Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (33 page)

“Licks, a lot of licks.” He also heard screams. Painful screams.

Then things got quiet. Willie kept going, but he saw a white man come out of the shed and walk over to a water pump to take a drink. It was J. W. Milam. He knew that because he had seen Milam around the plantation before. Milam’s brother, Leslie, was the Sheridan Plantation manager. Milam had a holster strapped around the waist of his khaki trousers. There was a pistol in the holster.

Willie felt helpless to do anything about what was going on, so he did the only thing he could. He stopped at Amanda Bradley’s place, just across the way from the shed. He asked her what was going on, who was getting beat to death out in the shed. Then he went out to get a bucket of water from that pump near the shed. The same one Milam had used. The sounds had died down. From the window back at Mandy Bradley’s place, he could see a tractor being pulled out of the shed and the truck backed up. Something wrapped in a tarpaulin was placed in the back of the truck before it was driven off.

Willie seemed less nervous as he continued his testimony. Like the rest of us, he felt better knowing the press was there to observe everything that was going on. He was betting no one would try anything as long as the reporters were around to see it. It was the watchful eye of the press that seemed to keep things in line. It was the press that had helped me get so much attention when Emmett was taken, when his body was found. In fact, that’s how Willie had connected it all up. He had seen Emmett’s picture in the paper and remembered what he had seen days before that, early in the morning, before he went to Sunday school.

Willie looked at the Christmas picture of Emmett, the one that had been marked for evidence after my testimony earlier. He said the person in the picture looked like the person he saw in the back of that truck. Prosecutor Smith asked Willie to identify the man he saw at the Sheridan Plantation that Sunday morning, the white man with the holster and the pistol. As Willie pointed out Milam, he noticed a slight smile on his face. Milam was just looking at Willie. And Willie looked back at him. Milam’s little smile seemed to tell Willie that his testimony would not mean a thing. To Milam, or to the jury.

Defense counsel J. W. Kellum wanted to make sure Willie’s testimony didn’t count. He moved to have it stricken. It was irrelevant, he said. The judge ruled against him. Well, then, Kellum argued, the testimony shouldn’t apply to Bryant since Willie had identified only Milam. The judge said the defendants had decided to be tried together so the evidence applied to both of them. Kellum also tried to shake Willie’s testimony, asking him questions about distance, testing him to see if he really could have seen what he said he had seen. How far was he from the pump when he first saw Milam? How far was the truck when he saw it? But Willie stuck it out. He had been encouraged to do that and he made it through.

The other surprise witnesses called by the state that day were Add Reed, Willie’s sixty-five-year-old grandfather, and Amanda Bradley, who was fifty. They basically confirmed parts of Willie’s story. Add Reed testified that he saw Leslie Milam near the shed around eight o’clock Sunday morning. He also saw the pickup truck parked near the shed. Mandy Bradley testified that she looked out the window and saw the green and white Chevy truck. She also said she saw four white men going in and out of the barn. J. W. Milam was one of them.

The prosecution rested. It was around two that afternoon and like clockwork, right away, the defense made its move. The lawyers said the judge should order the jury to acquit Bryant and Milam right then and there. A directed verdict of acquittal, that’s what they called it. These defense lawyers argued that the state had not even set out a case for murder, so there was nothing for them to defend. Judge Swango denied their motion. He argued that there was something for the jury to consider in all this. Enough evidence had been presented to move forward.

The way things were going, there was new reason to have hope. The prosecutors had put their case together with some thought and care, even with no help in the investigation and no time to do it all. Papa Mose had sworn that Bryant and Milam took Emmett from his house. Sheriff George Smith and his deputy John Ed Cothran had testified that Bryant and Milam admitted taking Emmett, even though they said they let him go. Now there were witnesses who said they saw Milam and three other white men early Sunday morning, just hours after Emmett was taken. And Willie Reed actually saw Emmett in the truck with the white men and two black men, before he heard beating and screaming in that shed. And, of course, I swore to the identity of my son. One of the men who had come to Sumner with Congressman Diggs, a lawyer, thought it looked like the state had done a pretty good job of setting things out. And it was a good sign that the judge thought there were enough issues to be considered by
the jury. Well, that sounded encouraging to me. But this game was still in play and we couldn’t trust that the defense team would play fair.

