When Emmett crossed over into Mississippi, there surely must have been something familiar to him. Not something he recognized with his eyes, but something he felt deep within his soul. Mississippi had always been a part of his life. It was always present in our little community of Mississippi transplants in Argo. It was in our awareness, always there, even if we were only thinking about why we didn’t want to think about it anymore. Even in Argo, even in Chicago, Mississippi was still a place we were desperately trying to escape. Why had my son wanted to go back there so badly? What was this deep longing that he felt? It was like he had been programmed at birth to return to the soil of his ancestors, at this time, in this way, and for a purpose he could not possibly have recognized.
It was a strange time for a black boy from Chicago to go to Mississippi. Especially Emmett. Independent and uncompromising in so many ways, he found himself in a place where these qualities were not tolerated in black boys. Self-assured, confident about a future without limitations, he must have gazed out at the wide-open spaces of the Mississippi Delta in amazement. As he surveyed what seemed like an endless plain, he must have seen the ideal place for a boy with unbounded spirit, completely unaware of the boundaries that had begun to close in on him as soon as he got off that train.
The home of Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy was one of the largest on the 150-acre plantation. It had four bedrooms. Emmett and Wheeler would double up with Maurice, Robert, and Simeon—Emmett’s cousins, Wheeler’s uncles. Emmett would share the bed with twelve-year-old Simeon. Wheeler slept in another bedroom with Maurice. Willie Mae’s son, Curtis, would share the room with Robert after joining the boys down there a week later. Papa Mose had almost a full acre of land to himself. It was set back about fifty feet from the road, behind the trees—cedar, persimmon, pecan, and cottonwood—and at the edge of the cotton fields. The sounds of the country surrounded you in that place. The killdeer whistling on the wing around the lake across the way, the mockingbird everywhere, singing the song of any other bird it could imitate. And there were the farm animals. Plenty of space on this plot for them. There was a cow. And, even though everybody in the house had chores, no one but Papa Mose could mess with that cow. That was the family’s source of milk. On his earlier visit, when he was just a little boy, Emmett was amazed to see the milk come from the cow. After all, he had been friends with the milkman in Argo, who had given him a little bottle of chocolate milk for helping out. He could put away a quart of milk all by himself. All he had ever known was that milk came in a bottle from the milkman, or from the store. There was no way he was going to get chocolate milk from a cow anytime soon. He could never work up a taste for the buttermilk the family served up, even on this trip. It tasted sour to him. Aunt Lizzie told me Bo didn’t drink any milk while he was there.
So the cow was only for milk. The meat came from the chickens and hogs. Actually, the family got eggs and meat from the chickens. Sunday was the first full day for Bo in Mississippi, and that was the best day for meals at the Wright home. The family would have chicken for breakfast and for supper in the evening. The boys would have to catch the chickens for Aunt Lizzy, who would wring their necks, chop their heads off, soak them in hot water, pluck them, and cook them. Oh, my goodness, Bo had never seen anything like this. He bought our chicken all packaged up. He was just amazed to watch all this activity, but he didn’t have any problems at all eating chickens from the yard. That was the best-tasting chicken ever.
The hogs were always slaughtered in November, smoked, and put up to carry the family through the winter. Bo wouldn’t get a chance to see that during his summer visit. Mostly, though, except for Sundays, the meals were centered around vegetables. And, oh, the gardens they had. There were two big vegetable gardens. Now, Emmett was used to gardens. Everybody in Argo kept one in the backyard, side yard, back porch; wherever people could drop some seeds into some dirt, they were growing things. But he had not seen anything like these gardens. There was cabbage, turnip greens, mustard greens, carrots, lettuce, string beans, butter beans, sweet potatoes, beets, squash, tomatoes, and bell peppers. There were even two apple trees in one of the gardens. The family had to split half and half with the boss man. Only the apple trees, not the vegetables. The boss, the owner of the land, was a German, Grover Frederick. The family called him Mr. Grover. He once asked Papa Mose to give up one of the vegetable gardens so he could plant more cotton. Papa Mose refused. He had to feed his family.
