The Eerie Tragedy of Emmett Till’s Father, Told by John Edgar Wideman
|
Version 0 of 1. WRITING TO SAVE A LIFEThe Louis Till FileBy John Edgar Wideman193 pp. Scribner. $25. This incident happened several years ago in a now defunct upscale Manhattan department store. The elevator going down was crowded. I stood next to a large white man who carried a small blond girl, possibly age 3 or 4, on his shoulders. At the next floor a well-dressed middle-aged black man got on. Suddenly the voice of the little girl rang out: “Daddy! Is that man going to hurt me?” she asked, pointing a small finger at the black man as he entered and turned to face the front of the car. The collective intake of passenger breath was almost audible. You could hear a pin drop. I dared a sideways look at the now brick-red, grim-faced father staring straight ahead — while everyone else seemed to be looking at his or her shoes. No one looked at the white man — and certainly no one looked at the black man, whose back was carved in stone as he faced the front of the car. I sensed a fervent prayer, my own and everyone else’s: “God, get me out of here as quickly as possible.” Finally at the ground floor, the black man, in the front of the car, got out first. No one wanted to see his face. As public racial incidents go, this was very minor — but those moments in the elevator were awful. I never told anyone about the incident because you had to be there. It seems that black men in America have always been there — presumed guilty, presumed dangerous, every day of their lives. I am a weeper. Certain names alone make me well up — Anne Frank, for instance, and Emmett Till. Emmett is like an Anne Frank figure. But unlike Anne, age 15 when her family was betrayed to the Nazis, 14-year-old Emmett had no chance to express his humanity — although his valiant mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, did her best in a poignant autobiography. When Emmett’s body was fished out of the Tallahatchie River, the state of Mississippi ordered its immediate burial, but his mother insisted on its being returned to her in Chicago. His boxed remains arrived under official Mississippi seal, to be buried without opening. His mother, however, opened the box, and Jet magazine published a picture of Emmett’s horribly mutilated face. John Edgar Wideman, in “Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File,” reports that the top of Emmett’s head was crushed in, one eye was missing, and his face had “all the human being battered out of it.” Wideman and I both remember finding it almost impossible to look at the picture of Emmett Till’s face in the Sept. 15, 1955, issue of Jet. I was a freshman in college. Wideman was 14 — the same age as Emmett. Now Wideman, known for books like “Philadelphia Fire” and “Brothers and Keepers,” adds a quietly harrowing postscript to the tragedy of Emmett Till. Louis Till was Emmett’s father, an abusive husband who did not really know his son. Ten years before Emmett was murdered by Mississippi racists, 23-year-old Louis Till was executed by a racist American military system. The coincidences and parallels are almost surreal. Louis Till was accused of raping two women and murdering another in Italy in the waning days of World War II. Emmett was accused of whistling at a white woman — clearly tantamount to rape and murder in 1950s Mississippi — although his mother states in her book that Emmett had a bad stammer and whistled to get certain words out. Both trials, of Emmett’s alleged killers and Louis’s alleged crime, were a farce. During the trial of Emmett’s killers, Louis’s confidential military record was mysteriously declassified and leaked to the press just in time to sabotage any chance of a kidnapping conviction. Southern justice blamed the son for the sins of the father — and Emmett’s killers were swiftly acquitted by an all-white jury. Wideman’s book is part exploration and part meditation, a searching account of his attempt to learn more about the short life of Louis Till. A hugely disproportionate number of black soldiers were accused, convicted and executed for rape in World War II. At the trial of Louis and his co-defendant, each of the two rape victims admitted that “darkness, hoods, masks, shock, confusion made it impossible to identify the men who attacked them.” No victim could identify either man; nevertheless, Wideman writes, Louis and his co-defendant were found guilty and sentenced to death “on the basis of being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Till was accused and convicted of a second crime that occurred that night — the murder of an Italian woman. One of the witnesses actually swore that the killer was white, but later changed his tune. Louis Till was buried in the infamous Plot E of a United States military cemetery in France, reserved for executed servicemen. In plots half the size of those for the honored dead, there are 96 graves — 83, Wideman writes, for “colored men.” Emmett and Louis Till were both victims of what Wideman calls a “crime of being,” that is, being a black American. By the end of their stories, weeping is too easy. Outrage is needed, not tears. |