The Blood of Emmett Till(21)

“No, it can’t be,” she said. “Roy told me he didn’t do anything to him, that they turned him loose.”

“And [Raymond] said, ‘Well, Roy didn’t do it. Melvin Campbell did it.’ And that’s when I told him, ‘Well, why is Roy and J.W. in jail and Melvin’s out? Why would they arrest Roy, then?’ And he said I was not to tell anybody it was Melvin. And I guess Raymond told [the rest of the family] what I had said because they got us that night and took us to a sister-in-law’s house in Lambert, Mississippi. And we were really isolated then.”

The farmhouse in Lambert was about a forty-five-minute drive from the Bryant store in Money. Carolyn and her sons stayed there only a couple of days, and then the Milam-Bryant clan sent yet another relative to move them to another safe location. “I don’t remember who got us but it was always one of [the Milams]. Me and my two boys, we’d stay here a couple of nights, and then they’d take me to another relative and we’d stay a couple of nights.” The Milams refused to let her telephone even her mother or siblings, who became alarmed when they did not hear from her. “My brother came looking for me, and one of the Milam brothers told him that I didn’t want them to know where I was, that I didn’t want to talk to them,” Carolyn told me, still sounding offended. “They were keeping me from everybody. They were afraid that I might say something they didn’t want me to say or I might reveal something they didn’t want revealed.”13

Sheriff Smith told reporters for the Greenwood Morning Star on August 30 that he wanted to bring her in for questioning. She ought to know something useful; after all, it was Emmett Till’s “alleged insulting remarks” to her that provoked the kidnapping in the first place.14 The following day, the same day Emmett’s body was found, the New York Post reported that Leflore County authorities issued a warrant for the arrest of Carolyn Bryant on kidnapping charges.15 The Chicago Daily Tribune reported that the Sheriff’s Department had been unable to locate her to serve the warrant.16 Two days later, strange as it seems, the Birmingham (Alabama) News announced, “Authorities apparently have abandoned the search for Mrs. Roy Bryant.” Leflore County district attorney Stanny Sanders had told the Birmingham reporters that there were “no plans at present for picking up Mrs. Bryant.”17 Fifty years later the FBI informed Carolyn that a warrant had been issued for her arrest; that, she wrote in her memoir, was the first she’d heard of it.18

A spokesman for the Leflore County Sheriff’s Department told the Memphis Commercial-Appeal on September 2, “We know where she is and feel sure we can pick her up if needed.”19 But by the next day Sheriff Smith appeared set on leaving Carolyn out of it entirely. He claimed a chivalrous impulse that apparently overrode the belief that she had participated in the kidnapping. “Officers have not questioned Bryant’s pretty brunette wife, in her early 20s, who was believed to have stayed in the car with an unidentified man when Bryant and Milam whisked Till from the home of his uncle in Money, Miss. community,” stated the Greenwood Morning Star. “We aren’t going to bother the woman,” Smith told reporters on September 3. “She has got two small boys to take care of.”20

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Despite the unsettling sight of human toes protruding from the water, Robert Hodges finished checking his fishing lines, then hurried home to find his father, who reported what Robert had seen to B. L. Mims, their landlord. Mims called his brother, Charles Fred Mims, then Deputy Sheriff Garland Melton of the Tallahatchie County Sheriff’s Office. The deputy called Sheriff H. C. Strider, who telephoned his teenage son. “My dad called and asked me did I have a boat in the river,” Clarence Strider Jr. recounted, “and I told him I did. Then he said we’ll be down there in a little while and he sent the deputies to go with me.”21

Deputy Melton and Deputy Ed Weber picked up young Strider and made their way to the landing at Pecan Point, twelve miles north of Money, where they met Robert Hodges and his father. They took both boys’ boats into the muddy river and quickly saw what Robert had seen. “Well,” B. L. Mims said, “we saw a person—from his knee on down and including his feet—we saw that sticking above the water. And we could tell by looking at it that it was a colored person.” With the engine humming low, they navigated over to the body. Something was holding it head downward in the water. The men tied a rope around the legs and used the motor to pull the body upriver a few feet, until the weight holding the head down came unsnagged from whatever pinned it to the bottom of the river. Towing it over to the landing, they dragged the corpse up onto the bank. There they could see that an iron fan, the kind used to ventilate cotton gins, was lashed to the corpse’s neck with several feet of barbed wire. Packed with mud from the bottom of the river, the fan weighed about 150 pounds. Whoever had disposed of the body had intended that it never rise from the river bottom.22

As the men examined the body, Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran of Leflore County arrived, as did Sheriff Strider of Tallahatchie County. Strider noted what looked like a bullet wound above the right ear and that the other side of the boy’s face was “cut up, pretty badly like an axe was used.” That left side “had been beat up or cut up—plumb into the skull.” The sheriff estimated that the bloated body had “been in the water about two days.”23 He dispatched Cothran and another deputy to Money to fetch Moses Wright to identify the body. Cothran also contacted Chester Miller, a black undertaker at Century Burial Association in Greenwood, who, along with one of his assistants, met them down at the river.