Voices in Our Blood (18 page)

He Went All the Way

Sumner, Mississippi, September 22, 1955

Mose Wright, making a formation no white man in his county really believed he would dare to make, stood on his tiptoes to the full limit of his sixty-four years and his five feet three inches yesterday, 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 the night the boy was murdered.

“There he is,” said Mose Wright. He was a black pigmy standing up to a white ox. J. W. Milam leaned forward, crooking a cigaret in a hand that seemed as large as Mose Wright's whole chest, and his eyes were coals of hatred.

Mose Wright took all their blast straight in his face, and then, for good measure, turned and pointed that still unshaking finger at Roy Bryant, the man he says joined Milam on the night-ride to seize young Till for the crime of whistling suggestively at Bryant's wife in a store three miles away and three nights before.

“And there's Mr. Bryant,” said Mose Wright and 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.

He sat in a court where District Attorney Gerald Chatham, who is on his side, steadily addressed him as Uncle Mose and conversed with him in a kind of pidgin cotton-picker's dialect, saying “axed” for “asked” as Mose Wright did and talking about the “undertaker man.”

Once Chatham called him “Old Man Mose,” but this was the kindly, contemptuous tolerance of the genteel; after twenty-one minutes of this, Mose Wright was turned over to Defense Counsel Sidney Carlton and now the manner was that of an overseer with a field hand.

Sidney Carlton roared at Mose Wright as though he were the defendant, and every time Carlton raised his voice like the lash of a whip, J. W. Milam would permit himself a cold smile.

And then Mose Wright did the bravest thing a Delta Negro can do; he stopped saying “sir.” Every time Carlton came back to the attack, Mose Wright pushed himself back against his chair and said “That's right” and the absence of the “sir” was almost like a spit in the eye.

When he had come to the end of the hardest half hour in the hardest life possible for a human being in these United States, Mose Wright's story was shaken; yet he still clutched its foundations. Against Carlton's voice and Milam's eyes and the incredulity of an all-white jury, he sat alone and refused to bow.

If it had not been for him, we would not have had this trial. It will be a miracle if he wins his case; yet it is a kind of miracle that, all on account of Mose Wright, the State of Mississippi is earnestly striving here in this courtroom to convict two white men for murdering a Negro boy so obscure that they do not appear to have even known his name.

He testified yesterday that, as Milam left his house with Emmett Till on the night of August 28, he asked Mose Wright whether he knew anyone in the raiding party. “No, sir, I said I don't know nobody.”

Then Milam asked him how old he was, and Mose Wright said sixty-four and Milam said, “If you knew any of us, you won't live to be sixty-five.”

And, after the darkened car drove off, with his great-nephew, Mose Wright drove his hysterical wife over to Sumner and put her on the train to Chicago, from which she has written him every day since to cut and run and get out of town. The next day, all by himself, Mose Wright drove into nearby Greenwood and told his story in the sheriff's office.

It was a pathetic errand; it seems a sort of marvel that anything was done at all. Sheriff George Smith drove out to Money around 2 p.m. that afternoon and found Roy Bryant sleeping behind his store. They were good friends and they talked as friends about this little boy whose name Smith himself had not bothered to find out.

Smith reported that Roy had said that he had gone down the road and taken the little boy out of “Preacher's” cabin, and brought him back to the store and, when his wife said it wasn't the right boy, told him to go home.

Sheriff Smith didn't even take Bryant's statement down. When he testified to it yesterday, the defense interposed the straight-faced objection that this was after all the conversation of two friends and that the state shouldn't embarrass the sheriff by making him repeat it in court. Yet, just the same, Sheriff Smith arrested Roy Bryant for kidnaping that night.

When the body supposed to be Emmett Till's was found in the river, a deputy sheriff drove Mose Wright up to identify it. There was no inquest. Night before last, the prosecution fished up a picture of the body which had been in the Greenwood police files since the night it was brought in, but there was no sign the sheriff knew anything about it, and its discovery was announced as a coup for the state. But, with that apathy and incompetence, Mose Wright almost alone has brought the kidnapers of his nephew to trial.

The country in which he toiled and which he is now resigned to leaving will never be the same for what he has done. Today the state will put on the stand three other field Negroes to tell how they saw Milam and Bryant near the murder scene. They came in scared; one disappeared while the sheriff's deputies were looking for him. They, like Mose Wright, are reluctant heroes; unlike him, they have to be dragged to the test.

They will be belted and flayed as he was yesterday, but they will walk out with the memory of having been human beings for just a little while. Whatever the result, there is a kind of majesty in the spectacle of the State of Mississippi honestly trying to convict two white men on the word of four Negroes.

And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four.

