Writing to Save a Life by John Edgar Wideman

Author:John Edgar Wideman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

III

* * *

GRAVES

Even in death, no rest for Emmett Till, the Associated Press headline announces. As part of yet another investigation of his murder, Emmett Till’s body had been exhumed four years previously to verify through DNA testing that the corpse returned from Mississippi to Chicago in 1955 was indeed Till’s. Turns out Till’s body (now scientifically certified as his) may not have been properly reinterred. The glass-topped casket ordered by Mamie Till—so the world can see what they did to my baby—was discovered “in a rusty shed at a suburban cemetery where workers are accused of digging up and dumping hundreds of bodies in a scheme to resell burial plots. The casket, which was seen by mourners around the world in 1955, was surrounded by garbage and old headstones. When authorities opened it, a family of possums scampered out . . .”

The article reports that according to cemetery officials, Emmett Till’s original, glass-lidded casket had been stored in a shed because it was being saved to become part of a national civil rights memorial. Officials also claim that Till’s body was placed in a new casket that lies buried in a section of the cemetery undisturbed by the perpetrators of the grave-robbing, grave-selling scam. Till family members are said to be considering another exhumation in order to be sure the body in the new casket is Till’s.

* * *

In 1941 when I was inside her belly, my mother, because her skin was very light in color, could sneak me into the more comfortable, cleaner, whites only section of Washington, D.C., movie theaters. She said she was scared each time she smuggled us in but tied a scarf around her nappy hair and risked it, she said, on those infrequent occasions a spare dime was available to take in a matinee. She believes my father on one of his rare afternoons off from his government job, could have performed the same trick by walking up boldly, confidently, dressed in an African-looking robe and turban to a movie house ticket window and requesting a reserved seat. A colored D.C. man she’d read about in Jet had gotten away with it, so why not my father, she insisted, even with his brown skin and mine colored like his if it happened to show through whatever my father wrapped me in to carry me in his arms. Years later, after our family had migrated north from D.C., my mother recounted the sneaking into a movie scenario and I offered no comment, though I was dead certain the masquerade she had proposed, successful or not, would have given no satisfaction to the man I knew my father was.

* * *

I put Louis Till in my father’s place in my mother’s story. Louis Till carrying Emmett, father and son both African regal in bright swirls of colorful cloth. Stealing my father’s very polite waiter’s voice a minute, Louis Till requests a seat on the reserved ground floor, please. Flashes a smile at the young white woman in the ticket booth.

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