The Blood of Emmett Till(58)

“And did he then use language that you don’t use?” Yes, he had done that. “Can you tell the Court just what that word begins with, what letter it begins with?” She shook her head. No, she could not even say the first letter.

“In other words, it is an unprintable word?” It was. “Did he say anything after that one unprintable word?”

“Well, he said, well, ‘——with white women before.’?”

“When you were able to free yourself from him, what did you do then?”

“Then this other nigger came in the store and got him by the arm. And then he told him to come on and let’s go.”

“Did he leave the store willingly or unwillingly?”

“Unwillingly,” she replied. “He had him by the arm and led him out.”

“When he went out the door, did he say anything further after he had made these obscene remarks?”

“Yes. He turned around and said, ‘Goodbye.’?”

There were perhaps eight or nine black boys out front, she said, including her assailant, but she yelled back for Juanita Milam to watch the store and then walked out through this crowd of boys to Juanita’s car. She grabbed the pistol from under the front seat. The black boy who had seized her around the waist and uttered unspeakable obscenities was standing by one of the posts on the front porch. And he whistled at her.

“Was it something like this?” Carlton whistled. She nodded yes. “Did you have any white men anywhere around there to protect you that night?”

“No.”

“Was your husband out of town?”

“He was in Brownsville. He had carried a load of shrimp there.”

“When did you expect him home?”

“I didn’t know.” That was why Juanita was with her, she explained. “So that I wouldn’t be alone.”9

After Carolyn returned to her seat and the twelve men returned from the jury room, Dr. L. B. Otken testified for the defense. Having justified the murder of Emmett Till to uphold the purity of white Southern women, the defense shifted back to argue that their clients did no such thing. The boy had it coming, in other words, but our clients did not kill him. In fact, although it was his fault if he was dead, he might not even be dead.

A practicing physician in Greenwood, Otken had apparently viewed but did not examine Till’s body in “the colored funeral home.” Even so the defense regarded him as an “expert witness” because he was a physician who had experience with dead bodies. “This body was badly swollen, badly bloated,” Otken said. “The skin and the flesh was beginning to slip. The head was badly mutilated. The right eye was protruding. And the tongue was protruding from the mouth.” So far his testimony was no more than any reader of the Chicago Defender or Jet could have told the court. “I would say it was in an advanced state of decomposition,” he added. And then the point: “I don’t think you could have identified that body.”

“Could a mother have identified that body, in your opinion?” asked Breland.

“I doubt it.”

On cross-examination Special Prosecutor Smith asked Otken whether he “could tell if this was the body of a colored person or a white person.”

Otken answered that he could not tell, which somewhat begged the question of why the body went straight to “the colored funeral home,” death in Mississippi being anything but integrated.

On redirect examination Breland asked Otken if he could tell whether the injuries to the body that he described were present before death or could have been inflicted on the body after death. “I couldn’t,” answered Otken. In short, it was his studied opinion that the body had been in the water longer than Emmett Till could have been; that it was impossible to identify the body, even as to race; and that the mutilation could have been caused by the body bouncing along the bottom of the river, not evidence of murder.10

Sheriff Strider got the last word. He had gone to the river at about 9:15 on August 31, he told the judge, to see the body that people claimed had belonged to Emmett Till. “Well,” he said, “it was in pretty bad shape.” The skin had “slipped on the entire body.” There was a small hole in the head and two or three serious gashes. He estimated that the body had been in the river “at least ten days, if not fifteen,” which is to say longer than the body of Till could have been in the water. He could not even swear that the corpse was that of a colored person, a point he reiterated: “At the time it was brought out of the water he was just as white as I am except for a few places.” To underscore the point he helpfully added, “If one of my own sons had been missing, I could not swear if it was my own son or not, or anyone else’s.” He had signed the death certificate, true, but he did not recall whether or not it had Till’s name on it. Strider claimed that he’d “had several reports about a negro who disappeared over there at Lambert,” but he’d gotten conflicting stories. He’d been unable to investigate further. “I have been tied up here in court.”11

The following morning the defense called a handful of friends to attest to the fine character and neighborly attributes of J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. Then the defense rested its case and motioned to exclude all the evidence the state had presented against the defendants and direct the jury to send in a verdict of not guilty. Judge Swango overruled the motions, maintaining that the evidence presented some questions for the jury to answer for themselves. He ordered a fifteen-minute recess, until 10:38, when attorneys for each side would present summations.12