In my heart, I wanted to be brave like Preacher Mose and stand up to white people—?stand in a crowded courtroom and point a finger at someone like Ricky Turner and say, There he is! He’s the one that tried to run me off the road, then spat tobacco juice at me! He’s the one that chased nine-year-old Obadiah Malone into the woods and all the way to Stillwater Lake! He’s the kind of evil person who would kill a Negro for no reason!
But as Papa always said, the spirit might be willing, but the flesh is sometimes weak.
After hearing what Ma Pearl said about Preacher Mose, I suspected that in the courtroom his spirit was willing, but in the dark of the night, his flesh became weak. And when it came to standing up to white folks in Mississippi, my flesh, like Preacher Mose’s, weakened when I thought of the horrors they could do to me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
DURING CHURCH ON THE PREVIOUS TWO WEDNESDAY NIGHTS, I had been so tired after picking cotton all day that I barely kept my eyes open while Reverend Jenkins droned on with his lesson. As a matter of fact, I welcomed any prayers the congregation decided to offer, because it gave me a chance to rest my eyes. And I especially welcomed Deacon Edwards. That man could call upon the Lord for a good fifteen minutes without even stopping to catch his breath. But that Thursday night, when Reverend Jenkins decided to hold a prayer meeting before the last day of the trial, sleep was the furthest thing from my mind.
Church was packed. It was more of a victory celebration than a prayer meeting. Even Aunt Belle and Monty were there, as well as a few other folks from around Leflore County who didn’t regularly attend Greater Mount Zion Church.
“Today was a great day for the Negro in Mississippi,” Reverend Jenkins had said at the beginning of the service. “A historic victory.”
Not only had Preacher Mose stood before a courtroom packed with white people and pointed out a white murderer the day before, but on that Thursday, Mamie Till, the Chicago boy’s mother, had bravely testified before the court that she was one hundred percent sure the body found in the river was that of her son, Emmett Louis Till.
Sheriff Strider and the lawyers defending the “accused” murderers were adamant in trying to convince the jury that the body pulled from the river had been there too long to be that of Emmett Till, even making a mockery of the colored undertaker during the trial. They were still holding on to the claim that the NAACP had gone through all that trouble to secure a dead Negro’s body, tie a seventy-pound gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and throw it into the Tallahatchie River just so they could pick a fight with whites in Mississippi. Aunt Belle said she had even overheard one white person laugh and say, “Ain’t that just like a nigger to try to swim across the Tallahatchie with a gin fan tied around his neck.”
Whether they tried to make a mockery of the trial or not, Aunt Belle and Monty were convinced that with the testimony of two surprise witnesses, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had to be found guilty. An eighteen-year-old colored man named Willie Reed had been brave enough to testify before that menacing crowd that he had seen the two accused men take a Negro boy into a barn, and after that he heard screams and beatings. Willie Reed’s aunt, Amanda Bradley, had also been brave enough to go to a Mississippi courthouse and point Milam out among his own folks. She, too, had heard the screams coming from the barn that morning and had seen Milam leaving it.
With all that was going on in our little part of Mississippi, I felt invigorated. I felt hopeful. Colored folks were being brave and openly pointing a finger at whites who had committed crimes, and it was all because of a city boy who forgot he was supposed to act a certain way around whites in Mississippi.