Emmet Till
This
week of “alternative facts” emanating from Donald Trump has
coincided with the admission – sixty years too late – of a lie
that condemned a young black boy named Emmet Till to a horrible
death. The racism and hatred which our new president is calling up
from the depths of our history has never been more than occasionally
dormant, but we need to believe that truth in the end will
always overcome even the most vicious and destructive of lies.
As
to the amazingly trivial lies that pour forth from new chief
executive about the weather, the size of crowds and what he said five
minutes earlier, those may defy expectation but they do serve to
create a climate in which the big lies about Mexico, Muslims, and
Black people are more readily believed - even in some corners of our
usually rational upstate New York.
Of
course, people can hold to a lie for a long time, a lifetime even.
But at long last the woman whose lies cost young Emmet Till his life
in 1955 has finally come clean. Historian Timothy B. Tyson told The
Associated Press on
Saturday that Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an
interview with him in 2008. According to the professor, he spoke
to the 83 year old Donham for several hours and she admitted
inventing the attempted rape story about Emmet, although she did not
offer any explanation for her actions. Her husband and his brother
were charged with the 14 year old boy’s murder and
she testified in their defense during the
trial, claiming that Emmet had grabbed her and “in
profane terms, bragged about his history with white women. An
all-white jury predictably acquitted them although Donham’s husband
Roy Bryant later admitted, or bragged, about his guilt to
Look Magazine.
Carolyn Bryant Donham
Shocking as Carolyn Donham’s sixty-two year silence is, I find it even more remarkable that after her admission, she evidently resumed her silence and made no effort to reach out to the Till family or to tell anyone else what she had done. Professor Tyson’s only defense for not revealing this information when he first heard it nine years ago is that “historians think in different terms than do journalists. I'm more interested in what speaks to the ages than in what is the latest media thing.” Professor Tyson’s privileging of history “over the latest media thing” suggests that writers and historians owe nothing to the moral crises of their own time, but the corroding issue of racism is not something that can be put on a shelf for later study. In every era of American history, the racists will always say they must murder or abuse black or brown men to save us (white) people from some dark and evil threat. And the bizarre immigrant rape fantasies spewed by Breitbart and similar Trumpist sites are direct echoes of the lies told by Carolyn Dunham so long ago.
Louis Till
By
coincidence this week also brought attention to the great African
American novelist John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life about the life
and execution of Emmet’s father, Louis Till. Louis
has long interested me, in part because he was jailed with the poet
and fascist collaborator Ezra Pound near the end of the second world
war. He makes an appearance in my short novel, inspired by the war
stories of an old friend, John Schillace (Squillace in the novel) of Auburn, NY.
USO Dance at Auburn NY around the time when
John Schillace was drafted (from the Fingerlakes Blog)
Here is an excerpt: In The Forest of Tombolo:
John Schillace was drafted (from the Fingerlakes Blog)
Here is an excerpt: In The Forest of Tombolo:
There
weren't any cots and only a few blankets. I looked around and saw
thirty or forty colored guys staring at my face, probably ready to
blame me for everything every white man had ever done to them.
Washington tried to tell them I was okay but that only got him some
shit. Both of us were slapped around a little bit before one of them
said they should lay off. “This white boy can't be too bad if they
threw him in here with us.”
“I'm
Louie Till,” he said when the rest of them went back to whatever it
was they were doing before we interrupted their fun. “You a poet?”
“A
poet?”
“Yeah,
the other white guy here says he's a famous poet. Crazy as a bedbug.”
“Naw,”
explained Washington. “We been runnin' a black market game.”
“You're
shittin' me. They don't put y'all here for black market. This here
tent's for the worst of the worst. They gonna hang me as soon as they
get round to it.”
“For
what?” I asked.
“Rapin'
and murderin' an Italian girl. Only I never done it. White boys did
it but I'm the one they gonna hang for it.”
“You
mean they gonna hang everybody here?” Washington winced, pretty
banged up from the beatings he took.“We deserters but we never
killed nobody.”
“Maybe
they hang you and give this white boy life. But I think they hang
white boys too. Everybody says they gonna hang the poet on account of
he was workin' for Mussolini.”
I
was plenty scared, thinking they would charge us with joining the
enemy. That had to be a hanging offense. “You said the poet guy was
crazy. They won't hang crazy people, will they?”
“You
thinkin' of doin' a crazy act, huh? Don't think you could do it like
old Ezra. I was handcuffed to him all the way from Genoa and I
guarantee you never gonna talk as crazy as that old man. He sayin'
President Truman gonna fly him straight over to Tokyo on account of
how he can talk Chink and Jap. Him and this Chink named Confucius
gonna work out the whole thing so Japan surrenders nice n' peaceful.
He says he gonna do some deals with old Joe Stalin too, 'cause he
talk Russki like a champ. Can you match that kinda crazy talk?”
“I
guess not.”
Louie
Till was a very decent guy, and as I got to know him, I could see he
wasn't taking the prospect of hanging as easy as he put on. He had a
baby son and when he talked about never seeing his boy, he got real
sad. You probably heard about the son, Emmet Till. He grew up without
a father after Louie got hung, and it was all over the news when the
KKK down in Alabama lynched him just for whistling at a white woman.
