Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (22 page)

After everyone left, I tried to get a little sleep before getting up a little later to go to church. The telephone rang like an alarm. I looked at the clock. It was nine-thirty.

I picked up the receiver. “Hello,” I said. But there was nothing. “Hello,” I said again. Dead silence.

Finally the voice came through. “This is Willie Mae.” Curtis had called his mother. “I don’t know how to tell you. Bo.”

“Bo, what?” I sat up with a jerk, my mind racing. “Willie Mae, what about Bo?”

“Some men came and got him last night.”

 T
hat call. Early Sunday morning. August 28, 1955. I can never forget that call. As it turns out, Willie Mae had raised more questions than she answered. And I had so many questions to ask. What men? Why had they come? Where had they taken my boy? What was being done about it? But Willie Mae had been much too distraught. She just started crying and wound up hanging up the phone before she could explain anything more than what she had already said. Emmett was missing. Missing in Mississippi. Oh, my God. Oh, dear Lord, no. Please, no. Don’t let this be happening. The thing I had feared most, the thing that had made me take so long to even think about letting Bo make the trip, the thing that had kept me immobilized all week long, the most horrible thing any mother could possibly imagine was becoming a reality. I tried to fight back all the things, all the visions that were playing out in my mind. I tried to deny all the things that I could not allow myself to accept. The only thing I really knew was what Willie Mae had said, and that didn’t have to mean anything more than that. Somebody had taken Bo out of the house. Maybe that’s all there was to it. But she was crying so. What about her son, Curtis? And Hallie’s son, Wheeler? Where were they? Were they all right? And the other boys, Aunt Lizzy’s sons. What had happened? Aunt Lizzy, Uncle Moses. What was going on?

The thoughts were making my head spin, and my heart ache, and my breathing erratic. But I knew I needed to keep under control. I had to steady myself. I had to think. I had to call Mama, to tell her what Willie Mae had told me. I knew she’d have the same reaction I had. I knew my mother. I knew she felt like she was Bo’s mother. And, as I talked to Mama, I realized I was right. She had always been so strong, the rock for
all of us. But I could feel her cracking as she told me, or ordered me, or begged me, to come to her. Right then. I called Gene, told him, and he insisted on taking me to Mama’s. He wasn’t that far away, so okay, fine, I could wait for him. I probably didn’t need to drive anyway, not while I was in that frame of mind. So, yes, I would wait. Sit tight. But I couldn’t sit still. I needed to do something. I started making my bed. And finally I stopped, I caught myself. Why on earth was I doing
that?
Of all things. What was I thinking? Was I just trying to keep busy, keep from thinking? Lose myself in work to stop me from losing my mind? I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stay there. Not one minute longer. I got ready to leave, picked up Emmett’s watch, wound it, put it on.

Gene drove up just as I was backing out of the garage. He parked and slid behind the wheel of my car. We had barely made it a mile when I had to take over. I just had to do it. I knew I was in no condition to drive. But he was barely going the speed limit, stopping for all the lights, all the stop signs, and I didn’t care about any of that. I drove through everything as fast as I could go. I needed to get to Mama’s place. I needed to get to Mama. And I needed to do it fast. The way I figured it, if I had been stopped by the police that morning, then I just would have had a police escort.

We weren’t much good for each other at first, Mama and I. She usually knew exactly what to do at exactly the right time to do it. But she was in such an emotional state. Not hysterical. Just very, very quiet, like she had closed down. It wasn’t long before Willie Mae came to Mama’s, too. She was crying, I was crying, and she told a little more of the story, as much as she knew at the time. They said Emmett had whistled at a white woman.

We knew we had to do something. We kept trying to contact Papa Mose, but we couldn’t get through to him. Somehow, we decided to call the newspapers. A number of reporters came out. I had hoped Mama would know what to say, but she couldn’t say anything that would have helped. I stepped forward, I talked to the reporters, I told them the only thing I knew at the time. My son, Emmett Till, had been taken away in the middle of the night by white men who came into my Uncle Moses Wright’s home in Money, Mississippi.

I kept hoping that Mama would chime in, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. I still was holding out hope for a lot of things at that point. I hoped that Emmett was all right. I hoped that whoever had taken him had let him go, or that he had escaped. I hoped that he was only hiding out somewhere, and that was the only reason why we hadn’t heard from him. But, as I looked at Mama, I began to realize that she already had given up hope. Mama had lived in Mississippi. Mama knew what it meant when white
men came in the middle of the night in Mississippi. She had a look that made me pause. It was the look of someone who could see something she didn’t want to see. It was as if she had already accepted something I couldn’t possibly accept. The unspeakable. She remained silent, and I had to shake it all off. At that moment, I had nothing left but my hope. To let that go would mean I would have nothing.

