For it is always the face that matters. When his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on leaving his body unretouched, his casket open, what everyone remembered was the face. What was left of the child’s visage after hours of vicious torture is so gruesome I will not describe it in these pages. If you really need to see it, you can find it on the web. If you have seen it already, you never want to see it again. When Till Mobley—a tough civil rights activist before there were many—insisted on showing it at his funeral, she hoped it would produce wrath. With wrath, just possibly change. She couldn’t imagine that the image would become the spark that lit the smoldering civil rights movement. African Americans of a certain age remember exactly where they were when they first saw that photo.
What is the decent way to represent it? The Emmett Till Interpretive Center, across the street from the Sumner, Mississippi, courthouse where the boy’s murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury, chose not to use that picture. It doesn’t appear at all in their storefront museum. Instead they chose a picture of one of the cuter ten-year-old boys you ever saw, grinning in overalls. “We want to remind people it was a child that they murdered,” says the center’s director, Patrick Weems. Seventeen miles down the road is ETHIC, the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center. It is owned and run by John Thomas, the mayor of tiny Glendora, where Till’s body may have been found. Mayor Thomas, whom everyone in Tallahatchie County calls Johnny B., has taken the opposite tack. His museum has a life-size wax reproduction of Till’s coffin and body, along with a replication of the storefront of Bryant’s Grocery, where Emmett Till’s trip to buy a piece of candy turned out to be fatal. Again it is the face that compels you to look—and look away.
For many who knew little of civil rights history, New York’s 2017 Whitney Biennial was the first place they encountered Emmett Till’s face. Dana Schutz, a successful white artist, exhibited a painting called Open Casket. It is vaguely expressionistic, the face itself a wild blur. Hannah Black, an Afro-British artist based in Berlin, wrote a Facebook post that went round the art world and beyond. She argued that the painting should be destroyed, for it was another attempt made by white people to capitalize on black pain. Others went further and called not only for the picture but for the artist to be burned. It didn’t happen, but a strong young black artist, Parker Bright, stood in front of the painting to prevent its being viewed. Some called that performance art. What have they done to that face? it was asked. The discussion provoked a debate about cultural appropriation that is unresolved to this day.
“In the South, particularly the Deep South, courtesy is more important than truth,” said Frank Mitchener. We sat in his sunlit office in Sumner, overlooking the muddy bayou. Mitchener spent much of his life as a cotton planter. “Not many people left who still have a grandfather who fought in the Civil War,” he told me as he showed me a picture of a ramrod-straight soldier in uniform, cigar in one hand. “He carried the flag.” Mitchener is also proud to be one of the last people alive who went to the Till trial. “That trial was a catalyst for the civil rights movement.” He’s the president of the National Cotton Council, which makes him a powerful man in these parts. That enabled him to raise the money to renovate the courthouse, the base of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, where Mitchener serves as cochairman. “The best thing about the Emmett Till trial,” he told me, “is that it happened sixty years ago.”
You would think after sixty years, thousands of pages of scholarship, and an FBI investigation, everything about the death of Emmett Till, and the trial of the men who murdered him, would be known. But there are still questions open that leave people bickering in the Mississippi Delta today.
Here’s what is certain.
Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old boy full of life and dignity. His short time on this earth was not easy. His parents’ marriage ended before he could know his father. Complications at his birth left consequences so severe that doctors feared he would never walk. After he overcame that hurdle, a bout with polio left him with a mild speech impediment. But he was raised by a tough and loving mother who was utterly devoted to bringing him up right and a grandmother who was there for support when his mother went to work to pay the bills. They lived just outside Chicago, part of the Great Migration that left the violence and oppression of the South for cities up north, where they could find decent jobs and raise their children to hold their heads high.
Emmett developed a strong sense of responsibility early on, doing the cooking and household chores to relieve his mother’s struggles. That didn’t stop him from being a boy who loved baseball and made everyone around him laugh. Besides his mother and grandmother, he had a large extended family, some who came from Mississippi for visits, some who came to stay for good. Kin were always welcome. So when his great-uncle, Mose Wright, invited him and his beloved cousin Wheeler to come down south for a vacation, Emmett wanted to go. Wheeler Parker was his idol, his other half.1 There would be farming and fishing and plenty of open space. And there was something else, as his mother wrote later:
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 … 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 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.2
His mother said no. Absolutely not. His grandmother concurred. They prayed on it. Emmett argued, Emmett pleaded. Papa Mose Wright, a respected preacher who sharecropped a small plantation, gave assurances. “In a curious kind of way,” his mother continued, “a way that only makes sense to a fourteen-year-old boy away from home, away from the familiar world of a doting mother and grandmother, to that boy, Mississippi represented freedom.”3 In the end they said yes. It was the worst decision they ever made.
Not that they failed to prepare him. Don’t talk to white folks unless they talk to you first. If they do, say “Yes, ma’am” and “No, sir.” If you see a white woman coming, you step off the sidewalk. Don’t look her in the eye.
“‘If you have to humble yourself,’ I told him, ‘then just do it. Get on your knees, if you have to.’”
“It all seemed so incredible to him. ‘Oh, Mama,’ he said, ‘it can’t be that bad.’
“‘It’s worse than that,’ I said.”4
She repeated her lessons. In the relatively safe Illinois world he’d grown up in, she’d never had to talk to him about race. He was raised with a sense of confidence and pride. Everything he’d learned all his life had to be unlearned to prepare for the trip. But “how do you give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only known love?”5
You can’t, not really, but the first week of Emmett’s vacation was delightful. When he wasn’t helping pick cotton, he and his cousins went fishing or swimming in the Tallahatchie River, dodging water moccasins in the day and listening to The Lone Ranger around the radio at night. For boys from the city, the Delta was idyllic. All that wide-open space. Wheeler Parker was proud to pick one hundred pounds of cotton in a day, which was too hard and too hot for Emmett, even with a hat on. “Mississippi is home,” said Wheeler Parker half a century later. “Ain’t nothing wrong with the land. Ain’t nothing wrong with the dirt. Some of the people aren’t too cool.”
I was awed by his understatement. For Wheeler Parker was there, praying for his life, when some of those people barged into Mose Wright’s house at two in the morning, looking for the boys from Chicago. The men’s names were Milam and Bryant, and they were half brothers. Bryant was the owner of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, the only store in tiny Money, Mississippi. While Papa Mose was in church, the boys had driven the few miles uptown to buy some treats. Bryant himself was fetching a load of shrimp from New Orleans. His young wife, Carolyn, was minding the store when Emmett went in to buy two cents’ worth of bubble gum.
Emmett left the store with his gum. He whistled. Was it a wolf whistle? Or the whistle his mother had taught him to use when his stuttering threatened to get the better of him? No one will ever know. Turns out that a whistle, any whistle, was reason enough for a death sentence in that place and that time. In the dark of his home, Papa Mose pleaded. If Emmett had done anything wrong, he would take care of it. Even whip him if it came to that. Mose’s wife, Aunt Lizzy, offered the intruders money if only they’d leave the boy alone. They were armed and undeterred, and they took Emmett out to the back of their truck, where at least one other person was waiting. Milam told Papa Mose they would kill him if he ever identified them.
Everyone who saw what happened next is dead now, so no one alive can say for sure. What’s certain is what Bob Dylan, at the age of twenty, put so delicately: “They tortured him and did some things too evil to repeat.”6
Emmett Till was probably dead by the time they threw his body into the river, but they tied a seventy-five-pound cotton-gin fan around his neck just to make sure. They failed to weigh down his feet, so a fisherman found his body a few days later. Mose Wright was called to identify the corpse, which was so mangled he could do so only by the ring on Emmett’s finger, which had belonged to the father the boy never knew. Hoping to destroy any evidence that might bring trouble to his county, Tallahatchie County sheriff Clarence Strider ordered Mose Wright to get the body in the ground immediately. It took several courageous black Mississippians to prevent that from happening and send the body back to his mother on the City of New Orleans. It was the train she’d put him on two weeks before.
The face she had to identify, she wrote, was much worse than the face that the rest of the world saw three days later, though she’d asked the funeral director not to retouch it. She knew she could have described it in detail, but “people still would not get the full impact. They would not be able to visualize what had happened, unless they were allowed to see the results of what had happened. They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness.”7 She was right, and they did. Tens of thousands filed past the body that lay in a Chicago church, and millions more saw the photograph. Men cried, and women fainted.
It became national, even international news. Writing from Rome, Mississippi’s own William Faulkner said, “If we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.” The pressure was on Mississippi to act this time, so Bryant and Milam were locked up in a Delta jail. They confessed to kidnapping Emmett, though they claimed they’d let him go. In preparation for the first time in Mississippi memory that white men would be tried for killing a black boy, the state began a slow campaign. Sheriff Strider said the body had been too long in the water to be positively identified. Anyway, he said, there was evidence that the NAACP had plotted the crime. The jury was carefully selected to ensure that the murderers would likely be acquitted.
And they were. In September 1955, after a five-day trial, despite the unshakable evidence of brave African Americans who risked their lives to testify against white men, the jury took one hour and seven minutes to pronounce the murderers not guilty. Mamie Till Mobley came down from Chicago to dispute the claim that the body found in the water was not the body of her son. She stayed with T.R.M. Howard, a wealthy black doctor and activist who provided her with bodyguards. And in a moment so dramatic it’s been turned into a play, Mose Wright became the first black man in Mississippi to accuse and identify the killers in public. “Dar he,” said Wright of the man he’d seen kidnap his grandnephew. The photograph taken by the Chicago Defender shows an unswerving white-haired farmer pointing straight to the accused. That photo too went around all the wire services. Later civil rights heroes like Medgar Evers and Ruby Hurley worked with the black reporters who sat in separate side seats, along with Mamie Till Mobley. Like everything else in Mississippi, the Sumner courthouse was segregated. None of their strategies were enough to change the verdict, but with hundreds of journalists attending the trial, the story became known to the world. Mose Wright, who had never lived anywhere but the Delta, did not wait long. He left the cotton in the field, sold his farm animals, and, with the help of Dr. Howard and Medgar Evers, left for Chicago. His life was worth less than nothing in Mississippi anymore.
You cannot be tried twice for the same crime in America. Knowing this, Milam and Bryant were happy to take the $4,000 Look magazine offered for their story. It was a lot of money in that place and time. Four months after the trial was over, they confessed what most people knew: they killed Emmett Till. They said they hadn’t meant to go that far, “but that boy showed no fear. What else could we do to keep those people in their place?”8
Those are the facts that were proved over and over. Most people born in America before about 1970 knew them. Mamie Till Mobley spent the rest of her life speaking about it, fanning the spark until the civil rights movement was truly burning. Rosa Parks said it was the thought of Emmett Till that made her refuse to leave her seat on that bus in Montgomery. You couldn’t avoid knowing about it. Unless you lived in the Mississippi Delta, where no one wanted to talk about it for a long, long time.
“Not even at home?” I asked several black Deltans. “Something grandparents passed down to their grandchildren, perhaps as a warning?”
Most of them said no. Benjamin Salisbury, who works at the Interpretive Center, said some of his teachers did mention it, especially during Black History Month. “None of them said ‘If you don’t watch out, you’ll wind up like Emmett Till.’ I think the ones that talked about it wanted us to understand that the history, the stuff in the book, got there because it happened outside of the book first.” But Benjamin went to school in the twenty-first century, and his mother is a community organizer. Many other young African Americans who came from the places where the murder happened learned about it first at the summer seminar the Winter Institute gives for high school students across the state. The institute plans carefully to avoid traumatizing them.
White people in the Delta lived with silence too. Maudie Clay grew up just across the bayou from the courthouse, and she didn’t hear the name of Emmett Till until she was twelve. Even then, her teacher’s view of the story was, well, peculiar. “She explained that a bunch of outside agitators came into Sumner, and when she was in West Tallahatchie High School, they couldn’t get off the bus and go to the drugstore and drink Cokes because their parents said the town was full of outside agitators. It was all those reporters who came for the trial.”
It’s not unlike the silence that reigned in Germany in the first decades after the war. In both German and Jewish families, anything connected to the war was off-limits. Neither side could bear to talk about it, one side afraid of facing its own guilt, the other afraid of succumbing to pain and rage.
