Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (20 page)

With that, he bolted up the steps again. I was not allowed to go with
him up those stairs to the platform and the train. So I watched him as long as I could. And I was so happy when he got to the top and turned back to wave at me. I waved at him, and then he disappeared, running down the platform. Papa Mose and Wheeler had just about given up on Emmett, when they heard the commotion at the end of the platform and saw him running, finally, to make the train. And they were all relieved when he did.

As the train left the station, Mary Lee and I made our way out, and I began to feel weak, and stumbled. My heart was racing. So were my thoughts. There are certain things a parent owes a child. One is to prepare a child for his journey to the world outside. As I listened to that train pull out of the station, carrying Emmett on his journey, I reviewed everything, to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I considered every detail of every point I had made. As I wondered whether I had done enough to prepare Emmett for all of this, there was one thing I knew for sure: I had not done enough to prepare myself.

By the time we made the short drive back to my place, I felt like something had been ripped from me. I was missing Emmett already, but Mary Lee was more or less saying “poppycock.” She and I were going to join another couple of friends and spend the day doing whatever we wanted to do. It was going to be like a reunion for all of us. That’s what was on her mind. But, as I was getting out of the car, I told her that I didn’t think I was going to be able to run with her that day. She wasn’t just disappointed, she was angry. She said she would have been on her way much earlier had she known that. But then she saw that I wasn’t well at all. I got out of the car, made it to the steps of my building, and then I just crumbled. I was nearly crawling up those steps. Well, that certainly got Mary’s attention. She took my keys, helped me up to my second-floor apartment. She got me inside, managed to get my shoes off, and then got me into bed with all the rest of my clothes on. Then she left to make the rounds.

I just lay there for the longest time, thinking. I knew the train trip Emmett was making. I knew it from memory. I looked at Emmett’s watch on my wrist, listened to it tick. Around two that afternoon, the train would be in Cairo, at the southern tip of Illinois, a state that seems to stretch out at that end, to reach a bit, as if trying to hold on to something just a little while longer. Cairo was the place where everything had to be rearranged before the train crossed into Kentucky. Blacks had to change cars, if they were not already in the Jim Crow car up front. As a child, I remembered all the fumes that would pass through that front car, the Jim Crow car, closest to the engine. I had heard that there were ceiling fans in the other cars, the ones where white folks sat. From Cairo on, Papa Mose, Wheeler,
and Emmett would have to stay put. I had told Emmett that he was not supposed to go anywhere on that train. But I knew that Papa Mose would be there to take care of everything.

Within a few hours of Cairo, the train would be in Memphis, and then it would arrive in Winona, Mississippi, at 7:25 that night. That’s where Papa Mose and the boys would be met by Maurice Wright, the oldest son of Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy. He would be there waiting with the family’s 1946 Ford for the thirty-mile drive down marked roads and dusty back roads to the Wright home just outside Money.

I just lay there in my bed, overwhelmed, thinking of so many things, and of how quickly so many things had passed. From time to time, I would look at Emmett’s watch, knowing it would mark the time for me all the while he was away. Ticking away minutes and moments, counting them, keeping track. I’ve come to know moments. I’ve come to cherish them, to live in them, to appreciate them as fully as you possibly can. Moments like snowflakes, unique and precious and fleeting. Moments like heartbeats, full of life and joy and love. I once had a moment with Emmett. It was the moment of a lifetime. It was the moment of decision. And balanced on that moment was the tension of motherhood. Two sides of myself at odds. The part of me that longed to provide everything for my son’s happiness, the part of me that desperately needed to protect him even at the cost of his happiness. Strange how, before that, I had thought these two parts of myself were one and the same. What if I had paused at that point for just a moment longer and let the other side of me win, and let Emmett lose? How long would his disappointment have lasted? A moment, maybe? I would have a lifetime to consider all that, one moment at a time.