That wasn’t the only time he ever stood his ground with the boss man. In addition to picking cotton and sharing half the apples from his trees, Papa Mose also had to tend Grover Frederick’s vegetable garden. He got paid by the hour for this work. He kept a log. Once, only once, Grover Frederick questioned Papa Mose on his time. There is an old story about a cropper who went through his tallies with the plantation boss. The boss always found a way to add and subtract so that everything came out even. What he owed the black man for the cotton he picked somehow was always exactly what the black man owed him for provisions. So the white man didn’t pay him a thing after all that hard work. One time, the cropper held back one of his fields and waited for the boss to tell him they were even again before telling him he had some more cotton to add to the total amount. “Why didn’t you tell me that in the first place?” the boss said. “Now I gotta go through the whole thing all over again to come out even.”
Papa Mose didn’t come out even. Papa Mose told Grover Frederick in so many words, these are the hours, this is the time, this is what you owe. Pay up.
Papa Mose was well respected around the area. He had been a minister for years and, even though he had stopped preaching in 1949, everyone, even Aunt Lizzy, still called him “Preacher.” But he also earned respect because people knew he was a decent man, an honest man, and he always did what he said he was going to do. When he spoke up, people figured he must have an important reason, and they would listen. So Mr. Grover listened as Papa Mose told him he was keeping his two vegetable gardens. The boss man just let that one be, and Papa Mose kept his gardens. It never came up again. Besides, beyond the gardens, everywhere you looked, there was cotton. Plenty of it for picking and selling. In fact, that first Sunday Bo was down there was a special day of rest, because the next day, Monday, would be the first day of cotton-picking season, and my son was about to find out just how hard life could be on a Mississippi farm toward the end of summer.
It was just useless. I couldn’t do anything. I was in and out of bed most of the time. Gene and I were still planning to take the vacation I had worked out. We would go to Detroit, pick up one of my cousins, and take her to Omaha, where all of her family lived. But things were not working out according to plan. Not at all. I wasn’t doing anything to get ready. I missed Bo. I wasn’t worried so much; I just felt some big part of me had been taken away. I was so used to having Bo around. Ever since I had moved back from Detroit, we had always been together, except for those weekends he’d spent in Argo. But that was different from this, and this was so much different from that. It wasn’t even easy to call him down in Mississippi. Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy didn’t have a telephone. I’d have to call a neighbor and set it all up for them to be in place for my call. In so many ways, this was the most distance Bo and I had ever had between us. Oh, my, I missed him so. Gene checked on me all the time. He was good about that. Whenever I was ready to go, he’d be ready, too. And Mama had even come over to help me get the apartment in order before the trip, but it was useless. I couldn’t feed myself. I couldn’t cook, couldn’t even walk to the kitchen.
I had asked my aunt Mag downstairs if she would give me at least one meal a day. I figured, if she was able to do that, I’d be able to make it. She laughed when I asked her, and said I just wanted some of her food. Well, that was partly true. She was the best cook and everybody would find excuses to come by for something to eat. I mean, she would have company all the time, because people constantly were coming by to see what they could devour. To look at her, you could tell that nobody enjoyed her cooking, or I should say, eating her cooking, as much as she did. And Aunt Mag’s heart was as full and as generous as the rest of her. Every day around noon, she would come up those steps with this wonderful plate of food.
Now, climbing those steps was not an easy thing for Aunt Mag to do. She let me know it, too, through the huffing and puffing. “You’re going to have to get out of this bed,” she said. “I am too heavy to be climbing these steps every day.”
Carrying that huge plate of food didn’t make it any easier, either. I explained that I would get up when I could, but that I just couldn’t walk. My legs didn’t seem to be working. She wanted to know what was hurting me. Well, nothing was hurting me. My legs just didn’t seem to function. She couldn’t see any reason why I was in bed. And I wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining, either. So we would go on like that. She would stay until I got through eating, take my plate, and go home. Sometimes she and Uncle Mack might come up in the evening to check me out, to see if I was getting up yet. Through it all, she was faithful in bringing me that food, and a good helping of that “get up” talk.
First call came first thing in the morning at the Wright house. There was no second call. Papa Mose would walk through the rooms in the morning, and he’d call out “Boys” three times, once for each of his sons. He wasn’t coming back through there. Maurice, Robert, and Simeon didn’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t jumped out of bed right away and gotten ready to hit the field. They never tested it, so they never found out.
