Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (56 page)

It took the "wolf whistle" murder of Emmett Till to shock the entire nation into seeing the Southern white man's property code for what it was. Amid a traceable pattern of retaliatory strikes, death sentences and lynchings that went unpunished, the murder of Till stands out in stark relief. Nothing in recent times can match it for sheer outrageousness, for indefensible overkill with commu nity support. Old patterns die and new ones arise to take their place. In the following decade a new movement for civil rights forced the South to reorder its priorities and placed the battle to preserve the old way of life on grounds apart from the white woman's body. The murder of Till, we can see now in retrospect, came toward the end of a definable era.
It
was the landmark case of white male retaliation for black male transgression. In a sense, it broke the mold.

In August, i955, a fisherman pulled the decomposed body of a dead black boy out of the Tallahatchie River. The corpse bore signs of a terrible beating and the face was mutilated beyond recogni tion. A ring on one finger led to a positive identification: Emmett

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Louis Till, fourteen years old, who had come to the rural hamlet of Money, Mississippi, from Chicago to spend a summer vacation

with his uncle. There was little mystery in town as to who killed Emmett Till and why. Two white men,
J.
W. Millam and his half

brother, Roy Bryant, were promptly arrested.

Since the facts in the Till case were never in serious dispute, even by Millam and Bryant af ter a jury found them not guilty, a straightforward story can be told. Till, nicknamed Bobo, had been regaling the black youth of Money with tales of his exploits with white girls up North, proudly displaying the picture of one girl he carried in his wallet. His skeptical buddies dared the Chicago braggar to walk into Bryant's general store at the crossroads and ask the lady who was alone behind the counter, Bryant's young wife, for a date. According to a telescoped version provided by William Bradford Huie, who wrote several articles and a book about the Till case, "While the Delta Negroes peered, in delicious awe, through the front windows, Bobo took the dare; Carolyn Bryant chased him with a pistol and, in a gesture of adolescent bravado, Bobo 'wolf-whistled' at her."

At two o'clock the next morning, Millam and Bryant strode into his uncle's shack on a tenant farm and ordered Till to go with them. As Huie got the story from the unrepentant half brothers, the white men intended only to rough up the boy and send him packing to Chicago but Till did not display the proper cowering attitude. Instead he repeated his brag about having "had'' white women. Enraged, Millam shot him in the head with his Army .45. The two men tied a weight around Till's neck and dumped him in the Tallahatchie.

An all-male, all-white jury ( women were excluded by law from Mississippi juries until 1968) acquitted Millam and Bryant af ter an hour's deliberation, accepting the defense contention that there was no real proof that the body from the river was actually Till's. In a courtroom tableau preserved for posterity by a news photog rapher, Millam chomped on a big cigar as the two half brothers embraced their wives.

Never again was the Southern white man's property code so blatantly expressed. Four years af ter the murder of Till, Mack Charles Parker would be dragged from a jail cell in Poplarville, Mississippi, two days before his scheduled trial for rape, but

A QUESTION OF RACE
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Parker's murder was an anticlimactic echo to the whistle heard round the world.

Rarely has one single case exposed so clearly as Till's the underlying group-male antagonisms over access to women, for what began in Bryant's store should not be misconstrued as an innocent flirtation. Till's action was more than a kid's brash prank and his murder was more than a husband's revenge. The scene that was acted out in Money, Mississippi, had all the elements of a classical Greek drama. Emmett Till was going to show his black buddies that he, and by inference
they,
could get a white woman and Carolyn Bryant was the nearest convenient object. In concrete terms, the accessibility of
all
white women was on review. This is how it must have been perceived by Till's companions, who set him up with some degree of cruelty and then, sensing that things had gone too far, called him off. And we know this is how it was perceived by Millam and Bryant. "Hell," Millam told William Bradford Huie when he recalled the night of the murder. "He showed me the white gal's picture! Bragged o' what he'd done to her! What else could I do? No use letting him get no bigger!"

And what of the wolf whistle, Till's "gesture of adolescent

bravado"? We are rightly aghast that a whistle could be cause for murder but we must also accept that Emmett Till and
J.
W.