If you wanted to know, you could find out a lot. The facts I just listed have been confirmed now for decades. Patrick Weems told me about the matters that scholars still debate. He was born outside of Jackson in 1985 and began his political life as a right-wing Republican. Hurricane Katrina began to change his views. Sometime during his studies at the University of Mississippi he underwent a crisis of conscience, interned at the Winter Institute, and began to volunteer in Sumner, where he’s now the director of the Interpretive Center. After showing me the meagerly funded memorial park in Glendora, he took me to the red, rusting bridge over the river where Till’s body was found. That’s the official story.
“The problem with the story is that it’s not a river, it’s a bayou. The water moves very slowly—too slowly to carry a body all the way from Leflore County, where he was murdered. And the water’s way too low.” We looked out over the grimly named Black Bayou, which is studded with cypress trees. Though they were bare and bleak at the time of year I first saw them, I loved the way they stood straight in the water. They are all over the county, and I never saw them without humming the old civil rights song “We Shall Not Be Moved.”
“Look at the lines on the trunks,” I said, pointing. “The water used to be several feet higher. And wider as well; those trees on dry land have watermarks too.”
The land was not really dry when we scrambled down to look at it, pushing our way through tangled bramble. I turned back when the mud began to squelch through my boots, watching as Patrick continued to investigate the trees. “You’re right,” he said. “The water could have been high enough back then.” I couldn’t share his excitement. The question mattered a great deal at the time when it was a question of jurisdiction. Had the body been found in Leflore County, the trial would have been held there; the prosecution might have had a chance. Some say that Sheriff Strider purposely brought the body to Tallahatchie County, where a hostile, poor white jury was easy to ensure.
Given that the distances are a matter of a few miles, I couldn’t see why these unresolved questions mattered. For the rest of the world, Emmett Till was murdered in the Mississippi Delta, like so many African Americans before him. What I wanted to understand was the present: What does Till’s murder mean in the Delta today? How is it remembered? How is it repressed? What do local people, black and white, think about the efforts to commemorate it now?
But nowhere is Faulkner’s claim more fitting: in the Delta, the past is not even past. Patrick is working on a tourist trail that will tell different versions of the story. They are all still alive there.
The Most Southern Place on Earth is the title of one book about the Delta. “The Delta is to Mississippi what Mississippi is to the rest of the country,” says another. It’s a place of myth and poverty, and it probably always was. Even after every song and story you may have heard about it, the Delta hits you viscerally. Some people cannot stand it. “I don’t want to be part of a poverty safari,” said my son as I took him down Highway 61 to New Orleans. “It’s all right for you,” he added. “You’re doing work here.” Some people cannot let it go. As we stood in line at the Clarksdale Juke Joint Festival, a white woman from Greenwood told me,
There’s a magic, an aura about it. Watching that sunset over the Delta, you’ve got people that will look at it and say “There’s nothing here” and you’re going “No, it’s all right there, you’ve just gotta be open to looking at it.” And when you see those colors shot across the sky, you just feel it. Feel the humidity when your hair stands out like crazy. There’s just no way to explain it unless you were born and raised here.
I told her I got it, even though I wasn’t. I even get why many black people feel that way too. Morgan Freeman, who was born and raised here, now spends most of his spare time in Clarksdale. He’s got a home, a restaurant, and a blues club there, and he is often the man behind anonymous donations for local causes—private kindergartens, signs commemorating Emmett Till. He once paid for a fancy high school prom, on the condition that the students agreed to integrate it for the first time in Clarksdale history. But even black Deltans like Wheeler Parker, who are unprotected by fame and wealth, call the place home.
It’s a harsh kind of home, and probably always was. When white Americans who’d exhausted the soil in Georgia or Alabama came out to settle the Delta in the nineteenth century, it was wilderness in every direction. More panthers, bears, and alligators lived there than human beings. Millions of trees had to be cleared before the land was ready for farming; the rich black soil is considered the best in the world, with the possible exception of the delta surrounding the Nile. Trouble is, what makes the land so rich is what also makes it menacing. The Mississippi floods frequently, and while it spreads fresh fertile topsoil all the way from Illinois, it also washes out crops, and lives, on a regular basis. Even when the river isn’t flooding, the weather is extreme. All that flat space makes tornadoes and lightning easy to see at a distance, but they hit real fast. Summers are maddeningly hot, mosquitoes huge and fierce. The bears and the panthers are gone now, but you have to watch out for poisonous spiders and snakes.
The harshness of the land was compounded by the harshness of the settlers. A great deal of violence shadows those wide-open plains. As white settlement expanded with black slavery, Native Americans were slowly pushed from their lands. Andrew Jackson’s 1830 Indian Removal Act drove most of the Choctaw and Chickasaw, who’d populated the Delta, westward on the Trail of Tears. The soil they had lived on is so rich that for a good forty years the Delta was the place where America’s greatest fortunes were made. White planters took black earth and black bodies and forced into bloom the crop that would fund their lavish lives. Weeklong house parties with hoopskirts and hunting and plenty of whiskey. Mansions with Greek porticoes and marble bathrooms. The field hands who generated the product that created the wealth were truly dirt poor. At a time when cotton was America’s most valuable export, hundreds of thousands of slaves (and later sharecroppers, whose lives were only marginally better) toiled to produce the white gold. Picking cotton is hard, says everyone who ever tried it, and it has to be picked in late summer, when the fields offer no shade from the relentless sun. Slaves were tortured to keep up the vicious pace.9
You can still see fields of cotton all over the Delta, along with soybeans, alfalfa, and rice. But as agriculture became increasingly mechanized, most of the field hands became superfluous. Their luckier grandchildren find work today as guards at one of several huge prison complexes. Those who are unlucky tend to sit on the desolate stoops waiting for something to change. Most of their houses are in desperate condition.
In an attempt to fight the destitution, the state of Mississippi has encouraged tourism by trying to market the region’s highlights. You can take the Blues Trail from Memphis all the way down to Yazoo City. It’s studded with metal signs marking the birthplace of John Lee Hooker or the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil. You can see Charlie Patton’s grave and B. B. King’s birthplace. There’s a sign for a Juke Joint Chapel in Clarksdale that reads
THE GOOD LORD MUST LOVE THE BLUES
ELSE HE WOULDN’T HAVE MADE LIFE SO DAMNED HARD
There are several creaky blues museums to visit, and a host of annual music festivals. The Shack Up Inn has renovated sharecroppers’ cabins; you can pay $95 to spend a night in two funkily dilapidated rooms. “The Ritz We Ain’t,” says its website.
The second initiative is the Freedom Trail, sometimes called the Civil Rights Trail, set up by the state of Mississippi in 2011 “both as a visitor attraction and an educational tool.”10 Surely some of those who constructed it genuinely admire those men and women who risked and often gave their lives to bring justice to the state. The trail marks the grave of Fannie Lou Hamer, the homes of Amzie Moore and Medgar Evers, the place on the highway where James Meredith was shot, the parks where Martin Luther King held rallies, and many spaces devoted to Emmett Till. The markers are reverential, but their supporters also care about revenue. Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation, and the Delta—two hundred miles long and eighty-five miles wide—is its poorest space. There are very few jobs there. The Blues Trail and the Civil Rights Trail, which cross at several points, can feel awkward and eerie. They are evidently a way to commodify suffering, but they are also a major source of income for the rural black community. Buy a meal or a tank of gas in the Delta, and you’re helping some family get by. It’s a moral dilemma the young may find easy to resolve. I don’t.
Sumner, Mississippi, is a good case in point. Its population of about four hundred is literally divided by the train tracks that separate black from white. Like many a place in the Delta, freight trains still blow that lonesome whistle as they pass by. Like many a place in the South, it’s centered on a square anchored by a courthouse, with a Johnny Reb statue guarding the front. Surrounding the square are a row of storefronts, about half of them empty. Around the back are the remains of what used to be juke joints. There is no grocery store. Despite all that good earth, the Delta is called a food desert, since the fields are devoted to cash crops. You can go two miles down to Webb and buy junk food at the Dollar Store, or you can ride twenty miles to Clarksdale and get something better. Like many a place in the Delta, the town was on the verge of dying until it decided to own, and own up to, Emmett Till.
It’s only seventy miles from genteel, wealthy Oxford, and another world entirely. That’s the right amount of space for a day trip, but after a day trip to Sumner, I wanted a whole lot more. There’s no hotel near Sumner, but Patrick found me something better. His in-laws, Maudie and Langdon Clay, have a gorgeous Victorian on the bank of the bayou, brilliantly funked up with offbeat statues grouped ironically with signs like HELL HURTS. They also have a cousin who owns a building on the square. It’s occasionally used as an art gallery, and there’s a small apartment on the second floor. When I went to get the key at Maudie and Langdon’s place, Langdon had cooked up a fine dinner. They are both internationally known photographers, and they told me they’re the only Democrats in Tallahatchie County.
Maudie is as local as it gets, though unlike anyone in these parts, she spent ten years in New York City, where she met and married Langdon. A fifth-generation Mississippian, she was born in the house where she lives. Her mother was born there as well. Her grandfather owned ten thousand acres of cotton plantation in neighboring Sunflower County, where the family spent their summers. It was “a pretty bucolic childhood. We never did a damned thing. My brother and I tried to pick cotton one time, and I don’t think we lasted more than a couple of hours,” she said ruefully. “Having grown up here as a white person of some means was kind of like winning the lottery, but I didn’t quite know how lucky I was until later.”
She grew up with books and The New Yorker, both a rarity in Sumner even among families of wealth. Maudie always wanted to get out of Sumner, until she had children of her own, when she returned to raise them in the small town she knew. “And then they could leave it. Can’t really say why, except that I just had a very deep connection to this town and this Delta. I have a real mission here. I’ve taken some photographs in other places, but this is the place I wanted to reveal, just by keeping a record of what it was like here.” Her haunting book of Delta images is dedicated to the memory of Emmett Till. Born in 1953, she is too young to remember the trial, but she read most of what was written about it. Like the time a New York Times reporter was approached by “kind of a country guy who said ‘Why are y’all so interested in Emmett Till? There are hundreds of dead niggers in the Tallahatchie River.’”
That’s just why Emmett Till matters, of course. That’s what Black Lives Matter marchers mean when they chant
Michael Brown, Emmett Till
How many black boys will you kill?
When Maudie came back to Sumner, she thought “in my insane youth” that she could change people. “I thought people can listen to reason, understand that there’s a big world out there, and that this sort of insular thinking is wrong. But it turns out I didn’t have many allies out there.” Because her family has long, deep roots in Sumner, she and Langdon are tolerated “as token liberal artists,” though her neighbors never talk to her very deeply. She has seen some progress. “When I was a kid, a black person had to jump off the sidewalk and tip their cap, and I didn’t even know there was anything wrong with that.” The biggest change in her lifetime came when African Americans were allowed to vote, though she noted that it took death and destruction to get there. Sometimes Maudie engages in local politics, even running for alderman. Mostly she takes powerful, poignant photographs and looks forward to leaving for Europe whenever she or Langdon has a show there.
“Are there enough towels over there?” asked Maudie as I rose to leave for the apartment they’d lent me. “Be sure to shake ’em out.” The brown recluse spider, she continued, has a bite that can kill an old man or a baby. “They’ve been living in this house for a hundred years, so we try to coexist with them.”
I found no spiders, and with its airy ceilings and exposed brick walls, the apartment would delight anyone seeking space in Greenwich Village. What buoyed my heart the most was the view overlooking the square out to the courthouse, where, despite an expensive renovation, the clock kept no time. Everything moves so slowly that it doesn’t much matter. After the Sumner Grille shuts down at nine p.m., there isn’t a soul on the square, and my car was the only one parked there. There was a bit of a glow from a streetlight, and no noise but an occasional hound barking into the darkness.
