence and the legality of my mother's marriage at the time of my birth. Then he told me to get lost. He didn't quite tell me that, but the meaning was the same.
What had I expected? Had I really figured to knock on the door, wave hello, and wind up onstage at the Copacabana?
Yeah.
Yeah, I guess I had, my vision limited with blinders of me taking bows before a laughing, clapping, loving crowd of people. I'd figured the only thing I had to do was show up, and all that would be waiting for me. I'd figured very, very wrong.
But the same arrogance or naiveness, stupidity maybe, that sent me to the Copa kept me from quitting things then and there. So I wouldn't kick things off at the Copacabana. So what? There were nothing but clubs in the city. If the Copa didn't want me, I'd take my act elsewhere. I took it to the nightspots strung along Fifty-third Street. Took it to clubs in hotels, their fancy bars and cocktail joints. I took it to clubs on the East Side, the West Side, coffeehouses and dives on both sides of the Village. I took it around for nearly a month, and I got turned down for auditions just as fast as I could find new doors
to pound on. Nobody was taking what I was selling. Nobody was hot for a comic—for one more comic—coming their way. A realization was catching up to me: A whole lot of people in New York wanted to be in show business, and a whole lot of clubs and coffeehouses and nightspots were sick of seeing them come around.
I worked my way down to the Fourteenth Street Theater, down other than just locationwise. Down meaning I'd busted through the bottom of the barrel of respectability. The Fourteenth Street Theater was left over from vaudeville. A dinosaur that didn't know the rest of its kind was off marking time in a boneyard. Specializing in cheap beer and bad burlesque, it was a hole of a joint where comics and singers and novelty acts could go and do their thing for what constituted an audience. Between acts the theater showcased strippers. Or, depending on how you looked at things, between strippers the theater had acts so married guys could go home and tell their wives they were out seeing a show and not be lying about it.
I came around looking for the manager. I got a guy named Ray. I asked for an audition, asked with all the confidence I had left, trying to sound like a young man who was going to light up the world and not just another kid who wanted to crack funny but couldn't get stage time anywhere else.
Ray didn't seem to care one way or the other. He told me to come back two weeks from Sunday, to be at the theater at seven o'clock, then was done with me.
TWO WEEKS.
They passed, but they took their time about it, me spending nearly every minute of every day refining fantasies about going onstage, what it would be like up onstage, what my life—my gorgeous new life—would be like following the Sunday that was fourteen days and counting to come. But prior to being reborn, there was my real and current life to be lived in its two main components. There was my dad—always around and always high. Always ready to abuse— and there was my job at the moving company. I never had much of a build, always slight. Standing six one but never tipping out at more than one seventy, I wasn't made for lifting furniture. Except I was black. That was about the sole requirement for manual labor.
One time Mo and I were on a job, the fellow we were moving had a big … thing. Still don't know for sure exactly what it was. Like a chest of drawers only longer. Not as tall. Solid wood. Heavy. Of course it wouldn't fit in the elevator, so me and Mo had to haul it downstairs. Six flights, and on a New York-hot day. Hot like little sister. The heat, the weight of the thing, the sweating they made you do, didn't help my grip any. Also didn't help to have the guy who owned the piece at the top of the stairs barking down orders drill sergeant-style. “Don't drop it!You boys be careful and don't drop that!” Like if he hadn't told us we would've thrown it down the stairs for lack of knowing better.
“Don't drop it!Don't you drop that!”
His voice kept pounding my ears. The stifling air kept choking my throat. Hands wet, slick on the wood. Back screaming at me, arms crying. My foot caught a step wrong. No way to keep steady. I let my end drop. The piece hit the stairs. Not hard. Too hard for the cat it belonged to. He flew down the steps at me; he came fast and he came swinging. The side of my head took his punch and lit off fireworks inside my skull. When my eyes stopped rolling and fluttered open, I was where I'd so often been: on the floor, again. My face turning red under the black, again. Looking up at my attacker, trying not to cry, trying to take what I'd been given like a man. But my version of stoic was trembling and going teary-eyed. Again.
And while the man was raging at me with “how dare you” bits, cursing my useless Negro—not the word he used—self for dropping his expensive whatever, Li'l Mo stood watching him. Watching and balling his hands into tight, angry fists the same way he had back in the logging camp when he was ready to have a go at that redneck and his redneck clan. He was set to lash out, strike a blow against the oppressors. Li'l Mo was ready to start the revolution.
From my spot on the floor I gave Mo a look that told him to cool it. Only thing starting trouble would buy us was more trouble. Wasn't worth it. It was never worth trying to fight The Man.
Day over but not done, wanting to be alone, I gave Mo some story about needing to be somewhere to do something and went off walking, kept company by my stinging face and angry thoughts. I wanted bad to have at that white cat for slapping me. I wanted to fist up my hand and smack him right back. But hitting him would've gotten me fired. At least that. I hated my job, but I needed my job and had affection for the money that came with it. It's hard to have pride when lust and greed get in the way. Especially when your skin color is a permanent factor. So I took the man's slaps. And so what if I did? Real soon I'd be in a place where that white guy, where anybody, wouldn't be able to give me the back of their hand again. Real soon. Less than fourteen days.
