Emmet Till's Father and a Guy from Auburn NY

    

    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:

    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.

   

    John Edgar Wideman
  

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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