At some point, Papa Spearman, Mama’s husband, suggested we call on his nephew Rayfield Mooty. That wound up being a good call. Papa Henry Spearman was a security guard at Inland Steel Container Company. Rayfield also worked with Inland Steel, and was a union official, head of the Steelworkers Local. He had good contacts. He knew all the big labor people, the steelworkers, the autoworkers, the sleeping-car porters, everybody. Because of his organizing work, he also knew politicians and civil rights people. But I had not gotten along very well with Rayfield. There was some distance between us. He was strictly business. He never seemed to be a man who showed much feeling and I had always found him to be especially cool toward me. In fact, I had always thought he was rather mean. He had taken sides with his uncle against my mother and he knew I did not appreciate that. So, when he came by that Sunday morning, our first moments together were a little tense. I tried to explain things to him, but I couldn’t stop crying, blowing my nose. Everything was starting to come out of me by this time.

He was impatient. “Why don’t you stop all this,” he said. “Just blow your nose, stop crying, and tell me what’s going on here.”

“They took Emmett,” I managed to say. “Some men, in the middle of the night. They took Emmett away.”

“Emmett? What, who’s Emmett?”

“My son,” I said. “Emmett Till. Mr. Mooty, that’s Bobo.”

He stiffened and his face lost all expression. He said nothing, nothing at all. He just lowered his head, turned, and walked out of the room. I was puzzled by that. Rayfield Mooty was a man of action, and I couldn’t believe this would be his only action. To just leave us there like that. It seemed like he was away for about ten minutes. Then he came back. He looked like he was ready to cry. And it made me start crying again. Everybody knew Bo. Everybody knew him by that name. Everybody loved him. He had even touched Rayfield Mooty, who was now prepared to do everything he could to help.

Mama’s house was filling up with people, friends, relatives. Ollie was there. She was always there for me. She brought food and unconditional love. Ollie also worked for Inland Steel Container Company. Her supervisor was the head of industrial relations. The company had offices in the
South, in New Orleans and Memphis, and she would see if there was anything her company might do to help.

We still hadn’t reached Papa Mose. So we decided to try Mama’s brother, Uncle Crosby. Thank God, we were able to talk to him. Aunt Lizzy was there. The other boys were okay and Uncle Crosby was going to the sheriff with Papa Mose.

At the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, the church Emmett loved so much, the church his grandmother helped to found, the entire congregation stood and prayed. The members prayed for Emmett, they prayed for Mama and me. They prayed that their prayers had come in time.

Monday morning, August 29, Rayfield arranged for me to meet with the Chicago branch of the NAACP, and we were referred immediately to William Henry Huff. He was the Chicago NAACP counsel, the chairman of the organization’s Legal Redress Committee. He was a dignified man who spoke with assurance and experience. He had been involved in a number of Mississippi matters, getting people out of that state and out of danger. He promised to put his resources to work and immediately reached out to political contacts. Between Rayfield Mooty and William Henry Huff, things started happening. The story was appearing in the Chicago papers and I was getting calls. Lots of calls. The local officials began pressing Mississippi authorities to find Emmett right away. Before I knew it, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was involved. And so was Illinois Governor William Stratton, and William Dawson, the powerful South Side congressman. Ollie’s boss at Inland Steel Container Company had talked to the president of the company, who was sympathetic. He contacted the company’s Southern offices to put their planes on the lookout as they flew over the area in Mississippi where Emmett had been taken.

I wanted to catch the first thing smoking to Mississippi, but Uncle Crosby convinced me to wait in Chicago while he took care of things down there. That day, Monday, in Mississippi, Leflore County Sheriff George Smith announced that he had arrested two white men on kidnapping charges. Roy Bryant, owner of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, and his half-brother, J. W. “Big” Milam, who managed cotton pickers for local plantations. They admitted they had taken Emmett, but said they let him go. The sheriff was still looking for Roy Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, and one other person in connection with the abduction.

They said they had let Emmett go. Maybe there was some reason to hope that my boy was okay and would be taken care of. Wheeler had been put on an early-morning train at Duck Hill, headed back to Chicago, back
home to safety. In Argo, his brother William imagined Emmett making it through the woods after Bryant and Milam let him go. He imagined how Emmett could make it to the home of some nice colored people who would make sure he got back to his own home. If anybody could, he knew, Emmett could. I tried to imagine the same thing.

