Emmett
I wish I said I was sorry to that lady, but it happened so fast. I tried to tell them men, but they wouldn’t listen. Me and the boys went there to get candy, that’s all. I laid my bubble gum on the counter, and reached my hand into my pocket to grab my money. All the boys was waitin’ outside, so I was trying to hurry and my dumb chubby hand got caught in my trouser pocket. When I yanked it out, I moved too fast and flung the money out on the counter by accident. It rolled towards her and I went to snatch it so it wouldn’t roll off. When I did, I brushed her hand. I didn’t mean to, and I started to say I was sorry, but this flame lit up in her eyes, and she raised her hand like she was gonna hit me. I got so scared Mama. I kept trying to say the word “sorry,” and that was when I started stuttering. So I started whistling to calm my stutter. She took to screaming then and sayin’ she was gonna get her gun. I was so scared. That look in her eyes made me know she would do it. I didn’t understand why she was so mad. That’s when Wheeler grabbed me and we ran out of that store like the devil was after us.
I’m so sorry we didn’t tell Uncle Moses. Wheeler said he would be mad at us, and that he wouldn’t let us go swimming. But when we finally got back to the house, I felt safe.
Mamie
The tick, tick, tick of his watch on my wrist reminded me of when we switched watches at the train station before he left. Now it was the only sound cutting through the thick blanket of silence in this room. I don’t know why he wanted to switch watches that day. I’m not even sure he knew. But that was just Bobo and me. We were so close that sometimes I wasn’t sure where I ended and where he began. That day I didn’t think anything of it when he pulled his watch off, crumpling it in my hand. Then he slid mine off slipping it on his wrist before giving me that big smile and telling me that he loved me.
I couldn’t even remember what life felt like before I had Emmett. I remember my childhood, but now looking back, I can’t remember what it was like not knowing him. Not having him anymore took the person that I knew I was away, and now I didn’t know who I was. God, just let me die. Please don’t let me live without him.
Emmett
For the next three days we ran in the fields, played stick ball in the dirt, and picked cotton with Uncle Moses. I felt so free, but I didn’t know nothin. That night that I went to sleep, I didn’t know there were men out lookin’ for me.
I was dead asleep when I heard Uncle Moses yelling at someone to please leave me alone. That he would spank me good if they just left me there. It was weird waking up hearing Uncle Moses calling out my name in the dark and knowing that he wasn’t talking to me. That’s when a hand came at me out of the darkness yanking me clean off the bed. A man’s voice I didn’t know told me to put on my shoes. I told him that I don’t wear my shoes without my socks on but he said he didn’t care. That I better get them on quick.
Everyone looked scared when those men led me out of the house. Wheeler pulled the covers over his face, and I could hear him and Curtis crying. I thought for sure they just wanted to talk to me outside and then I would come back in. I didn’t know who they were, I never saw them before. Aunt Lizzie was crying and trying to shove her money jar at the men, telling them to take anything they wanted, just please leave me, that I was all my mama had. The younger one knocked the jar out of her hands and the glass shattered all over the kitchen floor. Aunt Lizzie screamed as the coins scattered and rolled across the wood. Uncle Moses chased us out of the house until that bald man pointed a gun at him and told him if he took one more step it would be his last.
“No!” I yelled. That’s when Uncle Moses locked eyes with me giving me a chill of terror down my spine. He knew there was nothing he could do. They would kill us both right in front of the others. Someone as strong as he was and having that look in his eyes stopped me in my tracks. I stood there staring at him and that’s when I realized what he saw.
The younger one’s rough hands grabbed me on the back night shirt, and pushed me forward by the neck towards the truck. I heard her voice cut through the darkness. “Yep, that’s him.” It was the lady from the store.
Someone pulled something over my head then and everything went black as they threw me into the back of the truck.
Mamie
I hate the sun for shining, and I hate the people that will enjoy its light.
