Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (50 page)

With each day, I give thanks for the blessings of life—the blessings of another day and the chance to do something with it. Something good. Something significant. Something helpful. No matter how small it might seem. I want to keep making a difference. Although I am much more aware now of the limits of my own life, I am not afraid. My son has taught me so much about facing all aspects of life with courage. I have planned for the end of my life as carefully as I planned so much of the life I have lived recently. We have made arrangements with Mrs. Slivy Edmonds Cotton, president of Perpetua, Inc., the owners of Burr Oak Cemetery, for the establishment of a mausoleum and museum at the cemetery. Emmett, Gene, and I will be there together with pictures and other remembrances of our lives in a setting that will enable children to learn. Not just about our history, but also about the transition in store for every life. The cemetery is for the living, after all, not the dead. And I want children to be able to touch my life and Bo’s life and Gene’s in ways that I hope we have touched everyone else’s.

I just want to make sure now that I tie up all the loose ends, finish the work God put me here to do, see Mama again in the still peace of the riverbank, and prepare to live in eternal bliss with Emmett and Gennie once again, finally as family.

And, Bo, I do think we’re ready now.

 E
very now and then, you have the good fortune to meet someone who changes your life. When you consider the impact a life-altering experience can have, every now and then is plenty. Mamie Till-Mobley became such a person for me. One day this past December, I sat in her kitchen and watched her in action. Now, getting to that kitchen had been a two-step process. The first time we met, we sat in the dining room. There had been a certain formality to that, proving myself worthy of crossing a threshold in our relationship, moving into the kitchen. Much cozier, that kitchen, the nerve center of her home. As in the dining room, there was a table to bring us together. That was a big part of her life. A table, and all that it represented: business, as well as food, nurturing. The table was where she did her work, and where she said her blessings.

So one December day we sat at the kitchen table, in the middle of one of our many interview sessions for this book. She was involved in so many other things at the same time. To know Mother Mobley was to know that there always would be so many other things. There were constant phone calls, from schedulers for upcoming events, out-of-town events that would force her to change her three-day-a-week dialysis schedule, and there were media inquiries. At times she would just hand the phone to me. She knew
I
could say no. Wait for the book, I would say. It’s only ten months away. She couldn’t say those things, couldn’t hold back. She had been waiting too long already. “I’m like a glass of champagne that keeps bubbling up,” she’d say. Vintage Mamie, consumed by the moment. So, ten more months seemed like a lifetime to her.

There was all that, and then there was the food. The chicken and
dumplings, the yeast rolls, the banana pudding, and so much more sustenance that Mother Mobley and her family friend and nurse, Earlene Greer, always were so eager to provide. On this one day, at the height of just that kind of activity—the calls, the conversation, the cooking—she did something that really amazed me. She walked. Just stood on her own and walked from the kitchen to her adjacent office and back again, without her walker, without her cane, without even an arm to lean on. I waited for her to take her seat again before calling all this to her attention. It just seemed like a good idea to wait.

She hadn’t even noticed that she had done this thing that had amazed me, this thing I hadn’t seen her do before. But then she gave me a wink of a glance. “Well,” she said, “I have to be able to get around if I’m going to go out on the road and talk about my book.”

Indeed. And I wanted that for her. I wanted that very much. For her to be strong and healthy, to be able to go out, tell the story she had waited so long to tell. When you care about somebody, you want them to have what they want. Everyone who knew Mother Mobley cared about her. People who only knew
about
her cared about her. She once jammed the aisles in a local grocery store when her cousin Abriel Thomas told only a couple of people that Emmett Till’s mother was there shopping. Word spread. People knew her story, parts of it, anyway, and they wanted to tell her how it had changed their lives. It was like that wherever she went. But there was much more than the pieces of a story. There was Mother Mobley herself. She was Everymother. She had an aura, a smile like the sunrise, and a way of making you want to make her smile just to get warmed by it. There was a magnetism, a way she had of drawing you in like a loving embrace. It would make you just want to do things for her. It made me want to call ahead of time, every time I’d come over, to see if she needed anything, anything at all, from the store. Of course, she needed that, the attention, the care, the help. Just as other people, especially the family members who looked after her, needed her to be pleased. She was that special person who said the things we always want to hear:
I missed you. God bless you. I love you, too
.

