We Are Not Like Them(35)

“No, leave it closed. Leave it be.”

I turn back, sit on the edge of the bed. “It’s awful. I know. It’s just awful.” God, can I manage anything more than these empty platitudes?

“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Kevin killed that boy.”

“I know, Gigi. I can’t believe it either.”

“He killed that baby.” Gigi’s facing the same struggle, saying it out loud, processing it, trying to figure out how to feel and what it means.

“Just like Jimmy,” she adds softly.

Does she think Justin’s name is Jimmy now?

“Who’s Jimmy, Gram?”

“They left him hanging from a tree, full of holes.”

I still don’t understand, but the imagery instantly conjures a cold dread.

She pulls her hand from under the sheet to grab ahold of mine, like she’s steadying herself.

“Jimmy was my aunt Mabel’s eldest boy. You remember Aunt Mabel, my mom’s older sister.”

I do, vaguely. I remember her as an impossibly ancient woman I met a few times as a child. She always had a butterscotch candy in her mouth and would point to her prune-like cheek and say to me, “Come give me some sugar,” which I resisted until Momma ushered me forward with a jab in the back that said, “Or else.”

“Jimmy was my cousin. Mabel’s oldest. Eleven years older than me. Lord, did I worship him. He loved his woodworking, and sometimes he let me help him in his little shop. In the afternoons we’d go fishin’. Out there by the stream for hours even though we never caught nothin’. I’d just be so happy he let me hang around.” Her lips curl into a gentle smile at the memory.

“Jimmy was only ’bout seventeen or eighteen, still a young fool who didn’t know better. Well, he did know better but was too much a fool to stop himself—he took up with a white girl in town, daughter of Roger Wilcox. I caught them kissing once, in his woodshed. He bribed me with a peppermint to keep my mouth shut, and I did, never told a soul. But then Roger caught them one afternoon, and they said he raped that girl and took Jimmy to jail.”

I know exactly how this story ends. Now it’s me squeezing Gigi’s frail fingers inside my own. I ease off before I hurt her.

“They tried to go visit him that night—my parents and Aunt Mabel and Uncle Donny—but they couldn’t. The sheriff wouldn’t let ’em. Our parents went about gathering money for a lawyer, a good colored lawyer someone knew up in Montgomery, but…”

A bout of dry coughs leaves her struggling to catch her breath. I pick up a glass of water, maneuver a long straw to her lips. Gigi takes another full minute to recover, or maybe it’s to gather her strength before telling me the rest.

“That night, they got him. Just took him.” She’s crying in earnest now.

“It’s okay, Grandma.”

“It’s not okay, it’s not.” Her words drip with anger. I know it isn’t directed at me but at everything else. At all the ways it has not been okay. “They dragged him through the town. Roger and his friends. They did terrible things to him. Terrible.” I don’t need the horrific details; she can spare us both. I can already picture them. I have a vivid memory from my own childhood of coming across a copy of the 1955 issue of Jet magazine with Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse right there on the cover. I found it in Daddy’s desk drawer, tucked away like a keepsake. There was Till’s face, bloated beyond recognition, flesh mottled with deep purple bruises, swollen slits where his eyes should be. You couldn’t even tell he was a young boy, only a few years older than I was at the time; the savage beating and drowning had left him horribly disfigured. I couldn’t tear myself away from the picture, or the article. I read it over and over, like it could offer an answer to the question that most vexed my young mind: Why do they hate us so much?

When I learned a few years later, in my sixth-grade history class, during our requisite one-week unit on the civil rights movement—in February, of course—that the white men who’d lynched Emmett Till were acquitted, I’d slumped in my seat in disbelief. I couldn’t believe how naive I’d been, how shocked I was to learn this, like I had somehow missed some essential truth, like I should have known better.

The week before, when we’d covered slavery, our teacher had avoided looking at me the entire time—at all the Black kids—speaking about its horrors in this singsongy voice she never used otherwise. Mrs. Trager came from New York, a master’s program at Barnard. She was completing a one-year teaching fellowship in the Philly public school district, and even though she tried too hard, I liked her.

As she spoke, I busied myself writing in my notebook (“Dred Scott,” “Underground Railroad,” “Middle Passage”), hoping to avoid the uncomfortable glances of my white classmates, even Jenny. I knew she wouldn’t get it either. Why did I feel so ashamed and self-conscious when I hadn’t done anything wrong? A sickening realization had dawned on me: my good grades didn’t matter, or the extra credit, the proper English, how faithful I was, how kind. None of it could ever erase the fact that people were going to hate me. My head felt heavy. I let it drop to my desk, hiding from the burden of it all. In that moment, tucked into the dark haven of the crease of my elbow, more than anything in the world, I wanted to be cute and white and blond and have the whole world find me precious. I wanted to be Jenny.