emmett till and murder and willie reed and wheeler parker

You can never hear the story of Emmett Till told too many times. Whenever someone tells it I again run through the calendar of 1955 in my mind. I begin on Sunday, August 21, 1955 when Till, with his 16 year-old cousin Wheeler Parker, arrived in Money MS by train from Chicago to visit great-uncle Mose Wright. Tonight my thoughts finished on August 31, when Till's body was found washed up on the banks of the Tallahatchie River several miles from Wright's home--where Till was abducted early on the morning of Sunday, August 28. Unlike other tellings of the Till murder I have previously heard, however, tonight I heard it from the lips of Till's cousin, the Rev. Wheeler Parker, who told his moving story to the Willamette University community at the invitation of Prof. Olympia Vernon. Many other web pages give the factual details of the Till "case." Tonight, however, we heard the throbbing memories of one present, both at the store where Emmett "wolf-whistled" proprietor Carolyn Bryant on August 24 and in the house of Mose Wright at 2:30 a.m. on Sunday August 28 when Till was taken at gunpoint and never seen alive again. Three points stand out powerfully from Wheeler Parker's presentation.

The Palpable Nature of the Details

He began by saying that he is no hero, but that he just happened to be present at an unfortunate event in an unfortunate time. He knew his cousin Emmett from an early age, for he lived next door to him in the late 1940s in Chicago after Parker had moved there with his family from Money, MS. Till was a "playful prankster," a person who always had to be in the middle of everything, a lover of animals, a leader of boys. Such traits, admirable in the Black community in the North, were more than problematic in MS in 1955. Emmett didn't know the ways of the South, the region that Parker called "Behind the Iron Curtain," where there literally was no help to be gotten from any quarter for a Black person in trouble with Whites. Though his mother warned him how to behave in the South, Till violated the code of racial relationships on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 24, 1955 by whistling appreciatively at Carolyn Bryant, wife of the one of the owners of the store. The boys with Emmett knew he was immediately in trouble, and they tore down a dirt road in their car to get away from the store. A speeding auto behind them intensified their fear, but they realized after they pulled over and fled that the auto wasn't after them. They decided to lie low for a few days, to see if the incident would pass.

The Deep Terrors Hit

For three days nothing happened. Indeed, the two men who owned the store (Bryant and Milam), had been away and only returned on Saturday, August 27. Emmett, Wheeler and others were out until about midnight that evening, returning to the pitch darkness of Mose Wright's home. He mentioned that the dark in rural MS in 1955 was so impenetrably dark that, when the moon wasn't in the sky, you couldn't see a hand in front of your face. Parker emphasized that Wright's home had four-bedrooms with kitchen separate and was not a "cabin" as is often reported on the Net or elsewhere. In the middle of the night Parker, who was not sleeping in the room with Till, was awakened by a stirring at the front door. Bryant and Milam, armed with pistol and flashlight, were arguing with Mose Wright, saying that they wanted to talk to the "fat boy" (Till weighed around 160 pounds). They moved slowly through the house, walking right by the bed where Parker was immobilized with fear, and into the next bedroom where Till was sleeping. They became quite impatient with Till, who wanted to put his shoes on before going with the men, but soon they were left with Till, leaving the others in the house. Parker described the feeling that pervaded the house--not fear or weeping for Emmett, but a sense of deep and irremediable sadness, and a profound silence that was only interrupted by heartfelt "umm" sounds of Mose Wright. Parker said that he felt a similar terror a few days later after his relatives decided to send him by train back to Chicago (before Emmett's body had been discovered), when he disembarked from the train in Memphis, missed the signs distinguishing "Colored" and "White" restrooms, went into the latter, and was abruptly confronted about his error.

Aftermath

Everyone knows the story of the publication of the photos of Till's nearly unrecognizable body, taken at his open casket on Sept. 3 by a photographer from Jet Magazine. But what Parker focused on in conclusion were his feelings over the years and the striking courage of one witness at the trial, 18 year-old (in 1955) Willie Reed. With respect to his feelings, Parker said that he never cried about Emmett's death and never contemplated revenge. It was as if he was in some kind of shock when the great terror struck, unable to feel the emotions which we would normally associate with such a trauma. His beliefs as a Christian, that he will see Emmett again, and that all of us, in our good and bad deeds, will reap what we sow, give him an equanimity and gentle wisdom that filled not only his words but also our hearts. But he couldn't finish without telling us about Willie Reed, an 18 year-old young Black man who came forward at trial to say that he heard the screams of Till being tortured in a large shed near where he was picking cotton. He had to leave town right after the trial (Bryand and Milam were acquitted within a month of the finding of the body), suffered a nervous breakdown and even to this day seems to speak with a pained expression as he tells his story. As Professor Vernon said, in each such incident of terrible brutality, it seems as if there is at least one person whose heart is touched by the fire and must tell the truth. So, in addition to 64 year-old Mose Wright, who pointed out Bryant and Milam at trial, it was the young man Willie Reed who displayed this fire.

Conclusion

Questions lingered long after the last words were spoken. For me they are questions of fact and feeling, of historical understanding and unmitigable grief. Yet the spirit of Emmett Till lives on, a boy who died before his voice had fully changed, now to live with a voice of such deep sonority that no one can ever forget it.

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