 W
hen Emmett crossed over into Mississippi, there surely must have been something familiar to him. Not something he recognized with his eyes, but something he felt deep within his soul. Mississippi had always been a part of his life. It was always present in our little community of Mississippi transplants in Argo. It was in our awareness, always there, even if we were only thinking about why we didn’t want to think about it anymore. Even in Argo, even in Chicago, Mississippi was still a place we were desperately trying to escape. Why had my son wanted to go back there so badly? What was this deep longing that he felt? It was like he had been programmed at birth to return to the soil of his ancestors, at this time, in this way, and for a purpose he could not possibly have recognized.

It was a strange time for a black boy from Chicago to go to Mississippi. Especially Emmett. Independent and uncompromising in so many ways, he found himself in a place where these qualities were not tolerated in black boys. Self-assured, confident about a future without limitations, he must have gazed out at the wide-open spaces of the Mississippi Delta in amazement. As he surveyed what seemed like an endless plain, he must have seen the ideal place for a boy with unbounded spirit, completely unaware of the boundaries that had begun to close in on him as soon as he got off that train.

The home of Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy was one of the largest on the 150-acre plantation. It had four bedrooms. Emmett and Wheeler would double up with Maurice, Robert, and Simeon—Emmett’s cousins, Wheeler’s uncles. Emmett would share the bed with twelve-year-old Simeon. Wheeler slept in another bedroom with Maurice. Willie Mae’s
son, Curtis, would share the room with Robert after joining the boys down there a week later. Papa Mose had almost a full acre of land to himself. It was set back about fifty feet from the road, behind the trees—cedar, persimmon, pecan, and cottonwood—and at the edge of the cotton fields. The sounds of the country surrounded you in that place. The killdeer whistling on the wing around the lake across the way, the mockingbird everywhere, singing the song of any other bird it could imitate. And there were the farm animals. Plenty of space on this plot for them. There was a cow. And, even though everybody in the house had chores, no one but Papa Mose could mess with that cow. That was the family’s source of milk. On his earlier visit, when he was just a little boy, Emmett was amazed to see the milk come from the cow. After all, he had been friends with the milkman in Argo, who had given him a little bottle of chocolate milk for helping out. He could put away a quart of milk all by himself. All he had ever known was that milk came in a bottle from the milkman, or from the store. There was no way he was going to get chocolate milk from a cow anytime soon. He could never work up a taste for the buttermilk the family served up, even on this trip. It tasted sour to him. Aunt Lizzie told me Bo didn’t drink any milk while he was there.

So the cow was only for milk. The meat came from the chickens and hogs. Actually, the family got eggs
and
meat from the chickens. Sunday was the first full day for Bo in Mississippi, and that was the best day for meals at the Wright home. The family would have chicken for breakfast and for supper in the evening. The boys would have to catch the chickens for Aunt Lizzy, who would wring their necks, chop their heads off, soak them in hot water, pluck them, and cook them. Oh, my goodness, Bo had never seen anything like this. He bought our chicken all packaged up. He was just amazed to watch all this activity, but he didn’t have any problems at all eating chickens from the yard. That was the best-tasting chicken ever.

The hogs were always slaughtered in November, smoked, and put up to carry the family through the winter. Bo wouldn’t get a chance to see that during his summer visit. Mostly, though, except for Sundays, the meals were centered around vegetables. And, oh, the gardens they had. There were two big vegetable gardens. Now, Emmett was used to gardens. Everybody in Argo kept one in the backyard, side yard, back porch; wherever people could drop some seeds into some dirt, they were growing things. But he had not seen anything like these gardens. There was cabbage, turnip greens, mustard greens, carrots, lettuce, string beans, butter beans, sweet potatoes, beets, squash, tomatoes, and bell peppers. There were even two apple trees in one of the gardens. The family had to split
half and half with the boss man. Only the apple trees, not the vegetables. The boss, the owner of the land, was a German, Grover Frederick. The family called him Mr. Grover. He once asked Papa Mose to give up one of the vegetable gardens so he could plant more cotton. Papa Mose refused. He had to feed his family.