Late August in a Mississippi cotton field is very hot and very humid. Mid-nineties hot. Sticky hot. Horseflies like vultures. No shade. No place to hide. Whole families would take to the fields under these conditions. The Wrights had to pick thirty acres, the largest field of any of the families’ on Grover Frederick’s place. But every family had large areas to pick. Even the youngest children might be pressed into duty, usually toting water out to the workers whenever they’d see someone wave a handkerchief in the air. All of Papa Mose’s boys picked with nine-foot sacks. Smaller children might carry only six-foot bags. The normal run of a day was about three sacks of cotton. Bo went out to the field on Monday, the first day of cotton-picking season. The bolls had started to open up like flowers. It was a good year for cotton and there was a large crop. The Wright boys showed Bo how to pull the cotton out of the boll. There’s a certain way you have to catch it, get right into the boll and pull it clean out so that you don’t get all the debris mixed in with it. Nobody wanted dirty cotton. But you also had to take care that you didn’t stick your hand on the ends of the bud. And if you didn’t get it just right, it would stick you. Your cuticles would get cracked, and then you might get sores and those bolls would hit those sores every time. That was not a good feeling. So the boys showed Bo how to do it, but they didn’t take very long with him. They had to get to it.
Now, you’d have to walk a row, carrying that nine-foot sack on your back, bending over to pick about ten bolls in succession—very quickly, but very carefully—before you could pause long enough to put the cotton in your bag. A handful at a time. Each boll was less than one ounce, so it took quite a few handfuls to fill up those bags. There were people who could pick four hundred pounds a day at the rate of two dollars for every hundred pounds. Some boys might earn up to twenty-five dollars in a week, which they mostly had to turn over to their parents. Many families worked it out so that kids got to keep all the pay from their Monday pickings. That wasn’t all that generous. After they had hung out until late on Sunday—their only day off—most boys weren’t worth much on Mondays. So they basically got to keep what they were worth: not much. Even though you picked a sack at a time and got paid by the pound, success was measured by the bale, roughly twelve hundred pounds or so.
Papa Mose surveyed his field and looked forward to about thirty bales that season. That was a lot of cotton. Bo picked about twenty-five pounds that first day before he decided he had just about had enough. Twenty-five pounds meant an automatic whipping for any of the Wright boys. But this was Bo’s vacation and Papa Mose gave him a break. That sun was just too hot for Bo, even with a hat on.
Bo continued to work, he just did it around the house, where Aunt Lizzy was in need of some help. There was a full house and a lot of washing to do. She had a new Maytag wringer washing machine. We had the same type at home, so Bo knew how to operate Aunt Lizzy’s machine. Since he wasn’t going to go out to the field that much anymore, he would get up in the morning and do the wash before breakfast. Then after breakfast, he’d help clean up before going into the vegetable garden with Aunt Lizzy to pick the vegetables for afternoon dinner and supper later on.
The workdays were shorter at the beginning of the picking season. Usually, the pickers would weigh up around noon, eat dinner, and work again until four in the afternoon, when they’d weigh up again. At this time of the year, though, there wasn’t much point in working the whole afternoon. So the boys could have a little fun. The Wright boys had been so excited to hear that their Chicago relatives were coming. And, just as in Chicago, Emmett was the center of attention. They enjoyed hearing Emmett tell his stories. Oh, that boy was a talker. One of his Argo cousins said that if a dog could talk, Emmett would have a conversation with it. Emmett would tell his cousins about all the attractions of Chicago. There was the Lincoln Park Zoo and Bushman, the largest gorilla in captivity until he had died a few years before. There was Riverview Amusement Park with all the great rides and the roller coaster. Oh, Chicago had the biggest this and the best that, to hear Emmett tell it, and he told it in a way that made everyone believe it. His cousins were awestruck.