 

 

Upon Such a Day

Nashville, September 10, 1957

7:55
A.M.
, September 9—The ladies of North Nashville were on parade, in sweat socks one, in formless cotton sacking others, with signs saying, “Keep Our White Schools White”; “Keep Your Kids Home”; and “KKKK,” which stands for Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Their husbands, the knights, stood protected behind them, on the grass around Glenn School. One knight held up a sign saying: “What God Has Put Asunder [sic], Let No Man Put Together.” A little girl pointed to him and said, “Gee, there's Carol Sue's daddy,” and, with her mother and her little brother, joined the little clump of indecisive who milled not in or out but on the rim.

8:15
A.M.
, same day—A convertible came by; the ladies of North Nashville set up their tribal cries. The police told its driver to park down the road. He came out, at last, a large man, holding by the hand his daughter, a small Negro child named Lajuanda Street, and followed by a woman with her child, Sinclair Lee, Jr., and a man with glasses and his daughter Jacqueline Faye Griffith. The children were all first-graders. “If that don't make my blood boil,” said a woman. The children passed through the crowd; they were out of sight; nothing of this historic parade could be seen except Harold Street, who was bulkier than anyone there. One of the knights looked at Harold Street and thought better of pushing him, and pushed M. J. Griffith, who is smaller, instead.

“You'll come out of there feet up,” one of the Valkyries shrieked. City Detective C. E. Burris, a fat man in a Panama hat, shoved the knight halfway across the walkway. The menace collapsed. The cry came up safely from the back: “You see what they do to the white people. Who's gonna take up for the white people?”

9
A.M.
—Some thirty-odd mothers, dragging their children, had come out, each one to be greeted by wild cries. Three or four of the children were crying. Their mother comforted two of them by giving them signs saying “Keep Our White Schools White.” They were not quite large enough to carry this burden; the sign kept bowing and falling away. But a white woman walked the gantlet escorting her two children late to school. One of the Valkyries called her a tedious obscenity. She answered: “You tend to your business and I'll tend to mine.”

10
A.M.
—John Kasper, taller than all his flock, with his felt hat sweated through, was telling the crowd that the jails weren't big enough for all of them. “The niggers are in there now; we're gonna continue the boycott.” A cop said everyone should get up on the sidewalk, “because we don't want nobody to get run over.” “We're gonna stand and stand and stand,” said John Kasper.

10:15
A.M.
—Edna Jean Moore, arrested at Fehr School for throwing a stick of wood at a Negro mother, was bailed out for $10 and brought back to the scene of the resistance in a KKK car. A mother whispered in a little girl's ear, and having learned that lesson, her child, a blond, marched the sidewalk, chanting, “Go home, niggers, go home, niggers.”

11
A.M.
—The intervening minutes had been occupied with Kasper on the need to keep on, keep on. Jones School was very peaceful. Inside, a visitor looked into room 105, and saw first-grader Charlie Battles, with the smile all children have at peace, playing blind man's buff with the white kids. It seemed a pleasant place to watch and wait; Charlie Battles sat down and began working earnestly with another child on his drawings, and before long the first day of school was over.

Mrs. Pauline Brommer, Charlie Battles's new teacher, said that the children had been bothered a little by the clatter outside, and that they had asked what it was. “I told them,” she said: “Those were mommies and daddies; they're just waiting for us to finish school.

“It was,” she said, “a delightful day. I wasn't sure at the beginning just how it would be, but we began to play the game of sharing, and right away Charlie said he had a song to share with us, and he gave the most wonderful imitation of Elvis Presley singing ‘Hound Dog' and the children just loved it.” Her visitor left walking past a sign which said: “God is the author of segregation.”

There were very few of them really, these criers against the daylight, and, once school was out, Nashville was as it always had been. They met at seven fifteen, 400 or so of them, on the steps of its War Memorial, and, with the city going about its shopping hours unheeding, listened to John Kasper. It was a date-night audience.

“We've started from nothin',” cried John Kasper. “They said it couldn't be done but we did it. Let's start hating the nigger until we get him out of our schools. Let's say we want him either to be a dead nigger or back to Africa.” The audience laughed. “We say no peace,” said John Kasper. “We say attack, attack, attack. There ain't any jails big enough.” A high school boy, who preferred not to give his name, bawled he would die before he'd let yer little brother grow up to marry one of them black et ceteras, et ceteras. The crowd went trooping up the steps of Nashville's State Capitol to better affront Governor Frank Clement.

John Kasper held up a rope, and everybody laughed and cheered. This is Dixie, he said, the best and most bloodthirsty people under God's skies. “Let's for one time show what a white man can do.” He announced that ten men would pass through the crowd soliciting funds. The crowd began to flee, while the high school boy, still anonymous in his red sweater, said: “It's like a football game; we're not out for love; we're out for blood and victory.”

It was horribly ugly, and it was about nothing. Upon such a day, Charles Battles played blind man's buff with the white children on his first day in school.

 

 

Next Day

Nashville, September 12, 1957

The gathering place of the Klans of Nashville had been moved yesterday from the streets to the City Court where Judge Andrew Doyle adjusts the passions of the disorderly poor.

