The Blood of Emmett Till(57)

To anyone still committed to reading the Till trial as an exploration of facts and justice, this is where things take an odd and revealing turn. The jury had been given powerful prosecutorial evidence that Bryant and Milam kidnapped and murdered Emmett Till. Rather than refute that evidence, the defense now wanted to tell the jury why Milam and Bryant had every reason to do so: because that black boy had tried to rape this white Southern woman. There was the oddity: the defense wanted to admit evidence that would further damn their clients, and the prosecution wanted to stop the defense from explaining why their clients were guilty.

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building—“Equal Justice Under Law”—can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955. If the real question was whether or not Milam and Bryant had committed murder, wouldn’t each team of attorneys have approached the trial differently? Of course. So why didn’t they? The obvious answer is that every lawyer in that courthouse knew that a jury of white male farmers from Tallahatchie County would hear a story about a black boy and a white woman and approve of that boy’s murder. The contradiction of a defense team strategizing to introduce a motive for the crime they professed their clients did not commit provided glaring evidence, if any were needed, that the trial had never been about justice.

Fifty years later Carolyn summoned her courage to tell me that her testimony had not been true, even though she didn’t remember what was true, but that nothing Emmett Till did could ever justify what had happened to him. But in 1955 she provided the court and the case with a billboard: My kinsmen killed Emmett Till because he had it coming.

Carolyn knew then, as she would admit much later, that her testimony was a lie. If Till had deserved what happened to him, then why did she hide the incident at the store from her husband and brother-in-law, if that is what she did? If Till had done something terrible, something he ought to have been brutally punished for, then why had she been reluctant to identify him? If he had laid his hands on her, then why didn’t she tell her lawyer so only a few days after it happened? Why did her husband and brother-in-law persistently refer to Till’s alleged crime as “smart talk” and “ugly remarks”? Is it plausible that Till put his hands on Carolyn and yet his assailants referred only to his verbal transgressions, never uttering a word about something approaching a rape attempt?

But that day in the Sumner courthouse, the jury didn’t even need to hear her testimony. After a brief discussion of legal points, the question before Judge Swango boiled down to this: the unchallenged testimony in court had heretofore been that Milam and Bryant came to get “the boy that did the talking over at Money,” and now the defense wanted to fill in the details of just what that “talking” had concerned. Except whatever may have occurred in the store at Money clearly did not alter the facts of a kidnapping and murder that occurred several days later at the instigation of the defendants. What should not have been a matter of courage—ruling appropriately on a matter of law—became one in that Jim Crow courtroom: Judge Swango ruled that the jury was not going to hear Carolyn Bryant’s testimony.

The world, however, would hear it. After Swango’s ruling, Breland said, “We wish to develop the testimony for the sake of the record.”8 Why? Here is yet another shard of truth: Breland and his colleagues knew it was next to certain that the jury would hear about Carolyn’s testimony within a few hours. Indeed they knew that the jury had taken their seats in the jury box with some understanding of what Carolyn was going to say, what the combination of a dead black boy and an affronted white Southern woman implied without anyone saying anything further, their respective roles firmly established over centuries. And as the jurors filed out of the courtroom, Carolyn Bryant was at the witness stand, having come to play a part that each of them knew by heart. So, “for the sake of the record,” Carolyn Bryant testified.

“This nigger man came in the store and he stopped there at the candy counter.” The counter was at the front of the store, on the left. “I asked him what he wanted,” and he ordered some candy. “I got it and put it on top of the candy case. I held out my hand for his money. He caught my hand.” She demonstrated his grip.

“By what you have shown us,” said Carlton, who was handling the direct examination, “he held your hand by grasping all of the fingers in the palm of his hand, is that it?”

“Yes. I just jerked it loose.”

“Just what did he say when he grabbed your hand?”

“He said, ‘How about a date, baby?’ I turned around and started back to the back of the store. He came on down that way and caught me at the cash register. Well, he put his left hand on my waist and he put his other hand on the other side.” At the request of her attorney, she stood up and placed his hands on her body in just the way she said the boy did.

“Did he say anything to you then at the time he grabbed you there by the cash register?”

“He said, ‘What’s the matter, baby? Can’t you take it?’?” It was with considerable difficulty that she was finally able to free herself from his hold on her. “He said, ‘You needn’t be afraid of me.’?”