Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (38 page)

Since there was no third man there to hold Emmett down in the back of the truck, Emmett just sat there and went along for the ride, according to this story. He was taken to J. W. Milam’s place, where he was pistol-whipped with the guns Bryant and Milam had been issued in the army. Milam was using the one he had used to beat answers out of German prisoners. They claimed Emmett kept talking back to them the whole time. They claimed he had a picture of a white girl in his wallet and that he bragged about having white girlfriends. So, they kept beating him with the pistols they had taken as mementos of their service to the country. And, they said, after all this beating, he got in the back of the truck to ride around some more. With only the two of them in the front, Emmett still just sat there passively in the back of the truck all by himself while they drove around searching for a gin fan. It was getting light out by this time and Milam said he was starting to get concerned that somebody might stop them. For stealing the gin fan. They said Emmett was still defiant as
he stood on the riverbank and was told to strip and as the gun was pointed at his head.

Reporters ask questions. They ask questions and they examine records. They probe. That’s how they find out things. That’s how they get at the truth.

William Bradford Huie negotiated for this story. His interview with Bryant and Milam had been cleared by their lawyers, and they were very careful not to bring anyone else into the picture. Bryant and Milam had already been acquitted of murder. They could never be tried again for murdering my son. Other people didn’t have that kind of protection. Lawyers would understand that sort of thing and advise their clients accordingly.

So, the Bryant and Milam version of events, the one that looked like it had been cleared by the lawyers, did not include the Sheridan Plantation in Sunflower County, where Leslie Milam was in charge. That’s where Willie Reed and Amanda Bradley had both testified that they saw J. W. Milam and his truck and three other white men the Sunday morning Emmett was killed. Willie even saw Emmett in the back of that truck with the two black men. Willie’s grandfather Add Reed testified that he saw Leslie Milam there about the same time the other men and the truck were there. But the
Look
article ignored all this witness testimony and accepted J. W. Milam’s version of the story that they went to his place way over in Tallahatchie County. That would take Leslie Milam out of the picture altogether. It also left everybody else out.

This article seemed to go out of its way to exclude Carolyn Bryant from anything besides being insulted and telling her husband about it. And here Huie seemed to rely on that exaggerated story Carolyn Bryant told in court, the one that presented Emmett as brash and boastful. And worse. It was a picture of Emmett that easily fit a stereotype one white Southerner might easily have presented back then, and another white Southerner might easily have accepted. And published. Oh, God, if Huie had only looked at the photograph of Emmett’s body, he would have known that Emmett was in no condition to stand at the riverbank and talk back. Milam claimed he did. Huie accepted that claim, it seems, without question. After that savage beating Emmett took, I doubt that he could have stood at all.

The portrayal of Emmett in this story was just awful and seemed to rely not only on what Carolyn Bryant had said in court but also on what people had been spreading around Money a couple of months after the fact. But stories in the Delta pop up as fast as the cotton in late summer, another cash crop. And they grow even faster in the hands of each picker passing them on. There was one that Jimmy Hicks had picked up in one
of the juke joints where Too Tight Collins used to hang out. It was said there that the hole in Emmett’s head was not a bullet hole at all. It had been made by a drill. All sorts of horrible stories sprouted up after the trial, like the one about the picture of the white girl. It seemed as if stories about Emmett and what went on in that store that Wednesday night were going to continue to grow and be cultivated.

The money must have been a great temptation for Bryant and Milam. But they also seemed to have a strategy in mind. They must have known after their acquittal that there was some support among other white racists in the Delta for what they had done and some lingering questions in the minds of others. In painting the picture of Emmett as an arrogant and defiant black boy from Chicago, they finally were doing something that they could have never done in court: They were telling a version of events that could not be challenged under oath, and appeared to go unchallenged by the journalist taking it all down. They obviously wanted to show that they had justification for doing what they boasted about doing to Emmett. The way they saw it, he had provoked them by talking back to them. In the minds of so many whites in the Delta, it would have taken far less than what they described in that story to provide a justification for his murder. And, in the process of telling this story, Bryant and Milam also accomplished something else: They had protected other people.