That wasn’t the only time he ever stood his ground with the boss man. In addition to picking cotton and sharing half the apples from his trees, Papa Mose also had to tend Grover Frederick’s vegetable garden. He got paid by the hour for this work. He kept a log. Once, only once, Grover Frederick questioned Papa Mose on his time. There is an old story about a cropper who went through his tallies with the plantation boss. The boss always found a way to add and subtract so that everything came out even. What he owed the black man for the cotton he picked somehow was always exactly what the black man owed him for provisions. So the white man didn’t pay him a thing after all that hard work. One time, the cropper held back one of his fields and waited for the boss to tell him they were even again before telling him he had some more cotton to add to the total amount. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” the boss said. “Now I gotta go through the whole thing all over again to come out even.”

Papa Mose didn’t come out even. Papa Mose told Grover Frederick in so many words, these are the hours, this is the time, this is what you owe. Pay up.

Papa Mose was well respected around the area. He had been a minister for years and, even though he had stopped preaching in 1949, everyone, even Aunt Lizzy, still called him “Preacher.” But he also earned respect because people knew he was a decent man, an honest man, and he always did what he said he was going to do. When he spoke up, people figured he must have an important reason, and they would listen. So Mr. Grover listened as Papa Mose told him he was keeping his two vegetable gardens. The boss man just let that one be, and Papa Mose kept his gardens. It never came up again. Besides, beyond the gardens, everywhere you looked, there was cotton. Plenty of it for picking and selling. In fact, that first Sunday Bo was down there was a special day of rest, because the next day, Monday, would be the first day of cotton-picking season, and my son was about to find out just how hard life could be on a Mississippi farm toward the end of summer.

It was just useless. I couldn’t do anything. I was in and out of bed most of the time. Gene and I were still planning to take the vacation I had worked out. We would go to Detroit, pick up one of my cousins, and take her to Omaha, where all of her family lived. But things were not working out according
to plan. Not at all. I wasn’t doing anything to get ready. I missed Bo. I wasn’t worried so much; I just felt some big part of me had been taken away. I was so used to having Bo around. Ever since I had moved back from Detroit, we had always been together, except for those weekends he’d spent in Argo. But that was different from this, and this was
so
much different from that. It wasn’t even easy to call him down in Mississippi. Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy didn’t have a telephone. I’d have to call a neighbor and set it all up for them to be in place for my call. In so many ways, this was the most distance Bo and I had ever had between us. Oh, my, I missed him so. Gene checked on me all the time. He was good about that. Whenever I was ready to go, he’d be ready, too. And Mama had even come over to help me get the apartment in order before the trip, but it was useless. I couldn’t feed myself. I couldn’t cook, couldn’t even walk to the kitchen.

I had asked my aunt Mag downstairs if she would give me at least one meal a day. I figured, if she was able to do that, I’d be able to make it. She laughed when I asked her, and said I just wanted some of her food. Well, that was partly true. She was the best cook and everybody would find excuses to come by for something to eat. I mean, she would have company all the time, because people constantly were coming by to see what they could devour. To look at her, you could tell that nobody enjoyed her cooking, or I should say, eating her cooking, as much as she did. And Aunt Mag’s heart was as full and as generous as the rest of her. Every day around noon, she would come up those steps with this wonderful plate of food.

Now, climbing those steps was not an easy thing for Aunt Mag to do. She let me know it, too, through the huffing and puffing. “You’re going to have to get out of this bed,” she said. “I am too heavy to be climbing these steps every day.”

Carrying that huge plate of food didn’t make it any easier, either. I explained that I would get up when I could, but that I just couldn’t walk. My legs didn’t seem to be working. She wanted to know what was hurting me. Well, nothing was hurting me. My legs just didn’t seem to function. She couldn’t see any reason why I was in bed. And I wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining, either. So we would go on like that. She would stay until I got through eating, take my plate, and go home. Sometimes she and Uncle Mack might come up in the evening to check me out, to see if I was getting up yet. Through it all, she was faithful in bringing me that food, and a good helping of that “get up” talk.

First call came first thing in the morning at the Wright house. There was no second call. Papa Mose would walk through the rooms in the morning,
and he’d call out “Boys” three times, once for each of his sons. He wasn’t coming back through there. Maurice, Robert, and Simeon didn’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t jumped out of bed right away and gotten ready to hit the field. They never tested it, so they never found out.