The Blood of Emmett Till(15)

“We left the motel late that afternoon,” recalled Carolyn. On the road they passed her sister and brother-in-law going in the opposite direction. Both cars pulled over to the side of the road, and Carolyn told her sister the news. “My sister hugged us, wished us all the best, and hurried off to tell Mama.” The happy couple jumped back in the car and drove on to Itta Bena, where Roy’s family had gathered to celebrate the union; the decision to elope had been no secret among the Bryants and Milams. They enjoyed a huge supper and a festive evening, but Roy had to catch a bus back to Fort Bragg that night. “Here we were, married only a few hours, and he was going to leave me,” she wrote later. “I was devastated.”11

Carolyn found it bizarre that her mother-in-law, Eula Lee, drank whiskey for breakfast and carried a pistol in her purse at all times. Short, plump, and bossy, Eula Lee “could embarrass a sailor, cursing. . . . And could put away the booze. That’s the first thing she did in the morning was fix herself a hot toddy. Bourbon.” Her brother-in-law Melvin Campbell likewise poured down the whiskey. “All the time, from the very time he woke up in the morning until he passed out.” Melvin in particular “could flare up in a minute. He had a real hair-trigger temper.” Roy’s brothers drank heavily, too, and were also quick to fly into a rage. “Well, it was like that with all of ’em. Roy was like that. That’s the way every one of them was like.”

Along with drinking hard, carrying a gun, and having a bad temper, overt expressions of white supremacy were simply part of the Milam-Bryant family’s way of carrying themselves in the world. “They were racist, the whole family,” confided Carolyn, implicitly exempting herself. “For one thing, it was the ‘N-word’ all the time. ‘I’ve got this N working over here doing this, I’m gonna have to go get my money from that N over there because he’s not paying me.’?” History had stacked the social world of Jim Crow Mississippi like pancakes, with African Americans distinctly on the bottom. Pro-slavery ideologues of the late 1850s would have called black Mississippians the “mudsill,” a foundational class to perform the necessary labors of life so that the higher classes could pursue the loftier aims essential to civilization.12 One problem with this social structure was that middle-and lower-class whites tugged and scraped to find a satisfactory place for themselves. Their one undeniable accomplishment, which afforded a social status that could not be denied them, was to be born white. White sharecroppers, the lowest of whom even African Americans quietly dismissed as “poor white trash,” occupied the rungs just above blacks. Laborers and small-time merchants like the Milams and Bryants, who made their living from selling cigarettes and snuff, illegal whiskey, and various snacks and staples, were only marginally higher; their betters derided them as “peckerwoods.”

Though she liked to have a good time, Eula Lee was blunt. “If you [didn’t] want to know the truth, [you didn’t] ask her,” her daughter-in-law chuckled. “The only thing I ever heard her say, actually, about [the Till murder] was that it was a shame I’d left the pistol in the car, I could have saved them all that trouble.” Though tough as rough-hewn timber, Eula Lee pulled her children close to her and taught them to work hard and stick together. She organized an unflagging stream of family gatherings, often at her little grocery store in Swan Lake or the one after that in Sharkey, to eat big meals and drink a lot of whiskey. Somebody would bring fried chicken or pork chops. “It seemed like almost every weekend we were going to somebody’s house or somebody was coming to our house,” Carolyn recalled. “And we’d have just lots of regular old food, beans and peas and corn and potatoes, and all of it.” There were few if any secrets. “Everything you did or got, whatever,” Carolyn told me, “was everybody’s business. And they were all in on it.”13

The Milam-Bryant brothers were especially close, working together and regularly playing cards and drinking together. “You could never tell they were [only] half-brothers,” said their mother, “unless they told you.” Each of them carried a pistol. Seven of the eight of them had served in the military.14 And most of them eventually ran small grocery stores throughout Leflore, Tallahatchie, and Sunflower Counties, in Swan Lake, Glendora, Minter City, Itta Bena, Ruleville, and Money. According to local law enforcement records, the stores sold whiskey in violation of the state’s Prohibition laws.15

Eula Lee’s sons practiced a raw style of masculine camaraderie that revolved around guns, hunting, fishing, poker, and drinking. Boys would be boys and women would stay out of it. Carolyn said, “They did such crazy things all the time anyway, you didn’t really question what they were doing. ‘Well, you wanna go see if we can find a deer?’—you know, at two o’clock in the morning—or ‘Let’s go get so-and-so and play some cards.’?” They shocked young Carolyn with their loud arguments over practically anything. “They did have some of the worst arguments, cuss-fights, you ever heard, with their poker games. You would think they were gonna get up and fight, yeah.” Eula Lee tried to reassure her daughter-in-law. “I would say ‘Oh, my goodness’ when I first got in the family, you know, and I thought, ‘Ooh, what’s going on, they’re getting ready to fight in there.’ And Mrs. Bryant would say, ‘Oh, don’t pay any attention to them, they’re not gon’ fight.’?” Carolyn believed her, up to a point. “You just never knew what was coming—those kind of people. But they were hard.”