It all began at a
general store in Money, a one-horse town not far from
the Tallahatchie River. This general store was
frequented by bus loads of cotton choppers and pickers.
We went there for lunch at noontime to buy pork ’n’
beans, sardines, cinnamon rolls, and RC colas. Often we
stopped there on the trip home from the Welds in the
evenings. It was a place of alcohol, tobacco, gossip,
rumors, and pathos.
On this particular
weekend, rumors were afoot that Emmett Till had entered
the store on a dare from some of his young friends and
begun a conversation with Roy Bryant’s wife, who was
behind the counter. While his friends peeped in from the
outside, Emmett talked freely with the woman. Though it
was never proven, one account has it that he
"wolf-whistled" and inadvertently touched her in a
"non-sexual" way. At this point Emmett’s friends became
frightened and warned him that they should all run away.
As rumors of the
incident spread, Emmett began to share his friends’
concern. He talked of cutting short his stay and
returning to Chicago. His aunt felt the incident would
blow over if he kept quiet and out of sight. Sometime in
the wee morning hours of the following Sunday, two white
men went to the home of Emmett’s aunt and uncle and took
Emmett.
When Emmett’s
savagely beaten and decomposing body was found eight
days later, he had been bound with barbed wire, shot in
the head and thrown or rolled into the Tallahatchie
River, weighed down by a seventy-four-pound fan used to
draw hot air out of a cotton gin.
Immediately, Milam
and Bryant were suspects, at least in our minds.
Reluctantly—these were, of course, "upstanding" white
citizens of our community—they were arrested by local
authorities. They admitted abducting and beating Emmett
but said they did not kill him. Five white lawyers
volunteered to represent the brothers, and an all-white
jury acquitted them.
