called Emmett’s mother and she screamed and screamed until he couldn’t take it anymore and laid the phone down on his lap.
Tass heard the screen door squeak open and bounce softly closed again.
“I got coffee made,” Hemmingway said.
“No, too hot for that. Thanks though.”
Silence.
“He dead, ain’t he?”
“Yeah.
“Jesus.”
“I was the one who found him.”
“Mercy,” Hemmingway cried, and then, “Where?”
“In the river.”
“They butchered that boy. Even Moe Wright wasn’t sure it was him, and that’s his kin.”
“Goddamn crackers!”
“One of his eyes was hanging out …”
“Humph.”
“Look like they took a butcher knife or something to his nose and across the top of his head—”
“My God, my God!”
“Took it to his private parts too.” Carson let off a weary sigh. “Shot him through the temple, tied him to a cotton gin fan, and tossed him in the Tallahatchie.”
Hemmingway started to weep.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
* * *
In her bedroom, Tass pushed her face into her pillow and screamed.
The coroner placed his body into a pine box and sealed it shut. When his mother arrived at the funeral home where they stored the body, they stopped her at the door and informed her that she could not see her dead son and that there was a law that required the body to be buried immediately.
Mamie Till pursed her lips, pulled the handles of her pocketbook up over her shoulder, and left.
Back at Moe’s house she called a cousin in Chicago.
“They killed my boy and now they telling me I can’t bring him home.”
The cousin said, “Sons of bitches! You wait right there by the phone. I’ma call you back.”
The cousin knew people in local authority in Illinois and those people knew people in the state legislature. When Moe Wright’s telephone rang again, Mamie Till answered. “Hello?”
“You don’t worry, Mamie, things have been set in motion.”
At the sheriff’s department and in the office of the undertaker, one call after another came in from people neither man had ever heard of.
Some of the callers were cordial; many others were downright nasty. One man threatened, “Heads will roll!” Another promised, “You and your family will be dead by dawn.”
When Mamie Till answered the phone early the following morning, it was the undertaker’s voice she heard.
“I done already made the arrangements. The casket will be placed on the next train headed to Chicago.”
Click.
In Chicago, Mrs. Till placed a call to John H. Johnson, the president and CEO of the Johnson Publishing Company. In 1955, Johnson’s Jet Magazine had a circulation in the black community that counted in the hundreds of thousands.
Mr. Johnson took the call, and offered his deep and sincere condolences. Mrs. Till thanked him and asked if he wouldn’t mind sending a couple of his Jet Magazine photographers to her son’s funeral.
Johnson was taken off guard by the request and politely asked, “Why would you want me to do that, Mrs. Till?”
There was a pause and then Mamie Till said, “So the world can see what those men down in Mississippi did to my boy.”
A broken heart would have been kind, mendable—but Tass’s heart was shattered so completely the pieces were small enough to fit through the eye of a needle.
A man leaving a woman was one thing—there was always the possibility of reconciliation. A woman could live months and years on that possibility.
But how does one wait for death to come to an end? Death is final, right? Wrong! Death is the end and the beginning. But I am getting ahead of myself.
* * *
Hemmingway and Padagonia didn’t know how to make Tass feel happy again, and so they just waited for the melancholy to drift away. But it never did—not really. It faded some, got washed out a bit and worn down in places, but if you looked real hard, you could always see it pulsing behind her eyes.
The September issue of Jet Magazine just made things worse. Of course, Bryant’s grocery store didn’t carry the magazine, so a few people went to Greenwood to buy copies. They brought them back here and passed them around amongst the residents. When folks saw that black-and-white photo of Emmett “Bobo” Till, laid out in a coffin with his face so battered it looked like a Halloween mask, the rage it elicited spread like fever.
Because Moe Wright and his family had witnessed J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant remove Emmett from their house, the law picked the two white men up and put them in jail to await their trial. When their defense attorney told them that they were being charged with murder in the first degree, Roy almost pissed on himself and J.W. laughed.
“Even if we did kill that boy—and we didn’t—ain’t no court in the land gonna convict two white men for killing a nigger.”
At the trial, Carolyn Bryant took the stand and placed her left hand on the Bible and raised her right hand into air and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The defense lawyer asked, “Did Emmett Till whistle at you?”
“Yes sir, he did.”
Tass, Hank, and Padagonia were called into testify.
“Did Emmett Till whistle at Carolyn Bryant? Yes or no?”
“He whistled, but—”
“Yes or no!”
“But sir, what I want to say—”
“Your Honor, please instruct this witness to respond to the question with a yes or no.”
“Respond to the question with a yes or no.”
“I’ll ask the question again: on the afternoon of August 24, 1955, did Emmett Till, a.k.a. Bobo, whistle at Carolyn Bryant?”
“Yes sir, he did.”
As if having an all-white jury didn’t already guarantee their acquittal, the defense went so far as to claim that the body pulled from the Tallahatchie wasn’t even Emmett Till, but some cadaver planted by the NAACP. To add insult to injury, they accused Mrs. Till of faking her son’s murder to collect a four hundred–dollar death benefit.
A white man who claimed to have seen the body before it was boxed and shipped out of the state said that he was more than sure that it wasn’t Emmett Till. When asked why he was so confident in his belief, the man threw his hands up in the air and declared: “’Cause that body had hair on its chest and everybody knows niggers don’t grow no hair on their chest until they’re twenty years old!”
On September 23, 1955, less than one month after the day Emmett Till was kidnapped, murdered, and mutilated, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were found not guilty and strolled out of the courthouse into the autumn sunshine, free men.
Some people called it one of the worst days in the