The Emmett Till Interpretive Center began with an apology. Jerome Little, the first African American president of the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors, believed that the town of Sumner should apologize to the Till family for the murder and trial. Little, who grew up on Frank Mitchener’s plantation, couldn’t move the most powerful person in town by himself. But he knew Susan Glisson, the director of the Winter Institute, because of her work in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where she had helped move the community through the process that brought the murderer of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner to trial. When Susan turned to Governor Winter for advice, he urged her to contact Betty Pearson, a fierce and fearless plantation owner in Sumner who had been radicalized by witnessing the trial. With Little, Pearson became cochair of the committee that eventually constructed the apology that was read on the steps of the courthouse in 2007. When Pearson retired to California to be near her children, Mitchener took her place.
Over dinner with Susan and her partner, Charles Tucker, I asked him what Susan’s contribution to Sumner had been; I knew she was too modest to tell me herself.
“She moved the biggest boulder in Tallahatchie County.”
“Boulder?”
“Frank Mitchener,” said Charles.
“Susan’s a peacemaker,” Frank Mitchener told me later.
For years, some in the African American community had pushed for a monument, but without white support they got nowhere. The early meetings were contentious. They fought over the word apology. Mitchener refused to agree to one. He had nothing to do with the murder and he opposed the outcome of the trial, so why should he apologize for it? He was willing to agree to the word regret. The compromise was to call it “The Apology” but to use the word regret in the text itself. Frank thinks the process worked because they agreed to the Quaker model of ruling by consensus. “It takes a little longer, but it works.” But the committee didn’t just want an apology, it wanted to restore the courthouse, and many in the community objected.
“‘Why in the damned hell are you trying to fix that courthouse? Why do you want them to remember how it was in ’55? We want to forget about that,’” Mitchener quoted.
Mitchener didn’t get to be a boulder without learning how to negotiate. The town was dying. The courthouse provides a couple of jobs, but its significance is primarily symbolic. A courthouse is the anchor of every town in Mississippi; it’s the center of Sumner, such as it is. Without a working courthouse, a town is likely to expire.
“Frank loves his community,” said Patrick. “Jerome called him the godfather of West Tallahatchie. Maybe even Tallahatchie County. People say that if Frank believes it should be done this way, he probably has a good reason for it, and we should go along with whatever Frank thinks.”
“I’m one of those white people who wanted to save the courthouse,” said Frank. Even if it meant opening old wounds. He described his childhood as idyllic: raised in a little town where he could walk to school and back home for lunch, play football at recess, ride horseback in the country. Like most white people in Mississippi, he began by telling me that the North was racist too. “We in the South get criticized for having segregation until the sixties. Yet Princeton University was segregated.” He’d had an offer to study at Princeton, but his father refused to let him go north of the Mason-Dixon Line. “And the United States Army was segregated until 1949.” On the whole, Frank told me, the Delta was a cosmopolitan place. “We had three or four Jewish families, the Italians had grocery stores, and the Lebanese, who we called Syrians. In Cleveland they had three school systems: Chinese, whites, and blacks.”
Aside from a stint in the army, Frank has spent his life in the Delta. You can see his love for the place in the way he sweeps his arm over toward the muddy bayou that passes, slowly, just feet from his office. “You’ve heard the term earmarks? That’s a dirty word now, but that’s where we got our money from.” Frank asked Senator Thad Cochran—“a moderate Republican like myself”—to set aside $850,000 to renovate the courthouse. The renovations took several years, and the renewed courthouse did contribute to a small revitalization of the town. There’s a good restaurant on the square now, and a brand-new beauty salon. Both are black-owned and -operated small businesses. Race relations are better now, most people say. There’s a little bit of tourism; even buses come by regularly to tour the courthouse. Patrick, or one of the volunteers from the Interpretive Center, begins the tour by reading the apology.
THE APOLOGY: RESOLUTION PRESENTED TO THE FAMILY OF EMMETT TILL
We the citizens of Tallahatchie County believe that racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth. We call on the state of Mississippi, all of its citizens in every county, to begin an honest investigation into our history. While it will be painful, it is necessary to nurture reconciliation and to ensure justice for all. By recognizing the potential for division and violence in our own towns, we pledge to each other, black and white, to move forward together in healing the wounds of the past, and in ensuring equal justice for all of our citizens.
Over fifty-two years ago, on August 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was kidnapped in the middle of the night from his uncle’s home near Money, Mississippi, by at least two men, one from Leflore County and one from Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Till, a black youth from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, was kidnapped and murdered, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. He had been accused of whistling at a white woman in Money. His badly beaten body was found days later in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi.
The Grand Jury meeting in Sumner, Mississippi, indicted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam for the crime of murder. These two men were then tried on this charge and were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury after a deliberation of just over an hour. Within four months of their acquittal, the two men confessed to the murder.
Before the trial began, Till’s mother had sought assistance from federal officials, under the terms of the so-called Lindbergh Law which made kidnapping a federal crime but received no aid. Only a renewed request in December 2002 from Till’s mother, supported by Mississippi District Attorney Joyce Chiles and the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, yielded a new investigation.
We the citizens of Tallahatchie County recognize that the Emmett Till case was a terrible miscarriage of justice. We state candidly and with deep regret the failure to effectively pursue justice. We wish to say to the family of Emmett Till that we are profoundly sorry for what was done in this community to your loved one.
We the citizens of Tallahatchie County acknowledge the horrific nature of this crime. Its legacy has haunted our community. We need to understand the system that encouraged these events and others like them to occur so that we can ensure that it never happens again. Working together, we have the power now to fulfill the promise of liberty and justice for all.11
It meant a lot in Sumner, and it didn’t come easy. But like Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech in Germany, it stated only what the rest of the world thought obvious.
The makeshift museum tells the story of Till and the trial, but the center’s main focus is the present, leading small groups of visitors through discussions before they tour the courthouse itself. As at the Winter Institute, discussions begin by asking participants to recall the first time they noticed race. “We actually had a Rockefeller,” Patrick told me. “David Rockefeller told his story of recognizing that race existed while he was at Harvard because he had a black roommate. Then Bill Foster, a sharecropper’s kid, told his story. It’s really good to see people integrate their own stories into Till’s story and this national story.”
You can’t quite say the town has prospered since it acknowledged its history, but it is no longer moribund. Frank’s connection to Senator Cochran provided a lifeline. I’m loath to say his involvement only stemmed from pragmatic motives. He has a sense of justice that led him to attend an NAACP meeting back in 1959. “I just felt like I needed to. They weren’t getting much white support, and they needed my support.” Ninety-nine percent of white Tallahatchie County was against any form of integration. Three white faces at the NAACP meeting in Clarksdale couldn’t change things on their own; it was federal intervention that forced it. Still, the support of a few white Mississippians—Betty Pearson at the forefront—was important.
But Frank’s sense of justice is tempered by loyalty to his own family history. It was his grandmother, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who built the Johnny Reb statue on a pedestal that reads OUR HEROES in front of the courthouse. He doesn’t want the statue taken down, but he was crucial in the decision to erect the plaque that stands on the other side.
EMMETT TILL MURDER TRIAL
IN AUGUST 1955 THE BODY OF EMMETT TILL, A 14-YEAR-OLD BLACK YOUTH FROM CHICAGO, WAS FOUND IN THE TALLAHATCHIE RIVER. ON SEPTEMBER 23, IN A FIVE DAY TRIAL HELD IN THIS COURTHOUSE, AN ALL-WHITE JURY ACQUITTED TWO WHITE MEN, ROY BRYANT AND J.W. MILAM, OF THE MURDER. BOTH LATER CONFESSED TO THE MURDER IN A MAGAZINE INTERVIEW. TILL’S MURDER, COUPLED WITH THE TRIAL AND ACQUITTAL OF THESE TWO MEN, DREW INTERNATIONAL ATTENTION AND GALVANIZED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IN MISSISSIPPI AND THE NATION.
A Mississippi magnolia marks the sign as official state property. I don’t know how many committee meetings it took to agree on the statement, but I know that each word was considered over and over. If you want an emblem of the state today, you cannot do better than face that courthouse. In the front, the American flag waves over the Mississippi one, which still has a Confederate flag in its upper-left corner. On each side, a memorial: one to the “deathless dead” who fell serving the Confederacy from Tallahatchie County, the other to Emmett Till. In the current debate over Confederate monuments, many in the South argue that they should stay and be complimented by monuments to others: civil rights heroes or victims of racist terror. But in Sumner, as elsewhere, the monument to the Confederacy towers over everything else.
That marker is made of very thick metal. The purple ones that dot the county, marking different steps of the Till saga—the grocery store, the funeral home, the cotton gin, the place where his body was (perhaps) found—are not so solid. They were damaged very early. “Jerome said this is what you get when you have national leadership like George W. Bush,” Patrick told me. “This is what happens on the local level when people at the top are giving them cover.” One sign was knocked down. One was smeared with the initials KKK. And one was shot up. It was replaced. And shot up again. And again. Seven times. Patrick let it lie in his parents’ garage for a couple of years before he put up a new one. Just five weeks later, in July 2018, four bullets pierced it anew. The sign is located two miles down a gravel road outside of town. This is not a matter of chance.
Not every white man in Tallahatchie is as torn between justice and loyalty as Frank Mitchener. When pushed to choose between them, most will favor loyalty, even if it means violence. But there are conversion stories too. When the thick metal sign first went up before the courthouse, one white man was enraged. He marched into the courthouse, screaming at a black woman who worked there. She called the police, who came but didn’t help. Then she called one of the white board members of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission, who came down to the courthouse to speak with the man I’ll call Bobby.
“What’s the matter?” asked the board member.
“Why are we bringing this Emmett Till thing up again?” He kept on; she listened; and when he was done ranting, she asked just one question.
“Bobby, how old is your son?”
“He’s about to turn fourteen.”
“Well, Bobby, we’re not trying to force anything on anybody, but we think this is an important story to tell so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”
Bobby went home and thought about it. The next day he went to the board member’s house. She was anxious until he spoke. “Look, my wife is a seamstress. We think we need to have a proper unveiling the day of the apology. I think she could put something together so we can have a proper cloth on top of the sign.”
And she did.
Not every conversion happens so quickly, and it’s hard to know how deep Bobby’s conversion went. It was a start, however, and it’s the kind of thing that gives Patrick hope. He sees the Interpretive Center as a place “to incubate new stories.” He wants not to dwell on Till’s murder, but “to use this space not only to reflect on this community’s journey toward racial reconciliation, but to point the finger back at the tourist and say ‘What are you doing on your own?’” This would be, he says, a pivot from dark tourism to reconciliation tourism. “Which might be out of bounds for what a museum on a shoestring is supposed to do, but I don’t care.” Patrick hopes for a grant that will allow him to develop an Emmett Till trail, renovating all the spaces and accompanied by an app that explains and raises questions about the story. In the meantime, there are occasional art exhibits, poetry readings, drama and film performances.
Two evenings a week the space is open to Baby University, where Mae Ruth Watson, who trains Head Start teachers for a living, lectures on what she calls positive parenting. All her students are African American, in their late teens or early twenties, and most of them are obese. It is almost impossible to eat well in the Delta. She teaches them to replace corporal punishment with discipline, and television with interaction. At every session they receive a free case of Pampers and a box containing a healthy meal of chicken salad and fruit. Mae Ruth bowed her head to say a quick grace before opening her plastic container. “You have to break bread with us,” she told me, for I’d hung back, unwilling to take anything from this impoverished institution. “There’s plenty for everyone,” she assured me.
Mae Ruth was scathing on the subject of education in the Delta. When she first entered community college there, she told me, she couldn’t speak a whole sentence. A trim, silver-haired woman with grace and authority, she worked her way up till she could train Head Start teachers herself, turning the program into one of the best in the state.
I thought about Mae Ruth’s claims about the Delta school system while I was talking to Benjamin Salisbury. He’s the only person who has worked at both Emmett Till museums, giving tours, doing clerical work and odd jobs. Born in 1985 about a mile from Sumner, he graduated from West Tallahatchie High School, then went to a Delta community college. “I majored in music. I didn’t think I was good at anything else.” He taught music in elementary school, but he “did a horrible job” and decided that teaching was not for him. I can understand that. Benjamin is a warm and friendly young black man with very little self-confidence. His inarticulateness has nothing to do with vocabulary; he doesn’t quite believe he has a right to speak, at least not with force. He was clearly surprised at my own way of talking when we spoke about national politics. He seemed to agree with everything I said about Obama and Trump; he’d just never heard anyone speak so decisively. Before you can learn anything else, your teachers must have taught you that your voice matters.