Into my own thoughts, my eyes missed a two-by-four that had been tossed out in the alley I walked. My foot caught it, got tripped up, and I went over. As I flew for the ground, my hands jumped out to take the fall. Waiting on the pavement to meet my right palm was a piece of broken glass. Small, but just big enough to gash my flesh and start up a flow of blood. I sat on the dirty ground, pants torn at the knee, bleeding. And my face still hurt.
I looked up.
Sitting in the alley was a brand-new 1956 Packard Caribbean, a chromium wonder. Parked. Lifeless. Not doing a thing. Nothing except mocking me. It bragged of things I would never have: a near-six-grand touring car that I couldn't afford in a lifetime of trying. Whitewalls, white leather interior, and a tri-tone paint job—eggshell, sky blue, tango red—fresh-polished to a mirror shine. And that grille, that chrome-dripping grille that was like a big fat smile that came with a ridiculing laugh. A laugh directed square at my face: See me, Jackie? See what you can't have you poor, dumb, useless—
The two-by-four was in my hand. The two-by-four was all over the Packard. It smashed and spider-webbed the windshield. It de-sideview-mirrored a door. A swing and a hit; the hood ornament was sent out of the park. And then the grille. Then I went to work on that stupid, shining grille. The wood tore at the chrome, peeled it back, dented it in, beat down the bulbous points that were excess for the sake of excess. I beat them, but what I was doing was smacking back the white man who'd smacked me. I smashed die headlights, but I was giving it to my dad after taking it for so long. I pounded and pounded and pounded the car, but what I was really doing … What was I doing?
I stopped.
After the hammering of wood on metal the alley was horribly quiet. All of New York around me and the only thing I heard was the sound of a dog barking deep in the city, the sound of my heart beating in my chest. I heard the sound of the two-by-four clunking against the ground. All of New York around me, and I felt like every citizen was listening to the sound of my deep breathing and racing feet as I busted from the alley, from my victim: a Packard that had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
SUNDAY. FINALLY SUNDAY. I hit the theater around five-twenty, spent a solid forty-five minutes cooling my heels before the joint opened up enough to even let me in. That got followed by another thirty minutes of standing around waiting for the show to start. When it did, fifteen people sprinkled a house that sat two hundred. I was scared I was going to get thrown on first. How was I supposed to do any kind of a show for that non-crowd?
I was burning calories with worry over nothing.
The seven o'clock hour passed and so did the eight with lots of acts going on and me still marking time.
After nine. The house was closing in on half full—as full as it was likely to get. The audience—all men, slobbish, and in a class somewhere between middle and low, warmed up and fairly sober even with the beers they downed at a pace—was peaking. The moment was ripe for me to take the stage, display my skills. I didn't. Instead, up went some singers, a couple of comics, specialty acts, dog acts, a guy who recited lines from a play, and strippers. All kinds of strippers. Every shape, size, and age equally represented. Except the good-looking kind. Those the theater apparently banned from the premises. The men
in the house didn't much care. The men in the house gave the women drunken salutes, and in thanks the women peeled their clothes with a smile and a tease before letting them fall away altogether. It made the boys happy, and the boys made the girls happy, and everybody was happy except for me. I was just standing around watching the crowd get half as large and twice as loaded and plenty more hot with every comic and singer and dog act that went on taking up good and valuable stage time that could be better enjoyed with more stripping.
I tried to pin down the emcee, get a rough idea when I might— might—be going on. Scared mice were easier to corner. His best estimate, when I could get any out of him, was: “Soon, chum. Real soon.” He said the same thing to some old guy with a banjo when he asked when he'd be going up.
Ten o'clock got to be eleven and twelve. The audience got cleaved. One and one-thirty cut their size again. The strippers had been through two rotations and a half, but to the boozed oglers who remained, the girls were new and unfamiliar, and with an alcohol makeover they were nearly beautiful.
At about two-thirty, when I was tired by just the thought of the full day of moving furniture that was waiting some five hours away from me, the emcee came over, said: “You're next, Jake.”
“It's Jackie,” I started to say. But just that quick, after standing around all night, I suddenly had to wrestle with my stomach, which decided it was nervous and had to empty itself. Sweat-slick palms clutching gut, I took up a spot in the wings. Occupying my future space onstage was a girl whose talents lay in her ability to unbutton buttons and unzip zippers nearly in rhythm to music. Nearly. And when she'd finished the job the house would belong to me. I tried to snapshot every second that passed as I waited. I wanted a museum-quality collection of memories of this event, this moment of personal history. I wanted it well documented in my mind, easily recallable in complete and exact detail for the day, for the certain day, when people would say to me: Tell us, Jackie. Tell us how it all began.