Millam shared something in common.
They
both understood that the whistle was no small tweet of hubba-hubba or melodious ap proval for a well-turned ankle. Given the deteriorated situation she with a pistol in her hand, he scampering back to safety with his buddies-it was a deliberate insult just short of physical assault, a last reminder to Carolyn Bryant that this black boy, Till, had in mind to possess her.

A murder for a wolf whistle and a jury that refused to convict. The Till case became a lesson of instruction to an entire generation of appalled Americans. I know how I reacted. At age twenty and for a period of fif teen years af ter the murder of Emmett Till whenever a black teen-ager whistled at me on a New York City street or uttered in passing one of several variations on an invita tion to congress, I smiled my nicest smile of comradely equality no supersensitive flower of white womanhood, I-a largess I ex tended with equal sincerity to white construction workers, truck drivers, street-comer cowboys, indeed, to any and all who let me

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know from a safe distance their theoretical intent. Af ter all, were not women for flirting? Wasn't a whistle or a murmured "May I fuck you?" an innocent compliment? And did not white women in particular have to bear the white man's burden of making amends for Southern racism?
It
took fif teen years for me to resolve these questions in my own mind, and to understand the insult implicit in Emmett Till's whistle, the depersonalized challenge of "I can have you" with or without the racial aspect. Today a sexual remark on the street causes within me a fleeting but murderous rage.

And we know from the record how another person, Eldridge Cleaver, reacted to the murder of Till. In
Soul on Ice
Cleaver writes that he was nineteen years old when he "saw in a magazine a picture of the white woman with whom Emmett Till was said to have flirted." Cleaver spelled out his reactions in full, for the Till case was a critical event in his life, one that turned him "inside out."

While looking at the picture, I felt that little tension in the center of my chest I experience when a woman appeals to me. I was disgusted and angry with myself . Here was a woman who had caused the death of a black, possibly because, when he looked at her, he also felt the same tensions of lust and desire in his chest and probably for the same general reasons that I felt them I

looked at the picture again and again, and in spite of everything and against my will and the hate I felt for the woman and all that she represented, she appealed to me. I flew into a rage at myself, at America, at white women, at the history that had placed those ten sions of lust and desire in my chest.

Cleaver had a small breakdown two days later during which he says he "ranted and raved . . . against white women in particu lar," and then, "Somehow I arrived at the conclusion that, as a matter of principle, it was of paramount importance for me to have an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women. The term outlaw appealed to me . . ." His solution: "I became a rapist."

Cleaver's thought pattern and the ideological construct he used to justify his career as a rapist, a career cut short by imprison ment, is interesting on several levels. Besides being a rare glimpse into the mind of an actual rapist, it reflects a strain of thinking among black male
.
intellectuals and writers that became quite fash ionable in the late nineteen sixties and was taken up with astonishing enthusiasm by white male radicals and parts of the white intellectual extablishment as a perfectly acceptable excuse for rape committed by black men. The key to the ready acceptability of Cleaver's thesis is obvious.
.
The blame, as he saw it, belonged on white women.

Before I quote further from Cleaver the practitioner it might be instructive to hear from some of his contemporaneous brothers who struck a similar chord when attempting to explain or exhort the black man. Cleaver himself makes passing reference to the poetry of LeRoi Jones ( Imamu Amiri Baraka ) : "Come up, black dada nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats," and comments coolly, "LeRoi is expressing the funky facts of life."

Funky or extreme as the poetry and plays of Jones-Baraka might be, no such criticism could be leveled at the black sociologist al\14n(c;;Hernton, who made a serious stab at defining the black male perspective in
Sex
and Racism in America. "Ill am well·awarel writes Hernton, "that, .like
.
murder; rape
,
has
.
many motives. B1,1t wheri
-
.
te motive for rape, however· psychotic, is ·basically racial,

-
._that
is a different matter. think :now that, at one time or another; in,
:
1every"·Negro who grows
.
up.in
.
1 the· :south, there is a rapist, .no

..
matter how hidden. And that: rapisb has
·
been
.
eonceived in the