Ben was raised by a single mother who works on community development for an NGO. “She works in trying to help people, in a nutshell. It was always something she … I wouldn’t even say ‘made time for,’ it’s just what she did.” So it’s no surprise that Ben wants to give something back to the community. “Tallahatchie County is my home, good and bad, or what I perceive to be good and bad.” He volunteered for the one Emmett Till center before getting a paying job at the other, for he believes that learning the story can help the community. “Because we live one day at a time. So you’re trying your best to ensure that if you saw the beginning of that day, you’ll see the end of it. But we’re connected to those things that guide us to the day we’re in.”
Ben insisted that he wasn’t taught the Emmett Till story as a way of scaring young black people into compliance. “But growing up here, there were certain things you were taught about how to carry yourself to minimize the likelihood of being targeted or accused of something. In my house we were told the importance of just doing such and such and avoiding such and such.”
“What were you supposed to do, and what were you supposed to avoid?” I was interested in specifics, but how can a young black man in the Delta—told all his life to watch what he says—feel at ease with a strange white woman who walks into life here for a very short time?
“The way my mother described it was: Carry yourself like a child of God. Carry yourself like a person who knows God for themselves and that intel should prevent some things from happening. Sometimes bad stuff happens no matter what, but there’s a difference between those instances and those where you bring unnecessary attention to yourself.” In other words: Don’t stand out. Don’t talk too loud or too forcefully. Australians call it the tall poppy syndrome, but down in the Delta it’s not just flowers whose heads get cut off.
I asked Ben what he’d like to do with the center if money were no problem. Suppose a big grant came through: What would the Interpretive Center do with it to help the community? His answer was immediate: he would like to offer scholarships for youths in the community so they could take steps to be self-sustainable. “For black people, it was a dream come true to be able to go to college.” Now the cost of an education, even at a small local college, has made that dream unaffordable. Who from the Delta can afford to graduate with debt? He’d also like to have a computer lab that gave the community access. Tablets are getting cheaper, but most people have no internet access. The internet connection in the apartment where I was staying, right on the Sumner square, was so hopeless that I’d taken to using the wireless at the Interpretive Center.
“Contrary to popular opinion,” Ben continued, “most folk in this community don’t disregard the ability to learn. There are things that—I don’t want to say hinder, but there are things that stand as obstacles to them taking certain steps to be a little more informed and engage with the world outside the one they know.”
It would take so damn little. College scholarships, broadband access. They’d create a community where people felt they had to know what was happening in the world simply in order to talk with their neighbors.
Ben has decided to stay in Mississippi—for now, he says. “I know that just as we all have the capacity for bad stuff, we also have the capacity to do good. There is that hope that resides within myself, my family and friends. So that’s why I guess I love this place. Mississippi is special because it’s a surprisingly accurate reflection of our country. It’s good and bad.”
Bill Foster was always ashamed that he was born in Mississippi, and grateful that his family moved to Illinois when he was six years old. He still remembers his teachers, and he’s grateful for the education he got there. I noticed the difference immediately. Unlike Ben, who is still struggling to find his voice, Bill was educated to believe he has the right to speak boldly and clearly about anything under the sun. As a child, he made fun of Mississippians. He was astonished that his cousin Jerome Little wanted to stay in Sumner. “He loved it here, always had animals. He was happy to go out and slap the hogs.” Bill’s family came down from Chicago to visit their kin every summer—through 1955. He still remembers the rules of the day. “Face down if you see a white person coming; you move to the side. At no time did you have any interaction with females. That was really taboo.” After Emmett Till was killed, there were no more summer vacations in the Delta.
Like Jerome, who would be the driving force behind the Emmett Till Interpretive Center until his death in 2013, Bill was born on Frank Mitchener’s plantation, where his father worked chopping cotton. When they moved up north, he found work digging graves. Bill himself worked for the railroad, laying track in the Chicago cold until he joined the air force, which he called his lucky break. If he’d joined the army, he would have been sent to Vietnam. Instead he got to see the world: five years in Germany, another year in Korea.
Bill preferred the summers in the South to the winters in the North. When he first retired to Sumner, he wondered what the hell he was doing there. If anything feels like home to him, it’s Chicago. Yet there are times when he appreciates the smallness, the neighborliness of Sumner. Like the time he got a prescription at the pharmacy and later ran into the owner, who said he owed him some pills. He’d counted them wrong the first time.
Bill Foster’s original connection to the Interpretive Center was through his cousin Jerome, but he began volunteering because of Patrick Weems. Initially Bill thought Jerome was mistaken, stirring up all that painful history. Let the past be past. Then he read the apology. “And I got to understand what they were trying to do here. A lot of it was for the courthouse; it’s not because they’re so good inside. In the South people are more concerned about monuments. I never thought about leaving my name on something.”
Now he leads tours there. However many mixed motives were behind the restoration, he thinks people should know the history. He’s disappointed that people from outside the community seem the most interested; locals, whether young and old, don’t care as much. There are some, he allowed, but Patrick seems to be better at reaching them.
Bill Foster remembers the first time he saw the Emmett Till photo. He was eleven years old, standing with his cousins, and he cannot describe the look on their faces. “I thought: Why would they show the body like that? It was a powerful, powerful moment.” For a long time he thought the murderers were monsters. “They had that much hatred in their hearts?” Now he thinks they were “just people, and that’s what people do.” He has seen people “turn into animals” in gang wars in Chicago. “They weren’t any worse than the guys that I know.”
Later I asked Patrick how he won the community’s trust.
“Slowly,” he said.
Everyone in the county, black and white, greets him warmly, even if it’s just with a wave from a car window. He is friendly and respectful, and he remembers all the names. He joined the volunteer fire department. For years he worked without a salary to build up the center. That made an impression on the black community, which was suspicious of a white boy from Jackson. But he learned everything there is to know about Emmett Till and got to know the surviving Till family. Being a student of Susan Glisson, who was well respected in the black community, surely helped. And it didn’t hurt that he was courting Maudie and Langdon’s daughter, Anna Booth, and got married in the Sumner church.
It’s easy to see why Patrick feels a rapport with his in-laws. His own parents are “pretty supportive” about his work at the Till Center; his mother has donated to it, but they’ve never taken a tour and they don’t really understand it. His grandfather ran a gas station—“just a step above the Bryants.” This meant they weren’t classy enough to be invited to join the White Citizens’ Council, and they didn’t join the Klan. His mother claims she didn’t know anything about the racist terror going on in Mississippi and Alabama; she was caught up in joining a sorority, not knowing what was going on in the rest of the world. Or around the corner. “My mom made sure my dad didn’t say the N-word around us, but it slipped out from time to time.” Some of those memories are vivid and painful. Like the rest of his family and friends, Patrick was a die-hard Republican who got his information from Fox News. He was enthralled by Bill O’Reilly. He was still a Republican when he started interning for the Winter Institute in 2006. “We didn’t understand civil rights and human rights as a political issue. We were of a mind-set that things were post-racial. They were rough around the edges, but we just needed to make this last push and we’ll integrate everything. Then we can finally have black Republicans.” Susan Glisson and the Winter Institute opened his eyes; so did a black preacher in Oxford who listened to his story and gave him books to read. Desmond Tutu. Henri Nouwen.
“He uses the language of a beloved child of God, and he means that. I didn’t know I was a beloved child of God, and to really claim that means that you have self-worth and you can also give that self-worth to other people.”
As we drove along the two-lane highway, Patrick asked if I could smell it. “We’ve been crop-dusted. They call it the Delta crud.” He pointed to a small yellow plane flying low over the soybean fields. “What you’re smelling now is poison.” It stank. We rolled the windows tighter. In addition to many health problems born of poverty and poor nutrition, cancer rates in the Delta are high. That’s one result of the crop dusting on those long, lonely fields.
Patrick’s cell phone rang; it was a Chicago newspaper doing a story on the memory of Emmett Till. “It’s not guilt that drives me,” he told the journalist. “It’s a sense of responsibility.” When he hung up, I told him that’s the slogan of the best postwar Germans: no to collective guilt, yes to collective responsibility.
The granddaughter of Sheriff Strider, the man most responsible for fixing the trial, bent over backward to help the center. Patrick is grateful for her help, which also led him to think about the differences between guilt and responsibility. Responsibility, he says, is more powerful “because guilt like that is not sustainable. It’s not systematic. It’s not helpful.” Responsibility, on the other hand, is something that can drive you for a long, long time. “I might not be at the Emmett Till Center forever. I might have to take a job that pays more bills, but my true work, my passion, will always be this kind of work.”
I’m not sure his distinction between guilt and responsibility works. It’s true that guilt can twist you, turn you lame. If that happens, it makes everything worse, turning remorse into resentment. When your soul is the thing that matters most, it can leave you seeking redemption without regard to the souls you left behind. There’s a lot to be said for the Jewish tradition around Yom Kippur. That’s the day we read a plaintive list of our collective wrongdoing and ask God to forgive us. We have sinned. We have lied. But you are not meant to sing the prayer without first going to everyone you’ve wronged during the past year and making amends. Otherwise God will not hear you.
I doubt that guilt can be entirely separated from responsibility. What makes a young white man from Jackson feel responsible for this corner of the Delta? Isn’t it at least partly the fact that members of his own family, though never veering into murderous racism, had been the sort of softly angry racists whose views helped shape the world that would acquit a child’s killers?
I’d heard a lot about Johnny B., one of the first black activists in Tallahatchie County, before I met him, but I never heard the same thing twice. “One of them guys who started to fight for whatever rights people had.” A sonuvabitch? A shyster? A racist? A black Donald Trump? A convicted felon? Asking around, I never got the same two stories about what he did to deserve six months’ jail time—during which he continued to serve as the mayor of Glendora, conducting business by phone. Embezzling the federal funds earmarked for his town? Bootleg whiskey? Whatever it was got him kicked off his original post as treasurer of the Emmett Till Commission. Once the foundations looked at the website and saw that a man convicted for messing with money was the treasurer, the commission could forget about raising any more funds. They allowed him to stay on the board, but Johnny B. is still fuming about the fact that their public museum gets more funding than his private one, ETHIC—the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center—seventeen miles down the road.
One thing no one disputes about Johnny B.: his father was an accomplice in Emmett Till’s murder. He worked for J. W. Milam, and what Milam told him to do, he did. Hold the boy in the back of the truck? Drive the truck itself? Burn the boy’s shoes? Wash the blood that flowed from the wounds into the tin slits of the truckbed that carried him to the river? No one alive knows exactly what his tasks were. What’s certain is that Sheriff Strider kidnapped Johnny B.’s father, Henry Lee Loggins, and another black man who had been there. Strider locked them in the Charleston jail under assumed names for the whole of the trial so they couldn’t be subpoenaed as witnesses. It was almost like being the son of a kapo, I thought, those concentration camp prisoners selected by the SS to supervise others. Their choice was to help brutalize or be brutalized themselves, and few people choose the latter. Still, it’s hard not to feel guilt for the sins of the father. Even if it’s not the guilt that Sheriff Strider’s granddaughter feels. Patrick told me he had more sympathy for Johnny B. than most of his colleagues did, “even when he does things that are, well, Johnny B. Go make up your own mind.”
In his office at the Emmett Till museum he built in Glendora, Johnny B. was suspicious, though I’d been careful to buck local custom and call him Mayor Thomas. He wanted to know whom I’d talked with, and when I described the book I was writing, he wanted to hear more about Germany, like everyone else in Mississippi. They really talk about it? Acknowledge, apologize, repent, renew?
He was the first interviewee to balk when I asked for permission to record our conversation. “What for?”
“My memory is terrible.” Which is true. “If I don’t record it, I won’t remember the half of what you tell me.”
Johnny B. played for time. He is writing a book of his own about the murder, he told me. It will highlight the stories his father told him, stories no one else ever heard. Since Henry Lee Loggins was the only real witness to the torture and murder of young Emmett Till, Johnny B. thinks his book will be a sensation. He’s been working on it for years.
