The Blood of Emmett Till(11)

Sometimes Mamie would cart the boys to the beach on Lake Michigan; she had to take care, of course, since segregation of public beaches, though not a matter of law, was a fact of life in the 1950s.29 But that did not spoil their fun. One day the Argo crew decided to wear their swim trunks home and just carry their clothes. “Donny Lee made the mistake of falling asleep in the car with Bo,” Mamie wrote. “He woke up to find that he was wearing his underwear after all. On his head.”30

On warm nights the boys would end up “doo-wopping” under a lamppost. It was most likely Emmett, whom everybody described as a natural showman who “liked the spotlight,” who brought this new form of entertainment to his cousins.31 Throughout the 1950s a burgeoning South Side street-corner doo-wop scene blended gospel harmonies with pop lyrics to produce groups such as the Dells and the Flamingos and singers like Curtis Mayfield and Jerry Butler.32 According to Mamie, however, the Argo boys were in no danger of hitting the big time: “For this group of boys standing under a curbside spotlight, the music was off-key, it was out of sync, it was perfect. The grace note of their young lives.”33

Emmett seemed to blossom in the years he lived in Chicago and played in Argo. He enrolled in the fifth grade at James McCosh Elementary School, only two blocks from their place on South St. Lawrence. McCosh was an all-black school with 1,600 students in kindergarten through eighth grade and an interracial faculty. “Emmett was never a discipline problem,” the principal told reporters. “He tended to be quiet. As a student, he was average.” Teachers noted that he was close to his mother and that he attended church regularly.

The pastor of the Church of God in Christ in Argo—the church founded many years earlier in Alma Carthan’s house—observed that young Emmett rode the 63rd Street bus almost every Sunday morning to attend the church where he had grown up. Wheeler Parker Sr., Emmett’s uncle and superintendent of the Sunday school, reported that Emmett had a near-perfect attendance record every year.34 “He liked going to church,” said his mother, who attended far less often, “and he was under the influence of his grandmother, a deeply religious woman.”35

After his mother’s marriage to Pink Bradley ended in 1953, Emmett took on more adult household responsibilities. “Since I had to work and make the living,” Mamie said, “Bo did all of the housework and laundry. I did the cooking but he even learned to do some of this. He was a good housekeeper.”36 Eva Johnson, who lived next door, recalled “the time he was going to surprise his mother with a cake.” It was a yellow cake “made with eggs like pound cake, only using ready-mix.” Emmett asked Johnson to come tell him what was wrong with the cake. “Lord ’a’ mercy, he’d watched it ’til it began to rise, then he began stirring it! I told him it was ruined [and] he’d better just quit.”37

His increased responsibilities moved young Emmett quickly to the edge of manhood. “In between taking care of more and more things for me,” Mamie noted, “he made sure he took care of his own things.” He was meticulous about his clothes. He fancied a straw hat and a tie when he went to church, and even on the ball field he tried to look his best. But if this was to impress girls, he did not appear to be very good at it. At fourteen he had had only one date, and he never really had a girlfriend. He still stammered at times, a lingering effect of polio. He was only five feet four inches tall, but stocky, weighing about 160 pounds. His great-uncle Moses Wright acknowledged, “He looked like a man.”38

And so it was understandable that his mother gave her assent to the proposed trip to Money but also delivered lengthy lectures about the differences between Mississippi and Chicago. She urged Emmett to avoid conversations with white people, to speak only if spoken to, and to always say “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” or “No, ma’am” and “No, sir.” If a white woman should walk toward you on the sidewalk, take to the street and lower your eyes. Should any dispute arise with any white person whatsoever, humble yourself and agree with them. Emmett protested that he knew all that, that she had already taught him how to act.

In the glare of attention following the murder of her son, Mamie claimed, “This was the first time I had ever really spoken to Emmett about race.” Perhaps. “After all, how do you give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only known love?” Certainly it is true that Emmett grew up blanketed by love, and if he drifted into any of the racial battles around him in Chicago, no record of it exists. But it is unlikely this was the first time she cautioned her son to watch his step. In the segregated and often violent Chicago of the 1950s, Emmett did not need to take a train south to discover that being black made him a potential target, any more than he needed his mother to explain that fact.

Mamie and Emmett were to meet Uncle Moses and Wheeler at Englewood Station about eight o’clock that morning. It was practically around the corner, but even so, the whistle blew while Mamie was buying Emmett’s ticket, and they had to run to the train. “He liked to got left,” Wright said later. “If he’d taken five minutes later, he’d have missed it.” A quick kiss and he was gone, wearing his father’s silver ring engraved “L.T.” and waving to his mother from the top of the platform.39





5


PISTOL-WHIPPING AT CHRISTMAS


“The color of our skin didn’t make any difference when we were young,” Carolyn Bryant lied wistfully, looking back over eight decades. In this cheerful falsehood she had a lot of company. But unlike many other white Americans, Carolyn was also capable of honesty and even clarity on matters of race. “As I grew older,” she continued, “I learned that it was not okay to have black friends, [though] our parents taught us that everyone deserves respect.”1