Every
day it seemed they took out another colored fella to be hung, and I
was scared shitless. I knew there had to be a court martial first,
but those were always fixed deals, and you only had a few hours
before they put the rope around your neck. I was awake all night
dreaming up totally impossible ways to escape. Besides the two lines
of barbed wire and the dogs, the klieg lights were on all night and
the MP's had two machine guns trained on the barracks. Like Louie
said, they considered us the worst of the worst and weren't about to
let any of us go climbing over the fence and strolling away.
I
thought my number was up on the day that Sergeant Sessions and his
pal came into the tent and pointed a long bony finger in my
direction. “Wa'al, you a whi'man, huh? Git ov'here.” His
southern accent was so bad I hardly understood a word he was saying.
When I didn't move, he just yoked his arm across my throat and
dragged me out of there. Washington must have tried to stop them
because the last I saw, the other GI had beaten him to the floor and
was kicking him in the head.
When
we were outside the wire, they dumped me on the ground. “What' a
you, a fuckin' nigger-lovin' queer or a whi'man? Stand y'self up at
attention when I'm talkin' t'you.”
I
got to my feet and did my best to stand steady while the sergeant
walked around me, poking at my ribs with his billy club. “Tha's
better. Now folla me and try'n act like a whi'man.”
When
we reached a bunch of tents that weren't surrounded by barbed wire,
Sergeant Sessions told me I was a fucking disgrace to my race. “But
ya ain't no nigger, are you? You kinda dark. You half-nigger? You
tell me the truth or I beat you to death here'n'now.”
I
told him my parents were Italian but I was born in New York state.
“You a yankee Eye-talian? Tha's almos' bein' a nigger in my book.”
He thought he was pretty funny and began to laugh himself silly. “Na,
you ain't no nigger. Sorry 'scuse for a whi'man but a whi'man all the
same. I got a job for ya.”
“Yes,
sir.”
“Ya
can call me sarge, that's good enough. Sergeant First Class Lucius B.
Sessions from Shit Creek, Alabama. Here, have some coffee.”
Sergeant
Sessions handed me some clean fatigues, and outlined his plan for me.
“Get you a shave'n'shower and you'll pass for a soljer. No reason
why you can't stand guard for a sixteen hour stretch, is there?”
“No
sarge, I'll do whatever I'm told to do.”
“Sure
as shit you will. Just keep your eyes open for brass and don't never
fall asleep, and we'll be the best a'friends. The thing is we got us
another whi'man here, but I can't do nothin' for him. He's a traitor
and your job is jus' make sure he don't kill himself before he gets
hung.”
“The
poet?”
“You
know'im?”
“No,
I just heard there was a crazy poet here. Or writer or something.”
"Asshole
buddies with old Benito is what Mr. Ezra Pound was. A genuine traitor
who I woulda had shot the day we got'im but the brasshats are
stallin'. Meantime we gotta stand guard and I am sick of staying up
all night long watchin' the fuckin' traitor snore away like he dint
have not a care in the'world. And that's where you come in. You gonna
watch him sleep, only you best not fall asleep y'self or I beat you
to death, you get it?”
And
that's how I ended up meeting Ezra Pound. Of course, I'd never heard
of him, being a high school dropout like I was, but I knew I had
fallen into a pretty sweet deal. Sergeant Session was the worst bigot
I ever met but lucky for me I was white, and one thing he could not
abide was seeing a white man thrown in with a bunch of coloreds.
Seemed too much like race-mixing to him, I guess, so he killed two
birds with one stone. He and his cousin Lamar got out of having to
guard Pound every night and he stood by a fellow white man. I didn't
know it at the time but he covered his tracks by ripping up all the
paperwork on my crimes. As far as the official Army records went, I
had never deserted, never ran a black market game, never fraternized
with Nazis and Fascists, never been arrested during the raid at
Tombolo.
Wideman’s
book, of course, is not focused on an unknown upstate guy assigned to
guard a crazy poet, but on a black man who was hanged for rape and
murder
and whose son would be lynched ten years later. As Thomas Chatterton
Williams (New
York Times 1/29/2017) puts it, “(Wideman's)
disposition is to bypass blunt polemic and make his case through
description and story, which is by necessity inventive, conditional
and ambiguous. Simplicity sells, but the truth is seldom
simple.” Williams goes on to say:
“He
(Louis Till) is not Rosa Parks by any stretch and Wideman makes
no attempt to sanctify his character. Yet there is undeniably
something in him that the author not only relates to but also
admires, and it has to do with the fact that Till does not ever beg
or plead but keeps quiet, even stoic, in the face of a system that
“provides agents ample, perhaps irresistible, opportunities for
abuse.”
What
unsettles Wideman about the Till case is not only that it was
flagrantly flawed but that everything had the veneer of propriety
about it. “Every T crossed, every I dotted,” he writes. “But
seamless, careful, by-the-book performance provides no evidence of
what the spider’s thinking about the fly enmeshed in its web.”
Even participants in an unjust system can be blind to the ways they
sustain it. It’s a jarring idea when taken to its logical
conclusion, that, independent of any willful bigotry, the person on
the jury or in the voting booth may not even know why she decided the
way that she did. For Wideman, this means that transcendent racial
harmony may permanently lie on the horizon, just beyond our reach.
Which is also why, in his view, storytelling takes on the dimensions
of a battle royal, a “never-ending struggle” to make sense of the
world, which implies a kind of “ultimate democracy” but also “a
kind of chaos.”
The reality, the facts, are always there, but it is a "never-ending struggle" to find them in the sea of lies and delusions surrounding race, resentment and fear in America - and never has that been more true than today.
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