Things were so hectic at Mama’s with people coming in and out constantly, with so many calls coming in. We had to add a second line. That way we’d have one for making calls, one for taking them. We couldn’t let a moment pass without trying to reach out to somebody, anybody, who might help us. And we couldn’t take a chance that the most important call we could ever receive would get blocked by a busy signal. I spent so much of my time by the phone, taking down notes, dates, times, details. I had to keep busy. I had to keep my mind off my greatest fear, I had to focus on everything around me, all the bustling, all the energy. And the absolute joy when he walked through the door.

Wheeler was just sixteen, a boy becoming a man. He felt things that a boy cannot always express, and a man might try to suppress. I could see that as he began to approach me as I sat there by the phone. He loved Bo. Bo loved Wheeler. I loved Wheeler, too. But I knew there was someone else in the room with even stronger feelings at that moment. I knew that the way only a mother can know such things. That’s why I stopped Wheeler in his tracks and said what I had to say: “Go hug your mother.”

Somewhere around seven in the evening on Wednesday, August 24, after supper, while Papa Mose was in church, Maurice, Wheeler, Bo, Simeon, Roosevelt Crawford, and Roosevelt’s niece Ruthie Crawford climbed into Papa Mose’s car and drove uptown. Although there were a couple of hundred people who lived around Money, the town itself was little more than one street. Not a street, really. It was more like what somebody once called “a wide place in the road.” A whistle-stop. It was a lazy place. Easy to feel relaxed there. In Money, there were no obvious signs of trouble. None of the things Emmett had been warned about. No “White” or “Colored” drinking fountains, no segregated sections on buses, nobody stepping off sidewalks to let white folks pass. But that was because there were no drinking fountains, there were no buses, there were no sidewalks. Money wasn’t like other places in the Jim Crow South. It was worse. It was much worse. The dangers were hidden, and a lot more treacherous. It was a place with racial attitudes as rigid as an oak tree in the dead of winter. People who lived in the area knew where the lines were, knew not to cross them. They didn’t need signs to direct them. They didn’t need help abiding
by the rules, just like they didn’t need help breathing. It was in them. A basic life function. For outsiders, things weren’t that obvious.

The kids had driven uptown to buy a few treats at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Roy Bryant, the owner, was out of town. His twenty-one-year-old wife, Carolyn, was working the counter alone that evening. On the porch, there was a checker game going on, as usual, with about four or five people involved. And there were other black kids hanging around. One at a time, the boys bought things in the store. Wheeler was inside when Emmett walked in. Wheeler left and then Simeon came to stand in the door to look out for Emmett, who paid two cents for some bubble gum and left. For Emmett, this little transaction was not all that different from any other one he might have had at Miss Haynes’s store back in Argo.

A few versions of what happened next would emerge and even more variations on the story would develop over time. The kids were standing around on the porch outside the store when they saw Carolyn Bryant come out and head for a car. They kept laughing and talking as Emmett told everyone what he had bought. That’s when the whistle was heard. Maurice would later tell reporters that Emmett made a whistling sound when he got stuck on a word. “Bubble gum” would have given him as much trouble in Money as “Moon Pie” once had given him in Argo. Roosevelt said he thought Emmett was whistling at a bold checker move on the porch. The others felt he was doing it as a joke, intentionally, to be playful. Whatever it was, it stopped all the laughter. Right away, someone said that Carolyn Bryant was going to the car for her gun. Everyone scrambled. The kids jumped into the Ford. But Maurice didn’t get it moving quickly enough. Maybe it was that nasty gear problem again. And that made everyone nervous. They yelled at him to get going. Finally, he did, and they started on their way back home down Darfield Road. About two miles out of Money, a mile away from home, the kids saw something that upset them all over again. There were headlights in the rearview mirror. It had gotten darker by now and the headlights behind them were getting brighter, moving closer. Everybody knew right away what that meant. Somebody was coming after them. Maurice had a choice to make. But he knew he couldn’t outrun another car in that forty-six Ford on that dusty road on that night. Without really thinking about it, he pulled over and jumped out of the car. Everybody jumped out after him. Everybody except Simeon. He just slid down on the seat to hide. The others ran through the cotton field hoping they could disappear into the darkness. Hoping whoever was following them wouldn’t find Simmy in the car. As the kids ran, the bolls—the ones that hadn’t opened yet—kept hitting against their legs.
Cotton may be soft, but those bolls were kind of hard when they hadn’t opened yet. They hurt and they made Wheeler and Bo trip and fall to the ground. The boys looked back over their shoulders and watched. They saw the car continue moving down the road, right on past the Ford, where Simmy finally felt it was safe enough to sit up again.