Writing to Save a Life. John Edgar Wideman
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and Post)
Fair Trial Was Credit to Mississippi . . .
. . . Mississippi people rose to the occasion and proved to the world that this is a place where justice in the courts is given to all races, religions, classes. (Greenwood, Mississippi Morning Star)
In my notebook, the newspaper excerpts end with the words of Chester Himes, a colored novelist who chose not to reside in his segregated country and probably sent his letter to the Post from Paris, France:
The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop . . . So let us take the burden of all this guilt from these two pitiful crackers. They are but the guns we hired. (New York Post)
As I read more about the trial, I discovered that the jury had deliberated less than an hour—sorry it took so long, folks . . . we stopped for a little lunch—before it delivered a not guilty verdict. For an American government waging a propaganda war to convince the world of Democracy’s moral superiority over Communism, intense criticism of the verdict abroad and at home was an unacceptable embarassment. Federal officials pressured the state of Mississippi to convict Milam and Bryant of some crime. Since abundant sworn testimony recorded in the Sumner trial had established the fact that Milam and Bryant had forcibly abducted Emmett Till, the new charge would be kidnapping. Justice Department lawyers were confident both men would be found guilty.
Except, two weeks before a Mississippi grand jury was scheduled to convene and decide whether or not Milam and Bryant should be tried for kidnapping, Emmett Till’s father, Louis Till, was conjured like an evil black rabbit from an evil white hat. Information from Louis Till’s confidential army service file was leaked to the press: Emmett Till’s father, Mamie Till’s husband, Louis Till, was not the brave soldier portrayed in Northern newspapers during the Sumner trial who had sacrificed his life in defense of his country. Private Louis Till’s file revealed he had been hanged July 2, 1945, by the U.S. army for committing rape and murder in Italy.
With this fact about Emmett Till’s father in hand, the Mississippi grand jury declined to indict Milam and Bryant for kidnapping. Mrs. Mamie Till, her lawyers, advisers and supporters watched in dismay as news of her husband’s execution erased the possibility that killers of her fourteen-year-old son Emmett would be punished for any crime, whatsoever.
Revisiting trial testimony did not help me produce the Emmett Till fiction I wanted to write, but I did learn that his father’s ring was on Emmett’s finger when he was pulled dead out of the Tallahatchie River. The ring a reminder that Emmett Till, like me, possessed a father. A Till father I had never really considered. A colored father summoned from the dead to absolve white men who had tortured and shot his son.
While I gathered facts for an Emmett Till story never written, a second encounter with Louis Till occurred. In the mail I received an unsolicited galley of The Interpreter, a biography of the French novelist Louis Guilloux, author of OK, Joe!, a fictionalized account of his job as interpreter at trials of American GIs accused of capital crimes against French citizens during World War II. The Interpreter’s author, Alice Kaplan, used Guilloux’s experiences to examine the systematically unequal treatment of colored soldiers in United States military courts during World War II.
I found myself quite moved by Kaplan’s description of her pilgrimage to the grave of Private James Hendricks, hanged for murder by the U.S. Army in 1945, a colored soldier at whose trial Louis Guilloux had worked. Kaplan’s book took me 120 kilometers east of Paris, to a part of the countryside where the fiercest battles of World War I were fought—a gentle landscape of rivers, woods, and farmland, interrupted by an occasional modest village. I arrived with her at a massive World War I cemetery, with its iron gates and stone entry columns. Stood finally in a clearing enclosed by laurel bushes and pine trees reached by exiting the back door of the cemetery administrator’s quarters. The clearing contained Plot E, the officially designated “dishonorable” final resting place of ninety-six American servicemen executed by the U.S. military during World War II.
Situated across the road from Plots A–D, where 6,012 honorable American dead from World War I are buried in the main cemetery of Oise-Aisne, Plot E is quiet, secluded, seldom visited, meticulously groomed. A place unbearably quiet, I imagine, as I read Kaplan’s depiction of Plot E in The Interpreter and surveyed with her eyes an expanse of green lawn dotted with small white squares she discovers are flat stones embedded in the crew-cut grass. Four rows of stones, twenty-four stones per row, the rows about five feet apart, every white square engraved with a gray number, she writes.
I accompany her, moving slowly up and down the slight slope, between the rows, because when you stand still, Plot E’s quiet is too enveloping, too heavy, too sad. I need to animate my limbs, stop holding my breath in this almost forgotten site where ninety-six white squares mark the remains of men, eighty-three of them colored men. What color are the eighty-three colored men now. What color are the thirteen other men beneath their gray numbers. I think of numbers I wore on basketball and football jerseys. Numbers on license plates. Numbers tattooed on forearms. My phone number, social security number.
On page 173 in chapter 27, the final chapter of Kaplan’s book, she narrates in a footnote how she reaches number 73, the corner grave in row four that belongs to Louis Till. His story has such tragic historical resonance, she writes, then informs the reader of Private Louis Till’s execution by the army in 1945 for crimes of murder and rape in Italy, and that ten years later in 1955, Till’s fourteen-year-old son Emmett was beaten, shot, and thrown in a river in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman.
With research of Emmett Till’s murder fresh in my mind, I had wanted to inform page 173, inform Alice Kaplan the wolf whistle was only one of many stories, a myth as much as fact, though I didn’t speak to her then, in the shared quiet of Plot E whose silence I feared breaking even as I also understood I could not break it. Instead I raise my eyes from the page, my gaze from the photograph of a numbered white square of stone, and disappear, a ghost in the machine of a book, machine of my body. I do not speak to Alice Kaplan in Plot E. It’s not the time or place to discuss the wolf whistle’s problematic status. Not the time now to expand this anecdote about finding Louis Till in Kaplan’s book nor to talk about my own trip, years later, to the French cemetery. This is just a brief version of encountering Louis Till. Anyway, I believe the truth is more like he found me than I found him.
Dear Professor Kaplan,
In your account of a visit to Plot E of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial on Sunday afternoon in January 2004, you relate that the look-alike white grave-markers were engraved with gray numbers and not names. How could you identify the person buried beneath a particular stone. More specifically, how did you know Louis Till was under stone 73. Had you obtained a directory, a guidebook, some official document matching names with numbers. If you possess such a source, where did you discover it. Would you be willing to share it. Does it contain facts about the dead other than names and numbers. Did you have in hand a map of Plot E so that you anticipated finding Louis Till’s grave at the corner of row four. Were you touched equally by the Till grave and the grave, number thirteen, of Private James Hendricks, the colored soldier whose trial you feature in your book about French novelist Monsieur Louis Guilloux, the interpreter at James Hendricks’s court-martial. Were you struck, Professor Kaplan, by the coincidence that both Mr. Guilloux and Mr. Till bear the given name Louis or by the resemblance between Guilloux and guillotine. Did you feel on the Sunday afternoon you explored Plot E that the life of each one of us no matter how tightly we clutch it, is an unanchored thread that does not guide us out of the labyrinth. I thank you in advance for any information you’re able to offer about these matters. Your book The Interpreter led me to Plot E of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, and in a very real sense I have been wandering since in a limbo inhabited by shades of men buried there.
Several years after that letter—never sent—I was shaving and the TV news talking in another room announced a black father declared guilty of protecting his son. A carful of mad white boys rolls up to the black man’s suburban Long Island driveway and they demand he surrender his son to them because the son they