“How’s your book gonna affect my book?”
I assured him I wasn’t there to steal his story. I would not ask about the secrets his father told him. Perhaps my book might even help raise interest in his. “I’m only devoting a chapter to the commemorations of Emmett Till. It could make people curious to hear the whole story.”
There was an old clock ticking on the dull brown wall of the office and foyer to his ETHIC museum. Johnny B. hesitated a moment longer.
“Okay, let’s tape,” he said.
He began by complaining about the museum in Sumner. In Glendora, by contrast, “you have an institution that is the first in the country recognizing the situation with the child who was fourteen years old. In 2005, two years before they did anything in Sumner. Yet we’ve been totally left behind. We spent four hundred thousand dollars and are barely able to keep the lights on, which is how this free state of Tallahatchie works. I’ve been trying to correct that since ’75, being the first African American elected to office in this county since it was founded in 1833.”
He was also angry about losing the fight with Frank Mitchener, who refused to apologize for the murder and trial ten years earlier. “We asked for an apology and received a regret. ‘We regret what happened,’” he repeated with disdain. “It’s too late now.”
He went on. “They don’t show the kid’s body as we display it here. I think it should be the full treatment, as Mrs. Till said. In Sumner you won’t find the casket or the body display, which I think is a crucial part of everything.”
I asked him what he would do with a bigger grant if he had one. It’s a fantastic sort of question, so his first answers were understandably vague. He’d like to get the community engaged in its own history; they don’t care enough. He’s an advocate for charter education and hopes the other building on his land could be converted to an educational facility. That would lead to jobs, if people only cared about the history of the community. “We should have our own documentary. You should be able to get a DVD. Have our Trail of Terror tour or the Glendora walking tour, which includes all the sites involved in the murder of Emmett Till.”
Though I kept my promise not to ask about his father, he wanted to talk about him anyway. “The African Americans that were engaged in this heinous act are now being called accomplices. They were directly under the duress of J. W. Milam, who lived just over there.” Behind the wall where Johnny B. was pointing lay a long tract of bare field.
“He doesn’t sound like a man you could say no to.”
“He wasn’t. When you pass this building, there used to be a crossing. A train was coming, and J. W. Milam told one of his fellows, ‘I don’t like this truck here. Take it and run it into the train.’ He did. End of story. That’s how much clout J.W. had here.”
Glendora is frighteningly poor. Its two hundred citizens are all African American. It’s hard to call it a town, just a few flimsy houses and a ramshackle row of stores alongside the train tracks. Only one was open, selling fishing tackle, chips, Wonder Bread, and beer. Otherwise there’s just ETHIC, Johnny B.’s museum in an old barn. Outside it is a rusting wagon wheel and a cotton-gin fan. There are weeds pushing through the cracked brick path. Patrick once took me here to look at the river site. Everywhere else in the county, people give him a friendly wave, but in Glendora, a young black man, eyes full of despair and anger, rolled down his window to spit. Nobody seeing the state of the town could blame him.
I asked Johnny B. how his father’s story affected his life. His answer was indirect; he said he was destined to be where he is today. “Milam once said there would never be a nigger running this town as long as he lived. Because I was a year, eight months, and twenty-eight days old at the time, he couldn’t stop me.”
Johnny B.’s father told him Milam was a good man, as far as it went, well-regarded in the community until the crime. Were standards of goodness so low that they didn’t notice? In the introduction to Blues for Mister Charlie, James Baldwin’s play based on Emmett Till’s murder, Baldwin wrote that he feared he would never be able to draw a valid portrait of the murderer:
In life, obviously, such people baffle and terrify me and, with one part of my mind at least, I hate them and would be willing to kill them. Yet, with another part of my mind, I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes … But if it is true, and I believe it is, that all men are brothers, then we have the duty to try to understand this wretched man; and while we probably cannot hope to liberate him, begin working toward the liberation of his children. For we, the American people, have created him.12
Worried about possible attacks on his family, Johnny B.’s father went into hiding after the crime. Whether attacks from a white community still fearing he could reveal something that might do them harm or attacks from a black community unable to let out its rage on the real criminals, Johnny B. wouldn’t say. For six or seven years his mother raised eight children on her own. He was the only one in his family who couldn’t pick cotton.
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
“Couldn’t. My older brother could pick two hundred pounds by three o’clock and barn it and go home. I got to be out here all day, and I wound up with twenty or thirty pounds. Fifty years later a writer brought me a book about the lynching, and that’s where I read about my mom talking about if they were sick, J.W. would come in the house and beat them and make them go to the field. I must have been there when all of these things were taking place, that’s why I couldn’t pick cotton. Just couldn’t pick it.”
Johnny B. said his father was never the same after Emmett Till’s murder. As far as he’s concerned, “He passed away with the killing of Emmett. He had to, he and the other African American who was there. I don’t see how they could ever survive in the right sense with such an incident taking place.”
He was done talking about his father. Wanting to change the subject, I pointed to the invitation to attend President Obama’s 2009 inauguration, hanging framed on the wall, and said I was jealous. I’d been one of the two million people freezing out on the Mall. Johnny B. thinks Obama didn’t do enough for African Americans. He allowed that he’d be in the grave if it weren’t for Obamacare, but he didn’t have much good to say about the former president. “I didn’t get a chance to get any closer to him than the first inauguration and that was the Fallen Hero ball I was invited to as a result of my son committing suicide in the military after two tours in Iraq.”
His son had enlisted for a career in the military and served seventeen years, the last few as a medic. Somewhere along the line he developed PTSD. “My daughter-in-law recognized the situation and tried to get him to go in for treatment, but he knew that any time they go in for treatment, that was it. No more promotion, no more advancement.”
I was quiet for a long time. There were no windows in the big tin barn to stare out of, and it would soon be time for both of us to move on. I asked him what he thought Emmett Till’s story can do for us today.
“I’m a believer that if you don’t remember the past, then you don’t know where you’re going. You just stumble back over the same thing. So Emmett, as we use him here, is the beginning of healing. I think that case, at some point, will be a shot heard round the world. I’ve had Russians, Ukrainians come here. Everybody.”
I am still trying to understand how the story can heal. Heal whom, in fact. Doesn’t the image of Emmett Till create pain? Rage on the one side, shame on the other? “Racial reconciliation begins with the truth” is the first sentence of the Sumner apology. That’s a fine beginning. Now what?
Johnny B. thinks the white community has to step forward for healing to work. African Americans have been too reactive. “I can apologize for my father being involved, and that’s what I did. That’s when we got the family down here—we held Emmett’s seventieth birthday here in Glendora with his family. Because I wanted to apologize on behalf of my father as well as this community. It was this community that it all took place in, from premeditation to the end of the day when the blood was washed out on these grounds.”
He is proud to own the grounds. Their original owner had told him, “‘Johnny B., you ought to be floating down the river behind this town.’ Just like they did Emmett. I looked at him and said, ‘You ought to be in front of me.’” This is, Johnny B. told me, the reason he worked so hard to buy the place. I understand his desire for revenge. I understand the youth who spit at a car full of white people on the Glendora tracks.
Not six weeks after our talk, a big storm hit the Delta and a tree fell on Johnny B.’s house. The roof collapsed on the bedroom where he was sleeping with his wife. That’s Delta weather, and Delta housing. His wife was killed. Johnny B. survived.
I was not the only person driving around the Delta listening to stories about Emmett Till in the spring of 2017. Long before the Dana Schutz painting, Black Lives Matter brought the case back to the fore. The North Carolina–based historian Timothy Tyson had just written a book, criticized by the local people and lauded elsewhere. Its singular feature was Carolyn Bryant’s confession: contrary to what she’d said at the trial, Emmett Till never tried to touch her. Most people thought she was lying back then, so what difference did her late confession make? At least three films about the case are in production, one of them produced by Jay-Z and Will Smith, another by Whoopi Goldberg. There were also Darryl and Brandon, documentary filmmakers who had already made a film about racial terror in Florida. Like me, they were less interested in the Till trial itself than in its impact on the local community. Over first-rate hamburgers and fries at the Sumner Grille, Darryl was telling me about his work covering juvenile (in)justice for The New York Times when he spotted his quarry on the other side of the room.
“That’s John Whitten sitting at the bar. He’s the son of—”
“I know who John Whitten is.” His father was one of the lawyers appointed to defend Milam and Bryant. I’d even been shown, during a quick drive-by, the military arsenal he keeps in his backyard, but I’d never seen him up close. He looked like a caricature of a good ole boy: big belly, small eyes, short white beard, a sort of hunting cap on his head. It was the first time in the Delta that I felt a shiver of fear.
Darryl wanted to interview him very badly, and he spent much of the dinner wondering whether he should introduce himself. Should he walk over to the bar and buy him a beer? Would it be rude to interrupt him in front of his wife and friends? Maybe not, but would the fact that his friends’ backs might be turned signal disrespect? After eyeing him all evening, Darryl decided against approaching him; he had the man’s phone number, and he’d be returning to Sumner again. That’s when Whitten, weaving slightly, walked straight up to us. “What a good-looking table! Y’all ought to stay here.”
Darryl says that Southern men are taught to be gracious to ladies. That’s one way of putting it. Meanwhile, Darryl played his hand with the ease of a good actor. “No! You’re John Whitten? I’ve heard so much about you.” Leering at me all the while, Whitten asked what we were doing here. In a town of four hundred, every stranger gets noticed. I said I was writing a book about how Mississippi remembers its history.
“Here they just defecated on it.” Whitten gestured toward the courthouse a few steps past the door. “The Emmett Till thing. I saw it, and I know what I know.”
Asked what he saw, he noted that he was seven years old at the time of the trial, so what he saw was the television cables coming from the courthouse. “You had to slow down or they’d bounce the fillings out of your teeth.” As an adult, however, he had talked with Sheriff Strider and an FBI agent when an investigation was opened many years afterward. “Tallahatchie County didn’t have a damn thing to do with it, other than the sheriff missing his guess on the county line by about one hundred fifty feet, which put it in our court system here.” He promised to tell us more if we came to his place the next afternoon.
Sumner feels so safe it is hard to imagine a crime taking place here. Except the one that made history, and that was long ago. Whitten, however, believes the place is full of criminals, and he keeps up his target practice, though he doesn’t hunt anymore. Preparing the deer is too hard, and he doesn’t believe you should shoot anything you’re not going to eat. “But if you can’t defend yourself and your family, you shouldn’t be here, ’cause they’re going to kill you.” He didn’t say who they were, but that was his excuse for the giant arsenal he showed us the next day. The yard is very large, but most of the tanks are parked in the garage.
“Not a tank,” he told me. “That’s an armored personnel carrier.”
“He showed you his arsenal?” exclaimed Frank Mitchener later. “Oh, Lord.”
He showed it off proudly, along with his shed labeled MAN CAVE and DANGEROUS. Most of the signs inside were advertisements for beer, but one poster was remarkable. It pictured four Native Americans in full regalia, each carrying a rifle. TURN IN YOUR WEAPONS! read the caption at the top. Below, in smaller letters, were the words THE GOVERNMENT WILL PROTECT YOU. It sits behind the table that held the largest electric train set I ever saw.
“In a lot of places, the Civil War is real abstract,” he told me. “Here it’s close to home.” His great-grandfather was a lieutenant in the Confederate Army. Whitten’s grandfather’s grandfather had a farm outside Atlanta when Sherman’s crew went through. When they started to torch his house, he argued with the soldiers. They shot him. His widow loaded up what valuables they had. Of the twenty-four slaves they had owned, twenty-two came with them on the shambling wagon train to Mississippi. Of their own free will, emancipated. At least that’s what Whitten said.
