“Yeah,” said Emmett.
“Well, that was my sister-in-law and I won’t stand for it. And don’t say ‘Yeah’ to me or I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on.” Milam told Simeon to close his eyes and go back to sleep, while Emmett pulled on a white T-shirt, charcoal gray pants, and black loafers.22
Elizabeth offered them money if they would leave the boy alone. Curtis thought Bryant might have accepted if he had been there without his burly half-brother, but Milam yelled, “Woman, you get back in the bed, and I want to hear them springs squeak.” With unimaginable poise Wright quietly explained that the boy had suffered from polio as a child and had never been quite right. He meant no harm, but he just didn’t have good sense. “Why not give the boy a good whipping and leave it at that? He’s only fourteen and he’s from up North.”23
Milam turned to Wright and asked, “How old are you, Preacher?”
Wright answered that he was sixty-four. “You make any trouble,” said Milam, “and you’ll never live to be sixty-five.”24
Milam and Bryant hauled the sleepy child out the front door toward a vehicle waiting beyond the trees in the moonless Mississippi night. Wright could hear the doors being opened, though no interior light came on; then he thought he heard a voice ask “Is this the boy?” and another voice answer “Yes.” He and others later speculated that Carolyn Bryant had been in the vehicle and had identified Emmett, thereby becoming an accessory to murder. But besides being dark it was hard to hear the low voices through the trees, and Wright told reporters at the time, “I don’t know if it was a lady’s voice or not.” The vehicle pulled away without its headlights on, and nobody in the house could tell whether it was a truck or a sedan.
After he heard the tires crackling through the gravel, Wright stepped out into the yard alone and stared toward Money for a long time.25
3
GROWING UP BLACK IN CHICAGO
It was Reverend Wright who started the three Chicago boys, Emmett, Curtis, and Wheeler, thinking about going to Mississippi that summer of 1955, only a few days after Emmett turned fourteen. A former parishioner, Robert Jones, who was the father-in-law of Wright’s daughter, Willie Mae, had passed away in Chicago, and the family asked Wright to conduct the funeral. While he was up north it was decided that he would bring Wheeler and Emmett back to Mississippi with him and that Curtis would join them soon afterward.1
The image of Wright in Chicago is one of the more pleasing in this hard story. While he was in town he rode the elevated train, toured the enormous Merchandise Mart and the downtown Loop, and gazed out from atop the 462-foot Tribune Tower, which featured stones from the Great Pyramid, the Alamo, and the Great Wall of China, among other famous constructions. He enjoyed the sights but was hardly dumbstruck. The city had its glories, he acknowledged, but he boasted of the simple pleasures of rural life in the Delta. Four rivers—the Yazoo, the Sunflower, the Yalobusha, and the Tallahatchie—passed near his Mississippi home, and there were seven deep lakes. This surely offered the best fishing in the world.2 His stories enchanted Emmett. “For a free-spirited boy who lived to be outdoors,” Emmett’s mother, Mamie, said, “there was so much possibility, so much adventure in the Mississippi his great-uncle described.” Although Mamie originally refused to let him go south, she soon relented under a barrage of pressure from Emmett, who recruited support from the extended family.3
One stock theme in stories of Emmett Till is that, being from the North, he died in Mississippi because he just didn’t know any better. How was a boy from Chicago supposed to know anything about segregation or the battle lines laid down by white supremacy? It is tempting to paint him, as his mother did, as innocent of the perilous boundaries of race; her reasons for doing so made sense at the time, even though being fourteen and abducted at gunpoint by adults would seem evidence enough of his innocence. But it defies the imagination that a fourteen-year-old from 1950s Chicago could really be ignorant of the consequences of the color of his skin.
Race worked in different ways in Chicago than it did in Mississippi, but there were similarities. After Emmett was murdered one newspaper writer, Carl Hirsch, had the clarity of mind to note, “The Negro children who live here on Chicago’s South Side or any Northern ghetto are no strangers to the Jim Crow and the racist violence. . . . Twenty minutes from the Till home is Trumbull Park Homes, where for two years a racist mob has besieged 29 Negro families in a government housing project.” Emmett attended a segregated, all-black school in a community “padlocked as a ghetto by white supremacy.” Hirsch pointed out, “People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.”4
There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for instance, would live on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and African Americans in the South Side’s “Black Belt.” All of these groups had gangs that regarded their neighborhood as a place to be defended against encroachments by outsiders. And the most visible outsiders were African Americans.
Black youngsters who walked through neighborhoods other than their own did so at their peril. Those searching for places to play, in parks and other public facilities, were especially vulnerable. These were lessons that black children growing up on the South Side learned with their ABCs.6
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