In Judge Doyle's court, by tradition, Negro and white, although united in trouble, sit segregated as spectators. As defendants, they are intermixed in the bullpen where they await trial. A man was saying yesterday that the quickest way to get integrated in Nashville is to resist a cop in the cause of segregation.

The judge was gentle enough with most of the rioters who were before him for loitering. Glowering and disturbing, they are a thin-blooded crowd, most of them; the passion which had flared in them Monday was down to soggy mush. G. H. Akins, who had been calling the cops to come and fight him in front of Caldwell School Tuesday, broke down and blubbered, with his two little girls clutching his knees before the judge. To such as these Andrew Doyle gave $5 fines; he knew they would not trouble him again.

He saved his moral indignation for people worthy of it. Marvin Sullins, a farmer in his fifties, was before him for hitting a thirteen-year-old Negro boy in front of Caldwell School Tuesday. William Jackson had been running from an assaulting corps of white children when Marvin Sullins got him. The police had found a pair of brass knuckles on Marvin Sullins when they brought him in.

William Jackson told his story and looked up at Marvin Sullins's eyes. Marvin Sullins had not the moral force to brag about his moment of struggle for the purity of the white South; he mumbled that he couldn't have hit this boy: “He's too little.” Judge Doyle said “Yer a coward,” and fined him $200 and told him he could never again be a free patient at the county hospital, and Marvin Sullins shuffled off to the county workhouse to render his payment to the God which watches over little children.

Then John Kasper came in on the counts of vagrancy, loitering and disorderly conduct. Andrew Doyle looked at him and saw only William Jackson who was chased on the street by white boys and was caught and hit by a fifty-five-year-old man. The point to him was not about fascism or racism or other abstract things; it was that John Kasper makes his war on little boys.

Floyd Peek, a county constable, told of Kasper's standing on the steps of the State Capitol and waving a rope and telling the poor that blood should run in the streets. John Kasper, dream-walking, stumbling in his speech, kept asking if he had said that, like the man who had blacked out on whisky the night before and was asking around town what had he done. He is an apprentice demagogue in a section whose politicians can summon up passion as Horowitz plays the piano. It is extraordinary the passion this essentially passionless man can arouse. Assistant City Attorney Robert Jennings cried out for a punishment that would degrade John Kasper and bring him to his knees in atonement:

“I hope your Honor fines him so much that he will be unable to pay and have to go to our workhouse where they'll put him behind a clean broom and send him back to those schools to clean up the debris he's left behind in our streets.”

I would swear that John Kasper winced. And then Andrew Doyle raised his eyes from the docket and stared straight at John Kasper, and the back of John Kasper's neck went red with the blush that small boys cannot hold back and his eyes had no sight in them. Andrew Doyle spoke without a note and he drew the line where it belonged:

“I only wish,” he said, “we had enough policemen to take you by the seat of yer britches and the nape of yer neck and throw you outside the city limits of Nashville as far as possible.

“Yer purpose was to cause trouble and fatten yer pocketbook with the dimes and dollars of irresponsible and uneducated people. You go into homes and take food from their mouths when they can hardly feed their own children. You pass the hat to nobody but people who can't afford to give the money you take from them. I wish I could do more on the vagrancy charge, but the only thing that I can do is to fine you $50 and that is what I will do, because you are the worst vagrant ever to hit the city of Nashville and the state of Tennessee, and I hope we never see another like you.”

And then Andrew Doyle fairly cried out from the scar that the sight of little Willie Jackson had left upon what should by now be a calloused memory:

“We tried this white man just now for something that happened as a direct result of what you have agitated. He had no more sense than to attack an itty bitty kid. Only a coward would take after an innocent child rather than pick on somebody his own size.”

And having said this, Andrew Doyle fined John Kasper $200 on four counts. There was an indecisive floundering about for a bondsman; none was found, and John Kasper went back to the workhouse. At midnight last night, he remained unbailed; it seemed impossible that this shaker of the earth could not raise $200. It may be that he has been left, as so much of his battleground is, morally exhausted, and will go stumbling tomorrow as a city prisoner cleaning the streets in the company of some defaulting Saturday night drunk who might be white or might be colored, because only accident and pauperism brought him here.

The point of it, I think, was moral exhaustion. The schools were emptier than they had been the day before; some of the Negro children even stayed home. The father of one of them said yesterday that he was tired and that he just didn't think he would mess with it today. So long had it been since Monday. The sidewalks in front of the schools were barren of disturbers of the peace; the cops lounged in the sun before Jones School, and Cecil Ray, a little Negro boy who has come here every day, was by now quite the pet of the policemen. Nashville will pick itself up and begin again today. Yesterday it was used up. The moment of purgation was, for John Kasper and everyone else, the moment of exhaustion.