The Blood of Emmett Till(51)
Moses Wright did not go into hiding for the rest of the trial. He did not follow his wife and leave immediately for Chicago. Every day of the trial he could be seen around the courthouse, wearing blue pants and a crisp white shirt, his pink-banded hat tilted back on his head. Wright seemed transfigured by his bravery on the witness stand. “He walked through the Negro section of the lawn,” wrote Dan Wakefield for the Nation, “with his hands in his pockets and his chin held up with the air of a man who has done what there was to do and could never be touched by doubt that he should have done anything less.”11
When court resumed, defense attorney Breland said, “If the Court please, the Clerk has just handed Defense Counsel a list of additional witnesses which the Clerk states he has subpoenaed both for the state and defense. We now move the Court that the defendants’ counsel have the opportunity of examining these witnesses in the witness room before they are offered as witnesses by the state. The names of these witnesses,” he continued, “are as follows: Amandy Bradley, Walter Billingsley, [Add] Reed, Willie Reed, Frank Young, and C. A. Strickland.” These were the local African Americans discovered by the Mississippi underground, and the defense had no idea what they might tell the court. The judge acceded to the request and let the state call its next witness, Chester Miller, the African American undertaker from Greenwood who had taken Till’s body from the riverside to his funeral home.12
On August 31, Miller testified, Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran called him to pick up a body in Tallahatchie County. He took one of his helpers and found the body lying in a boat beside the river. Tallahatchie County law enforcement officers suggested that Miller remove a silver ring from the finger of the deceased for purposes of identification. “I laid it on the floorboard of the ambulance,” he said. Before he could load the body into the ambulance he had to detach the barbed wire that lashed a heavy gin fan around the neck. “It was well-wrapped,” he testified.
He had then asked Moses Wright to identify the body, which Wright did. In the courtroom, Special Prosecutor Robert Smith asked Miller, “In your opinion, was the body that was put in your ambulance, was it possible for someone who had known the person well in their lifetime to have identified that person?”
Before the defense could shout their objection, Miller replied, “Yes, sir,” but Judge Swango sustained the objection and asked the jury to disregard the answer.
Taking another tack, Smith asked Miller to describe the body. “Well, it looked to be about five foot four or five inches in height,” the undertaker said. “Weight between one hundred and fifty or sixty pounds. And it looked to be that of a colored person.”
“Could you tell whether it was the body of a young person, or middle age or an old person?” Smith inquired.
“It looked like it was the body of a young person.”
Miller told the prosecutor there was a hole in the head that “looked like a bullet hole.” The defense again objected successfully, though Miller managed to say on the record that it was a half-inch hole just above the right ear. Smith asked about the other side of the head. “Well,” said Miller, “it was crushed on the other side. You couldn’t tell too much, it was crushed so. And it was all cut up and gashed across the top there.”
“Would you state whether or not the wounds described here were sufficient to cause his death?” Smith asked.
Defense attorney Breland broke in: “We object to that, Your Honor. He is no expert to that. And the jury knows as much as he does about that. I think that is within the province of the jury.”
“I am going to let the witness answer the question,” Swango responded.
Smith asked the question again and Miller said, “Yes, sir.”
“I believe I asked you this, but I am not sure,” Smith continued. “You testified that there was some barbed wire in the boat. But did I ask you whether or not the barbed wire was on the person of the deceased?”
“Yes, sir,” replied Miller. “Around the neck.”
For anyone striving to believe otherwise, it was growing harder and harder to evade the conclusion that a murder had been committed. But on cross-examination Breland went after the ghastly description of the injuries to the body. “Now, what you saw about the condition of that man as to his head, you couldn’t tell whether it was caused before or after his death, could you?”
“No, sir,” said Miller.
“And you couldn’t tell whether it was caused in a car accident or some otherwise, could you?”
Miller responded, “No, sir.”
The court then recessed for lunch.13
The defense was offering the jury a thin veil behind which they could pretend to believe that the savage injuries might have occurred in an unknown manner to an unknown person and that the body had then been dumped in the river, recovered, and presented in a gruesome, politically inspired hoax as the body of Emmett Till. It remained to be seen whether the twelve jurors would take up that veil, or even needed to.
After the lunch break Sheriff Strider stared at the black reporters gathering their things for the afternoon session. Some of them had been part of the Mississippi underground that had convinced the additional witnesses to come forward. All of them would be reporting the trial’s proceedings to the world. “Hello, niggers,” he said.14
Robert Hodges, the seventeen-year-old fisherman who found the body snagged in the muddy water of the Tallahatchie, opened the afternoon testimony, followed by B. L. Mims, whose motorboat had pulled the body to shore. In each case the body began to appear more and more indisputably that of a murder victim.15