Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (2 page)

When Ms. Parks was asked “Why did you not go to the back of the bus after such threats?” she said she thought of Emmett Till and said she couldn’t go to the back.

Usually death stops everything. That is the calculation of the enemy. But here, death started everything. The murderers of Emmett Till miscalculated the power of people who have faith in God. People of faith are convinced and are able to say, “Though you slay me yet will I trust you, God.” The enemy puts faith in death. They feel death can protect their tyranny. If Pontius Pilate and the Roman government had known the power of the resurrection beyond the crucifixion they would have gone another way. If they had known when they lifted Him up on the cross that He would draw men unto Him, they would not have chosen state-sponsored murder, resulting in a religious movement known as Christianity.

If the men who killed Emmett Till had known his body would free a people, they would have let him live.

God had the last answer. Even death cannot stop our God. Mamie turned a crucifixion into a resurrection. Well done, Mamie, well done. You turned death into living. Well done. You awakened the world. Well done. You gave your son so a nation might be saved. Well done.

A magnificent woman.

R
EVEREND
J
ESSE
L. J
ACKSON
, S
R
.

Chicago
                               

January 11, 2003
                 

 H
ardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about Emmett. There are constant reminders. I see his face everywhere. It is on my datebook, on the calendar on my wall, on a special T-shirt I wear. Everywhere. Pictures and mementos fill my house, his presence fills my life. At times I will think about something he said or did—something funny, something so many years ago—and it will still make me laugh, each time just like the first time. When I am out and about, people recognize me and they want to talk about him, what his death meant to them, what I mean to them still. They just can’t help it. On the news, there are human interest stories about mothers and sons and grandsons, and I find myself thinking about what life might have been like if I still had a son to look after me in my old age, or grandsons whom I might look after, and spoil rotten. Then there are the tragic reports of child abductions and hate crimes. I know about these things. I know about them the only way you really can know about them. And I quietly pray for the grieving mothers of other missing or murdered children, hoping they will find the peace and the meaning that took me so long to find. We are connected, these other mothers and I. We share a bond, the knowledge of an exclusive few: that there can be no greater suffering than the pain of a mother who must bury her child, and be left alone to wonder if there might have been even one small thing she could have done to make a difference.

Hardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about Emmett and the promise of a lifetime. There are constant reminders. But, then, a mother really doesn’t need reminders. Just as you always remember the agony of childbirth, you can never forget the anguish of losing a child. You don’t
need to be reminded of the horror you have seen—even for a brief moment—in your boy’s battered body. That vision plays back forever like a perpetual nightmare. Emmett Louis Till, my only son, my only child, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered at the hands of white racists on August 28, 1955. That was so many years ago, yet it seems like only yesterday to a mother who needs no reminders. After all, every shattered piece of my heart has its own special memory of Emmett.

They say there are lessons to be learned from every experience in life. It has taken practically all my life to sort out the lessons here. I couldn’t see how there might possibly be any good to come of something so evil. What could the lesson have been? How could anyone deserve this? Then there was the mistreatment, the indifference of those who I thought really cared, the betrayal by those I trusted, the injustice at the hands of the justice system.

It has taken all these years of quiet reflection to recognize the true meaning of my experience, and Emmett’s. It took quite a while for me to accept how his murder connected to so many things that make us what we are today. I didn’t see right away, but there was an important mission for me, to shape so many other young minds as a teacher, a messenger, an active church member. God told me, “I took away one child, but I will give you thousands.” He has. And I have been grateful for that blessing.

That is why, for forty-seven years, I wasn’t quite ready to write this book. It took a long time for me to reach this kind of deep understanding. I have been approached, oh, so many times by people who wanted to tell my story or put words in my mouth to tell their version of my story. But I just couldn’t do that. I owe Emmett more than that. I owe him the absolute understanding I finally have come to appreciate; the deep understanding of why he lived and died and why I was destined to live so long after his death. You see, my story is more than the story of a lynching. It is more than the story of how, with God’s guidance, I made a commitment to rip the covers off Mississippi, USA—revealing to the world the horrible face of race hatred. It is more than the story of how I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that led ultimately to a generation of social and legal progress for this country. My story is more than all of that. It is the story of how I was able to pull myself back from the brink of desolation, and turn my life around by digging deep within my soul to pull hope from despair, joy from anguish, forgiveness from anger, love from hate. I want people to know about all of that and how they might gain some useful understanding for their own lives from my experience. But I also want people to know my Emmett, the way they might have
known him had they met him so many years ago—as the driven, industrious, clever boy that he was at age fourteen. Forever fourteen.

Thankfully, Emmett has helped to steer me in my lifelong odyssey. He does still. I often hear his voice guiding or chiding, the voice of a boy much older than his years. In fact, as I began discussions for this book, I sat down at my kitchen table, my workspace. As I sometimes do, I asked that a trifold picture frame of images of Emmett and me be taken down from atop the china hutch in my living room and placed on the table in front of me. I focused on my son while I considered this book. I scanned the pictures that portrayed a life from infancy through boyhood into adolescence. I prayed and asked for help in making this important decision. The result is in your hands. Now, only now, I can share the wisdom of my age. I am experienced, but not cynical. I’ve been disappointed by so many of the people I’ve trusted over the years, but still I am hopeful that we all can be better than we are. I’ve been brokenhearted, but I still maintain an oversized capacity for love.

It is not that I dwell on the past. But the past shapes the way we are in the present and the way we will become what we are destined to become. It is only because I have finally understood the past, accepted it, embraced it, that I can fully live in the moment. And hardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about Emmett, and the lessons a son can teach a mother.

