The Blood of Emmett Till(10)

Louis’s efforts to reconcile with Mamie also became abusive, and she obtained a restraining order against him, which he violated persistently. In later years she claimed that a judge finally gave him a choice between jail and military service. He joined the army and regularly sent his estranged family child support payments of $22 a month. In July 1945 the checks stopped coming and a telegram from the Department of Defense informed her that Louis had been executed in Italy for “willful misconduct.” The army later sent her attorney a record of the court-martial, which would have explained that he had been convicted of raping two women and killing a third while stationed in Italy. The army shipped his few belongings to Argo, including a silver ring engraved with the initials “L.T.” She put the ring away, thinking that Emmett might want it someday.16

When Emmett was naughty, he hid under the bed, peeking out to see if anyone was chasing him. Mamie was completely disarmed by his playful defiance and could hardly think to scold him.17 Her mother supplied most of the order and discipline in the household. As far as Alma Carthan was concerned, she now had two babies. “I was the big kid, Emmett was the little kid,” Mamie explained. “We were so much like brother and sister, like friends back then, and it added a unique dimension to the mother-son bond we would forge over the years ahead.”18

That bond grew even stronger after a crisis that struck them in the summer of 1946. Emmett had just turned six. His mother noticed that although he had plenty of energy during the day, he seemed to deflate with fatigue every evening. This was unlike him, who was ordinarily a dynamo until bedtime. Then his temperature began to rise sharply every night. Alma and Mamie rubbed him with “goose grease” and made him drink “hoof tea” every evening. “These remedies were supposed to cure a lot of things,” Mamie wrote. “I never knew why or how. I didn’t even know what kind of hoof came in that little box of tea. I didn’t know what [goose grease] was supposed to do, either. I just knew that all our folks from Mississippi used it.”19

But Emmett only grew worse with the home remedies, so they called a doctor, who gave the boy a diagnosis that broke Mamie’s heart: “Polio was the worst thing that could happen to you back then. It didn’t kill you, but it could take your life away from you just the same.” Polio threatened permanent limb damage and lifelong disability. The doctor ordered Emmett quarantined at home; he couldn’t leave the house, nor could anyone come over to see him, a decree the six-year-old fought. “Mama had to sit with Emmett all the time, practically holding him in the bed,” remembered Mamie.20

After thirty days “he had beaten it. . . . He was finally up and running again and practically tore a hole in the screen to get out.”21 The polio left him with a noticeable stutter and weak ankles that forced him to wear special shoes, but neither of those infirmities kept him from moving relentlessly through the world. Endearing and lively, he had plenty of toys and plenty of friends, so that his grandmother’s yard became a kind of neighborhood playground. He and his friends played baseball and basketball in the nearby schoolyard and park, and on special occasions they liked to go to the Brookfield Zoo about three miles away.

Just as Emmett recovered from polio and escaped to the baseball diamond, Mamie’s cousins Hallie and Wheeler Parker Sr. moved from Mississippi to the house next door. It was the house where her uncle Crosby Smith had lived until he decided to move back to Mississippi. Emmett became best friends with Wheeler Jr., who was two years older.22

Aside from that month of pain and the loneliness of his quarantine, those three years in Argo, from 1947 to 1950, were paradise for Emmett, surrounded by playmates and next door to his best friend. So when Mamie and Emmett moved to Detroit in 1950 to live with her father while she worked at the Fort Wayne Induction Center, Emmett was terribly homesick. The following year she met Pink Bradley, an auto worker at Chrysler, and married him after a brief romance. Seeing Emmett’s homesickness grow worse Mamie decided that her boy should move back to Argo and live with Uncle Kid and Aunt Marie.23 When Pink lost his job at Chrysler, he and Mamie relocated to Chicago; there they moved into an apartment on South St. Lawrence, right next to the apartment her mother had moved into earlier. Emmett happily joined them.24

But Pink began spending his weekends in Detroit, a five-hour drive away. Slowly he drifted back to Detroit altogether and away from his marriage. When Mamie learned that he had a woman in Detroit, she and her mother changed the locks and threw his clothes into the yard.25

Now Alma, Mamie, and Emmett were back together again, with Emmett, a natural prankster and mimic, keeping all of them entertained. “From the very beginning with Emmett there was laughter,” wrote Mamie. “I heard about more chickens crossing more roads, and knock-knock this and knock-knock that. All those tired, old jokes that were still new to him. Sometimes he would tell riddles that he seemed to have been making up, because they didn’t make sense. Or maybe you just had to be [a child] to understand them.”26 They got a television, and Emmett learned to mimic the early comedians. “He knew the routines of all the top ones on television,” Simeon Wright remembered, “Red Skelton, Jack Benny, Abbott and Costello, and George Gobel. Gobel, with his deadpan delivery, was a particular favorite of Bobo’s.”27

Emmett’s audience included the band of boys he ran with on weekends in Argo, which he could reach in less than an hour on the 63rd Street bus. His cousins Wheeler, William, and Milton Parker were regular playmates, as were his cousins Crosby “Sunny” Smith, Sam Lynch, and Tyrone Modiest, and friends like Donny Lee Taylor and later Lindsey Hill. “When those boys got together it was non-stop laughter,” his mother recalled.28