The Blood of Emmett Till(13)
Barnes was “more light-skinned” than his father, “kind of chocolate milk color,” Carolyn told me. “I think he was probably kind of large for his age.” He was four or five years older than Carolyn, but despite their age difference, they often played together. Barnes’s play was inventive, “like putting a rope on an old tire and hanging it from the tree, and Barnes would push us on that tire. We’d sit with our legs through it and he’d swing us.” With the distance of time she described Barnes as her favorite companion, with the possible exception of Aunt Mabel, who frequently kept Carolyn at the family homeplace in Cruger, within about ten miles of the series of plantation houses where Carolyn’s family lived while she was growing up. Cruger was where she usually played with Barnes.
Aunt Mabel was more doting grandmother than aunt, with never a cross word for her favorite niece. Mabel contracted polio as a child and had limped after she recovered; as an adult she fell and shattered her hip and thereafter spent most of her time in a wheelchair. Carolyn’s time with her aunt was therefore often sedentary, a blessing on the hottest days of the summer. A screened porch ran the length of the house and looked out on the dirt road that led toward town, a generous term when applied to Cruger. “It was a little bitty town [that] just had a row of stores and that’s it,” Carolyn said. Her grandfather Lee Pikes owned some land near Cruger, and “a little shack down on the lake he sold fish out of, and he had a grist mill and ground meal, and he bootlegged liquor.” In the scorching, steamy summer heat, Carolyn and Aunt Mabel spent most of their time on the porch, shelling peas, snapping string beans, or just sitting. “I almost never wanted to be inside and was content to sit in the swing on the porch, trying not to move, so I might be cooler.”
But every now and then Carolyn chafed against the quieter tempo of her aunt’s house. One summer afternoon when she was ten or eleven and Barnes was fourteen or fifteen, just the age of Emmett Till when he ran afoul of Mississippi’s customs, she was sitting alone on the porch when Barnes rode his bicycle past the house and waved. “Hey, Barnes,” Carolyn yelled. “Where you going?”
“I’m going to the store to get something for my mama,” he replied.
“I asked, ‘Can I go with you?’?” Carolyn told me. “He said, ‘Yeah, sure. Jump on the back.’ He had this little rack on the back like old-timey bicycles. . . . I darted off the screened porch, slamming the door behind me as usual. And I jumped on the back of his bike.”
Almost instantly, before Barnes had a chance to push off and begin their ride, Aunt Mabel rolled out of the house onto the porch, pushed open the screened door, and screeched at the top of her lungs, “Get off that bike and get in this house, right now!”
“I was startled to hear her scream, as she had never raised her voice at me before. Immediately I did as I was told, but I was puzzled, as she seemed to be mad at me.” When Carolyn asked why she was upset, her aunt replied, “Because you don’t need to be riding with boys on your bike, because people will talk about you.”
“It didn’t dawn on me at the time,” Carolyn wrote many years later, “but the real reason she was upset and yelled at me was because Barnes was a black boy. . . . This was Mississippi. At that time it was okay [for small children] to play with black friends at your home [but] it was completely unacceptable for me to be with Barnes and go off to the store on the back of his bike.”7 She told me, “I don’t remember being around him much after that. So maybe he and I both got corrected, you know.”
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Carolyn was fifteen in 1949, in high school near Cruger, and had just won the school’s beauty contest when her father suffered a series of strokes. The first two weakened him greatly and kept him from working. The final stroke, at age sixty-three, killed him as he sat in their living room. She was bereft, as was her mother, who was only forty-six years old.
Carolyn’s mother began training as a nurse, and the plantation’s owners were kind enough to let the family remain in the house until she earned her nursing degree. Then the family moved to the nearby small town of Indianola, the seat of Sunflower County. There her mother worked long hours at the hospital while they lived in a small apartment across the road. Carolyn was barely over five feet tall, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and had lovely brunette hair and full lips. Her new classmates seemed to agree that she was movie-star material, for she soon won her second high school beauty contest. To help make ends meet she worked behind the sales counter at the Morgan & Lindsay Variety Store and babysat for a number of local families. When her mother worked late Carolyn took care of her younger siblings.8
Their distance from what Carolyn saw as the paradise of the plantation Delta seemed to be echoed in her memories of race. Indianola, where the Citizens’ Council would one day be founded, was firmly and vehemently segregated. “There were no black children in school with us—this was no different from the Delta, of course—and no black families in our neighborhood. In fact, the only contact I had with any black people was when I was waiting on them at the Morgan and Lindsay.”
In town Carolyn learned the rigid folkways of race. Black people were expected to say “Yes, ma’am” and “Yes, sir” when talking with white people, even whites younger than themselves. Blacks were “actin’ up” or “weren’t ‘in their place’?” if “they didn’t step aside when someone white passed them on the sidewalk. They better not look any white person in the eye, either. That’d get them punched.” Carolyn maintained that in that respect Indianola “was certainly different from the plantation I grew up on,” but it may simply have been that her awareness of racial arrangements grew as she got older.