The first witness called by the defense was Carolyn Bryant. It was clear right away that Defense Attorney Carlton wanted to put Emmett on trial. His line of questioning focused on that Wednesday night when Emmett and the other kids had come into Money and walked into Bryant’s store. As soon as the lawyer began, the judge ordered the jury out of the room. He wanted to see where this was all going before he allowed the jury to be inflamed by it. And it was enough to set anyone’s passion on fire. To me, it was pure drama. And the audience was ready for the show. It seemed like the entire courtroom tilted in that woman’s direction; all the white people moved forward, sitting on the edge of their seats, as if they wanted to embrace every word of their star attraction, the woman billed in the Southern press as the “pretty twenty-one-year-old mother of two.”

Carolyn Bryant told the story of how she worked alone in the store on the night of August 24. What she meant by this was that her husband was out of town and her sister-in-law, Juanita Milam, was in the living quarters in the back of the store. So, while Carolyn Bryant was out front, behind the counter, this black “man” with “a northern brogue” had come into the store and had gone over to the candy counter. He was buying bubble gum.

When she held her hand out for the money, she claimed that he grabbed her arm and spoke to her. “How about a date, baby?”

She said she broke free and that he came around and grabbed her by the waist and spoke again. “What’s the matter, baby, can’t you take it? I’ve been with white women before.”

Carlton got her to stand and acted out the scene with her, touching her waist the way she claimed the black man had done. She said he used foul language. So foul, in fact, she just hung her head as she thought about it in court and said she could not repeat it there. She
would
not. At a certain point, she claimed, a Southern Negro came in and grabbed the man and took him out. She said she ran out to get a pistol from the car and saw the man standing there on the porch with the other Negroes. As she made her way to the car, she says, she heard the whistle.

Carlton decided to demonstrate for everybody in the court. He blew a whistle. A wolf whistle. Two notes that slashed the air of that packed courtroom like a knife. She swore that was the sound.

Oh, that woman’s testimony was outrageous. It just seemed obvious to me that she had added so much to this brief encounter to try to justify what her husband and brother-in-law had done to my son. Emmett might
not have known everything about the way things worked down South, but this white woman certainly did. She would have never held out her hand to take Emmett’s money. Black folks always dropped their money on the counter. That was the best way to avoid even looking like they had physical contact. Even if Emmett had held out the coins in his hand, she would have let him drop them. That was the Money way. Second, by all accounts, Emmett wasn’t in the store long enough to have had that much conversation with the woman. Much of that time, Simeon was standing in the door waiting for him, looking at everything. He surely didn’t have time to chase her around the store. Third, if she had been insulted and had been afraid, as she swore she had been, her sister-in-law was right in the back of the store and there was a gas station only steps away from the store. She went to the car. She could have called for help when she was there, or run across the way for protection if she felt somebody was assaulting her, as she swore some black “man” had done. And, if things had happened the way she claimed, then why did it take so long for everything to heat up? I doubt that those boys would have even made it three miles back to the house that night, let alone come back to Money a couple of days later, when it seemed that the whole thing had blown over.

The defense wanted the judge to allow Carolyn Bryant’s testimony to be heard by the jury. Special Prosecutor Robert Smith argued that whatever happened that Wednesday night in the store should not be connected up to what happened early Sunday morning. It was irrelevant, he said. In any event, it certainly was no justification for murder.

The judge saw it his way. He refused to allow the jury to hear her testimony. But the damage was done already: You could be sure the jury would hear it. After all, the judge had allowed that fantastic story to be told in open court in front of all those other white people. Even though the jurors were kept at the Delta Inn Hotel each night of the trial, and even though they were told not to speak to anybody about the case, there was going to be so much buzzing about that testimony that there would be no way the jurors could keep from hearing the story. And they would wind up hearing the story in all the twisted and distorted ways people could possibly tell it. That is, if they hadn’t heard it already, long before the trial even got under way.

