On Emmett Till, "Till," and Gwendolyn Brooks

So already, today is the anniversary of the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi sixty-eight years ago--the second anniversary of his death since the passage of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. On the night of August 28,* Till was kidnapped, tortured, killed, and then disposed of in the Tallahatchie River, where he was found by a fisherman three days later.** On September 3, Mamie Till demanded that his casket remain open for the viewing in his hometown of Chicago: "'Let the people see what they did to my boy!'"*

 

Ever late to the movie theater, I saw "Till"*** just a few weeks ago, and was humbled and awed by Mamie Till's emotional journey and steadfastness of purpose, and Danielle Deadwyler's portrayal of them: while thoroughly submerged in a mother's profound grief, Mamie Till navigated forward, making one brave, principled decision after another so that Emmett's death would not be in vain, so that it would unmask and foreground the unconscionable race-based violence and injustice baked into the American system and too easily unseen or ignored by most white people. 

 

Though the movie vividly dramatizes how Mamie Till's choices jump-started and intensified civil rights efforts,**** it never lets us forget that Mamie Till is Emmett's heartbroken mother. In its beautiful final scene, after weeks in the national spotlight, she stands in her son's bedroom and envisions a sunny Emmett standing opposite her with his signature hat upon his head, and returns his smile with all the love, joy, and grief in her heart.

 

Some months ago, my poetry-reading group turned our attention to Gwendolyn Brooks' poems: we'd just read Joy Harjo's golden shovel poem "An American Sunrise," and a few of us were unfamiliar with "We Real Cool." Both it and "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" appear in Brooks' third collection of poems, The Bean Eaters, published in 1960.

 

The poem's "Mississippi Mother"***** is Carolyn Bryant, whose accusations led to Emmett Till's being beaten and murdered by her husband and brother-in-law. Two weeks before our scheduled discussion, Carolyn Bryant Donham****** died, triggering a media rehashing of her varying accounts of Till's actions in her Money, Mississippi general store where they came face-to-face. So there was a lot of easily available background material for our group to read as we prepared to discuss The Bean Eaters, including the The New York Times article entitled "Carolyn Bryant Donham Dies at 88; Her Words Doomed Emmett Till" that detailed the changes in Bryant Donham's story.

 

By the time Bryant Donham sought out Duke University historian Timothy B. Tyson to share her side of the story in 2008, she was already unclear about the details: "'Honestly, I just don’t remember. It was 50 years ago.'”******* What she could recall--and I suspect this is what she really wanted to share with Tyson--was that she had never felt Till deserved what had happened to him, even though she bore so much responsibility for it: “'Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,'" she told Tyson.*******

So who and what was she? How did this woman who entitled her unpublished memoir "More Than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham”******* define herself? Who or what contributed to making her that twenty-one-year-old accident-just-waiting-to-happen from the perspective of a teenage black boy about whom so many were ready to believe the worst? What did she want and feel entitled to? 

 

Whenever I look at the widely circulated courtroom photo********* in which Bryant Donham leans with her eyes closed against her husband's shoulder, I always feel like I'm looking at a scene in a movie. Perhaps she was genuinely overwhelmed by the situation her inconsistent accounts had precipitated but that was now far beyond her control. But I can't help thinking that as the winner of two beauty pageants, she knew something about how to present herself to an audience in order to achieve a particular effect.

 

No doubt Gwendolyn Brooks saw this photo and the others that featured Bryant Donham's children, as if to suggest that Emmett Till had posed a threat an entire family: why else would two small children have even been present and photographed in a courtroom during their father's murder trial?  Gwendolyn Brooks might have easily simply despised Bryant Donham for her lethal, inconsistent accusations packaged in feminine meekness that made her a sympathetic victim in the eyes of so many. But Brooks looked harder and further not only to understand how Carolyn Bryant Donham might have come to play her role in history, but to suggest what would her life might be like once the trial was over. What would have motivated a twenty-one-year-old Mississippi white woman, a former beauty queen and current mother of two who worked behind the counter of rural general store, to double down on the most disturbing of her uncertain claims? How did her hazily remembered encounter with Emmett go from being something she and her sister-in-law initially sought to hide from her husband to something she was willing to testify to in a courtroom, as if to justify her husband's actions?

Brooks explores these questions by writing a narrative poem set in the Bryant home around the breakfast hour the day after Roy Bryant's acquittal. And just to say, Mamie Till did not live in the Bronzeville section of Chicago; Gwendolyn Brooks, also a mother of two, did.

 

What we learn at the start of "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon" is that the Mississippi Mother********* has imagined her story of the past few months as following the pattern of the romantic ballads she read in school but admits to not having fully understood: the "milk white maid" is rescued from the "Dark Villain" by the "Fine Prince" to live in "The Happiness-Ever-After." Standing at her stove the day after her husband's acquittal, she muses on the exhilaration she'd felt during the past weeks: "it had been like a/ Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood./ A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches." So during the last weeks, bloodshed had been an essential ingredient in her feeling excited and alive.

But something's wrong, now that the events are over. She burns the bacon she's cooking as she wrestles with the problem, then identifies it: the Dark Villain was too young and innocent to merit being being slain by the Fine Prince.

