The Blood of Emmett Till(14)
Of course racial separation went deeper than public social arrangements. The idyll of Barnes and the Cruger of her youth was over. “We could no longer have black friends when we lived in Indianola,” she wrote. “It was something that was never spoken directly to us but something we understood as the way things were.”9 At least in memory the change from the more intimate racial paternalism that represented one kind of life in the rural Delta seemed to Carolyn tied to her family’s loss of a father and their fall from a certain kind of grace.
But for a pretty white girl Indianola had its charms. At her new high school Carolyn soon had a boyfriend with a car. One day he drove her out in the country and offered to show her “the hanging tree.” He explained that “a long time ago” white men had hanged black men “when they were actin’ up and weren’t in their place.” Carolyn knew how trivial an offense could constitute a violation of racial mores. “I’m not sure how long ago ‘a long time ago’ was,” she said as she told the story. “But I told him, ‘Sure, I want to see the tree.’?” On a deserted side road he stopped the car in front of a huge old tree. Up in the thick lower limbs Carolyn detected an ancient length of rope snagged in the trunk, leaving only a foot or so of frayed rope hanging free, tied in a noose.
Carolyn’s childhood stories are a narrative of class decline. They establish the understanding that she and her family were a rung or two above the family into which she married because they were capable of a paternalistic generosity toward black people in a way her in-laws were not. There are grains of truth here, to be sure, but it is also a self-exculpating story: if she hadn’t gotten mixed up with the Milam-Bryant clan, the stories suggest, this ugly Till lynching and its aftermath would never have happened. That is almost certainly true. There was, she declared, a greater degree of gentility to her upbringing, and indeed her character, than the Milams and Bryants possessed. She described herself as an innocent wandering into a place she didn’t quite belong.
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The matriarch of a headstrong clan, born Eula Lee Morgan, gave birth to eight sons and three daughters by two different men. Five boys carried the Milam family name: Edward, the oldest; Spencer Lamar, whom they called Bud or Buddy; followed by John William (J.W.), Dan, and Leslie. Their father had been killed in a road construction accident when a gravel pit caved in on him and three other members of the crew.10 Eula Lee then married a cousin of her late husband, Henry Ezra Bryant, whom everybody called “Big Boy,” and had six more children: Mary Louise, who married Melvin Campbell; two twin boys, Raymond and Roy; then Aileen, James, and finally Doris, born with severe mental disabilities.
On ordinary mornings Eula Lee would fix breakfast while Big Boy opened their store, which was next door. Later in the morning Big Boy would come back and eat his breakfast while his wife took care of the store. Then they would both work in the store all day. One morning Eula Lee had eaten her eggs and sausage and waited for her husband, but he did not come home. When she walked over to the store to find him, she found instead an empty cash register, and one of their cars was missing.
“So she called the bank to see about the bank account,” Carolyn told me, “and it’s been closed down, and he’s gone off with another woman.” Big Boy and the woman fled to Arkansas, where they lived for seven years, a separation period after which Mississippi law at the time granted an automatic divorce. After he married the woman, they moved back to Mississippi and ran a store in the small community of Curtis Station, forty miles northeast of Eula Lee. Occasionally Roy, who was sixteen or seventeen when his father deserted the family, would drive up there with Carolyn to see him but he was careful to keep these trips a secret, especially from his mother. She swore that if she ever saw “Big Boy” again she would kill him, which was one reason that she carried a .38-caliber revolver everywhere she went. Mrs. Bryant would frequently say, “If I ever see him again,” and shake her head, reaffirming her homicidal vow. “The pistol was in her purse,” said Carolyn. “Always.”
Carolyn first met Roy Bryant at a party when she was fourteen and visiting her oldest sister and her family in Tutwiler. “He was about seventeen and so handsome,” she recalled. A few days later Roy dropped by her sister’s house and asked her to accompany him and some friends to another party. Carolyn’s sister said no, but Carolyn’s eyes said yes, which he noted.
She didn’t see Roy again until after her father died. “Roy’s family had moved to Indianola about the same time that we moved there,” she told me with a glimmer of excitement still flickering sixty-five years later. “I was walking home from school one day, and Roy Bryant rolled up beside me in his Forty-nine Chevrolet.” He smiled and offered her a ride. “I didn’t hesitate one second.” Thereafter Roy appeared quite regularly to give her a ride and sometimes take her for a hamburger and a Coke on the way. “I did slip away with him a few times, but I knew I had to get home to babysit.”
At eighteen Roy joined the 82nd Airborne and was stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Juggling school, her job, and her work about the house, Carolyn waited eagerly for his furloughs. “We seemed to grow closer and closer, and I looked forward to his visits when he received leave from the service. I just knew I was in love.” One beautiful day in the spring of 1951, Roy proposed. “We decided to elope the next day,” she said, because she was only sixteen and hadn’t finished high school. “Mama would never sign for me to get married.” The next day Carolyn pretended she was going to school but instead met her beau at the post office in Indianola. They picked up a license at city hall, drove to the parsonage at the Second Baptist Church in Greenwood, and were married in the living room, with Roy’s cousin and the preacher’s wife as witnesses. Then they drove straight to a motel to consummate the marriage.