For Emmett Till.
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit…”
In this photo he’s laughing. And there is no cotton gin tied around his waist. He’s not stretched into swollen limbs, his eyes are still haze and recognizable. Two neat white rows of perfect teeth sit totem-like in his mouth, and the world did not know him because he had not been murdered yet.
He’s still slippin’ into the kitchen to get another piece of cornbread while his momma ain’t looking. He’s gonna mash it with his finger, drink some buttermilk and smile with those eyes and they are still hazel and bright like stars in uppercase, and ain’t nobody gouged them out or shut ’em close. And when he goes to school he’ll do a silly little dance with his arms and legs cocked out at odd angles and his classmates gone laugh and there will be no cotton gin tied around his waist.
You know, in this photo, he’s proud of the hat on his head. You can see that by how straight his neck is and his momma’s in the picture and they got the same face. And his head is high and perfect, and ain’t no bullet in it, and it will be months before there is one, and in those months he is his mother’s child: the smug and overfed manchild all Southern ladies love to cook for because he licks the plate clean.
And ain’t no men dress like midnight, with sunless unlaughing eyes, snatching him out the door, changing everything when neither he or his momma asked to be anything other than laughin’ in the kitchen with the greens still simmerin’ in the pot.
This last photo of Emmett Till is a holocaust. The one history concretized into the nighttime musings of black children who hopscotched above and below Bible Belt; who saw a tattered, other-worldly version of the 14-year old Emmett Till. Head poised strangely above a sharp black suit on the cover of Jet Magazine. There were no eyes smiling; mischievous manchild, wonderful cornbread and buttermilk slickin’, fast-talking, looking like his momma, bubble gum pop, psalter and sizzle, straight neck full of tomorrow’s boy staring back into the camera.
What was there was not there at all! What was there swallowed the world!
It is an image I shoved at my own 14-year old son, frenetic in my attempt to tell him that this is black history. I need him to know if he’s not careful, not brave, not the sum total of all our unlit courage, if he relegates these stories to CliffNotes–well, he bleeds out and dies in the epilogue.
So I need you to know, Sali: my arms are never gonna be wide enough to cover sins like these. That your head, held so high, is still a cautionary tale, but go on and do it anyways, son.
Go on and do it anyway, and laugh, and dance, and clap, and dance with your arms and legs cocked out at odd angles, and slip by me, and get the extra cornbread whenever you can, and be grateful that when you and your boys say some slick shit about the pretty blonde girl in the front row of Algebra, you’re permitted that levity after 400 years of midnights, necks decorated in nooses, plantations that dressed up terrorism in white laced gloves and mint julep.
I tell my son to remember Emmett Till when his head was high, when his eyes were still hazel. I tell my son I’m gonna be his momma all the days of my life, that I will celebrate his brown boy buoyancy. And while I do not know what tomorrow holds, I know he’ll never be strange fruit, he’ll never be broken open, he’ll never have his face, so like my own, crushed, hatcheted, and mangled. I tell my son, “I’m growing these limbs for you, Sali, to get around you, and surround you.”
And we will be strong, and unapologetically black for as long as we can be.
