Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (18 page)

They kept going, right on past us, leaving Aunt Mag and Uncle Mack cackling, me in shock, before cruising around the corner to come up the back way to the garage.

Mama had contracted to have that two-car garage built. I had parked the car on the street when I first brought it home. I was so proud to wake up in the morning and look out at it, sitting there on the street—the first car I ever owned with tubeless tires—and I’d smile. Until one morning, I looked out the window and saw that my trunk was slightly open. I went flying downstairs and found that some joker had taken my spare tire. Oh,
I was so unhappy. It was such a traumatic experience. Emmett took it worse than I did. He was angry. After all, the car was his, too. If he could have caught that fellow who broke into his car—oh, my, he just talked and talked about what he would do with him. He calmed down, and I called my mother. Mama came over and, as always, she took care of everything. And after she did, that car stayed in the garage.

By the time Gene and Bo pulled around to the garage through the alley in back, I was standing there, watching with my arms crossed. I couldn’t get too upset, though. Not as long as I could remember back when I was a teenager, finding my mother’s keys and slipping her car out to run errands with Ollie.

Fortunately, Gene and Bo got out and Gene took charge of the parking. Bo’s chest was all puffed up. He looked so pleased with himself. It wasn’t just that he had driven the car, it was that I had seen that he had driven the car.

Gene took it all in. My expression. Bo’s pride. Then he spoke, looking at Bo, so I didn’t realize he was really aiming at me. “Next time, I’m gonna teach you how to back into the garage.”

“Oh, don’t you dare,” I said before I saw that big smile on Gene’s face.

Even though I watched Emmett grow through the years, it would always surprise me when I’d look up and notice that he had reached another level. And at each stage, he would see the world differently, react to it differently. It happened when I first saw him running around our old neighborhood in Argo, helping the iceman. I realized then that I didn’t have a little baby anymore. I had a little boy. And when I saw him driving our car, I realized that he wasn’t a little boy any longer. He was a teenager. In another heartbeat, he would be a man. My God, how had he grown so fast? As much as I had promised myself that I would not make the same mistake my mother had made with me, I realized that there were things I had not told Emmett, things he would need to know to become a man. Maybe that was because he always seemed to know so much already. Maybe that’s why I let it slip by. But what about girls? What did he really know about girls?

Emmett never really had a girlfriend. At least none that he mentioned to me. He had one date. It was when he was still eleven years old. It was around Easter, and the little girl lived in Argo. I didn’t know Bo had been looking at the girl, really, until he told me he wanted to take her to the show. Well, that’s when I got very interested. He told me he was going to have to go out to Argo to get her. Then they would ride the streetcar together back to Chicago to see the movie. Then he was going to ride back to Argo with her, and finally come back to Chicago. That was a whole lot
of streetcar riding. After he explained his master plan to me, he asked me for the money. Now, really, who was going on this date, anyway? He promised to pay me back out of his grocery earnings. And that was just fine. I gave him five dollars and he went on his way. They would go to the South Town Theater near Halsted, one of the most beautiful theaters I had ever seen.

Emmett told me about the date when he got home. At the ticket window, he had put two quarters down and the person in the booth looked him over. Now, you had to start paying full price at age twelve. Emmett was still about four months away from his twelfth birthday at this point, but he was big for his age. The ticket person in the booth told him he was not getting in for less than the full price. He tried to explain his age, but it was no use. One dollar for him, and one dollar for his date. Well, Emmett knew he wouldn’t have enough money to get home at that rate, but he was the problem solver. He asked the little girl to pay her own way.

Oh, I was so embarrassed when he told me. “You can’t do that.”

“Why not?” Emmett asked. “That was too much money. I had to take her home. I had to buy her popcorn and pop. So I let her pay her own way in.”

They saw the movie and he took her back to Argo. He couldn’t stay long because it was getting late, and he had a curfew. Going to Argo took an hour. Coming back took an hour. He had already spent three hours on the road, plus the movie time. So when he took the little lady home, he just said “Bye,” turned around, and came back to Chicago.