He pulled all kinds of things out of his little bag of tricks. Of course, there was his father’s ring. He even let Simeon wear it a couple of days. But it kept getting in Simmy’s way when he had to work in the fields, or when the boys played ball. There were plenty of other things for Emmett to share as well. The music the boys heard most was the country music on the radio coming out of Memphis. Emmett shared a new tune. He tried to sing a little Bo Diddley. But there was no mistaking my Bo for the other Bo. Couldn’t sing a lick. But everybody got the idea. They had never heard of Frankenstein before Emmett showed them the comic book he had brought along, and talked about the movies he had seen. I can only imagine how those boys felt. The first Frankenstein movie was made when I was a little girl. Of course, I wasn’t able to go to the show to see it. But the kids would tell me all about it. And, oh, that just made it come alive to me. When I would go to bed at night, I would see Frankenstein hanging on the nail that was holding the coat on my wall. Every time the house would creak, it would scare me to tears: I thought Frankenstein was coming after me. I really became ill from fear. So, I could imagine what effect that might have on kids who had never heard the stories before. Especially out in the country, on a dark Mississippi night, when you might be able to see every star in the sky, but nothing else around you.
Emmett’s cousins were impressed. But his cousins had a few things to show him, too. In the afternoons when they weren’t working the fields, the boys could swim in the lake directly across from the house. Or maybe down a little way through the woods, down to the Tallahatchie River. Of course, there were places where the boys wouldn’t dare swim without beating the water first, making enough commotion to drive the water moccasins out onto the banks on the other side. Someone had once told the boys that water moccasins don’t bite in the water. But they never took chances. That’s because somebody else said they once saw a man jump out of the water with a bunch of snakes hanging off him. Frankenstein might have been in the movies, but the snakes were right there in the Delta.
The fishing was everything Papa Mose had boasted about in his Chicago visit. Bass and bream and catfish. The boys had a special way they liked to fish. A very creative way. They didn’t have rods and reels and lines. They’d place their bait in a glass jar, leave it in the water. The next day, they’d come back and find the jar bobbing up and down, all around. You see, that fish couldn’t back out. Now, the trick was that to catch the fish, the boys would have to catch the jar.
In the early evening, Maurice might take the wheel of Papa Mose’s car. He loved that car, loved it so much he stripped the gears starting out in too much of a hurry, and had to take a little while now to pop it into second, to get it going. But they’d all pile into that car Maurice loved so much, maybe bring along the Crawford boys, Roosevelt and John, neighbors within hollering distance, and they’d drive the turning roads, the ones that go through the fields. Or they’d drive three miles uptown, into Money, for refreshments after a light supper. The nearby plantation store closed early and didn’t sell all the things the boys liked to buy anyway: bubble gum and ice cream and gingerbread cakes and soda pop. All those things they could find at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money. All those things and a checker game that seemed to go on forever on the store’s lazy front porch.
Most nights, everybody would wind up around the family’s Philco radio, listening to the popular shows. Robert was in charge of the dial. That meant everybody had to listen to what Robert liked best. But that was okay. They all liked it, too, The Lone Ranger, Gangbusters, Mr. and Mrs. North, Gunsmoke. There was no television. But, somehow, that didn’t seem to matter. Emmett’s heart was beating to the rhythm of his adventure, his nose was filled with the earthy excitement of this new world, his eyes glowed with the reflection of a billion nighttime stars that could be seen only from this spot. His thoughts already were on the next summer, when he could come back. In a curious kind of way, a way that only makes sense to a fourteen-year-old boy, a boy away from home, away from the familiar world of a doting mother and grandmother, to that boy, Mississippi represented freedom.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I just couldn’t take it. I needed to talk to Bo. I needed to talk to Aunt Lizzy. Late in the week, I placed a call to one of the neighbors so that I could get Emmett and Aunt Lizzy on that phone. They both sounded so good to me, and they were surprised to hear from me, since they thought I was away on my vacation. Emmett said he was having a good time; Aunt Lizzy said he was a good boy. A fine boy. She told me about all the chores that he did and what a blessing he was to her, and I thought about all the things he had done for me. She told me I should be proud to have such a son. And, of course, I was. They had written letters and sent them to me, thinking I would get them when I got back from Omaha. Emmett told me he needed more money. More money? He had left home loaded, as far as I was concerned. I’d given him about twenty-five dollars and I knew Gene had slipped him something, knowing Gene. But Emmett said he was broke. What in the world was he doing with his money down there, in the middle of nowhere? He told me he was treating other kids to sweets when they’d go to the store in Money. He also asked me to get his bike fixed while he was down there. But he said he’d explained all that to me in the letter.
I had called because I wanted to know how things were going, but mostly to find out that Emmett missed me as much as I missed him, that he wanted to come home as much as I wanted him to. He said he’d be home in a week. Now I knew. He was having too good a time to even think about returning sooner than that.