The fun was disturbed, then all but nullified
When the Dark Villain was a blackish child
Of fourteen, with eyes still too young to be dirty,
And a mouth too young to have lost every reminder
Of its infant softness.*(10)

. . .

It occurred to her that there may have been something
Ridiculous in the picture of the Fine Prince
Rushing (rich with the breadth and height and
Mature solidness whose lack, in the Dark Villain, was impressing her,
Confronting her more and more as this first day after the trial
And acquittal wore on) rushing
With his heavy companion to hack down (unhorsed)
That little foe.
So much had happened, she could not remember now what that foe had done
Against her, or if anything had been done.
The one thing in the world that she did know and knew
With terrifying clarity was that her composition
Had disintegrated. That, although the pattern prevailed, 
The breaks were everywhere *(10)

So how long can the Mississippi Mother play the part of the rescued milk white maid once she knows that the ballad story has a major flaw that might make her husband more bully than hero, even in the eyes of the men who shared his politics and allegiances? With no time to figure this out before she has to call him to breakfast, she embraces her two-time beauty queen default, fixes her hair, and applies lipstick: "It was necessary/ To be more beautiful than ever" because sometimes she fancied he looked at her as though/ Measuring her. As if he considered, Had she been worth It?"

 

Oh, the power of the capitalized, two-letter word "It"! Had it cost him too much to rescue his damsel in distress, and what exactly had it cost him? The Mississippi Mother imagines that what her husband might have seen, heard, and felt while murdering and disposing of the too young Dark Villain might have permanently disturbed his peace:

 . . . the cramped cries, the little stirring bravado,
The gradual dulling of those Negro eyes,
The sudden, overwhelming little-boyness in that barn?*(11)
Whatever she might feel or half-feel, . . .. He must never conclude
That she had not been worth It.

Once they're sitting at the table, things go from bad to worse. The morning papers' "meddling headlines" elicit the Fine Prince's racist, anti-Northern rage--and his easy relationship with murder:

What he'd like to do, he explained, was kill them all.
The time lost. The unwanted fame.
Still, it had been fun to show those intruders
A thing or two. To show that snappy-eyed mother,
That sassy, Northern, brown-black—

One thing both husband and wife share is the belief that in the right circumstances, violence and bloodshed are fun; maybe she is worrying too much about his having been disturbed by murdering a fourteen-year-old.

 

And then that violence strikes home. When one of their children throws a molasses jar at the other, and "The Fine Prince leaned across the table and slapped/ The small and smiling criminal," "She could think only of blood." This time, there's no mention of fun;  any ballad comparisons are supplanted by allusions to Macbeth, in which "blood will have blood" (III.4.151), especially when the blood of the innocent has been shed.

She did not speak. When the Hand
Came down and away, and she could look at her child,
At her baby-child,
She could think only of blood.
Surely her baby's cheek
Had disappeared, and in its place, surely,
Hung a heaviness, a lengthening red, a red that had no end.
She shook her had. It was not true, of course.
It was not true at all. The
Child's face was as always, the
Color of the paste in her paste-jar. 

She stays silent, but recognizes "one of the new Somethings—/ The fear,/ Tying her as with iron." The old ballad archetypes are completely broken as evidenced by the milk white maid's imagining herself tied and weighted down, as Emmett Till was.

 

The Fine Prince completes his metamorphosis into the Dark Villain on the final page of the poem. He grabs her and kisses her, but his "wet and red" mouth, from her perspective, is only more blood. Though she's repulsed, she remains controlled:

He whispered something to her, did the Fine Prince, something
About love, something about love and night and intention.
She heard no hoof-beat of the horse and saw no flash of the shining steel.

He pulled her face around to meet
His, and there it was, close close,
For the first time in all those days and nights.
His mouth, wet and red,
So very, very, very red,
Closed over hers.

Then a sickness heaved within her. The courtroom Coca-Cola,
The courtroom beer and hate and sweat and drone,
Pushed like a wall against her. She wanted to bear it.
But his mouth would not go away and neither would the
Decapitated exclamation points in that Other Woman's eyes.

She did not scream.
She stood there.
But a hatred for him burst into glorious flower,
And its perfume enclasped them—big,
Bigger than all magnolias.

The "Decapitated exclamation points" in Mamie Till's eyes--I saw them in Danielle Deadwyler's eyes in the movie when they registered Mamie Till's knowledge that Bryant Donham was lying during her testimony in the courtroom. While Mamie Till could believe that her son might have transgressed some Mississippi white-black behavioral boundary, she knew he would never have touched or propositioned a white woman. At this point, she knows definitively there will be no justice in that Mississippi court room. Any bond between these two mothers will have to exist in Donham Bryant's mind alone.

