Humane Insight by Courtney R. Baker

Author:Courtney R. Baker [Baker, Courtney R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I was not bending. That box had to come open. I mean, I didn't even know what we would find inside. There could have been bricks, mud, someone else's body. I would spend the rest of my life not knowing. Besides, I had heard so many things over the past couple of days, I had to see for myself what they had done to my son.5

In her own words, her need to see and to recognize her son was necessary, not optional. We can intuitively understand this response as the desire of a mother to bestow upon her deceased son the caring look of humane insight. Yet another explanation connected with the work of mourning permits us to extrapolate from this specific occasion of death an understanding of the visual encounter with the dead body as a project of compassionate responsibility.

In demanding that the box be opened, Mamie Till articulates a logic explained by Jacques Derrida as the responsibility of the living to the dead. Contemplating the legendary onus encapsulated by Hamlet and Antigone, two literary characters whose motivations are entirely propelled by their imagined responsibilities to their kin, Derrida offers that “[n]othing could be worse for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt: one has to know who is buried where.”6

However, as Till's mother soon discovers, the task of recognizing her son's body is not easy. In the Chicago funeral home, Mamie Till's visual project of bestowing a particular humanity—her son's—on this body is influenced by her identity as a mother, an identity that in turn gives the task of recognition the great urgency underscored by Derrida. But her task is frustrated by the body's visual appearance. At a speech given shortly after Till's murderers’ acquittal, Mamie Till admitted that “[w]hat I saw in that box was not like anything I've ever seen before in my life.”7 The detailed description of that initial visual encounter that she offers in her memoirs is wrenching.

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