Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (25 page)

When I got to his chin, I saw his tongue resting there. It was huge. I never imagined that a human tongue could be that big. Maybe it was the effect of the water, since he had been in the river for several days, or maybe the heat. But as I gazed at the tongue, I couldn’t help but think that it had been choked out of his mouth. I forced myself to move on, to keep going one small section at a time, as if taking this gruesome task in small doses could somehow make it less excruciating. I had started out doing this item analysis with the kind of detachment a forensic doctor might have, but I wasn’t a forensic doctor. I was Emmett’s mother and I was overwhelmed by a mother’s anguish as I continued tracking Emmett through his night of torture. Step by step, as methodically as his killers had mutilated my baby, I was putting him back together again, but only to identify the body.

From the chin I moved up to his right cheek. There was an eyeball hanging down, resting on that cheek. It looked like it was still attached by the optic nerve, but it was just suspended there. I don’t know how I could keep it together enough to do this, but I do recall looking closely enough to see the color of the eye. It was that light hazel brown everyone always
thought was so pretty. Right away, I looked to the other eye. But it wasn’t there. It seemed like someone had taken a nut picker and plucked that one out. Then I glanced down at the mouth, quickly now, because I needed to keep moving. Emmett always had the most beautiful teeth. Even as a little baby, his teeth were
very
unusual. And I recall how much I had hoped that his permanent set would be as perfect as his baby teeth were. Oh, and they were. Just beautiful. So I looked at his teeth, because I knew I could recognize them. Dear God, there were only two now, but they were definitely his. I looked at the bridge of his nose, at the point right between his eyebrows. It had been chopped, maybe with a meat cleaver. It looked as if someone had tenderized his nose.

From there, I went to one of his ears. Even though I could recognize the color of the only eye he had left, and even though those two teeth looked like his teeth, and his ankles and his knees were all so familiar, I felt that I still needed something, something more to let me know this was my child. With everything I had seen and touched, I still could not identify this body as Emmett. Or maybe I was just not ready to admit that this was my baby. So, I looked for his ear. I believe it was his right ear. The little curled-up part at the tip of the lobe. And that’s when I found out that the right ear had been cut almost in half. The part I was looking for wasn’t even there anymore. And I don’t know what had happened to that part of his ear, but it wasn’t on the back part of his skull. I did check. And when I did, I saw that someone—Milam or Bryant—had taken a hatchet and had cut through the top of his head, from ear to ear. The back of his head was loose from the front part of his face. As I moved around, I saw a bullet hole slightly back from the temple area. And I could see light shining through the hole on the other side, where the bullet left the skull. That’s when I had to stop. My momentum was broken. With all the grisly things I had just witnessed in silence, it was that one bullet hole that finally caused me to speak.

“Did they have to
shoot
him?” I mean, he had to be dead by then.

It was Emmett. I knew it the way a mother knows every part of herself. Especially her child. I had examined every part of him I had ever loved, every part of him I had nurtured and helped to mend. I looked deeply at that entire body for something, anything that would help me find my son. Finally, I found him. And lost him.

I looked at Gene. He nodded. “That’s Bobo,” he said. “I know that haircut.”

Everyone, it seemed, would recognize the parts of him they knew best. That’s when it occurred to me that I had never used the photos I had
brought with me. In the end, we didn’t need that kind of aid. In the end, we already had committed Emmett to memory.

I couldn’t help but think of the first time I laid eyes on my son. I remembered my reaction to his distorted little face and how I made him cry. I would have given anything to take that back. That face seemed so adorable now. My first look and my last look at Emmett would forever be fused in my mind.

I kept looking at him on the table and I thought about what it must have been like for him that night. I studied every detail of what those monsters had done to destroy his beautiful young life. I thought about how afraid he must have been, how at some point that early Sunday morning, he must have known he was going to die. I thought about how all alone he must have felt, and I found myself hoping only that he died quickly. I can never forget what I saw on that table and how I felt. And I can never forget the complete devastation I experienced when I realized for the first time something that would haunt me for such a long time to come. At some point during his ordeal, in the last moments of his precious little life, Emmett must have cried out. Two names. “God” and “Mama.” And no one answered the call.