The mail from Mississippi came Saturday, August 27. Three-cent stamp. Two letters. One envelope. I think they were trying to save on postage. It had been a whole week since I had put Bo on that train and taken to my bed. I was so delighted to read the letters, sort of a summary of what Aunt Lizzy had told me on the phone. What a nice, obedient young man I had raised. Then there was Bo’s letter. He asked me to please have his bike fixed by the time he got home. Oh, he really needed that bike. Get his bike fixed and he would pay me back when he got back the following week. On Sunday, Aunt Lizzy wanted to take Bo to visit Uncle Crosby, who had lived next door to us in Argo years ago, before returning to Mississippi.
Mama came by later that day. She also had gotten letters and was so pleased. But she was not happy with me at all. She scolded me for not getting ready to go on my trip. I hadn’t packed. She lost patience with me. She wanted me to get out of that bed, get myself ready to go. Then she began to lay out my suitcase. She wanted me to be all ready to get out of there on Monday. I just looked at her and thought, Gee, she doesn’t understand. I hadn’t been able to get ready to go or to do anything else, for that matter. In fact, I had a meeting of my club, Les Petite Femmes, at my place that night and didn’t have a clue about how I was going to get ready for that. I was doubtful that I was going to take the trip. In a way, I think I was really stalling, thinking Bo might still come home in time to go with Gene and me. I was hoping. But I didn’t tell her. Maybe I didn’t need to. Maybe she really did understand. Maybe she just wanted to help me work through it.
No one had ever seen Emmett cry before. So they didn’t know exactly what to do, except keep their eyes on the dark road ahead. It was Saturday night. They were coming back from Greenwood, about twelve miles away from home. Curtis Jones, Willie Mae’s son, had just arrived from Chicago earlier that day, and Maurice, Wheeler, and Emmett decided to take him for a ride. Curtis knew people over in Greenwood. But they had stayed too long and had to hurry to get back before Papa Mose laid into them. Maurice had been doing just fine on one of those dusty roads. He had been making good time. But then something had happened. Something had jumped out in front of the car too fast for Maurice to react. Everyone in the car had felt that bump. It was a dog. They had looked around, but couldn’t see anything anymore. The dog must have run off somewhere. Maybe it was okay. Maybe it was dying. Emmett had pleaded with Maurice to stop the car, to check on the dog. But Maurice wouldn’t do that. He couldn’t, really. Maurice knew things Bo didn’t know about life on the back roads of Mississippi in the dead of night. If somebody had run across them out there on that road on that night—four black boys in the dark—well, their lives might not have been worth as much as that dog’s. Emmett didn’t understand that. There was a lot he didn’t understand about this place. He had gone out on a limb to rescue a cat back in Argo. The least they could do now was to stop by the side of a Mississippi road to check on a dog. But they couldn’t do that and he began to cry. Nobody knew what to say. There wasn’t much they could say, really. Nothing that would have made a difference. So Emmett just sat there crying. And everybody else was quiet.
Somehow, hosting our club meeting helped me to break out of my mood. There were about twelve of my friends there that night, including Ollie. And we talked and played cards and, for a moment, at least, I was able to distract myself. We were up so late, talking and laughing, that around one-thirty or two, I wound up making an early breakfast for everyone. I told them all about the letters I had gotten earlier from Aunt Lizzy and Bo and, oh, I just bragged about that son of mine. I told them that instead of making the trip to Detroit and Omaha, I really wanted to go down to Mississippi and bring my son back home.
Then I said something without really knowing why I said it. “If Bo could get his feet on Chicago soil, he would be one happy kid.”
Everything stopped for a heartbeat. Complete silence. Why had I said that? Then, just like that, everything started up again. The talking, the laughing, everything.
After everyone left, I tried to get a little sleep before getting up a little later to go to church. The telephone rang like an alarm. I looked at the clock. It was nine-thirty.
I picked up the receiver. “Hello,” I said. But there was nothing. “Hello,” I said again. Dead silence.
Finally the voice came through. “This is Willie Mae.” Curtis had called his mother. “I don’t know how to tell you. Bo.”
“Bo, what?” I sat up with a jerk, my mind racing. “Willie Mae, what about Bo?”
“Some men came and got him last night.”