I rub that familiar patch of skin on the bottom side of his right thumb. It was the spot I rubbed gently in a circular motion when he was a baby while I rocked him to sleep. It was the only thing that soothed him. My boy. My precious Bobo.
The street outside was starting to be busy, and I knew that the papers would be screaming headlines about Emmett’s body being shipped to Argo. A reporter called me before Emmett arrived asking me to call her with a description of the body when I was ready. I wasn’t ready.
When Emmett went missing we notified the NAACP. Medgar Evers was even out looking for him, going undercover in the cotton fields trying to get information about where he was. Everyone wanted to know what happened. Wanted to know what those men did, and I didn’t have the words to describe it.
His tongue was pulled out, swollen at least five times its size. All but two of his teeth were gone. They kept his body weighted down in the Tallahatchie River with a hundred pound cotton gin fan attached with barbed wire wrapped around his neck. That’s where he was when everyone was looking for him. He was at the bottom of the river.
And his eyes. My baby’s sweet hazel eyes.
Uncle Moses identified him, because he was the closest relative in Mississippi. He was the one that they stole him from in the middle of the night.
I didn’t have to ask Moses or Lizzie if he stayed on the porch waiting all night when they took him. I knew.
In my mind I can see him standing where the wood of the porch dips with all the weight it has bared over the years. His hand held onto the wood post the roof rests on while he stared into the darkness, watching the branches of the trees gain definition as the sun peeked over them. Aching to see the white metal of that truck coming toward him and hear the groan of the motor a few seconds behind on the horizon even while the reality took hold as the sun came up that they weren’t bringing Emmett back.
I guess it’s odd some of the things we admire about our elders. For me with Uncle Moses, he embodied a strength I never could understand. But it awed me. He did what the white people of Mississippi expected him to do. But he always did it in a way that showed unwavering strength, not weakness. He never looked them in the eye. He knew not to show emotion. No joy, no confusion, no sadness. Just nothing. Not ever letting them think that he knew he was as good as they were. But still, to his family and his congregation, he was the strongest man we knew. He was the one everyone would go to for advice or for help. Moses stayed behind when so many of us left in the Great Migration. So the way he behaved around the white people was not purposeful, it was ingrained. It was as much a part of him as the lines are in a steak. As much a part of him as his family was. You could not pull part of him away from the other part.
So even though I wasn’t there, I knew he stood there stone faced at the side of that river when the troopers asked him to identify Emmett’s body.
“Yeah, that’s Emmett.” He told them.
But when he told me about it later, his eyes welled up with tears and his voice broke remembering what it was like seeing him being pulled from that river with the mud and barbed wire pulling on his face and neck. I knew seeing Emmett like that broke him. That he was forever changed.
Emmett
When they threw me in that truck I felt a new set of hands on me. Strong and warm but more gentle than the ones that led me out of the house. I knew it was someone different than the men who took me. I felt the truck shift back and forth with the weight of people climbing into the front of the cab. Their voices sounded muffled when the metal doors slammed shut, but I could hear that they were with the woman from the store. Fear took over my body as my face rested against one of the raised metal ridges of the truck bed. My heart pounded in my ears, and I guess I was starting to cry when I heard the man’s voice that had his hands on me. He was a negro like me.
“Don’t cry boy. You’ll make it worse. Agree with everything they say. They just mad right now. They just need to blow off some steam,” I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was afraid too, but then an edge of anger came into it. “You shouldn’t be talkin to a white woman like that. Damn boy. You shouldn’t have done that. Let them have their way and blow off they steam so they will let you go.”
He said all this to me while he tied my hands behind my back. I begged him to let me go, that I just wanted to go back home to my Mama back in Argo.
“I can’t boy. I got to tie you up, else it will be me laying next to you with a sack over my head, and that won’t do neither of us no good.”
