Writing to Save a Life. John Edgar Wideman

thus the son must pay. But the daddy, an old-time emigrant from the deep south, got a long memory, got him a little pistola cached away for just such emergencies. No. No. Never again. Get thee gone, ye whited sepulchers, he goes or says other words to provoke a predictable riposte such as, Nigger, you better move your scrawny old black nigger ass out of the way, boy, an exchange I imagine escalating rapidly to nastier imprecations and threatening gestures terminated abruptly by a single gunshot. One white boy down, bleeding on the black man’s driveway. The other boys in his crew rush him to the hospital, but it’s too late. He dies on the way, and this morning the breaking news: a judge has pronounced the black father guilty.

      Familiar script. Offended white males go after black boy accused of molesting white female. Same ole, same ole Mississippi Till story repeating itself, but with the roles, the scenario sort of scrambled—north not south, day not night, black guy not white guy the one with a pistol in his hand, white accuser dies, accused black boy survives, and the court in this New York case declares black shooter guilty, not like Mississippi law declared the white shooter of Emmett Till innocent. This latest version of the script altered but not enough to obscure its resemblance to the original. Then the point would be lost, wouldn’t it. Just enough alike and different to appear as if festering ugliness between blacks and whites changes. Though it really doesn’t change, except maybe for the worse. This is what I heard from the TV in the other room as I shaved.

      And getting even worse day by day it seems when I pay attention—one more colored victim declared guilty without a trial falls, fallen, falling dead, here, there, everywhere . . .

      * * *

      This text will not become the Emmett Till fiction I believed I was working on. All the words that follow are my yearning to make some sense out of the American darkness that disconnects colored fathers from sons, a darkness in which sons and fathers lose track of one another.

      When I call the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the person, a specialist in military service records a friend suggested and whose extension I ask for, is unavailable. The phone of an alternative clerk, to whom I’m referred by a friendly human operator whose voice identifies him as alive and colored, picks up after three rings. A recorded message offers another extension that plunges me into a cycling menu of instructions, the product of Starquest Answering Service that’s either unintelligible by design or designed to make me pay for my sins—sins of age, of poor hearing and unnimble fingers, of unfamiliarity with the latest maneuvers necessary to wield control over recorded voices offering choices. Each set of options is so lengthy I forget them if I listen to the entire list. Or choose prematurely, always incorrectly, if I don’t listen to the bitter end. I feel like poor Ulysses roped to the mast, teased by a chorus of sirens or baffled, like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man by voices whose job is to keep me running. Voices that chirp, chatter, lecture, and sometimes, I’m sure, chortle at my efforts to steer through them and obtain information about Louis Till.

      Turns out the backup person I seek is not available either, I learn later from the friendly colored operator. The alternate person’s mother died suddenly and he’s away burying her in Alabama. The toll mounts. Casualties jinxed perhaps by mere association with the grim subjects of my inquiry: kidnap, rape, murder, execution by hanging.

      After weeks of calling and reaching no one, I complain again to the live voice. He offers yet a third number and bingo, persistence seems about to pay off. The original archivist who’d been reported gravely ill is either back at his desk or at a virtual desk in heaven where he’s able to receive calls. His voice is music to my ears even though it’s recorded music. He/it promises to return missed calls promptly, and sure enough my call’s returned. A recorded voice offers a number, recited twice to make sure I get it. I’m elated. Hang up immediately, punch in the twice-repeated number, and alas, find myself adrift in Starquest again.

      Leghorn, Italy, a.k.a. Livorno, the site of Louis Till’s court-martial, say documents arriving at last, at last, after I put my request to the government in writing. The Louis Till file mailed to me also states that the executions of Till and his codefendant, Fred A. McMurray, occurred in Aversa, Italy, near Naples. I welcomed such facts though they only led to more questions. According to the death certificates of Privates Till and McMurray, the men were hanged the same day—July 2, 1945. Little else about the executions in Aversa appears in the copious file. Did Till and McMurray drop simultaneously, each through his own trapdoor, at the conclusion of the same . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 countdown. Who counted. One countdown or two. One double scaffold or two scaffolds, separate and equal. Were the condemned offered a last chance to speak. Did either avail himself of the opportunity. Who witnessed the ceremony. Did the U.S. Army invite townsfolk and town officials, as was occasionally the practice at executions of American soldiers in occupied France. In Brittany, for example, the public execution site of a colored G.I. is remembered in the Breton language as park an hini du, black man field.

      Was a real doctor or army-trained medic assigned to listen for the absent pulses of dead Till and McMurray. Sunshine or rain that day. Did the condemned meet their fate resolutely or falter. What thoughts were they thinking on the gallows steps. How many steps. Were the steps wooden. Portable. Were photos taken of the living prisoners, dead prisoners. What archive holds them if they still exist. Much later I would find in a book, The Fifth Field, a few photos claiming to document the hangings of Till and McMurray. Are the photos authentic. Is Louis Till’s face truly one of the faces in the blurry snapshots.

      A copy of a Battle Casualty Report (July 20, 1945) appears on an early page of the Till file and registers Louis Till’s death. The words “in Italy” are typed crookedly into the Place of casualty box. An asterisk occupies the box where Type of casualty is supposed to be recorded. At the bottom of this page, just beyond the Casualty Report’s edge, a footnote, indexed by the asterisk above, contains two phrases, “judicial asphyxiation” and “sol died in a non-battle status due to his own misconduct.” Mrs. Till asserted on numerous occasions that only the second phrase was included in the telegram of July 13, 1945, sent to inform her of her husband’s death.

      Given many such willful or unavoidable or contested or careless or premeditated aporias in the official account, how could the most diligent researcher hope to accurately reconstruct a double hanging in Aversa, Italy, over a half century after it happened.

      Where there’s life, there’s hope, my mom used to say, even though my father, if he happened to be around, would always interject: And for every tree, there’s a rope, a rejoinder that would have irritated Mom even more if she had known (and probably she did) it was the punch line of a joke making fun of a southern darky ha-ha-ha obsessed with copping him a taste of white pussy ha-ha before he dies.

       Where there’s life, there’s hope

      Did Louis Till ever cop a taste of leghorn. Some historians contend the city of Leghorn is named for chickens its earliest settlers found in residence when they arrived to erect a fortified town in the middle ages. Others argue leghorn chickens—a small, hardy domestic fowl noted for prolific egg production—are named for the city where they were originally bred. Though the city of Leghorn, near Genoa in northwestern Italy on the Ligurian Sea, played a prominent role in his short (twenty-three years) life, it’s probably safe to conjecture Louis Till could not have cared less whether chickens or city bore the name leghorn first. But did he ever sample the local bird. Louis Till probably knew chicken in the sense Charlie Parker (a.k.a. Bird for love of them) knew chicken, but whatever Louis Till thought about leghorns or the city of Leghorn is lost in the silence that confronted me when I sought his voice in documents from the file.

      Malcolm (a.k.a. Malcolm X) who shares a family name Little with the famously paranoid bird Chicken Little, was not literally present at Louis Till’s trial and execution, but Malcolm informed the world in no uncertain terms why proverbial chickens on their way home to roost in America would have paused in Leghorn/ Livorno and clucked disapproval of the kangaroo court-martial conviction and hanging of colored privates Louis Till and Fred A. McMurray. Louis Till, my father and most other veterans of World War II, colored and not, are gone now and humankind is no closer to solving problems created by the conundrum of race than we are to figuring out whether leghorn