 T
hey say there’s something to be gained from all of life’s experiences. Even the bad ones. Especially those, really. But if the bad experience is a great loss, then what do we gain? Could it possibly be enough to make up for what is sacrificed? If it is, if things somehow balance out between what we lose and what we gain, if we only break even, then are we truly better off?

There were so many questions during that time, so few answers. The coming months would be such an intense period of hard questions, and answers that never seemed to come easily. I had prayed for answers and when they didn’t come right away, I became angry. I became angry with God. Why had this happened to Emmett? Why had this happened to me? What could I have possibly done to deserve this? What would become of me as a result of this?

So much was running through my head at the moment I stood there, at the funeral home, with A. A. Rayner and Daddy and Gene and Rayfield all standing by as I gazed at the mutilated body that once had been my son. At that moment I didn’t see what I possibly could gain from the worst experience anyone could ever have. All I felt was the vast emptiness left by what had been lost.

Into that void, I kept pouring so much pain and, oh, yes, so much anger. Emmett hadn’t done anything to deserve what was done to him. What was done to him by those men was savage, it was barbaric, and I wasn’t about to let them get away with it. Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had been arrested on Monday and charged with kidnapping. On Thursday, the day Uncle Crosby boarded the train in Mississippi to bring Emmett’s body home to Chicago, on that day the charges against Bryant and Milam
were upgraded to murder. Even so, before they’d stand trial, they’d have to be indicted by a grand jury in Tallahatchie County. The place where Emmett’s body was found. Just miles from the place where I was born.

I told Mr. Rayner I wanted an open-casket funeral. He looked at Emmett, that horribly distorted face, then he looked back at me. He asked me if I was sure. I was never more certain of anything. He asked me if I wanted him to retouch Emmett. If I wanted him to work on my son. If I wanted to make him more presentable.

I shook my head. “No,” I said. That was the way I wanted him presented. “Let the world see what I’ve seen.”

I didn’t really know what was motivating me, what was making me do what I was doing during this period. It was something I can’t explain, something working through me, something that would cause me to say things that would only become clear to me the instant I’d speak them. But the feeling was strong in me and I understood clearly what had to be done. It would be important for people to look at what had happened on a late Mississippi night when nobody was looking, to consider what might happen again if we didn’t look out. This would not be like so many other lynching cases, the hundreds, the thousands of cases where families would be forced to walk away and quietly bury their dead and their grief and their humiliation. I was not going quietly. Oh, no, I was not about to do that. I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what had happened to my baby, I could explain it in great detail, I could describe what I saw laid out there on that slab at A. A. Rayner’s, one piece, one inch, one body part, at a time. I could do all of that and 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 to this.

So I wanted to make it as real and as visible to people as I could possibly make it. I knew that if they walked by that casket, if people opened the pages of
Jet
magazine and the
Chicago Defender
, if other people could see it with their
own
eyes, then together we might find a way to express what we had seen. It was important to do that, I thought, to help people recognize the horrible problems we were facing in the South.

We gave Mr. Rayner the clothes to be used to dress Emmett. The black suit I had bought him for Christmas. The last Christmas. The best ever. I also gave him three photographs from that holiday. The shot of Emmett in his fine clothes, the shirt and the tie and the hat we had given him. The picture of Emmett leaning on his television set. And, of course, the one of Emmett and me together. Our mother-and-son portrait. I wanted the photographs displayed inside the open casket. People needed to see those,
too. People needed to see what was taken away from me, what was taken from us all.

