The Blood of Emmett Till(71)

By some accounts Collins was alone with Emmett in the back and had a hard time controlling the boy, so they stopped at a juke joint in Glendora and picked up some of the other men who worked for J.W.: Hubbard, Loggins, and perhaps Johnson. At this distance in time the role of the black men is a little hard to fathom. They could have had few illusions about the fate of the boy they were restraining. Their behavior may reflect their terror of and utter subservience to J.W.; they would have known that their objections to the boy’s fate would carry no weight and that the white men could kill them with impunity at any point. There was room in the Mississippi or the Tallahatchie for their bodies, too. An African American’s testimony in a court of law was all but useless in 1950s Mississippi, and they were unlikely to report the crime to Sheriff Strider. It is also possible that these black men suffered from an internalized white supremacy so deep that they virtually never questioned the prerogatives of white men; their world was certainly constructed to make it so. Suffice it to say that at every juncture the white men were calling the shots.

White men in the front, black men in the back, they drove around for some time, looking for J.W.’s proposed spot on the Mississippi, but failed to locate it for an hour or more. The drunken white men then turned the truck toward the farm that Leslie Milam managed, “tryin’ to make our minds up,” Roy told an interviewer, about what to do with the boy. There was a large equipment shed at the place where they could continue to torture him and perhaps decide his fate. It may not have been a foregone conclusion, at least not among all of them, that they would kill him when they got there. The truck rumbled onto the farm soon after sunrise. Leslie Milam was not happy to see them, in part because he had work to do that day, but he agreed to let them use the shed and then joined them there.3

Once inside the large equipment shed the men grabbed Emmett off the truck and began to beat him again, this time with shattering force. Most of the blows were to the boy’s head, their principal weapons the large-caliber pistols they carried. J.W. wore on his belt a heavy Ithaca-brand, U.S. Army–issued .45 semi-automatic, a hunk of steel that weighed 2.7 pounds, heavier than most carpenter’s hammers, and Roy carried a similar pistol. It is likely that one or more of the men used tools found in the shed; observers described wounds to the left side of Emmett’s face that seemed to have been made with a heavy blade.

While no one outside the shed saw what happened inside, several witnesses heard it. Willie Reed was awakened by his grandfather Add Reed at dawn and sent walking to the store. Passing near the barn, Reed first saw the four white men in the cab of the truck and three black men and a boy in the back. Cutting across the field, he heard the brutal sounds of a beating and agonized cries for mercy. As he came closer to the barn, a big bald-headed man emerged and walked to the nearby well for a drink of water. Reed later identified the man as J. W. Milam. “He had on a pistol. He had it on his belt.” J.W. stepped quickly back into the shed. According to T. R. M. Howard, Reed told him that he heard the frightened boy crying from the barn, “Mama, please save me,” and “Please, God, don’t do it again.” Reed testified in court, “I heard somebody hollering and I heard some licks like somebody was whipping somebody.” As to the number of blows: “There was a whole lot of them.” The intense screams finally faded to whimpers, then stopped altogether. Add Reed and Mandy Bradley, a neighbor who lived close by, supported Willie Reed’s account of events.4

The merciless ferocity of the assault may be proven by the injuries to Emmett Till’s body. Initially Emmett tried to fend off the blows with his hands and arms, but soon he was unable to do so. Both of his wrists were broken in the effort to defend himself. Vicious blows crushed in the whole crown of his head; similar strokes smashed the back of his skull so that pieces of it would fall off as the law enforcement officers pulled him from the river. Surprisingly, given Mamie Bradley’s description of his smashed teeth, only one of his teeth was missing; nor was he castrated, as some other accounts allege. His assailants managed to fracture his thigh bone, the largest and strongest bone in the body, which suggests they stomped on him with enormous and repeated force or beat him with something much heavier than a pistol. Deputy Sheriff John Ed Cothran testified that “his left eye was about out, it was all gouged out in there.” Part of one ear was missing, which could have meant someone tortured him with a knife or shears. A farm equipment shed likely offered a number of choices for implements to inflict pain and cause death. The injuries to his head almost certainly would have killed him, but the immediate cause of death was a gunshot wound above his right ear.5

Amid all informed speculation, there is this fact: it takes from five hundred to one thousand pounds of force to crack a human skull. No one exerts that level of force on a fourteen-year-old’s head without willingness to kill. When Carolyn Bryant says Emmett Till didn’t deserve what happened to him, this—delivering hundreds of pounds of force at impact, over and over again—is part of “what happened to him,” in addition to the other unspeakable tortures that went on in that barn.6 Clipped ear. Broken bones. Gouged-out eye. The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal. They reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a rage utterly beyond control. Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.

Despite the viciousness of the assault, it is not clear exactly when the men consciously made up their minds to kill the boy. In Bryant and Milam family lore, true or not, the story goes that at some point Roy developed misgivings about the fatal beating. According to Carolyn, the men told her that Roy had wanted to stop and take Emmett’s broken body to the hospital. She said this would have meant dumping his body in front of a medical establishment and driving away. “Well, we done whopped the son of a bitch,” Roy told a friend in 1985 who was wearing a hidden recording device, “and I had backed out on killing the motherfucker.” In the end, Roy told his friend, they decided that “carryin’ him to the hospital wouldn’t have done him no good” and instead they would “put his ass in the Tallahatchie River.” The proposal to take Emmett to the hospital, Carolyn told me, violated the sensibilities of Melvin Campbell, who muttered a curse and fired a .45-caliber bullet into Emmett’s brain. This may have been only a final malignant gesture, given the boy’s injuries. But certainly the gunshot brought an emphatic end to the grisly proceedings.7