The Blood of Emmett Till(53)

Mamie put on her glasses as Special Prosecutor Robert Smith began the examination. After establishing that Emmett’s father had been killed in World War II, “in the European theater,” Smith asked about the boy’s trip from Chicago, when Mamie had learned that he was missing in Mississippi, and where she had first seen her boy’s body when it returned from Chicago in a box. It was at the A. A. Rayner Funeral Home in Chicago, she replied.

The first time I saw it, it was still in the casket. I saw it later on after it was removed from the casket and placed on a slab. . . . I positively identified the body in the casket and later on when it was on the slab as being that of my son, Emmett Till. . . . I looked at the face very carefully. I looked at the ears, and the forehead, and the hairline, and also the hair, and I looked at the nose and the lips and chin. I just looked at it all very thoroughly. And I was able to find out that it was my boy. And I knew definitely that it was my boy beyond a shadow of a doubt.

“I now hand you a ring, Mamie,” Smith intoned, “that has engraved on it ‘May 25, 1943,’ with the initials ‘L.T.,’ and I ask you if that was among the effects that were sent to you which were purported to be the effects of your dead husband?”21 Smith called her by her first name, as was customary when a white person addressed an African American in 1950s Mississippi. By contrast, she always referred to Smith as “Sir.” Knowing the ways of the South as she did, Mamie Bradley accepted this disrespectful treatment with grace. But a performance perhaps necessary for a white jury in Mississippi played differently in the wider mid-twentieth-century world. The Washington Afro-American’s headline, for instance, was “Mother Insulted on Witness Stand.”22

“Yes, Sir,” she replied. “I kept the ring in a jewelry box but it was much too large for the boy to wear. But since his twelfth birthday, he has worn it occasionally with the aid of scotch tape or string.” He wore it when he left home for Mississippi, she said. “And I remember that I casually remarked to him, ‘Gee, you are getting to be quite a grown man.’?”

“And that was the ring he had when he came down to Mississippi?” asked Smith.

“Yes, Sir.”

Finally Smith asked her to look at a police photograph of her son’s body taken in the funeral home in Greenwood. “And I hand you that picture and ask you if this is a picture of your son, Emmett Till?”23

Taking the photograph in her fingers, Mamie bowed her head and wept, rocking slowly from side to side. Then, pulling off her glasses, she wiped her eyes and replied, “Yes, Sir.”24

When defense attorney Breland cross-examined the witness he, too, called her by her first name. “Mamie,” he asked, “where were you born?”

“I was born in Webb, Mississippi.”

“That is a little town just two miles south of here, is that right?”

“I can’t tell you the location.”

“When did you leave Mississippi?”

“At the age of two.”

“Then you have just been told that you were born in Webb, Mississippi? You don’t remember, is that right?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“When you can first remember, where were you living?”

“In Argo, Illinois.”

“How far from that is Chicago?”

“Approximately twelve miles.”25

With this new line of inquiry, the sons of Mississippi were no longer on trial. Now it was Chicago, Chicago that sent its swaggering black males south, Chicago that poured undue scorn hot and fast on the Magnolia State, Chicago that encouraged Mamie Bradley to declare that the entire state of Mississippi would have to answer for this murder, Chicago that was on trial. Had not Mississippi suffered enough at the hands of uppity northern blacks and obstreperous, meddling Yankees? The trouble did not start down here, was the defiant implication.

Was Emmett ever in trouble in Chicago? Breland wanted to know. Mamie stated that he never had been, but that didn’t matter; the question was intended to answer itself. For some percentage of the people in that courthouse Emmett’s being a black boy from Chicago answered the question, just as his winding up butchered and discarded in a river was explained clearly enough to some percentage of the country by the notion that a black boy had misstepped and thereby had some responsibility for what had been done to him.

Breland then pivoted, training his questions to discredit Mamie herself. “Did you have any life insurance on him?” She did. “How much did you have?”

“About four hundred dollars straight life. I had a tencent policy and a fifteen-cent policy, two weekly policies, and they equaled four hundred dollars.”

“To whom were those policies made payable? Who was the beneficiary in those policies?” Another fig leaf was being handed the jury.

“I was the beneficiary on one and my Mother on the other,” Mamie answered.

“Have you tried to collect on those policies?”

“I have been waiting to receive a death certificate.”

Suggesting that she was trying to capitalize on her tragedy was only part of Breland’s intent. He was also implying that since she had not tried to collect on the life insurance policy, since she had no death certificate, perhaps there had been no death. Here Sheriff Strider’s theory of the case, that it was a put-up job by the NAACP and the corpse was not even Till’s, eased into view.