Aunt Lizzy wasted no time getting out of Mississippi. She had come to Chicago and would be there at Bo’s funeral. The boys would join her. But Simeon would stay behind for a while with Uncle Moses. They were waiting behind, the two of them, to serve as witnesses against Bryant and Milam. It was a very dangerous thing to do. Aunt Lizzy would write to Uncle Moses every day, begging him to leave. But he wanted to stay, to see it through. He didn’t always stay at his house, though, and Simmy stayed with other relatives. That was a good thing. One night after Bo’s abduction, cars and trucks had pulled into Papa Mose’s lane. White men had come knocking on his door, looking for him. He had slept in his car, parked next to the cemetery behind his church, where nobody could see him. There were other restless nights. Nights when he slept in the house with his shotgun under the bed. Times when he might stay in the wooded area outside his home. One morning he came back to the house and found his screen door cut and the house ransacked, beds turned. He knew then that his days in Mississippi were numbered.

It was late on Friday when I viewed the body. Mr. Rayner did some work to prepare Emmett for the public viewing, despite our talk. Looking back on it now, I think he probably felt he had to do something. Emmett was in such bad shape when we got him back. Monstrous condition. But Mr. Rayner did what he could. That tongue had been removed, I guess, and put somewhere. The mouth was closed now. And you could see on the side of Emmett’s head that some coarse thread had been used to sew the pieces back together. I guess it was like that on the right side, too, but I couldn’t see that. The eye that had been dangling, that was removed, too, and the eyelid closed, like on the other side, where no eye was left. I told Mr. Rayner he had done a beautiful job. You would have to have seen Emmett when I first saw him to really appreciate what Mr. Rayner had done before my son’s body was viewed by the public and photographed for public view. What I had seen was so much worse than what other people would ever see. And what tens of thousands of people filing past Emmett would see would make men cry and women cry out.

It was reported that about five thousand people viewed Emmett’s body that night, and they would go on until the chapel closed at two in the morning. As I left close to midnight, it seemed that there were hundreds still waiting to get in. I stopped to speak to them. I felt that I had to. As I had looked upon my son, something was shaken in me. Things had
changed for me in an instant. They would never be the same again. I understood now that this was about more than Emmett. There was nothing more we could do for my baby, but we could honor him by recognizing that we all had a responsibility to work together for a common good. I could not accept that my son had died in vain.
We
could not accept that. So I told the crowd that the first step we had to take was to make sure the people who lynched my son were convicted, to make sure the world would be safe for so many other young boys. I was so caught up in my own passion and the energy of the crowd at that moment that I never paused to consider just how difficult that first step was going to be.

The service was scheduled to start at eleven. We were all pleased that Uncle Crosby’s son, Crosby Junior, was able to fly in. “Sonny” had been training as a paratrooper at Ft. Campbell down in Kentucky and was only one jump away from qualifying when he got the news about Bo. His commander got the Red Cross involved and arrangements were made right away to fly him in for the funeral. He would ride over in the family car with Gene, Mama, Papa Spearman, and me. As I had done every morning since Emmett had left for Mississippi, I wound his watch and put it on my wrist. I could practically feel it ticking. My pulse timed to Emmett’s. Two hearts in sync. For all time.

The Saturday-morning service would be held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. That was Mama’s first church in Chicago. It was the mother of all the Churches of God in Christ in Illinois. It had been the place Mama had been sent when she first moved to Argo from Mississippi. So I thought Bishop Roberts, pastor of that church, would preach the funeral. But Mama said he would serve as the host pastor and her new minister, Bishop Ford, of the St. Paul Church of God in Christ, would preach the funeral.

When we arrived at the church, it was packed, at least a couple of thousand people inside, a capacity crowd, with at least another five thousand outside, unable to get in. They were lined up around the block, four deep at some points, just to be able to walk through the church for the viewing. Loudspeakers were set up so that people outside could hear. We decided to postpone the burial until Tuesday, just to let everyone have a chance to see Emmett. So many people wanted to do that. At least they felt they could do that.