Gathering of Waters (16 page)

“Roy!”

“Yeah?”

“Come and do what we came here for.”

Roy wasn’t exactly certain what was expected. His eyes swung to Emmett and back to J.W.

“You gotta teach him a lesson!” J.W.’s eyes rolled crazily in their sockets.

Roy sighed and walked slump-shouldered over to the black boy. He balled his hand into a loose fist and socked Emmett in the mouth. The boy groaned and clasped his hand over his bruised lips.

“Again!” J.W. yelled.

Roy struck Emmett hard across the side of his head, and Emmett fell to the ground weeping. Roy turned on his brother. “Okay? You happy now? Let’s go home.” He dragged his hands through his hair and walked back toward the door.

“You faggot!”

That was a word Roy hated more than anything. He spun around angrily. “What did you call—” he began, and then realized that his half-brother’s taunt was meant for Emmett.

J.W. stood menacingly over Emmett. Not a lick of sympathy shone in his eyes as he watched the boy cry and rock in pain. “You niggers—you niggers make me sick!” he bellowed, and kicked Emmett in the ribs.

Emmett screamed, tried and failed to block the next kick and the one after that. The third one broke two ribs and he slipped into unconsciousness. That’s when J.W. went for the hatchet hanging on the wall.

Chapter Twenty-Five

W
hen Roy got home, he went out behind the store and burned every piece of clothing he had on, including his shoes. In the shower he stood beneath a steady stream of scalding-hot water until his skin turned pink. When he opened the bathroom door, a cloud of steam followed him out.

In the kitchen he opened the refrigerator and commenced to eat every piece of food it contained.

Carolyn had been standing at the bedroom window when the Buick pulled into the yard and Roy climbed out. She had run outside pelting questions: “What happened? Where you been? What y’all do to that boy?”

If she had not seen Roy climb out that car, she would have thought she was looking at a dead man, because his face was so still and pale.

Roy didn’t answer any of her questions, nor did he mumble a word for most of the morning. He had left his voice near the river, and when it finally found him again, it spewed out of his mouth in great, sorrowful wails of regret.

The last time J.W. could remember sleeping as soundly as he did that day was when he was in the war.

He woke in the late hours of the afternoon with the previous night’s events scattered through his mind like the remnants of a dream.

He stumbled to the bathroom, and as he stood at the toilet relieving himself, his eyes floated over to the heap of blood-splattered clothes. He began to reel with laughter.

Moe Wright, his wife, Hank, and the other boys sat up all night long waiting for J.W. and Roy to return Emmett. When the sun came up, and Emmett still wasn’t home, Moe climbed into his pickup truck and drove down to Bryant’s grocery store.

Roy was behind the counter.

“Morning,” Moe Wright managed steadily.

“What can I get you, Moe?” Roy said without looking at the old man.

“My boy. My grandnephew.”

Roy wished he could go to one of the shelves and pull Emmett from amidst the canned goods, bags of flour, and tins of sardines—if he could do that, he would hand the boy right over to Moe and say,
No charge, Moe.

Instead, Roy moved to the register and hit the cash sale button. The drawer slid open and he peered down at the money. It was eighteen dollars and seventy-two cents—he knew this because in an effort to wash Emmett’s face from his mind he had counted and recounted the money. And now he withdrew it from the drawer and began counting it again.

“Ain’t he home?” Roy mumbled as he thumbed through the bills.

“No suh, he ain’t.”

“Well, I don’t know where he could be. We slapped him around some and then put him out just down the road from your house.”

Moe knew a lie when he heard one. “Have a good day Mr. Bryant,” he said, and walked calmly out of the store.

He went to the sheriff and the sheriff assured him that he would look into the matter. And he did; that very night he questioned J.W. Milam as they sat playing poker.

“Moe Wright says you and Roy took one of his boys out for a whipping and didn’t bring him back. Is that true?”

J.W. rolled his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. He smoothed his hand over the bald part of his head, but kept his eyes on his cards.

“Yeah, we took him and then brought him back.”

“You brought him back to the house?”

“Nah, we let him out down the road some.”

“Oh,” the sheriff sounded, and then abruptly folded his hand.

Three days later, the Sunday morning sky was splattered with thick clouds when Carson Long woke up determined to get some fishing in before church.

At the river, he cast his line out over the water and sat down on the old wooden crate that doubled as a stool. A breeze rattled the tree limbs and filled Carson’s nose with the putrid stench of rotting flesh, causing him to double over and puke up the fine breakfast his wife had made for him.

He dragged his shirttail over his mouth and then used it to cover his nose. Figuring it was a dead animal— possibly a dog—he set out in search of the corpse.

Barely thirty paces away from his fishing spot, Car-son came upon a thick swarm of blue bottle flies. He combed his arms through the air and the flies scattered. When he looked down, his stomach lurched again.

He couldn’t drive. Not after seeing what he’d just seen. His hands were trembling too badly and his eyes kept tearing up. So he walked to Moe Wright’s house on shaky legs.

Moe opened the door and offered Carson a somber good morning. He stepped out onto the porch tugging the straps of his overalls over his shoulders. There were circles beneath his eyes as thick and dark as crude oil.

Carson looked into the man’s strained face. If there was another way to say it, an easier way, Carson would have done so, but there wasn’t.

“I think I found your boy.”

Moe scratched his stomach. “Where?”

“Down by the river.”

Moe excused himself and disappeared back into the house. When he returned he was wearing a blue cotton shirt and a brown baseball cap with a picture of an elk on the lid.

“We have to take your truck,” Carson said.

When they reached the river, Carson offered his hand to the old man as they descended the short hill that led to that place where the blue bottle flies were feeding.

“That him, ain’t it?”

Moe placed the hat over his face. When he spoke, his words were muffled. “I can’t be sure.”

The clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight beamed straight down onto Emmett’s dead body and bounced off the silver ring on his finger.

“Yeah,” Moe managed to choke out. “That’s him.”

Moe Wright went home and 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.

Chapter Twenty-Six

T
he 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 history of the American judicial system. Others claimed that if Dwight D. Eishenhower, who was the sitting president at that time, had said something—anything that expressed his abhorrence at what those men had done to that boy—things might have turned out different. But Eisenhower didn’t say one thing—which led some to believe that maybe he was okay with what J.W. and Roy had done to Emmett Till.

Two months after the men were acquitted of murder, the grand jury declined to indict them on kidnapping charges.

Double jeopardy
is a term most people who lived here had not been familiar with before the Till murder, but it became one they would remember for the rest of their lives. In 1956, Bryant and Milam sold their story to
Look
Magazine
, wherein Milam unabashedly admitted that he had killed Emmett Till and didn’t feel one iota of remorse.