It wasn’t long before the Carthans referred to Argo as their own “Little Mississippi.” Other family members had already established a beachhead for relatives, friends, and even strangers who heard there might be work in Chicago or Argo. Mamie’s grandmother founded a church for the migrants. “As I was growing up,” Mamie wrote later, “it really seemed like almost everybody from Mississippi was coming through our house—the Ellis Island of Chicago.”1
Mississippi in memory remained both the ancestral homeplace and a land of ghosts and terror. “All kinds of stories came out of Mississippi with the black people who were running for their lives,” Mamie wrote. There had been talk of a terrible lynching in Greenwood, another young man strung mutilated from a tree, not far from Money, where her uncle Moses and aunt Elizabeth Wright lived. The Greenwood lynching “was the sort of horrible thing you only heard about in the areas nearby.” In the decades before the civil rights era, racial killings in remote corners of the Deep South frequently went unreported by the national or even the local press.2 What the migrants learned by word of mouth has since been established as fact. Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.3 Richard Wright, writing of his boyhood in Mississippi in the 1920s, observed, “The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear about them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.”4
Mamie was haunted by the story of a little black girl who had been playing with a white girl at the home of the white family that employed her mother. The white girl got upset with the black girl and ran to tell her father as he walked up the driveway from work. He angrily snatched up the black girl, shook her like a rag doll, then tossed her up against a tree in the front yard. “Now, that girl’s mother had to finish her day’s work before she could even look after her daughter, who was left there writhing in pain the rest of the day,” Mamie remembered many years later. “Eventually, the little girl died of her injuries.” This was “a cautionary tale,” she said, a tale of horror rooted in real experience, whether or not it was precisely true in its particular details. “Was this a true story? I don’t know. But I do know this: Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.”5
Though Argo was almost close enough to be a part of Chicago, the reality the Carthan family lived was “a sleepy little town where whites called blacks by their first names and where blacks would never dare to do the same thing.”6 Segregation was haphazard and unpredictable. “Some of the white kids and people of Argo could get nasty and give the Negro children a rough time just for spite,” recalls Gerald V. Stokes, who grew up in Argo during the 1950s. Black children in Argo were told never to enter restaurants or business establishments except in the company of an adult: “They were warned never to take short cuts to school through the white neighborhoods. They were warned never to talk to strangers, especially white strangers, or to talk back [to] white folks.” In Argo, according to Stokes, “bad things happened to little Negro children at the hands of white strangers.”7
Argo was a community of immigrants, nearly all of them from Mississippi, who had come in search of the Promised Land and found something less grand. Even so the kids frolicked loudly up and down the streets until darkness began to fall. Mothers and fathers sat on the stoops and laughed out loud without concern for who might hear. Neighbors shared access to telephones, which were rare, and simply yelled to communicate with friends across the street. “Everyone talked loudly and freely,” writes Stokes. “They felt secure in the blackness of their lives.”8 Mamie agrees: “You could pretty much see it all from our end, on the sidewalk in front of our home. The elementary school right across the street, the church not too far down the street, and to the right, filling up the distant horizon, was the Corn Products plant. Our whole world.”9
All the Carthans’ immediate neighbors were family members from Mississippi. Aunt Marie, Uncle Kid, and his cousin “June Bug” lived west of the Carthans. Uncle Crosby and his family lived to the east. Just behind them were Aunt Babe and Uncle Emmett. Mamie’s great-uncle Lee Green lived across the street. This must have made a terribly hard thing a little easier when Mamie’s father left the family in 1932, when she was eleven, and moved to Detroit to marry another woman. Even with her daddy gone, Mamie grew up in the bosom of this extended family, much beloved, secure from the many-sided perils of Mississippi and sheltered from the Chicago that E. Franklin Frazier called “the City of Destruction.”10
And it wasn’t just Mississippi kin who found welcome and a sense of belonging in the Carthan household. “Our house was the meetinghouse, the gathering place, the center of the community,” recalled Mamie, whose deep attachment to her mother never faded. “It was the place where Mama had helped [her mother] found the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ and where she recruited new members with practically each new Mississippi migrant.” Here in “Little Mississippi” they found new lives anchored by the Corn Products plant and surrounded by the family but still tethered to the South.11 In the summer black folks from Argo felt an unwritten obligation to visit family in Mississippi and reconnect with the social and spiritual world that continued to define their lives.12
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On October 14, 1940, at eighteen, Mamie married Louis Till, a burly, athletic gambler who favored dice and poker and loved boxing. “I became pregnant right away, and being the plump type, I began filling out rapidly,” she later told a newspaper reporter. “This set the neighbors’ tongues to clacking busily.” Emmett Louis Till was born in Cook County Hospital on July 25, 1941, after a long and difficult labor. Medical complications during a breech birth left the infant scarred from the instruments and with a badly bruised knee, among other injuries. The doctors thought that some damage might be permanent; thankfully they were wrong. Mamie was in bad shape for months, but at two months old Emmett “was a beautiful baby with a sunny disposition and every sign of being normal.” By Mamie’s account, her husband never once came to see his son or his wife in the hospital.13