Roy assured her that he’d been playing poker all night at J.W.’s store in Glendora with his brothers and Melvin Campbell and a few others. According to Carolyn, he insisted, “We just whipped the boy and then dropped him off on the side of the road. That was it. We didn’t do anything else to him.” She maintained even years later that she had believed him at the time.9
Roy was still asleep when Sheriff Smith parked his squad car in front of Bryant’s Grocery at two in the afternoon. He woke only when he heard the pounding on the back door; then he quickly dressed and stepped outside, where the sheriff and his deputy, John Ed Cothran, were waiting. Smith and Roy got into the police car to talk. “I asked him about going down there [to the Wrights’ house] and getting that little nigger,” Smith testified. Roy acknowledged that he had done that. “I asked him why did he go down there and get that little nigger boy.” Roy said he had heard that the boy made some “ugly remarks” to his wife. He “said that he went down and got [Emmett Till] to let his wife see him to identify him, and then he said she said it wasn’t the right one, and then he said that he turned him loose.” Smith asked where they’d released Till. “He said right in front of the store. He said he went to some of his people—I don’t remember who he said just now—and he said he played cards there the rest of the night.” The sheriff arrested Roy for kidnapping and booked him into the Leflore County Jail.10
The rest of the country did not even know Emmett was missing—not yet. Mamie was only just alerting newsmen in Chicago. Moses spirited his grandson Wheeler to Greenwood to catch the train home to Chicago, which left him with three sons and one grandson. He still had twenty-five acres of cotton to pick and sell, money they would need under any circumstances, so the boys would help him.
Sheriff Smith continued to search for the corpse and seemed determined to build a case that would yield convictions. On Monday, August 29, the day after the sheriff arrested Roy, the Bryant-Milam clan gathered at Eula Lee’s store in Sharkey to discuss the situation. It was terrible that Roy had been arrested, of course, but now they wanted to make sure things didn’t get out of hand and sweep up the entire family. Roy was not the strongest stick in the bundle, and there was some concern that he might break under pressure and implicate everyone. It was decided that J.W. would allow himself to be arrested in order to keep Roy from “running his mouth” and changing the story they had agreed to tell. J.W. drove straight to the sheriff’s office, where he was immediately arrested for kidnapping. He acknowledged that he had abducted the boy but claimed to have released him that night, and he refused to implicate anyone else, even Roy. Other than that, J.W. didn’t say a word.11
On Wednesday, August 31, the third day after the kidnapping, Emmett’s body surfaced through the dark water. “I seen two knees and feet,” said the boy who discovered it. Robert Hodges, seventeen, was walking along the riverbank just after dawn. The ruddy-faced sharecropper’s son kept several “trot lines” stretched across the mud-brown Tallahatchie, and he was hoping to find them thrashing with one of the big catfish that lurked in the cool, dark depths. But this morning, as the dawn seared the mist off the river, the boy saw toes protruding from the water: “[The body] was hung up there on a snag in the bottom of the river.”12
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Decades later Carolyn Bryant still recalled the news about the body as a traumatic shock. After Roy’s arrest she and her two sons were taken in by the Milam and Bryant relatives. “I suppose they contacted Leslie or Melvin and they made arrangements,” she told me. The family kept her isolated from the unfolding aftermath of the lynching and would not even let her speak to anyone on the telephone. On the third day Carolyn was at Buddy Milam’s store when Raymond, her husband’s twin brother, walked through the door. “They found a body this morning,” he announced. “They think it’s [Emmett Till].”
“No, it can’t be,” she said. “Roy told me he didn’t do anything to him, that they turned him loose.”
“And [Raymond] said, ‘Well, Roy didn’t do it. Melvin Campbell did it.’ And that’s when I told him, ‘Well, why is Roy and J.W. in jail and Melvin’s out? Why would they arrest Roy, then?’ And he said I was not to tell anybody it was Melvin. And I guess Raymond told [the rest of the family] what I had said because they got us that night and took us to a sister-in-law’s house in Lambert, Mississippi. And we were really isolated then.”
The farmhouse in Lambert was about a forty-five-minute drive from the Bryant store in Money. Carolyn and her sons stayed there only a couple of days, and then the Milam-Bryant clan sent yet another relative to move them to another safe location. “I don’t remember who got us but it was always one of [the Milams]. Me and my two boys, we’d stay here a couple of nights, and then they’d take me to another relative and we’d stay a couple of nights.” The Milams refused to let her telephone even her mother or siblings, who became alarmed when they did not hear from her. “My brother came looking for me, and one of the Milam brothers told him that I didn’t want them to know where I was, that I didn’t want to talk to them,” Carolyn told me, still sounding offended. “They were keeping me from everybody. They were afraid that I might say something they didn’t want me to say or I might reveal something they didn’t want revealed.”13
Sheriff Smith told reporters for the Greenwood Morning Star on August 30 that he wanted to bring her in for questioning. She ought to know something useful; after all, it was Emmett Till’s “alleged insulting remarks” to her that provoked the kidnapping in the first place.14 The following day, the same day Emmett’s body was found, the New York Post reported that Leflore County authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant on kidnapping charges.15 The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that the Sheriff’s Department had been unable to locate her to serve the warrant.16 Two days later, strange as it seems, the Birmingham (Alabama) News announced, “Authorities apparently have abandoned the search for Mrs. Roy Bryant.” Leflore County district attorney Stanny Sanders had told the Birmingham reporters that there were “no plans at present for picking up Mrs. Bryant.”17 Fifty years later the FBI informed Carolyn that a warrant had been issued for her arrest; that, she wrote in her memoir, was the first she’d heard of it.18
A spokesman for the Leflore County Sheriff’s Department told the Memphis Commercial-Appeal on September 2, “We know where she is and feel sure we can pick her up if needed.”19 But by the next day Sheriff Smith appeared set on leaving Carolyn out of it entirely. He claimed a chivalrous impulse that apparently overrode the belief that she had participated in the kidnapping. “Officers have not questioned Bryant’s pretty brunette wife, in her early 20s, who was believed to have stayed in the car with an unidentified man when Bryant and Milam whisked Till from the home of his uncle in Money, Miss. community,” stated the Greenwood Morning Star. “We aren’t going to bother the woman,” Smith told reporters on September 3. “She has got two small boys to take care of.”20