For the time left, the defense lawyers called a bunch of character witnesses, including Milam’s wife, Juanita, and other people they paraded in front of the jury as “experts.” Since the defense opened the door to character, the prosecutors tried to raise questions about whether people knew Milam had been arrested for bootlegging. But the judge didn’t permit
them to go there. He did allow people like Sheriff Strider to come in to twist things up even more.

Strider testified that the body he saw looked like it had been in the water for somewhere between ten and fifteen days. Emmett had only been missing for three days. He said he couldn’t tell whether it was black or white. He just knew it was human. And, in a comment that I know was directed at me, he said he wouldn’t have been able to recognize that body if it had been one of his own sons. The special prosecutor asked him if he had signed a death certificate that identified the body as Emmett Till. Strider swore that he had not done that. It would be some time before I would finally receive Emmett’s death certificate that showed Strider had done exactly that on September 1. Twenty-one days earlier. But, of course, we had no way to know that at the time.

Dr. L. B. Otken, a physician, said the body could have been in the river for up to two weeks and was so bloated that a mother couldn’t have even identified him. He was able to give this “expert” opinion even though he never moved any closer to Emmett than the riverbank, because of the odor. Finally, H. D. Malone, the embalmer, said it looked like the body had been in the water for up to twenty-five days and was “bloated beyond recognition.” Each one of the defense team’s so-called experts seemed to be taking it up a notch. I mean, if this had gone on much longer, they might have tried to say Emmett’s body had been in that river since the end of the Civil War. None of these witnesses was a pathologist and they all had to admit when they were asked by the prosecution that a badly beaten body would deteriorate much faster and look like it had been in the river much longer.

Clotye Murdock, the
Ebony
writer, was so upset about Strider’s testimony that she approached the judge as court was recessing. She asked a question that the judge thought was a pretty good one. If Strider couldn’t tell whether the body pulled from the river was black or white, how come he turned it over to a black undertaker? It was a bold thing to do right there on Strider’s turf, and she realized it. Only after the fact. As it turns out, word never reached Strider. At least he never said anything or did anything about it.

There was plenty of reason to be concerned about harassment. Jimmy Hicks found that out. On his way into court one day, he was pulled aside by a deputy and taken before some kind of justice of the peace in another building. He was accused of passing a stopped school bus on the road. After a nervous moment, the whole thing wound up being thrown out. But Jimmy Hicks and everybody else got the message: People were watching
and they wanted us to know they could come after us when we least expected it.

Things were shifting again. After the defense began playing its cards, it was beginning to seem like none of our evidence, none of our testimony was going to matter. In a criminal case, all the jury needs to let somebody off is a reasonable doubt. What might have seemed irrational and distorted to the rest of the world came off as very reasonable in the upside-down world of Sumner, where it seemed people were looking for any reason, any excuse to set two murderers free. Once again, I was beginning to fear that things were not going to turn out well.

I really wasn’t sure I wanted to return on Friday. Not after listening to all those lies on Thursday afternoon. I mean, I just had this awful feeling, knowing now that it was possible for these people to take lies for truth and truth for lies. They had been living such dishonest lives for so many years that they probably didn’t even know the difference anymore. Oh, God, it seemed like all the blood drained out of my body. I just had to pray, and brave it. And so I did.

Friday, September 23, was the first day of fall. Summer had ended. But the heat was still on. In court, the morning was taken up by more character witnesses before the defense rested, and closing arguments were set to begin.

Well, I thought I had heard it all during the testimony, but those defense lawyers were saving the worst for last. They really wanted to end on a low note. They had built their whole case around creating doubt that the body pulled from the river was Emmett’s. They could have left it at that. But they didn’t. John Whitten practically accused Papa Mose and the NAACP of grave robbing to find a “rotting, stinking body” that could be thrown into the river with Emmett’s ring. He told the jury that he had confidence “that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men.…”