Then there was his birthday party. The kids were playing games while the adults were in another part of the house. Somehow they turned to spin the bottle. When one of the little girls would spin, Bo would jump from one spot to the next, trying to let the bottle stop on him. But his friends weren’t sure it was as much about the girls as it was about Bo. Bo was the life of every party, especially his own. He wanted to be funny. He wanted to win. These were the driving forces of his life.

To tell the truth, for the longest time I never really thought much about having a talk with Emmett. I wasn’t trying to encourage him with girls. For one thing, I wanted to keep him to myself. And, of course, I wanted him to focus on his schoolwork. There were a couple of times we sort of talked about the day when he might bring home the girl he wanted to marry, and I acted jealous. He promised he would buy a big house so that he could have his wife and his mother together under one roof. I have to admit, I thought about the grandchildren I might have one day. But I knew that there were things he would need to know to get there. I told Gene what I was thinking, and I asked him if he might want to have a little
talk with Emmett. Gene was not in a big hurry to sit down and have any “father and son” chats. Like that, anyway. I don’t know if they ever had a talk or not.

Someone would have to speak to Bo at some point. I knew that. I wanted Bo to know how to treat a woman well. I knew how important that would be, for him, for the woman. I knew that from my own experience, such that it was.

Mama arranged my first wedding. She had to. What did I know about anything like that? She took me downtown to get the license. Took me to get the blood test, too, even though that wound up being a full-blown physical. Years later she would explain that she just wanted to make sure I was a good girl. Fortunately, the doctor confirmed that. But, of course, I didn’t know how to be anything else. In fact, I knew nothing up to the very moment when I should have known everything.

I married Louis Till in the front room of my mother’s house. It was a special little affair with family and friends. Mama was very considerate. After the ceremony, after everyone left, she let us take the back bedroom. No one was in the middle room. She would sleep in front.

When it came time to go to bed, I looked at the few things I had that I could wear. Someone had given me a pink negligee, and, oh, my God, it embarrassed me to pieces. It was just too revealing. I said no to that. I walked up to Mama’s room and asked if she had a nightgown I could wear and she said yes. It was October and the weather was not cold. Even so, I went in the drawer and picked out a white flannel gown with images of flowers, mostly roses, I guess. I undressed in the front room and kept my girdle on. Then I put on the gown, which had long sleeves and dragged the floor. After I had stalled for quite a while, I still didn’t know how to go in that back room where Louis was. I was nervous. No, I was terrified. I mean, I hadn’t been down that path before and had no idea what to expect. I didn’t know how much he knew and I didn’t know how much you
had
to know. All I knew was what I didn’t know, which was everything a person is expected to know. My mother had just not prepared me to become a wife. She’d been too busy keeping me a virgin. I’d talked with other women, who had only told me they liked being with their husbands. But all I could think was, My God, I wish he would just go to sleep before I go to bed. Finally, Louis called me and I walked to the back, to the room.

After that first night, I decided I would stay up late, hoping I could stay awake longer than Louis. But, as it turns out, I didn’t have to. I was not well the rest of that week and all we could do was cuddle. I did like that part, even though there was never enough of it. You didn’t have to go any
farther than that for me back then. The rest of it, my Lord. I didn’t know what all the fuss had been about with those other women I had talked to. I figured maybe that’s why they called it “the birds and the bees” because, I mean, really, that was for the birds.

There was one good thing about that early experience: In no time, I learned that I was pregnant. Since we really didn’t do more than cuddle for a while after that first night, that would mean that my first time ever was the time Emmett was conceived.

Oh, there was so much I wanted for Emmett as he was beginning to take shape as an adult. I wanted him to see his wife’s needs and attend to them. I wanted him to be a partner to her and not be one of these guys who only looks out for himself. I wanted him to become a man about the house when it came to repairs or cleaning or anything that needed to be done. I knew where the mistakes had been made by the men I had married, and I wanted Emmett to avoid making those mistakes with the women he would know. I alluded to those things I didn’t like, and, of course, he had seen some things himself in my relationship with Pink, how Pink just didn’t measure up.

