The Blood of Emmett Till(56)
“And that was Emmett Till?” asked Smith.
“I don’t know if that was him, but the picture favored him,” replied Reed, who added that he had walked on past the barn.
“And what did you hear?” inquired Smith.
“It was like somebody whipping somebody.”
“We object to that,” Breland snapped.
“The objection is sustained,” Judge Swango responded.
Smith handed Reed a photograph of Emmett Till. “Now I ask you to look at that picture and I ask you . . . does that or does that not resemble the person you saw sitting there in the back of the truck on that particular day?”
Again Breland objected and again he was sustained.
Smith tried another tack: “Have you ever seen that boy before?”
“It is a picture of the boy I saw on the back of the truck.”
“Now, later on in the morning, did you see J. W. Milam out there?”
“Well, when I passed by he came out by the barn to the well.”
“Will you state whether he had anything unusual on or about his person?”
“He had on a pistol,” said Reed. “He had it on his belt.”
“And what did Mr. J. W. Milam do when you saw him?”
“He just came to the well and got a drink of water. Then he went back into the barn.”
“Did you see or hear anything as you passed the barn?”
“I heard somebody hollering, and I heard some licks like somebody was whipping somebody.”
“What was that person hollering?”
“He was just hollering, ‘Oh.’?”
“Was it just one lick you heard, or was it two, or were there several licks?”
“There was a whole lot of them.”3
Silence fell over the room, the Baltimore Afro-American reported. “There was no laughter in the courtroom then. Beer drinking dropped to a bare minimum. Bryant and Milam looked a trifle pale and the defense counsel—all five of them—looked worried.”4 The number of facts the jurors were expected to disregard had increased considerably.
Reed told of walking a little farther down the road and stopping at Mandy Bradley’s house and talking with her. “And after you left Mandy’s house the first time where did you go?” Smith asked Reed.
“I came to the well. . . . I came to get her a bucket of water. . . . I could still hear somebody hollering.” Taking Bradley her water, Reed walked on to the store and went home to get dressed for Sunday school. On his way back the truck was gone, the barn quiet.
The defense made two motions to strike all of Reed’s testimony, but each time Judge Swango refused. This was the most damning testimony so far, tying Milam directly to the killing of Emmett Till and showing clear evidence of murder. It also changed the place where the murder had been committed from Tallahatchie County to Sunflower County, which could have implications for jurisdiction. Buttressing Reed’s testimony were two subsequent witnesses, Mandy Bradley and Reed’s grandfather Add Reed. Both of them confirmed the eighteen-year-old’s account of that brutal morning. At 1:15 on only the second day of the trial, the state rested its case.5
James Hicks, who had done so much to help locate the witnesses and had discovered the story of the witnesses still hidden in Sheriff Strider’s jail, was baffled. The closing of the prosecution’s case seemed premature; at the least it left several witnesses still to be heard from. Hicks was not alone; the Mississippi underground and the black and white reporters who had helped round up the new witnesses also were surprised the others were not called. Frank Young, whose midnight visit to Dr. Howard’s place had set the underground to action, was believed to have important evidence in the case. But Young, reportedly seen outside the courthouse that morning, had disappeared. Later some would fault the prosecution for not managing the witnesses better, though it is hard to imagine that Young’s testimony would have been decisive, since Reed told essentially the same story and his grandfather and neighbor confirmed it.6 All five of the defense lawyers later acknowledged to an interviewer that the state had presented “sufficient evidence to convict” Milam and Bryant. The defense now needed to offer jurors committed to acquittal some plausible pretext for their votes.7
The first thing the defense did when the state rested its case was to move that the court exclude all evidence offered by the state and issue a directed verdict of not guilty for both defendants. Judge Swango dismissed the motion out of hand. The second thing the defense did was to call to the witness stand Mrs. Roy Bryant. It was time to play the old song of the Bruised Southern Lily and the Black Beast Rapist. Somewhere, perhaps while her husband’s family kept her hidden from the world, hidden even from her own family, Mrs. Roy Bryant seemed to have learned all of the verses.
Carolyn took the stand, swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and answered Carlton’s questions about her name, weight, height, marital status, and the like. “Now, Mrs. Bryant, I direct your attention to Wednesday night, on the 24th day of August. On that evening, who was in the store with you?”
Special Prosecutor Smith broke in: “If the Court please, we object to anything that happened on Wednesday evening unless it is connected up.” Breland interjected for the defense that they intended to connect the testimony to existing testimony. Judge Swango retired the jury so they could not hear the discussion or Carolyn’s testimony, if any.