The Blood of Emmett Till(19)
“He did whistle,” Carolyn told me, “but it was after he’d been in [the store] and I went out to get the pistol.”
Simeon wrote later, “We all looked at each other, realizing that Bobo had violated a longstanding unwritten law, a social taboo about conduct between blacks and whites in the South.” The local youths were dumbfounded. “Suddenly, we felt we were in danger and we stared at each other, all with the same expression of fear and panic. Like a group of boys who had thrown a rock through somebody’s window, we ran to the car.”16
The old Ford raced down the blacktop, but any relief the young people felt evaporated when one of them looked in the rearview mirror and saw headlights coming up fast behind them. Convinced that they were being followed, they decided to pull over and flee. Scattering in all directions through the dark cotton fields, they stopped only when the car flew past without even slowing down. Laughing a little, they decided their fear had been paranoia and piled back into the Ford to head home. They edged closer to the judgment Carolyn Bryant would reach decades later: that nothing their cousin had done at the store amounted to much.
Even so, as they drew near the Wrights’ place, Emmett begged his cousins not to tell his uncle and aunt about the incident. They all agreed, fearing that if the grown-ups heard about it Emmett might end up on the train to Chicago earlier than anyone had planned.
Someone did tell Elizabeth Wright, however, and her husband soon heard it, too, though who told them is not clear. Word was spreading. The next evening, Simeon wrote, “a girl who lived nearby told us she had heard about what happened in Money and that trouble was brewing. ‘I know the Bryants, and they are not going to forget what happened,’ she warned us.”17
7
ON THE THIRD DAY
Just after Emmett was kidnapped, Elizabeth Wright ran to the home of white neighbors to ask for help. It was not yet three in the morning. The darkness was complete, but urgency guided her steps across the fields to the distant house where the farmer and his wife slept. Perhaps she was too timid to explain herself well. Perhaps a black woman wailing at the door about a fourteen-year-old boy abducted by white men with guns frightened the couple. However Elizabeth asked for help, the wife wanted to give it but the husband would not consent, and Elizabeth returned home in tears, vowing to leave Mississippi forever. She insisted that Moses take her to her brother’s house in Sumner, so, leaving the five boys in their beds, they drove about half an hour to the home of Crosby Smith.
Elizabeth barely paused in her flight north. After she said what she had to say to her brother, Moses drove her from Sumner to Clarksdale that very morning, where she caught the train to Chicago at sunrise. She would never return to her house in Mississippi.1 Moses received a letter from her, from Chicago, dated August 30, two days after the kidnapping. “Come up here,” she wrote, “and tell Simeon to get my corset and one or two slips and a dress or two and bring them to me. If Eula sent my dress, bring it, also my stockings. I mean you come.”2
On the way back from the train station Moses picked up his brother-in-law Crosby Smith before driving back to Money. He intended to speak directly to the men who had threatened his life and kidnapped his nephew and ask them to return the boy—if he was still living. At about four or five in the morning, on a deserted street, the two men knocked at the back door of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Not knowing if they would be met with success or a shotgun blast, they did so with less noise than Roy and J.W. had made on the Wrights’ porch hours earlier.
“I heard a knock on the door,” Carolyn remembered. It was not loud. She was alone with the children, and, fearful about who would call on her at such an hour, she kept silent. “I heard another voice, a different voice. The voice sounded like a black man, saying to another person, ‘It looks like there’s nobody here.’ I heard a car slam, then the sound of a car driving away.” The men drove to the Wrights’ house in East Money to wait for daylight.3
At about nine on the morning of the kidnapping, Curtis Jones, one of the three cousins from Chicago who were staying with the Wrights, went to a neighbor’s house and called his mother, Willie Mae, to tell her the terrible news. She called Emmett’s mother: “I don’t know how to tell you. Bo.” Mamie’s mind began to race in horror. “Some men came and got him last night.” Mamie drove to her mother’s apartment at breakneck speed to share both news and anguish. Her mother alerted their church so that the congregation could pray for Emmett. Then Mamie did a curious thing, foreshadowing the boldness with which she would handle this tragedy. She started telephoning Chicago newspapers, which soon sent reporters to Alma’s apartment.4
It is important to recall what was and wasn’t possible in 1955. Mamie surely knew there was no existing local authority in Mississippi she could rely on, nor was there any federal authority she could reasonably hope to enlist. One exception was the press, particularly the black newspapers of Chicago. At some point, too, she called Rayfield Mooty, a distant relative and a savvy labor union official who knew all the African American political players in Chicago; he would become a key advisor. When he got to her mother’s apartment, Mamie told him, “Mr. Mooty, we just want you to take the case over. Daddy got a lot of confidence in you and he says you can do it.”5 While the fullness of her plan probably hadn’t taken shape in her mind, Mamie was already determined that they would not proceed quietly.