She was the teacher we’d always remember. You know, the one who changed our lives. She might have retired from teaching twenty years ago, but for Mother Mobley that was a minor administrative detail. She continued to teach in her own way. She teaches us still. She teaches as a mother would, warming our hearts, nurturing our minds. She teaches about the importance of living a committed life, a purposeful life. Of squeezing every ounce of enrichment out of every moment we are given. To live on purpose. She taught me these things, as I sat there in her
kitchen, as I listened to her, watched her on the move. She taught me the best way you can teach anybody anything: by example.

On January 6 of this year, Mother Mobley died. She suffered a heart attack. She had just started walking again, or trying to. She was on the move that day, on her way to another accelerated dialysis session so she could make an early-morning flight to Atlanta the next day. She was scheduled to speak at Ebenezer Baptist Church in connection with the exhibition “Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America” at the Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site. Abe and Earlene were with her on that last ride, one so much like others she had experienced, like the one the morning she got the news about Emmett’s disappearance, and when she heard about Gene in the hospital, racing the speed limit, hoping against hope that the outcome would be different from the expectation.

Maybe it all makes sense, that she would die as she had lived: on the move. At eighty-one, she showed just how short life really is, how important it is to seize the moment, to push beyond our limitations. She did that, stayed active, kept moving forward, knowing the great risk to her personal health. She did it because she wanted so much to tell the story, the story she had lived.

Her story was very important to her. She recognized the power of her message was in its simplicity. A boy was brutally murdered, the confessed killers were set free, an aggrieved mother found no justice, and race hatred was at the very heart of it all. It is a story that clawed at our conscience like fingernails on a blackboard. It challenged a nation in the most fundamental way. We looked at the tortured face of Emmett Till and saw what a nightmare the American dream had become for so many of us. One newspaper headline got it exactly right when it noted quite simply that Mother Mobley had opened a casket and opened our eyes. She made us face what we all must experience at some point in a full and complete life: a move away from our own naïveté, our own ignorance; an increase in our awareness. For it is only in the sacrifice of our innocence that we can achieve absolute understanding.

Mother Mobley’s message is political, it is spiritual. And people get it. Mother Mobley made sure of that. In fact, she
became
her own message. In the example of her life, we were able to see so much more than individual despair. She was a metaphor for the community she represented. Not just the abuse, the injustice we had suffered, but also the hope for a better day, the courage to fight for it, the faith that it eventually would come. She taught us that and she inspired us to put the lesson to work.

She also inspired us in the way she continued to live her life without bitterness. Her last public appearance came at the special request of Renny
Cushing, executive director of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation. On December 8, 2002, she participated in Victims’ Voices, a Loyola University forum in Chicago, sponsored by Cushing’s Cambridge-based group, which is opposed to the death penalty. Mother Mobley explained that she had never wanted to be consumed by hatred—the same destructive force that had driven Emmett’s killers—as she used the platform of the event to call upon Illinois Governor George Ryan to abolish the death penalty.

“For her, speaking against the death penalty was life affirming,” Cushing told me. “It was a way of keeping Emmett alive.”

On January 11, 2003, the day Mother Mobley was buried, Governor Ryan commuted 164 Illinois death sentences to life in prison without parole. Among so many other things, among so many other names, Mamie Till-Mobley was on the governor’s mind at the time, and in the speech he delivered when he cleared Death Row: “Mamie’s strength and grace not only ignited the civil rights movement—including inspiring Rosa Parks to refuse to go to the back of the bus—but inspired murder victims’ families until her dying day.”