I had to look at Emmett and realize he was already becoming everything I had hoped he might. There were things I had taught him, there were things he just seemed to know. I thought about the way he had treated me, taken care of me, protected me. I thought about the way he had taken to Wheeler Parker’s new sister, Alma, after she was born in 1948. Emmett always wanted to be the one to push her stroller, look out for her. He was two hundred percent boy, but that didn’t mean he was all play and mischief. It also meant he was a protector, a provider. He had his tender spot, all right, and it showed in the way he always took such care to find just the right cards to express just the right sentiments on just the right occasions, like Mother’s Day. I weighed everything as I watched a boy becoming a man and considered the kind of man I was determined he’d become.

As I did, I realized that I had been teaching Emmett all along, teaching him to be the kind of man any woman would want. The kind of man I had wanted in my own life. The kind of man I didn’t have in my marriages to Louis and Pink. Although I didn’t talk about sexual relationships, I talked to Emmett about the things that mattered most, the essential things that could make a relationship. I knew how important it was for mothers to shape boys, who someday would become men who would marry the women who would mother sons. These were the important things to share with my son. And I figured we would have time to take up the rest of it later.

 B
y summer, I was ready for a vacation, or as close to one as I was going to get. The car was still practically brand-new and I thought it would be so nice to take it out on the road before Emmett had to get back to school. This would have been my first formal vacation since I started working for the federal government twelve years earlier, and I wanted to drive with Gene and Emmett to Detroit and then to Omaha. I planned to take a month off and I was so excited about the trip that I even agreed that Emmett could take the wheel after we got out on the highway. He had only turned fourteen in July, but with Gene and me in the car, well, I figured we could steer him right.

It wasn’t long, though, before Emmett started moving in a different direction. My uncle Moses Wright came up to Chicago from Money, Mississippi, in August for the funeral of Robert Jones, the father-in-law of his oldest daughter, Willie Mae Jones. While he was in town staying with Willie Mae, he saw so many of the great sights a big city like Chicago has to offer, and he was impressed. How could he not be? But he preferred the simple pleasures of wide-open spaces and fishing and long summer nights in the Mississippi Delta, and he talked about all that in ways that made you want to be there, to see it for yourself. Emmett got caught up in these images that Papa Mose created. For a free-spirited boy who lived to be outdoors, there was so much possibility, so much adventure in the Mississippi his great-uncle described. But there was something else. Emmett found out that his cousin Wheeler Parker was going to travel to Mississippi with Papa Mose for a visit, and that another cousin, Curtis Jones, Willie Mae’s son, was planning to join them later. The boys were looking forward to
their visit, and that’s all Emmett needed to hear. Wheeler was like his other half. He was determined to go.

The answer was no. Absolutely not. I was against it, my mother was against it. No matter how much people were talking about Mississippi this and Mississippi that, we did not want Emmett to go unless he could go with one of us, as he had done a couple of times before when he was much younger. But Bo refused to let go of it. He couldn’t imagine letting his cousins go south without him, especially Wheeler, his best friend. He kept pushing it, I kept saying no. I tried to convince him that we would have just as much fun on the car trip, and that he would be able to drive the car he loved so dearly. But that just didn’t compare. It couldn’t. I guess he figured he could drive that car anytime, as he already had shown. All the while I was trying to convince him, he was working on me, too. In the end, he was more persuasive.

In one talk we had, he turned to me and began asking questions, questions that were really more like statements. “Why is it that you can take two of Papa Mose’s girls and raise them for years, and you won’t even let me go to Mississippi and stay a week?” I thought about Thelma and Loretha and how Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy had entrusted them to Mama’s care up in Argo, and to me later in Chicago. “How do you feel about that, Mama?” Bo asked.