 

The poem's final scene testifies that Bryant Donham has done it again: orchestrated a brutish response she doesn't want, or at least claims not to want. This time, she's deliberately made herself as physically attractive to her husband as possible--but without having anticipated her husband's violent response to their misbehaving child moments before he responds. As readers, we join her in hating Roy Bryant for his brute forcefulness--but our sympathy for her is short-lived. We've seen this same miscalculation before. Yes, perhaps from her perspective, things got out of hand in the Emmett Till situation, but she helped them get that way--all so the "maid mild" could feel "the breath go fast"--and maybe so she and her husband could hold their heads high among their white Mississippi neighbors who'd read the same ballads in high school. We know that she's made her bed and now must face lying in it.

 

The poem ends with three strange lines that anticipate The Bean Eaters' next poem, "The  Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till," which I believe may have been written in the voice of the Mississippi Mother, who's no poet--but who believes in the power of ballads:

The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till

    (after the murder,

    after the burial)

Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing;

       the tint of pulled taffy.

She sits in a red room,

       drinking black coffee.

she kisses her killed boy.

       And she is sorry.

Chaos in windy grays

       through a red prairie*(12)

It's the predominance of red, the insufficiency of the word "sorry" to express all that Mamie Till must be feeling, and the poem's attention to Emmett's mother's appearance that makes me attribute these words to the Mississippi Mother. But thus far, I can't find anyone other readers who agree with me. The Poetry Foundation's commentary on the poem assures me that Gwendolyn Brooks wrote both it and the Mississippi Mother poem to "reflect, and implicitly critique, American society’s tendency to value white experience more than black—at lethal cost."*(12)

 

That same Poetry Foundation article then provides a link to Patricia Smith's Golden Shovel poem called "Black, Poured Directly into the Wound" which "using the quatrain as its source poem, . . . focuses squarely on Mamie Till’s thoughts and feelings."*(12) I read that magnificent poem for the first time only yesterday, and link it here to give you the chance to end your reading of my blog today with more thoughts of Mamie and Emmett Till than of Carolyn Bryant Donham.*(13) 

I will always be grateful to Gwendolyn Brooks*(14) for walking in the shoes of the person who not only handed the gun to the murderer, but made sure it was good and loaded, despite her claims that she never wanted anyone to die. It's imperative that we try to walk in the shoes of those we shrink from instinctively so as never to forget that they are products of times and places, which in no way absolves them of personal responsibility for their actions, especially those for which others pay the ultimate price. Poetry helps hold them accountable without negating their humanity.

 

* Linder, D.O. (1995-2023). The Emmett Till murder case: chronology.  Famous Trials. https://famous-trials.com/emmetttill/1759-chronology 

** Screenshot of a photo of a front page of a newspaper article with the caption "A selection of text from the Aug. 31, 1955 edition of the Chicago Daily News, showing the first story to run in that paper about the discovery of Emmett Till’s body in a river in Mississippi." Kidnapped boy found slain. (1955, August 31). Chicago Sun Times. https://chicago.suntimes.com/1955/8/31/23842064/emmett-till-news-kidnapped-boy-found-slain

*** Screenshot of photo on UK Universal Studios website: https://www.universalpictures.co.uk/micro/till

**** Still, when  I asked my father just a few months before he died in 2020 whether the White people he knew talked about Emmett Till's lynching and trial in 1955, he replied, "Not enough."

*(5) Getty Images Photograph accompanying the following article: Fox, M. (2023, April 27). Carolyn Bryant Dunham dies at 88; her words doomed Emmett Till. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/carolyn-bryant-donham-dead.html

*(6) Carolyn Bryant divorced her husband and remarried twice.  

*(7) Fox, M. (2023, April 27). Carolyn Bryant Dunham dies at 88; her words doomed Emmett Till. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/27/us/carolyn-bryant-donham-dead.html

*(8) Associated Press Photograph from 1955 accompanying the following article: Associated Press (2023, April 27). Carolyn Bryant Donham, the woman at the center of the 1955 lynching of Black teen Emmett Till, has died. The Boston Globe. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/04/27/metro/carolyn-bryant-donham-woman-center-1955-lynching-black-teen-emmett-till-has-died/?camp=bg%3Abrief%3Arss%3Afeedly&rss_id=feedly_rss_brief&s_campaign=bostonglobe%3Asocialflow%3Atwitter&s_campaign=bostonglobe%3Asocialflow%3Afacebook&fbclid=IwAR2iQaagaKk_ZTzELnw-sal_Rz0FTqo-DcoQL0Y5HPuL1B_eRSP0-6cwKEU 

*(9) Screenshot of photo accompanying New York Times article.

*(10) Brooks, G. "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon." Saying His Name: Poems on Emmett Till curated by Terence Hayes. Poetry Society of America. https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/saying-his-name-1/saying-his-name

*(11) Duffy, C. (2018). The barn where Emmett Till was tortured and murdered [Photograph). ABC News. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-21/new-probe-into-emmett-till-murder-reopens-southern-wounds/10020712

*(12) Poetry Foundation. (2017, February 1). Golden shovels. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92342/golden-shovels

*(13) Screenshot of photo accompanying New York Times article.

*(14) Drawing by Tyrue "Slang" Jones called “Through the Words of Miss Brooks” accompanying Poetry Foundation. (2023). Gwendolyn Brooks: A Chicago Legacy. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92342/golden-shovels