Mourning Emmett: "One Long Expansive Moment"

Abstract

Mourning Emmett:"One Long Expansive Moment" Rebecca Mark (bio) However the image enters its force remains within my eyes —Audre Lorde, "Afterimages" A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. —Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History If you do not know—and you should know, as Americans we should know—Emmett Louis Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, died when at least two (but we now know, more than two) murderers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, dragged him from his uncle Mose Wright's house in Money, Mississippi at 2:00 a.m. the morning [End Page 121] of August 28, 1955, took him to a shed, pistol-whipped him and beat him with tire irons (he was screaming an awful piercing wailing cry that everyone nearby heard), shot him or drilled a hole in his head, (no one should ever have to write this sentence, read this sentence, or live this sentence), then took his body in the back of a pick-up truck and tied a heavy gin fan around his neck and dumped him off a cliff into the Tallahatchie River. After being tried and exonerated in the greatest travesty of justice, the worst farce of a trial in American history (Milam and Bryant and their wives sat in the courtroom drinking Cokes with their toddler sons and laughing no more than twenty feet from Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, later Mamie Till-Mobley), the two men confessed to William Bradford Huie, a southern journalist (who paid them for their confession) that they had killed Emmett Till—didn't want to, hadn't meant to, but had to, because Emmett had whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was married to Roy, the owner of a small grocery store out in the middle of cotton fields in the Delta of Money, Mississippi. Milam and Bryant and the others claimed they had to kill Emmett Till because he was too uppity and kept bragging that he had slept with a white woman in Chicago. They claimed he had a picture of his white girlfriend in his wallet. Emmett was only fourteen. What fourteen year old, what human, dragged out of bed at two in the morning in the loneliness of the Mississippi Delta by two white men with guns, pistol-whipped and beaten, would be talking about anything, let alone boasting. He was screaming in pain. He was dying. Bryant and Milam died years later. No one has ever paid for this crime. There is evidence that there were as many as seven, maybe more people involved, including Carolyn Bryant, and several African American men. As Toni Morrison writes in Beloved : this is not a story to pass on. Because I cannot bear that this narrative takes up space on this page, and because my heart dies a little each time I think about it, I swore off writing about Emmett Till after two years of collecting fragments—quotes and impressions, teaching a yearly course on the rhetoric of violence in the South that included many of the most important literary texts on Emmett Till, and co-directing the civil rights conference Unsettling Memories, which included the panel on Emmett Till that contributed to the birth of the comprehensive new book by Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress: Emmett Till in the Literary...