There seemed to be so much left for Mother Mobley to do, events to attend, business to attend to.
The State of Mississippi v. Emmett Till
was scheduled for a January reprise in Aurora, Illinois, where Mayor David Stover had been so moved by the first production and by meeting Mother Mobley that he had insisted on a return engagement. There would be a full run in the fall by the Pegasus Players in Chicago. Artistic Director Arlene Crewdson had chosen the play to lead off the twenty-fifth anniversary season of the best works the organization had ever mounted. There was the annual prayer breakfast in Chicago in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., where Mayor Daley would honor Mother Mobley, telling the capacity crowd that she deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in leading us to a better place. There was the Chicago screening of Stanley Nelson’s Emmett Till documentary, to which I was to escort her. There was discussion about other joint appearances with Emmett Till documentarian Keith Beauchamp, including a screening and panel discussion at the United Nations. And, of course, there was the book.

So much left to do. Mother Mobley wanted to live. But she was ready to die, emboldened by her unwavering faith. She wanted to be able to do much more than she already had done, but she had done so much already. In the end, God decided that she had done enough. As Dr. King might have said in one of her favorite speeches, she had swept her job so well.

Part of that job was in making sure there would be others to carry on the work she had started. And she was a tough taskmaster, too, in making
sure. She was as demanding of those around her as she was of herself. I had been warned that she evaluated people by an exacting standard, one that had been set by the last good person who had done the last good thing for her. Or, as David Barr so aptly put it after introducing us, “Mother Mobley grades on the curve.” I can only hope that I made the grade.

I know I kept up. And keeping up with her was no easy thing, especially when she wasn’t slowed by the walker or the cane. In every conversation we had, even between the formal interviews, there was at least one story, often more. But what I heard was so much more than stories. There was an urgency. It was the kind of thing you might expect to hear from a person who knows that ten months can be a lifetime. She wanted to make sure she said it all, shared it all, got it all down. She even made her own notes. Copious notes of every conversation, indexed and dated in her notebook. Everything had to be recorded, documented. She was her own archivist. She didn’t want to miss a thing. And although we never really spoke about that feeling of urgency, there was always the sense that we were racing the clock. I only wish we could have turned the clock back. I wanted to hear more stories, I wanted to have more time together, I wanted more banana pudding.

Then again, Mother Mobley never really stopped talking to me. In the months after she passed, I would sit in my study and hear her voice. The echoes were everywhere, in the words of the transcripts and the many scattered notes, rising and falling on that gentle cadence of hers, that distinctive clip in her pronunciation, each word spoken so carefully, so thoughtfully, so perfectly. I could look up from my computer monitor and see the newspaper clippings and pictures taped to the walls, and the words “Think Mamie” I had posted there. But there was something else. From my apartment, I can see the train tracks that run south all the way off to the horizon. Many mornings at 8:35, or maybe it was 8:37, or 8:52 (we’re talking Amtrak time here), as I was writing, I would hear the sound of a distant horn. It was the horn of a train, one that had crossed that horizon from the South, traveling all the way from Cairo, Illinois, and Memphis before that, and Mississippi before that; the train that would come barreling through my Hyde Park neighborhood on its way to the end of the line at Union Station in downtown Chicago. It was the
City of New Orleans
, the train that had brought Emmett’s body home. So many mornings I thought about that, about a mother and son, about tracks that disappear over the horizon, about a life’s journey, about homegoing, and about so many stories trumpeted by the horn of a train.

Early on Mother Mobley had described herself as an ordinary person who had faced an extraordinary situation. I wonder about that. Having
come to know her, I believe she was truly an extraordinary woman who had only been waiting for circumstances to arouse her power. Learning that has helped me realize that the same is true of all of us, really. We all are capable of extraordinary things when we open ourselves up to the possibility of the extraordinary. An evangelist as well as a teacher, Mother Mobley spent the better part of her life inspiring that discovery in the people she reached, especially the children. She saw the possibility for greatness everywhere she turned. And she left her mark, arousing an awareness, sharpening the vision in others. That was her gift. Her legacy.