As he told it, he was in college when a black man came to his door asking to see his grandfather. “‘I know you?’ asked Grandfather. “‘No, Dr. Thaxton, you don’t. I’m doctor so-and-so. I’m sure you knew my mother, so-and-so.’ My grandfather said, ‘Lord’s sake, man, why didn’t you tell me?’ and hugged him. Told me to get a couple of Cokes and cookies so they could sit on the porch swing.” The man’s mother was one of his grandfather’s former playmates. “She was the daughter of one of the former slaves, and the families were still on good terms at least as late as the sixties. You hear all the garbage about how badly the slaves were treated. Well, some of them were, but I don’t know any.” Whitten opened another beer. “Why should we mistreat our slaves? A slave cost one or two thousand dollars. Cheaper than a tractor today, but you wouldn’t mistreat your tractor, now would you?”
With the sky turning gray, the sun had receded; I started to shiver. Even the Delta can get cold in February.
“We’ve got a damp cold down here,” said Whitten.
I could not find the moral line between shutting up and listening for the sake of information, and being a coward. He knew I was not on his side. When I’d said I was based at the University of Mississippi, he’d replied, “I wouldn’t piss on it if the whole place was burning.” Given what I’d come to know about the University of Mississippi, it felt ludicrous to imagine it as a hotbed of liberal thinking, but that’s how it appears to much of Mississippi. I suppose it’s the difference between the gentility of the White Citizens’ Councils and the brutality of the Klan. Some say the Klan never took hold in the Delta, if only because the planters depended entirely on black labor. Finding truth is so hard when you stand on foreign ground. Though I didn’t really think the man would harm me, I didn’t think anything I could say would possibly change his views. I decided to keep my mouth shut and listen to him talk. To this day, I don’t know if I should have walked away.
His version of the Civil War was the one I’d heard talk about, but never quite so directly. Nobody in the South was in the slaving business. They just bought what was sold to them by those northeastern sea captains. Slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War. It was all about taxes. The South was carrying the burden while the North was getting rich.
“By the time the war broke out, folks in the South had already started a program trying to educate the slaves and trying to repatriate the ones that wanted to go back to Africa—”
“I thought it was illegal in most places to teach slaves to read,” I interrupted. “Or did I get that wrong?”
“I don’t know,” said Whitten.
“But in Mississippi?”
“I don’t know,” he repeated.
“You’re saying people educated their slaves here?”
“As far as I know, they did. I wasn’t there.”
I had circled around my main interest, the Till trial. What had his father told him?
“It’s difficult to make a conviction on something as serious as murder when (a) nothing happened in your county, (b) the folks aren’t from here, (c) the deceased was not from here, though he had some kin. People here had no connection with it. It may not have happened at all.”
“You think the murder may not have happened?”
“Well, they don’t know. They didn’t have DNA back then. They had a fella who’d been laying in the river for weeks and he wasn’t in real good shape when they pulled him out. Who knows? As a former prosecutor myself, I tell you it’s difficult to convince people to convict two guys who were well thought of, former military people. Fought from D-Day all the way to the end of the war. You can’t get twelve folks to think too badly of men who will fight for their country.”
Unless they were black men, many of whom were lynched when they came back home to the South after fighting for their country abroad. But that conversation was not going to happen. Instead I pointed out what everyone knew: Milam and Bryant confessed to the murder just months after they committed it.
“True,” said Whitten, “but that’s not a standard setup in a court of law. Once they were found not guilty, that’s forever.”
“I wonder what your father might have said about that.”
“It bothered him.”
“They did confess it.”
“That case bothered him the rest of his life.”
“Did he ever talk to you about it?”
“Not a whole lot.”
Had we left it right there, I could have left with some pity. Not a whole lot, but some. Few people are brave enough, and farsighted enough, to stand up to the conventions of their times, even when those conventions are rotten. In the Mississippi Delta. On the wide Prussian plane. It takes heroes to do so, when most of us prefer to be victims nowadays.
But we didn’t leave it there. “This whole Emmett Till situation, it wasn’t a hate thing here,” Whitten continued. “Just like Trump says, folks from New York came down and wrote every backwards slant they could. But all you’ve got to do is have one guy say it, and it’s put on the internet as truth.”
I suppose anyone who challenges the framework you live in will be accused of lying, at least for a while. Especially when a leader is making you doubt the possibility of truth itself. “I am just trying to understand you, because Milam and Bryant confessed it. It seems clear they killed that child. You don’t think it is?”
“I can tell you what I know. I know they got paid a lot of money by Look magazine. And I know they told Look magazine what Look wanted to hear, or they wouldn’t have paid them. We’re looking at two fellows trying to eke out a durn living in two small country stores. That’s why they were gone when the fuss started up in the first place. They were gone down to the coast to bring back a load of seafood to sell.”
No one disputes this.
“All I know is, I wasn’t there and I didn’t know either one of them and it happened somewhere else. It wasn’t here. The only thing we had here was the big, thick cables across the street and a half-length tractor-trailer truck that ran all the time the reporters were out there.”
The pale light was fading. Whitten said it was time to go out to feed his coons.
“Your what?” Had I heard wrong?
“My raccoons. I love coons, keep one in the house. We’re big on pets. The other nine are out at my place in the woods. I go to Charleston once a month and bring back a ton of dog food for them.”
The word coon is a racial slur. Looking up its origins later, I learned there’s a debate about its origin. Some say it’s short for barracoon, Portuguese for the cages where Africans were held, often for months, before being shipped off as slaves to America. Whatever its origins, the word coon is now second in offensiveness only to the word that begins with an N. In this light, Whitten’s obsession with his coons could be called extraordinary. I’m not a psychoanalyst, but I believe in the unconscious even for those who don’t believe in it themselves.
“Y’all wanna come out and see?”
Had Darryl and Brandon not been there, I wouldn’t have gotten into his truck, but they were set on the trip and I was curious about the raccoons. We drove out through the Delta, all lead-gray and brown, till we reached a shed on a plot that was run-down and dirty. A small American flag served as a curtain for one window, a large Confederate flag for the other. A little farther on was a rusting motor home, and yet another military vehicle.
“Automatic fake dog feeders,” said Whitten, pointing to five containers that looked like trash cans. “You put the food in the top, they use their noses to push it open.”
I took pictures of the desolation I didn’t want to forget and returned to the car, pleading cold. Whitten said the raccoons come out after dark; he wouldn’t expect a woman to haul those bags of dog food anyway.
Eating dinner back in Sumner a few hours later, I saw Whitten at the bar with his wife.
“I’m here every night,” he said cheerfully. “Paid for these seats myself. Got my name on it, so nobody else ever takes them.”
I wondered how Vanessa, the African American chef and owner of the Sumner Grille, can take it. She looked tough, patient, and weary. Like everyone else in town, she knows who he is. Away from Darryl and Brandon and their camera, Whitten talked more freely.
“Carolyn Bryant’s as senile as an old goat,” said Whitten. “More squirrels in her head than most people have in their attics.” He insisted her confession was worthless. “Why else would that happen to him if he hadn’t done nothing?”
Instead of talking about Emmett Till, he said, people should be talking of a black-on-white murder that happened in the neighborhood more recently. One of the criminals is on death row, but he isn’t dead yet. “They oughtta take him out and burn him. Or at least shoot him. State executioner is a friend of mine. He’s a real nice guy. I think he does it as a volunteer. Somebody’s got to protect the community.”
I finished my tuna salad, returned to the apartment, and locked the door, trying to understand how men like Whitten think. Or don’t.
These claims contradict each other completely; they cannot all be true. Yet Whitten seemed to hold them in his head all at once. That must have been how the defense worked at the trial. Here it seemed to work to defend Whitten from truth itself.
Earlier in the day I’d asked Whitten why he thought people outside the state were afraid of Mississippi. His answer was telling. “They think it’s a big, dark morass. We like it that way, ’cause we’ve got plenty of people here. We don’t need any more.”
Thank God the next day was Sunday, and I had an invitation to Willie Williams’s church. To tell the truth, I was fishing for an invitation the first time I met Willie Williams, who has been the treasurer of the Emmett Till Commission since Johnny B. had to resign.
“What I always say, and he laughs about it, I say he’s a preacher, so he’s not gonna steal,” said Mitchener.
Reverend Williams is the preacher of a small church in Tutwiler, the tiny town a few miles from Sumner, but he supports his family with his day job at the auto body shop he owns down the road. “I love messing with cars, so I went to a trade school and learned how to do auto body work.” Before he could open his own shop, he spent ten years as a security guard at Parchman Farm, the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary. The violence there, which extended to murder, affected him deeply. He went back to school at Millsaps, a progressive Methodist college in Jackson, and was ordained as a pastor in 1998. The auto body shop is small enough to manage while still doing the work of a preacher.
Willie Williams’s answering machine takes calls for customers and parishioners alike. It ends with the message “Have a blessed day, and don’t forget who gave it to you.” When I finally reached him, he was gracious and pleased. Willie’s face is noble and handsome, and there are bits of gray in his short Afro and beard. We were both born in the year Emmett Till was murdered.
As a pastor in Tutwiler, he feels “blessed, just to live here.” Working to build the community, he looks to help people “find their passion. Whether it’s tutoring a kid or trying to make life better for someone else. Why did God give you the creativity you have? You can spend your life, or you can invest your life. You just have to make a decision.”
One of his decisions was to join the Emmett Till Commission. He told me he was honored when Betty Pearson asked him to join and asked him to call her Betty. “It was hard, not because she’s white, but because she’s old enough to be my mother.” I didn’t quite believe that. Patrick had told me of another black board member who wanted to use the back door when invited to a party at Frank Mitchener’s house. It was 2015. But he’d grown up on Frank’s plantation, and, well … Willie doesn’t want to talk about anger, and perhaps he doesn’t feel it. He did speak of fear when John F. Kennedy was murdered. “The black neighborhoods said we were going to be sent back to Africa. They said this president was for black people, and that’s why they killed him.”
“I can imagine I’d be pretty angry if I’d been raised here, with those stories,” I said.
Willie replied by quoting Martin Luther King. If you hate, you make the person you hate too powerful. Hate isn’t sustainable, not without hurting yourself. The Emmett Till Commission, he thinks, is a way to make something healing out of the ashes.
He is carried by faith, but he is also the kind of person who makes that faith come alive. Willie exudes it. I know perfectly well what Marx said about opium. I know how many times Christianity was used to deflect African American attention from the hell they lived on earth. But talking to Willie Williams, you sense the ways in which faith can be a buoy, not an anchor. I’m still not sure why he’d told me earlier that I had to meet John Whitten.
“I know him a little bit,” said Willie. “We talk.”
“Now, how do you get along with somebody like that?”
“Well,” he said slowly, “the thing is, people are different. I don’t know. John is married, has two boys. He’s an attorney; his dad was part of the defense—”
“I know.”
“But being a person of faith, I pray for people. I believe that God can intervene in people’s lives.”
Could I pray for John Whitten? It was a moment when I was glad I’m not a Christian. But Christian or not, I stand by the Enlightenment. Doesn’t that mean believing every single soul is redeemable, one way or another?
I was very happy to step into Willie’s small brick church that Sunday morning. Half the women embraced me when I entered, and all of them did so when I left. In between, the reverend gave a strong, slow sermon. It was called “A Biblical Answer to Racism.”
“I really want to be sensitive to the pain and hurt that the sin of racism has bestowed on our nation, but God is a healer. This morning let us look at Acts chapter seventeen. Here’s what I want to ask you: Is God a racist? He’s not. Racism is a sin against God. There’s only one race, and that’s the human race. There’s different tribes and nations and tongues and the Bible never refers to the word race as applied to people. Always nations, and tribes, and tongues.”
Amen, said the congregation.
“Acts chapter seventeen, verse twenty-six, look at it. ‘And he made from one blood every nation.’ Lord, help us now. Even knowing all you know about us, yet you say ‘Come and let me reason with you.’”
Uh-hunnh, said the congregation.
“What I’m trying to tell you, don’t allow bitterness to enslave you. We’re not the only people—the Jewish race have been through things too. I was watching something last night about the Holocaust, the ovens and things. What kind of person does that to another human being? But it happened. We have all fallen short of the glory of God. Ask God to give you courage, to be able to see people as he sees people, amen!”
Amen, they repeated.
“It bothers me when people say we haven’t made any progress in this issue of racism. We have made some! There was a time when Susan couldn’t even be in our congregation.”
I blushed.
