The Blood of Emmett Till(4)

Standing by the door just inside the screened porch, a third man turned his head to one side and down low, “like he didn’t want me to see him, and I didn’t see him to recognize him,” the preacher said.14 Wright assumed the third man was black because he stayed in the shadows, silent: “He acted like a colored man.”15 This was likely one of the black men who worked for Milam. Or, if Wright’s intuition was mistaken, it might have been a family friend of the Milam-Bryant family, Elmer Kimbell or Hubert Clark, or their brother-in-law Melvin Campbell.16

Echoing Bryant, Milam said, “We want to see the boy from Chicago.”17

Wright slowly and deliberately opened the other bedroom door, the one leading into the front guest room where the two sixteen-year-olds slept. The small room quickly became crowded and thick with the odors of whiskey and sweat; faces, guns, and furnishings were caught in the shaky and sparse illumination of Milam’s flashlight. “The house was as dark as a thousand midnights,” Wheeler Parker recalled. “You couldn’t see. It was like a nightmare. I mean—I mean someone come stand over you with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight, and you’re sixteen years old, it’s a terrifying experience.”18

Milam and Bryant told Wright to turn on some lights, but Wright only mumbled something about the lights being broken.19 The wash of the flashlight swept from Maurice to Wheeler and back to Wright. The white men moved on. “They asked where the boy from Chicago was,” recalled Maurice.20

“We marched around through two rooms,” Wright recounted. Milam and Bryant, clearly impatient, may have suspected Wright was stalling. Elizabeth had moved quickly to wake Emmett, but he moved far too slowly. “They were already in the front door before I could shake him awake,” she said.21

Now the two white men stood over the blue metal bedstead where the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago lay with his cousin. “Are you the one who did the smart talking up at Money?” Milam demanded.

“Yeah,” said Emmett.

“Well, that was my sister-in-law and I won’t stand for it. And don’t say ‘Yeah’ to me or I’ll blow your head off. Get your clothes on.” Milam told Simeon to close his eyes and go back to sleep, while Emmett pulled on a white T-shirt, charcoal gray pants, and black loafers.22

Elizabeth offered them money if they would leave the boy alone. Curtis thought Bryant might have accepted if he had been there without his burly half-brother, but Milam yelled, “Woman, you get back in the bed, and I want to hear them springs squeak.” With unimaginable poise Wright quietly explained that the boy had suffered from polio as a child and had never been quite right. He meant no harm, but he just didn’t have good sense. “Why not give the boy a good whipping and leave it at that? He’s only fourteen and he’s from up North.”23

Milam turned to Wright and asked, “How old are you, Preacher?”

Wright answered that he was sixty-four. “You make any trouble,” said Milam, “and you’ll never live to be sixty-five.”24

Milam and Bryant hauled the sleepy child out the front door toward a vehicle waiting beyond the trees in the moonless Mississippi night. Wright could hear the doors being opened, though no interior light came on; then he thought he heard a voice ask “Is this the boy?” and another voice answer “Yes.” He and others later speculated that Carolyn Bryant had been in the vehicle and had identified Emmett, thereby becoming an accessory to murder. But besides being dark it was hard to hear the low voices through the trees, and Wright told reporters at the time, “I don’t know if it was a lady’s voice or not.” The vehicle pulled away without its headlights on, and nobody in the house could tell whether it was a truck or a sedan.

After he heard the tires crackling through the gravel, Wright stepped out into the yard alone and stared toward Money for a long time.25





3


GROWING UP BLACK IN CHICAGO


It was Reverend Wright who started the three Chicago boys, Emmett, Curtis, and Wheeler, thinking about going to Mississippi that summer of 1955, only a few days after Emmett turned fourteen. A former parishioner, Robert Jones, who was the father-in-law of Wright’s daughter, Willie Mae, had passed away in Chicago, and the family asked Wright to conduct the funeral. While he was up north it was decided that he would bring Wheeler and Emmett back to Mississippi with him and that Curtis would join them soon afterward.1

The image of Wright in Chicago is one of the more pleasing in this hard story. While he was in town he rode the elevated train, toured the enormous Merchandise Mart and the downtown Loop, and gazed out from atop the 462-foot Tribune Tower, which featured stones from the Great Pyramid, the Alamo, and the Great Wall of China, among other famous constructions. He enjoyed the sights but was hardly dumbstruck. The city had its glories, he acknowledged, but he boasted of the simple pleasures of rural life in the Delta. Four rivers—the Yazoo, the Sunflower, the Yalobusha, and the Tallahatchie—passed near his Mississippi home, and there were seven deep lakes. This surely offered the best fishing in the world.2 His stories enchanted Emmett. “For a free-spirited boy who lived to be outdoors,” Emmett’s mother, Mamie, said, “there was so much possibility, so much adventure in the Mississippi his great-uncle described.” Although Mamie originally refused to let him go south, she soon relented under a barrage of pressure from Emmett, who recruited support from the extended family.3