Writing to Save a Life. John Edgar Wideman

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      John Edgar Wideman’s books include American Histories, Philadelphia Fire, Brothers and Keepers, Fatheralong, Hoop Roots and Sent for You Yesterday. He is a MacArthur Fellow and has won the PEN/Faulkner Award twice and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and National Book Award. He divides his time between New York and France.

       ALSO BY JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

       Fanon: A Novel

       Briefs: Stories

       God’s Gym: Stories

       The Island: Martinique

       Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race, and Love

       Two Cities: A Novel

       The Cattle Killing: A Novel

       Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society

       All Stories Are True

       The Stories of John Edgar Wideman

       Philadelphia Fire: A Novel

       Fever: Stories

       Reuben: A Novel

       Brothers and Keepers: A Memoir

       Sent for You Yesterday: A Novel

       Damballah: Stories

       Hiding Place: A Novel

       The Lynchers: A Novel

       Hurry Home: A Novel

       A Glance Away: A Novel

       American Histories: Stories

      Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

       canongate.co.uk

      This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books

      Copyright © John Edgar Wideman, 2016

      First published in 2016 in the United States by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster

      The moral right of the author has been asserted

      In this work, which is an amalgam of research, memoir, and imagination, I have changed the names of some of the people and places that appear and in a few instances have created composite individuals

      Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

      ISBN 978 1 78689 372 7

      eISBN 978 1 78689 373 4

       Dedicated to prisoners

       Looking through steel bars at a guard, the prisoner said:I am sad to see how unhappy you are in your cage

       all stories are true . . .

      CHINUA ACHEBE, THINGS FALL APART

       CONTENTS

       I. LOUIS TILL

       II. THE FILE

       III. GRAVES

       I

       LOUIS TILL

      One of my grandfathers, John French, my mother’s father, taller, skin a shade lighter than many of the Italian immigrants he worked beside plastering and hanging wallpaper, used to ride me on his shoulders through the streets of our colored community Homewood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I loved to sit up there. Safe. King of the world. Entranced by my grandfather’s tales about the neighborhood, by his long silences, his humming, his rhymes and songs. His broad shoulders a sanctuary I would count on, even when my father disappeared periodically from various homes shared with my mother and me.

      I have never forgotten how peaceful the world looked from up there. How one day while I rode on my grandfather’s shoulders, my hands, knees, careful not to tip his wide-brimmed, brown hat, we passed Clement, a smallish man who swept out Henderson’s Barbershop. But back then, at this precise moment in the Homewood streets, I knew nothing about Clement, except I could see he limped, dragging along one worrisome foot in an oversize boot, and see he had a big face ugly enough to seem scary, even from my perch, a face with distorted features I did know would loom in my nightmares for years afterward.

      John French called out the name Clement and the man returned the greeting with a slowly forming but finally huge grin, openmouthed, few teeth, a lingering gaze that fixed upon us, then inside us, then wandered far, far past us. A look telling me that everything familiar to me could instantly be unsettled and dissolve.

      In 1955, about nine years after that encounter on the Homewood streets, I was fourteen years old, and a photo of dead Emmett Till’s mutilated face entered my life with the same sudden, indelible truth as Clement.

      Just in case you don’t recall, I’ll remind you that in 1955, Emmett Till, also age fourteen, boarded a train in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. A few weeks later a train brought his dead body back to Chicago. Emmett Louis Till had been murdered because he was a colored boy and had allegedly wolf-whistled a white lady.

      Over half a century later, I’m still dealing wih the faces of Clement and Till. To provide background for a fiction I intended to write about Emmett Till, I saved excerpts from newspaper coverage of the trial of Till’s muderers.

      Over sixty newspapers on hand in 1955 for the Sumner, Mississippi, trial. Thirty photographers popping flashbulbs, seventy reporters pecking away at truth on their typewriters. I was a bit surprised by how much national and international attention the trial had attracted. Not surprised to learn public interest had rapidly evaporated. Today Emmett Till is generally viewed as a civil rights martyr, but the shabby trial that exonerated his killers, and the crucial role played by Till’s father in the trial have largely disappeared from the public’s imagination. Silenced, the Till trial serves as an unacknowledged, abiding precedent. Again and again in courtrooms across America, killers are released as if colored lives they have snatched away do not matter.

      . . . the day opened hot and humid, the heat rising to an almost unbearable 95 degrees. (Chicago Defender)

      . . . townspeople of Sumner have never seen anything like it here—the crowds, the out-of-state newsmen and the excitement of a big trial—not even on Saturdays or when merchants conduct a drawing to give away an automobile . . . Citizens estimated as many as a thousand outsiders came, more than on the biggest trade days . . . a porter kept busy passing a pitcher of ice water to trial officials. Downstairs, a cold drink stand had its biggest day in history. (Memphis Commercial Appeal)

      Twenty-two seats were provided