“Not that she’d be threatened by us, but people of her own ethnicity would say, What are you doing down there with them black folks? God is not like man. He said whosoever will, let him come. I want to give a shout-out for our congregation—we love people, man. This place has been full of all kinds of folks from all over this country. You’ll never hear me minimizing the pain of racism. But in the civil rights movement people were killed on both sides. It was one black and two whites who lost their lives in the civil rights movement right here in Mississippi …
“Give God some praise! We are fearfully and wonderfully made. Some of us tall, some of us short, some of us got good hair, some of us got nappy hair. Some of the folks with the good hair, they want to have nappy hair; the folks with nappy hair, they want to have good. God likes a variety; we all bring something to the table. God says come to me and I will give you rest. Now bow your heads in prayer. Lord, I pray for the healing in the area of biracial relationships.”
The congregation prayed.
There was more, and collection plates were passed. Reverend Williams was trying to raise enough money to take the teenagers to the Lorraine Motel and the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.
“We do want to recognize our guest, Dr. Susan Neiman. All the way from Berlin, Germany, what about that? She’s been doing some work with the Emmett Till Commission—and I really appreciate you coming, it meant a lot to me.”
Trying not to stammer, I could only say that I appreciated the warmth of their welcome. “God bless you,” said the men and the women, coming up to shake hands or embrace, as they chose. I could not stop thinking of Dylann Storm Roof, for I was sure this is how he was treated that Wednesday night in Charleston. It was unspeakable enough to murder nine strangers, however often the phenomenon repeats itself throughout America. But to murder nine strangers who have welcomed you with openhearted love? The capacity to return hate with love wipes reason off the map, at least for a while. I cannot understand it any more than I can understand how, knowing that story, black churches across America continue to open their doors and their hearts to white strangers again and again. What love and courage. What courage and love.
The second morning I woke up in Sumner, I saw a white man in his fifties put a bag of rice on the hood of my car. “You’re a foreigner,” he said. In Sumner I’d count as a foreigner if I’d come from Jackson. “Have some rice.”
I was touched, for this was the Delta hospitality of which I’d heard tell. Then again, I doubted he’d be so hospitable if my skin were another color. It took me a moment or two to reply. “Thank you,” I said, “but please give it to someone who needs it more. I don’t eat a lot of rice.”
Days later I felt I’d been churlish to refuse. Mike Wagner is a member of the Emmett Till Commission. He truly cares about racism and poverty, and he gives away tons of rice every year. And as it happens, his rice turned out to be delicious, even for someone as indifferent to rice as I am.
Mike’s family has farmed for ten generations: rice and cotton and soybeans. His grandfather was considered progressive, inviting his black workers to sit at table with him. “If they’re good enough to work with me, they’re good enough to eat with me.” Mike Wagner was offered a job working for the Pearsons, the most liberal and engaged family in the county. “I think part of the job was being their son. Betty was way left of anyone around here.” Betty Pearson influenced him deeply. He started to buy land of his own; in a depressed economy, they were practically giving it away. “I probably have the closest thing to a plantation around here in terms of the land supplying the needs of the farm. We grow our own food.” But he specializes in rice, thousands of acres of it. One afternoon he took me to the rice mill he’d built, full of all the colors rice can bear. He hopes his son will take over the business.
Mike is proud of using methods he calls sustainably organic; he uses a few chemicals but not the massive poison that wafts through the Delta. He prefers to spray at night, when the wind is down, so he doesn’t hurt his neighbors. “He’s cutting-edge,” said Frank Mitchener. Mike is convinced the Delta will be “a splendid place someday. We’ve got the best land in the world and we’ve got brainy people. Now if we can only fix this damn educational system, we’ll be all right.”
In the past thirty years, he said, there’s been wonderful progress. When he first came to the Delta from Missouri, he thought it would take three more generations to solve the Delta’s problems with race and poverty. “We’re about one and a half generations into my thesis. We have way more problems on this planet than the color of your skin,” he said with some passion. “We’ve got water problems, we’ve got resource problems. But I digress.”
Mike was asked to join the Till Commission after Betty retired. He tried to refuse, but he was, he said, the last guy there. I suppose that means the last antiracist white guy; the commission is committed to having an equal number of blacks and whites on its board. He’s glad they restored the courthouse. “It’s one of the best examples of Romanesque architecture in the South, and it’s right here on this pretty little bayou.” Had the courthouse been condemned, it would have destroyed the town. Now there’s a little civil rights tourism, and the restaurant he opened and Vanessa took over. He got involved “selfishly, because I want my kids to have the best damn community in the United States. You don’t need to live in an urban area to enjoy what the best is.” Part of that means engaging with the memory of Emmett Till. “That event is what started the civil rights movement. That was huge.”
After showing me how the rice mill worked, Mike took me back to town the long way, past Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Mississippi, where the crime against Till began. The grocery has long been abandoned; one side, overrun by kudzu vines, looks ready to cave in. The Till Commission wants to buy and restore it, but the owners would prefer to consign it to oblivion. In front there’s a plaque marking the shuttered store as part of the Mississippi Freedom Trail, but it’s been badly scratched up. Nobody is working on figuring out who defaced that sign, nor who shot the thinner one full of holes. Mike Wagner is a gentle man. He does not want to believe that any of his neighbors could have done it. “Maybe it was just some hunters messing around,” he said helplessly.
“Seven times?”
He could not answer.
I’d left my perch in Sumner but drove the seventy miles back there often enough from Oxford, as I did for a reenactment of the trial. A high school teacher from West Virginia proposed to take his students to Sumner, where they would read the entire transcript in the courthouse where it happened. Was it a good idea? Wheeler Parker wanted it, and Patrick never says no to the Till family. The reading would take up three evenings; Jennifer Stollman and I went to the first.
It felt excruciating. Not because the kids evoked the pain, but because they could not. The mostly white students took their places in the courtroom—this was the witness stand, that’s where the jury sat—but they read without affect. Sometimes it seemed they had trouble reading at all. Was it their first rehearsal? The answer turned out to be no, but in the near-empty courtroom it felt appallingly flat. They read the description of Till’s beaten body the way one might read a description of how to build a house or fry an egg. Jen and I exchanged unhappy glances.
“I’ll stay if you need to for your research,” she whispered.
“Let’s go,” I answered. “I can’t take any more.”
I’d wanted to sit out the reading in order to meet Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till’s favorite cousin, but the reenactment was so disturbing it felt impossible to stay. Anyway, I had Reverend Parker’s phone number. When I reached him, he said he was leaving for Chicago the next day, but if I came to his hotel in Greenwood early, he was willing to talk. I explained my project in the hotel lobby. Wheeler Parker was interested; he’d been stationed in Germany in the ’60s.
“The thing I’ve noticed,” he said, “is that there are so many similarities between Hitler and Trump. I’m not saying Trump is as bad as Hitler, but—what did he say? The bigger the lie, the more they believe you. People want to be liked, so most people go along. You have to stand up with that fire in your belly and speak the truth in love, not in hate. The people who didn’t stand up in Germany, they’ve got to feel terrible when the truth comes out.”
“And their children hate them, mostly.”
“Do they talk about it?”
“All the time.”
“They recognize where they went wrong?”
“Yes, sir, they do.”
Wheeler Parker is kind, and the longer he talked, the kinder he grew. His wife joined us in the lobby. She thought the reenactment was “awesome. The first time I saw it, my husband and I left in tears. This put us right in the courtroom.”
“You’ve seen it performed by these kids before?” I asked, skeptical.
“In West Virginia. In fact it was our idea they should have the opportunity to perform it here. Some of the students were better than others.”
Who was I to criticize a reading that had left Reverend and Mrs. Parker in tears? No one was closer to the story than Wheeler Parker. He’d planned the trip with Emmett, ridden together with him on that train, changed cars when the City of New Orleans reached the segregated South. Knelt on the floor that hot night in August, praying that Milam and Bryant would not take him too. I trod very carefully. “My friend and I didn’t feel it was respectful enough. When they got to the graphic descriptions—”
“Well, that’s what you want,” said Reverend Parker. “You want it raw. As they talked, the description was clear in your mind. Took you right down to the river. It affected me emotionally.”
He told me about the preparations for the reenactment. The students wanted some props—in particular, a cotton-gin fan. They couldn’t carry one all the way from West Virginia, but they figured they were going to cotton country and could easily rent one there. They called one shop that sold agricultural equipment. Yes, there were gin fans. “Wait a minute,” said the white man on the phone. “You doing that thing over in Sumner? Well, you just go straight to hell.” The second call was even worse. “The last time we had a gin fan in these parts, we hung it around a nigger’s neck.” The man on the phone laughed when he said it, just like the man they’d called first.
I was almost too shocked to speak.
“I’m not,” said Reverend Parker. His face expressed a fine combination of sadness and savvy. “Some places are covert and some are overt. Here, they just come out and tell you what they feel.”
If that’s the kind of sentiment still buried so close to the surface, then what the students had done was right, even righteous. Only an aesthete, I thought, would complain about how well they’d performed.
“We know their attitude toward black boys,” Reverend Parker continued. “What’s happening now is kind of like during the civil rights era, when they put it on TV. Then the rest of you all saw it. We experience it all the time.”
Yet he called his years in Mississippi very precious. When he was coming up, everybody got to know each other, everyone shared. At the time of year when his family slaughtered the animals, Wheeler was always told to take a piece down to Mrs. Jones’s house. If somebody was in trouble, somebody else was there to help them. They didn’t need a whole lot, just enough to get by.
Now that chattel slavery is over, he thinks we’ve become slaves to riches. As a soldier in Germany, he’d been impressed that people there took time to take walks in the woods, and he swore he’d keep up that pace when he got back to America. Slow, he said, enjoying life. “I didn’t last three weeks before I went back to the rat race.”
Reverend Parker thinks greed is at the heart of America’s troubles. “If you’ve got money in America, we’ll look up to you. We don’t care how you got it, whether gangster or dope seller. Look at Trump.” He sighed. “I tell people, read the Bible. Rich people in the Bible are miserable people. Read the stories.”
He thinks Obama, by contrast, was a godsend, and he has little patience for young people who say he made no difference. “They have no idea of the price we paid to get an African American president. I never thought I’d see that in my lifetime.” Of course one man couldn’t change everything; we expected miracles from him like we expect miracles from doctors. Think they can fix everything. Still, Obama made a difference. “I like his spirit. What they say? When they go low, we go high.”
It is, in fact, the only righteous way to go. So easy to say, so hard to maintain. Yet it must have been this kind of a thought that sustained Wheeler Parker in that night of terror, and in all the nights thereafter.
“You can tell I come from a mix,” he said. Like most African Americans, he is brown but not black. “So who was doing the raping? Starting back with the president, what’s his name?”
“Jefferson.”
Though the reverend thinks the Great Migration was mostly driven by economics, his father-in-law left the South for another reason. “You couldn’t protect your wife or your daughter from the man.” White men want black women, but they fear black men. He believes that’s because when black men are free, they rise to the top. And the greatest fear is of black men taking white women. “People got killed for a reckless eyeball. Look at Emmett Till.” He sounded weary; he is not young. “I’m trying to get some philosophy and make sense of it,” he continued, “but I get so far and I can’t go any further. It just doesn’t make sense.”
I asked Reverend Parker what he thought about Dana Schutz’s painting, hanging at that moment very far from Greenwood, at the Whitney Biennial under massive protest.
“I’ve heard a little something about it,” he said, “but not enough to comment.”
“You’re talking about that painting in New York?” Mrs. Parker asked, looking disgusted. “She made him look like an animal. An elephant.”
That hadn’t been my problem; I found the painting too decorative. Hard to tell what was being represented on that canvas, but if you hadn’t seen the title, you might hang it on your wall. No one, ever, could imagine hanging up the photograph it was meant to interpret. It’s too harrowing to look at for long.
“Our attorney spoke to a group of people in New York regarding it,” said Mrs. Parker. “Call Chris,” she told her husband. “Ask him to come down.”