It seemed like every time we took a curve in the road, they did their best to throw us around in the back of the truck. My balance was off because I couldn’t see and didn’t have the use of my hands, so I rolled and slammed against the tire wells on almost every turn, my face rolling across the ridges of the bed of the truck as fast as the truck rolled over the gravel dirt road. I begged him to catch hold and steady me but he never did. I felt the bones crack in my nose as my face slammed into the tire well, tears flooding my eyes. An sweep of nausea overtook me and I vomited up my dinner in the bag that covered my face.
Mamie
Someone found a witness that heard screaming in a barn. Screaming. Emmett was screaming for me, but no one came. Even though they heard him.
Some say there was a black man there too. Some say three black men were there, some say four. My mind can’t go to that place. I can’t think about those men. I can’t try to understand why they helped those white men torture and kill my son, a fourteen year old boy. They would have done what they said for fear of what might happen if they didn’t. I couldn’t judge them. I couldn’t even let my mind go to thinking about what they saw. What they took part in. The children they went home to when it was all over.
They tied him up in that barn. I know that, but I wasn’t there to see it. I wasn’t there to hear Emmett begging them to let him go. I wasn’t there to hear him screaming as they beat him, or to watch his pants darken as the urine ran down his legs. I didn’t hear his head slice open with the blade of the hatchet, or hear the butt of the pistol crack his skull. I wasn’t there to hear what they asked him, wasn’t there to coach him on what to say. I wasn’t there to tell him what he shouldn’t say. I wasn’t there. I know he called out for me, but I wasn’t there to hear it.
I know Emmett watched that man come close to him with a bright metal tool towards his eye. He might have asked Emmett if he had white friends, if he looked those white girls in the eye when he spoke to them. I wasn’t there to tell him “say no, Emmett. Lie and say no.” He wouldn’t have lied. He didn’t know to lie. I never taught him that. He would’ve said yes, because things were different in Illinois than they were in Mississippi, and he didn’t understand.
I knew Emmett was dead before they told me they found him. There was a part of me that was gone when I woke up that Monday morning, a cold sweat covering my body. I knew on Monday, even though they didn’t find him until Wednesday. The silence of his absence from me already took over by the time the call came in. I was standing in my living room, my apartment full of every relative that I had in Illinois and some that already fled from Mississippi. I stood there holding the phone in my hand, still, and frozen, till it fell like a lead weight down by my side after I head the man’s words on the other end of the line.
“His body was identified.”
The room fell in chaos around me when they saw my face and knew what I knew. Their mouths were open, people were falling down onto the floor around me, falling into each other. But I couldn’t hear anything. I could see the movement around me, but everything went silent. The silence inside me was all I heard. That part of me is still silent, like a dark shadowed emptiness seeping through to the other parts of me, devouring me. Ever since a single gunshot.
His face. That smile and eyes with sparks of light that I saw through the train window, forever gone. Now, no resemblance of a face is left.
He died after all the torture, with a gunshot through his brain. His head, resting on the pillow now, shows light through a hole straight through his temple to the other side.
Emmett always wanted to look good. He wanted to look like the dapper young man with his sharp looking hats and stylish neckties. He wouldn’t want people to seem him like this. He didn’t even resemble a human now, much less a handsome child. I kissed his face, closing my eyes, pleading for this nightmare to stop. Praying that it would all cease to exist as I opened my eyes. Begging God to please, please let me feel the warmth of his blood flowing under his flesh again as my lips kiss his cheek. But it was gone. Everything was gone. He was cold, still and mutilated.
“Forgive me son,” I said as I opened my eyes and saw the mangled face still there. I was going to call that reporter back and tell her to bring a photographer with her. No one could explain to her what they did. She had to see. The world had to see. To see and know how hatred killed my son. “Emmett, I love you. Mama loves you Bobo,” I whispered the words to him as I brushed that little patch of skin under his thumb for the last time. I pulled the wind apart from his watch that was still on my wrist until the ticking stops and the whole room goes quiet.