I wasn’t there in Money at the store. But people who were there have said things did not happen the way Carolyn Bryant told the story in court, or the way they were embellished for the
Look
article. They never saw Emmett showing off a picture of a white girl. The only picture I could imagine Bryant and Milam finding in Emmett’s wallet was the one that came with the wallet. The one of Hedy Lamarr. I can’t imagine these killers could have mistaken a picture of Emmett’s favorite actress for his girlfriend. But, then, for a black person even to carry around a picture of a white Hollywood star would have been enough to offend the likes of these two. Sadly, the people who talked to me about what went on down in Money didn’t have their stories published in
Look
. That is the thing that is so troubling about this article. It seems to be built on an assumption that, where there is a conflict between two different versions of the same story—one black, one white—the white version is the one to be accepted. When you consider that the white version tends to play on black stereotypes, it was inevitable, over the years, that this story came to be the one that was relied on as the actual, factual account of what went on in that store in Money.

How sad. After all the relentless reporting that had been done by black
writers like Jimmy Hicks, L. Alex Wilson, and Simeon Booker; all the courageous undercover work that had been done by NAACP people like Medgar Evers, Ruby Hurley, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, and others; after the persistent efforts of Dr. Howard in coaxing testimony out of eyewitnesses, paying for their relocation to Chicago; after all that work to uncover the truth of what happened to my son, the story people would often cite over the years was the one
Look
published.

William Bradford Huie negotiated for that story. Usually, when you negotiate, you agree on a price, you agree on terms. We can only wonder what terms were set for Huie’s interviews, for what could be included, what would be excluded. In the end, Bryant and Milam were able to tell the story they seemed so eager to tell. And, for that, they collected close to four thousand dollars. For killing my son and boasting about it, they collected their reward, their bounty.

One thing about the Bryant and Milam version that is striking: Milam boasts about killing Emmett to teach him a lesson, and also to send a message to others. Whatever happened in that store in Money, whatever was said to have happened, whatever grew out of the imagination of people who told the story over and over again—the fact remains that Milam saw it as his duty as a white man to send that message. And sending a message to black folks is one of the key factors that distinguishes a lynching from a murder.

When it comes to a lynching, it is not just the actual killers who are guilty. It is the dominant culture, the entire society that permits such a thing, that encourages it. Bryant and Milam were not the only guilty parties in the lynching of my son. Witnesses have pointed to at least six or seven people. But, in a way, there were so many thousands more. People who were responsible, powerful, influential. People who could have chosen to lead, and chose instead to incite. People who could have condemned hate crimes and chose instead to condone them. People who could have come clean, and chose instead to live the rest of their lives with blood on their hands.

Many people were outraged when they read the admission of guilt. There was a call for a new kidnapping grand jury. Since Bryant and Milam hadn’t been tried on that charge, double jeopardy wouldn’t apply. But there would be no new grand jury. There even was a report that the new governor of Mississippi, James P. Coleman, said Bryant and Milam should have been executed. But he later claimed he never said that. The whole thing was just unbearable to me. On top of everything I had been through, this was just too much. Eventually, I filed a one-million-dollar lawsuit
against
Look
and Huie. Attorney Joseph Tobias represented me with that claim. The story had defamed Emmett. He was not the person who was portrayed in the article. I had not raised a person like that. What had been written about Emmett was simply not true. And it hurt so badly. Eventually, that suit was dismissed. Libel is a personal claim, I was told. In the end, as God would have it, the only person who could have filed that lawsuit was Emmett.