Christopher Benson is indeed an attorney, but that’s just the beginning. He’s an author, a professor of journalism and African American studies, and, most important in this context, the coauthor, with Mamie Till-Mobley, of Death of Innocence, her account of Emmett Till’s life and death. He has also written a play, Inheritance, about an encounter between the daughter of Amon Goeth, the concentration camp commander made infamous by the film Schindler’s List, and the Jewish woman who had been Goeth’s personal slave. Benson sees them as part of the same story as Emmett Till’s. It happens ever again. “I try to focus on the intimate story that has a much larger meaning. You focus on the traumatic memory of the survivor, but now you have an interesting story because the children of the perpetrators have also experienced some trauma.”
As one who knew Mamie Till-Mobley’s story so well—he was the one to help her write it down in the last six months of her life—Benson was asked by The New York Times to write about the controversy stirring up the art world. What would Mamie have thought about it? For her, wrote Benson, what happened to her son was not just an African American story. It was also an American story about “fulfilling the promise of freedom, justice and equality for all. She welcomed the megaphone effect of a wider audience reached by multiple storytellers, irrespective of race. Mrs. Till-Mobley opened that coffin to force us to cast our eyes on a shared national responsibility.” Benson believes that Schutz’s intentions in developing the painting were good ones. “Here she is in conversation with Mrs. Till-Mobley, who wanted to develop the universal themes of family love, tragic loss and a journey to justice. Still, Ms. Schutz inadvertently reminds us of a traditional expression of white power through imagery. Mrs. Till-Mobley flipped the script on the spectacle of black death … It is for these reasons that the image occupies such a special place in black collective consciousness.” Mrs. Till-Mobley, Benson concluded, would have supported a more robust kind of engagement, perhaps even organized by the Whitney. “As a public school teacher and activist, she would have seen a teachable moment here. And so should we.”13
Benson’s call for dialogue was heard by the Whitney Museum, which invited him and others to organize a public event. Watching a video of the discussion much later, I was disappointed with all the presentations but his. Many were disjointed, dogmatic, and far away from the real world that gave rise to the story. I didn’t think the painting was a good one, but it’s a far cry from that to the view that any white artist’s attempt to portray black pain was exploiting and commodifying that pain itself. If white people have a responsibility to examine white racism, isn’t an evocation of the violence it created a start? It’s insulting to call this an American problem, said one panelist. For me, that turns thought upside down. How hard did the heroes of the civil rights movement fight to make Americans see that racism wasn’t “the Negro problem,” but something concerning us all? That if black people were murdered and degraded by white people, it is white people, precisely, who must face that problem as our own?
People fought to get the blues played on mainstream radio stations; earlier it was called “race music.” As blues and gospel and R&B and soul and hip-hop took over the airwaves, there was plenty of exploitation of the musicians who created it. But shouldn’t the first step be to recognize all that music as American treasure, then to thank the African Americans who created it by fairly distributing the spoils? There’s no fair way to do it, some say. That music was born from black pain and struggle, and it ought to remain in black hands. But I know of nothing more moving than Paul Robeson’s rendering of the “Partisan Lied,” written in Yiddish as response to the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943. And the fact that he sang it in 1949 in Moscow, as Stalin’s anti-Semitism began to sweep the Soviet Union, shows he knew exactly how to use it. I don’t think a Jew could have done it better. It was Robeson’s use of that song, in Yiddish and Russian, to express a universal fight for justice that made it all so poignant.
There is a sense in which only an African American can understand the pain that photo of Emmett Till produced. Would it be the same sense in which only a Jew can understand the Holocaust? Here the ground starts to slip. I’m inclined to agree with Jean Améry that only a Holocaust survivor can understand the pain of the Holocaust; I do not think I can.14 Not by standing on the bone-white stones of Dachau or in the cold fog of Buchenwald. Not by reading memoirs, for even the best of them, like Améry’s and Ruth Kluger’s, leave me staring into a void I cannot fathom. Not by visiting a Holocaust museum that gives you a name on a tag to insist you identify with someone’s true story. Jews around the world were raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, but so much was drenched in myth that, for me at least, it always felt far away. Even when I sought the truths, the myth overshadowed. Even in Berlin.
If Améry is right, the Holocaust is only comprehensible, if at all, to other survivors. Born later to the same tribe, I am not one who will ever share the understanding of which Améry wrote. At best, I share understanding of what it meant to grow up in the wake of the Holocaust with Jews like myself—those who have tried to turn that wake into something alive and universal. Those who could grasp the Holocaust itself are not us, but survivors, be they Jewish or Roma or communist or gay. Understanding isn’t tribal, the stuff that flows in your veins. It demands either shared experience or very hard work. And even then there’s a gaping black hole that surpasses understanding in its heart.
Can a white woman understand the pain of Emmett Till’s mother—or Eric Garner’s, Trayvon Martin’s, Tamir Rice’s? If we cannot entirely understand it, aren’t we obliged to try? “All men are slaves till their brothers are free” rang the words of the now-forgotten “Medgar Evers Lullabye.” African American history in all its torment and glory is American history, and we cannot move forward until all Americans see it that way. Isn’t that why Mamie Till-Mobley opened the casket to begin with?
You cannot hope to understand another culture until you try to get inside a piece of it and walk around there for a while. You know you’ll never get it the way someone who was born inside it does. The songs you heard as a baby matter. The glances between your parents that could mean either joy or fear. How could you know? But they affected you the way cries in the night affected you, stirring up nightmares that went back generations. The stares and the slights you could not understand. The kinds of warnings other children didn’t have to hear. Beatings too, sometimes. How many black parents beat their children, hard, so they wouldn’t get beaten up worse by the man?
Those things you cannot learn later. But you can get quite a lot, actually, if you let yourself be touched by a piece of art. Made by cultural insiders for each other, to start with, but from the perspective of watchful outsiders too. Both inside and outside perspectives matter. We are not alone in this world. The arts are the only thing that have the power to shake you up. All the facts in the world don’t matter until they move you, and the arts, broadly speaking, can do that better than anything else.
Anselm Kiefer became Germany’s greatest postwar painter through his giant ravaging paintings that floodlit German crimes—and the tragedies, both Jewish and German, that they caused. Heinrich Böll and Günther Grass became Nobel laureates for doing the same. The light they provide is very different from that which Jewish artists evoke, but it’s light that we need all the same. All three are incomparably better artists than Dana Schutz, for Mamie Till-Mobley opened the casket to make the world see something concrete. In moving to the abstract, Schutz may fairly be said to obscure it.
So this is not an argument for Dana Schutz’s painting, but an argument for cultural appropriation—the only way we can begin to understand each other’s worlds. As Kwame Anthony Appiah argued in his powerful book The Lies That Bind, we’ve been doing it so thoroughly for so long that it makes no sense to speak of a pure cultural product at all:
All cultural practices and objects are mobile; they like to spread, and almost all are themselves creations of intermixture. Kente in Asante was first made with dyed silk thread, imported from the East. We took something made by others and made it ours. Or rather, they did that in the village of Bonwire. So did the Asante of Kumasi appropriate the cultural property of Bonwire, where it was first made? Putative owners may be previous appropriators.15
Appiah presented a host of examples that make it impossible to maintain an idea of essential cultural identities. He also offered an even more devastating argument: the problem is less that we can rarely decide who owns a piece of culture than that the very idea of ownership is the wrong model to impose on culture. “Unfortunately,” he wrote,
the vigorous lobbying of huge corporations has made the idea of intellectual property go imperial … To accept the notion of cultural appropriation is to buy into the regime they favor, where corporate entities acting as cultural guardians “own” a treasury of intellectual property, extracting a toll when they allow others to make use of it.16
This is not to deny that producers of culture are often exploited and underpaid, or that cultural traditions that have value—sometimes sacred value—to those who were born into them are trivialized and disrespected. But, Appiah concluded,
those who parse these transgressions in terms of ownership have accepted a commercial system that’s alien to the traditions they aim to protect. They have allowed one modern regime of property to appropriate them.17
The hotel lobby in Greenwood wouldn’t stop playing Muzak, so when Chris Benson arrived, we looked for another place to talk. “The Magnolia Room,” he said with a grin. “Very Mississippi.” He had talked at length to Dana Schutz, and he thinks she had every right to express her relation to the Emmett Till story. He found her well-intentioned but naïve, failing to understand the pain caused by the photo for “people who have struggled against the negative images that have been portrayed by white people taking ownership of it.” He thinks provoking discourse is crucial; otherwise we cannot move forward. But he knew from his own experience how hard interpretation can be. “Each time you interpret something that already exists, whether it’s a text or an image, you have to ask yourself ‘What can I add to this story?’ A white perspective certainly adds something.” But he didn’t think the painting was successful, perhaps because the softening of the photo was wrong. “I want to know the white perspective on this story,” he said. “How does this affect a white mother, a white person generally? What can you bring to help me understand you better? That’s more meaningful.”
Because I am Jewish, Chris called me a special sort of white person. “There is a commonality between the Jewish experience, the history of oppression, and the African American experience.” I was brought up to believe that, but I am no longer sure. Too many Jews have forgotten it, too many African Americans have denied it, seeing Jews as just white folks and exploiting ones at that. In the South there is still faint memory. Not just Goodman and Schwerner, but one-third of all the Northerners who came down in support of the civil rights movement were Jewish, whether they were religious or not. It’s all in the Prophets, and old gospel songs. But who remembers that?
“Reverend Parker and I were talking about it over breakfast this morning,” Chris continued. “That commonality is deeply rooted.”
It is certainly rooted for him; that’s why he’s working on a piece about the Holocaust. He has talked to Holocaust survivors and Jewish intellectuals, none of whom object to an African American telling their story. “But they do want me to do it right. So it’s fascinating; they embrace me and tell me stories. It’s like, we’re going to keep feeding you this information to make sure you understand us.”
Who has a right to Emmett Till’s story? Who has a duty to it? Horrific crimes were committed in the name of white women all over the South. As a member of that tribe, I surely have a duty to remember that violence and to act in ways inspired by it. But if I have a duty to a story, don’t I have a right to it?
Nor do black and white exhaust the perspectives we need. I’ve told this story from multiple standpoints: that of the loving relative who was with the child at the time; that of the son of a man who was forced to participate in the killing; that of the son of the man who most viciously argued for the murderers’ acquittal. Each has a perspective we need if we want to try to comprehend the whole. We need to know what resonates, and how generations who never knew the story are impacted by it, as well as the impact on those who were right next to it in the Delta. Looking at an event from multiple angles is the only way we can approach something like truth. As a Jew, I want to know more about W.E.B. Du Bois’s visit to the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, Paul Robeson’s thoughts about growing anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, Christopher Benson’s interpretation of an encounter between the daughter of a Nazi concentration camp commander and his Jewish slave. I am enriched, not diminished, by the reflections of others. Some things you see best from a distance.
One lesson from my time in the Delta: motives are always mixed, and in the end it is not motives but deeds that matter, as Arendt showed in Eichmann in Jerusalem. It doesn’t matter what moves you: it’s what you do, and leave behind, that counts.
The scions of Sumner were saving the courthouse by nodding to history, but it was more than a nod, and it wasn’t easy to achieve. The Emmett Till Commission required very hard work. And of course a mayor wants to bring funds and tourism to his destitute town, a place so poor that many shantytowns in the global South look acceptable by comparison. Johnny B. shines a light on a forgotten hellhole, and it brings some results. And if a German scholar is looking for a job and a German institution is looking for good public relations, isn’t it better that there be solid historical records of how often most institutions in Germany were entwined with the Nazi state?
What is certain: it’s good that those deeds have been marked and preserved. Imagine a world where the greatest crimes ever committed were consigned to dust. Where nothing acknowledged racist terror of any kind—the Holocaust, the genocides, the lynchings were left without a trace. Whatever helps us escape oblivion is welcome.
“You can’t possibly understand the civil rights movement without knowing the Emmett Till story,” concluded Chris Benson. “It’s an American story, but it is the story that affects African Americans in a much deeper way. Tell your story and how you relate to our story. Tell your story in ways you’ve been inspired by our story. Tell your story in ways you’ve been politicized by our story and how you’re now going to move forward to do your part in breaking down this system. We still see the residue of that. We haven’t had that moment of reconciliation.” That’s just what I’m trying to do, I thought. I do not know if I will succeed.