The Blood of Emmett Till(20)
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Watching the morning rise around his fields and porch, Moses Wright still hoped that Emmett would come back alive, that the white men would think better of killing him and bring him home. After a couple of hours, though, he and Crosby Smith drove to the office of Sheriff George Smith of Leflore County. Sheriff Smith knew Roy and J.W. well and immediately assumed that they had killed the boy and thrown his body in the river.6 The three men left to search for clues: Crosby Smith rode with one of the deputies, while Moses joined Sheriff Smith. “We looked under many a bridge that day,” Crosby Smith recalled. “Because that’s the first thing Moses thought. It was custom, what was being done around here in those days. We went by custom when something like that happened, and that’s usually what they done to ’em.”7
They found nothing. Just before two o’clock they called off the search, and the sheriff left to question Roy. When Moses got home, well-meaning visitors were waiting at the house. “By Sunday noon, every Negro for miles around knew all about it,” he said. “The people kept coming and we prayed and prayed.” Rumors began to spread that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant were the ones who had killed Reverend Wright’s nephew from Chicago.8
While the Wright household prayed that Emmett was still alive, Roy Bryant slept. As Carolyn describes the scene in her memoir, when Roy came home in the early morning light, she asked him where he had been and what he and J.W. had done with the boy. This scenario supports later testimony that the brothers brought Emmett to the store for her to identify. However, it does not close the speculation about whether it was indeed Carolyn in the darkened vehicle hidden on the Wrights’ property at two in the morning who identified Emmett as the boy who had assaulted her.
Roy assured her that he’d been playing poker all night at J.W.’s store in Glendora with his brothers and Melvin Campbell and a few others. According to Carolyn, he insisted, “We just whipped the boy and then dropped him off on the side of the road. That was it. We didn’t do anything else to him.” She maintained even years later that she had believed him at the time.9
Roy was still asleep when Sheriff Smith parked his squad car in front of Bryant’s Grocery at two in the afternoon. He woke only when he heard the pounding on the back door; then he quickly dressed and stepped outside, where the sheriff and his deputy, John Ed Cothran, were waiting. Smith and Roy got into the police car to talk. “I asked him about going down there [to the Wrights’ house] and getting that little nigger,” Smith testified. Roy acknowledged that he had done that. “I asked him why did he go down there and get that little nigger boy.” Roy said he had heard that the boy made some “ugly remarks” to his wife. He “said that he went down and got [Emmett Till] to let his wife see him to identify him, and then he said she said it wasn’t the right one, and then he said that he turned him loose.” Smith asked where they’d released Till. “He said right in front of the store. He said he went to some of his people—I don’t remember who he said just now—and he said he played cards there the rest of the night.” The sheriff arrested Roy for kidnapping and booked him into the Leflore County Jail.10
The rest of the country did not even know Emmett was missing—not yet. Mamie was only just alerting newsmen in Chicago. Moses spirited his grandson Wheeler to Greenwood to catch the train home to Chicago, which left him with three sons and one grandson. He still had twenty-five acres of cotton to pick and sell, money they would need under any circumstances, so the boys would help him.
Sheriff Smith continued to search for the corpse and seemed determined to build a case that would yield convictions. On Monday, August 29, the day after the sheriff arrested Roy, the Bryant-Milam clan gathered at Eula Lee’s store in Sharkey to discuss the situation. It was terrible that Roy had been arrested, of course, but now they wanted to make sure things didn’t get out of hand and sweep up the entire family. Roy was not the strongest stick in the bundle, and there was some concern that he might break under pressure and implicate everyone. It was decided that J.W. would allow himself to be arrested in order to keep Roy from “running his mouth” and changing the story they had agreed to tell. J.W. drove straight to the sheriff’s office, where he was immediately arrested for kidnapping. He acknowledged that he had abducted the boy but claimed to have released him that night, and he refused to implicate anyone else, even Roy. Other than that, J.W. didn’t say a word.11
On Wednesday, August 31, the third day after the kidnapping, Emmett’s body surfaced through the dark water. “I seen two knees and feet,” said the boy who discovered it. Robert Hodges, seventeen, was walking along the riverbank just after dawn. The ruddy-faced sharecropper’s son kept several “trot lines” stretched across the mud-brown Tallahatchie, and he was hoping to find them thrashing with one of the big catfish that lurked in the cool, dark depths. But this morning, as the dawn seared the mist off the river, the boy saw toes protruding from the water: “[The body] was hung up there on a snag in the bottom of the river.”12
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Decades later Carolyn Bryant still recalled the news about the body as a traumatic shock. After Roy’s arrest she and her two sons were taken in by the Milam and Bryant relatives. “I suppose they contacted Leslie or Melvin and they made arrangements,” she told me. The family kept her isolated from the unfolding aftermath of the lynching and would not even let her speak to anyone on the telephone. On the third day Carolyn was at Buddy Milam’s store when Raymond, her husband’s twin brother, walked through the door. “They found a body this morning,” he announced. “They think it’s [Emmett Till].”