 I
will always remember the day Emmett was born. It was July 25, 1941. A Friday. But I’m getting a little ahead of my story, because this is not where it really begins. You see, my mother had brought me to the hospital on Wednesday. And the fact that it was my mother and not my husband who took me to the hospital to have a baby probably tells you just about everything you need to know about Louis Till. He was at work that day, I think. He worked at the Corn Products Refining Company in Argo, Illinois, where we lived, just outside Chicago. I guess you might call Argo a suburb, but it didn’t have anything at all in common with the big city, except for being close to it. It was a sleepy little town where whites called blacks by their first names and where blacks would never dare do the same thing. It was a place where most little black girls dropped out of school by age sixteen to get married and where I was considered an old maid because I had waited until I finished high school to marry Louis at age eighteen. That was just the year before. Argo was also a place where it seemed the greatest ambition of most black men, like my father and my husband, was to work for Corn Products, and the greatest ambition of their wives was to take care of things at home for their husbands. So it was with my mother, who did what my mother always seemed to be there to do. She took care of me, and on that Wednesday when she drove me to Cook County Hospital in Chicago, I really needed care. I was going into labor and I didn’t understand much about that except for this: those pains were
talking
to me. They were saying: “Any minute now, Mamie Till. Any minute, girl.”

Now, Cook County was a public hospital and it was one place you were sure black folks could get treated. That’s not to say that we were treated well. The nurses decided right away that this was not an emergency. But,
then, of course, they were feeling no pain. They put me into a room with another lady and it seems that I was the only one who noticed that this woman was screaming and hollering and cursing and she was going through every four-letter word she could think of, teaching me a few in the process. That was about the time
my
pain stopped. I felt so sorry for her that I forgot my own troubles. I got up out of my bed after everyone left and started trying to comfort her, help ease her pain. I didn’t understand a lot of things back then. I mean, I was so naive it wasn’t safe for me to walk the streets alone. And listening to the screams of that poor woman really frightened me because I didn’t understand any of it. My God, was this what was in store for me? No one had prepared me for any of this. Why hadn’t my mother talked to me about these things? And why on earth did this woman want to kill her husband? I guess it was her husband. “That man,” I think is what she kept saying. Anyway, she told me that I would soon find out why.

Over the next couple of days, I was in and out of pain—terrible pain—and my mother was in and out of the room checking on things, taking care of me. That room always seemed dark, like a government office, not cheerful the way I thought it should look for such a blessed event. But that was Cook County Hospital. Louis never came to see about me. I would have thought that he would be excited about the baby, but he didn’t seem to care. On Friday during one of my mother’s visits, I told her what I had been telling the nurses: that I needed to go, that if the pain was a sign, then it was definitely time. I didn’t think I could take another minute of it. But they weren’t paying me any attention. Mama asked if my water had broken. I told her I thought it had and that I had asked somebody to come and change my bed. But when they didn’t, I just pulled the blanket up and got back on top of the bed. Well, Alma Gaines was having none of that. My mother called the nurse, who checked my situation and quickly got me into the labor room. And that’s where things really got serious. The doctor there began to examine me. He said something that I didn’t get, but I could hear the urgency in his voice. What I understood was that they had to get busy. They had to take my baby. The baby was coming butt first. It was a breech birth. I had no idea how serious that could be, but even
I
understood the anxiety I heard in the doctor’s voice, and the tense way things were moving in that room.

“What have you been doing?” he asked, like he was accusing me of murder.

Now I knew; it was my fault. Whatever was happening to my baby was all my fault. The only thing I could recall was that Louis and I had moved into a new place not that long before all of this. As the medical team
rushed to prep me, I thought about that move from my mother’s house to a little apartment down the street. I was so proud of that little place, our first apartment. I had bought curtains. Everything had to be perfect. I mean, I was such a perfectionist. And now, of course, I know better, but I didn’t know anything then. I was hanging curtains and I was cleaning cobwebs high up on the windows. And somebody came by and saw me and told me I shouldn’t reach overhead like that. So, it was my fault that all this was happening, all because I wanted a nice, clean place for the baby to live and play. Now, in the delivery room, I was being punished for it, but I didn’t want my baby to have to suffer for my mistake. The agony was so severe, I finally understood why that woman back in the room wanted to kill “that man.” Somehow, though, I didn’t think that would help. At that moment, I thought there could be no greater pain than giving birth to a child. I couldn’t imagine then how much more pain a mother might have to endure. Someone placed a cone over my mouth and told me to count backward from one hundred. The last thing I remember was “… ninety-nine …”

When I finally awakened, it seemed as if I had been dreaming. I was back in the room, but there was no baby there. In fact, I had never even seen my baby. I wanted to know where they had taken the baby. All they told me was that I was very sick, and they really didn’t want to bring him to me and they had taken him to do whatever it is they do to babies. “Him.” A boy. I kept insisting on seeing my baby boy and, finally, they gave in and brought him to me, probably just to keep me quiet, knowing how mothers are. But I didn’t care. I was so happy to see my baby, all six and three-quarters pounds of him.

Happy, that is, until I looked down at him in my arms.

I reacted right away with a frown. “Oooh, no …” I said, before thinking much about it.

His skin color was very, very light and he had blond hair and blue eyes. I looked up at the nurse, but I was assured that they had handed me the right baby. There was more. It had been such a difficult birth that they had used forceps and clinched him at the temples. He was scarred on his forehead and on the nose, and his little face looked distorted. My reaction must have startled him. His eyes grew wide, and he began to cry.