I had been asleep in my room up front one day and finally pulled myself up. I was groggy and tried to blink away what I thought I saw. It was a lump under my rug. Finally, after looking at it for a moment, I tried to smooth it out with my foot, but there was something there, underneath. I lifted the rug and saw what it was. Dirt.
Emmett
. That boy had been sweeping dirt under my rug. I laughed out loud, thinking about how we both had laughed so many months before that. It was after we had seen that cartoon, the one about the kids sweeping dirt under the rug. I had warned Emmett about doing such a thing. And he got me anyway. He was still making me laugh. But, in a way, he would have the last laugh on this one. I started to cry. There I sat, unable to decide whether I should clean up this dust under my rug. After all, this was Emmett’s last practical joke. Even this seemed like a keepsake, somehow. His memory, the spirit of his humor, written in that dust. Oh, God, he must have been so disappointed that he didn’t get a chance to see the look on my face when I found out about his little prank. He would have given anything to be there. I would have given a million times that much.

People have expectations. They don’t mean any harm by them at all. But they do have expectations. They might not tell you directly. In fact, they will probably be much too polite to ever say it directly. But you know or you feel that, even with the most horrible things that can happen to you, people sort of expect that you somehow will get on with your life. Trouble is, I didn’t think I had much of a life left to get on with. I wasn’t sure about returning to my job. It was hard to consider going back to anything familiar, although I should have been able to take at least some comfort from the familiar. My whole world had changed. And the new world that had only recently opened up, well, that world seemed to have spun away from me. Things had moved so quickly after Emmett’s death that I never really had a chance to grieve, to release the pain. Now, it seemed, I had nothing but time, and the pain was unbearable to me. I needed to talk, I needed to sort, but I was beginning to feel a little self-conscious about doing that. At least the public appearances, the speaking and all, that really
helped me, because I was able to talk about it. That was like sharing all that grief with thousands of others.

One day I was sitting at home all alone in the dining room, feeling so sorry for myself. Mama had gone home. Gene was working. When he’d get off from work at Ford, he would go home first, take his shower, and go to the barbershop. I might not see him until ten o’clock in the evening, when he’d come by to check on me, see if I’d had anything to eat. But he usually couldn’t stay long, because he had to go to work the next morning. So I was just sitting in the dining room feeling sorry for myself.

“What am I going to do?”

Almost as soon as I asked that question, the answer came. “End it all.”

Oh, I don’t know what possessed me. I really don’t have any idea at all. But I got up and walked over to a window. Well, that window was painted shut, so I went to another window. That one led out to a gangway, a stairwell, where I figured no one would find me until my body started to smell. No, that wouldn’t do. I looked at the front windows. One was a picture window that didn’t open, but then I couldn’t jump from those windows on the sides, either. Children played out front and that would be so traumatic for them. Besides, after I thought about it a little more, I realized something else that was very important: I wasn’t wearing pants. I didn’t wear pants back then. I was wearing a dress that Mama had made for me. Oh, I remember that dress. It was sleeveless, real tight in the waist with a long flared skirt. It was a white dress, white with a floral pattern, some kind of design in it, and that design was pink. That was one of my favorite dresses. I couldn’t stand the thought of jumping in that dress. More important, I couldn’t stand the thought that my skirt might fly up.

Just then, as I was thinking about all that, the phone rang. It was a reporter. He was thinking about doing a follow-up story on me and he wanted to know what I was planning to do. Well, I couldn’t tell him I was planning to jump out the window. So I said I wanted to go back to school and become a teacher. I turned around as if to ask, “Who said that?” Now, I don’t know to this day where it came from, but he said he would take me to register for classes. I mean, he was just going to carry me down to the college and walk me through it. That was fine with me, because I didn’t even know where to go. I hadn’t exactly given this a whole lot of thought.

As it turns out, the place to go was Chicago Teachers College. He took me there and, unfortunately, we were told that registration for classes had just closed. Before I even got a chance to start thinking about those windows back home again, he somehow convinced them to admit just one more student, and that’s how it all started. That’s how I was able to start over. I was going to go to college. I was going to become a teacher. I would
be able to work with children, to teach them, to help shape them, to introduce them to a whole world of possibilities. In the process, a whole world of possibilities was opening up to me.