"Till was hung yesterday
for rape and murder with the trimmings ..."
-- Ezra Pound, "Canto LXXIV"
Not every story need be told.
Though I am in the business of telling stories, I wish more people would withhold more, more often. An artist working from life has no duty to depict every mole or pimple.
On the other hand, every story left untold is sooner or later lost, or perhaps swamped by myth and misdirection, by the reductive leveling and smoothing of the well-meaning, who strive to protect us from truths we cannot handle.
Emmett Till was a Black boy who may have wolf-whistled or tried to flirt with a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. His story is well known, but perhaps not so well known that Chinonye Chukwu's "Till" is unnecessary.
"Till" is an admirable movie about how Emmett's mother pursued justice after the lynching of her 14-year-old son.
But something about it bothers me. In the movie, before young Emmett leaves Chicago for a summer vacation in Mississippi, he begs his mother to let him take a ring that belonged to his father who, we are told, died overseas during World War II. The implication is he died in combat, that he may have been a hero.
Later in the film, during the trial of Emmett's murderers, the ring and the father are brought up again. In the movie, as in real life, the ring serves as a way of identifying Emmett's battered and disfigured body. Once again we are left with the impression that the father, Louis Till, died during the war.
We are left to assume he died fighting the Nazis. This was the assumption of many northern newspapers that covered the trial of Emmett Till's killers: The boy's father had died serving his country.
That is not the case. Till was a U.S. Army private serving in a transport battalion during the Italian campaign in July 1944 when, during the chaos adjacent to a false alarm about a bombing attack on Civitavecchia, a port town near Rome, two Italian women were allegedly raped and another was shot in the belly and killed.
Three days before the crimes occurred, American military police identified four privates as suspects in a scheme to sell contraband bags of stolen sugar. Till was one of the suspects, fingered by a soldier who'd confessed his own involvement in the plan. He was known to the Army's military police.
Till was camped near where the women were attacked. Along with Fred A. McMurray, another Black private who was proximate to the crimes, Till was arrested and charged with rape and murder. At the trial, both rape victims allowed that it was too dark and that their attackers were wearing hoods. Neither could make a positive identification.
Till and McMurray exercised their right to remain silent. They were found guilty. Till was hanged on July 2, 1945.
Novelist and essayist John Edgar Wideman investigated the case against the elder Till, and set it out in an interesting book published in 2016, "Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File." Wideman describes the book as a fiction/nonfiction hybrid, but it's clear when he's speculating, and his conclusion is based on deep research and reflection. He believes Louis Till was lynched in 1945, as surely as his son was lynched a decade later.
"Colored soldiers whom the Army considered second-class citizens were suspects who possessed no rights investigators need respect," Wideman writes. "The logic of Southern lynch law prevailed. All colored males are guilty of desiring to rape white women, so any colored soldier the agents hanged could not be innocent."
It's understandable that if Mamie Till knew her husband had been executed by the Army, she might not want to talk about it. And it's possible that--as "Till" and other sources suggest--she had only the vaguest information about Louis' death.
But after Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, the white men accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering Emmett, were acquitted, the public outcry was such that the State of Mississippi convened a grand jury to investigate whether they might be charged with kidnapping or some other crime.
As that grand jury was being convened, someone--Wideman suspects one or both of Mississippi's U.S. senators--leaked Louis Till's confidential Army service file to the press.
The grand jury refused to return an indictment, despite Milam and Bryant's having admitted taking Till from his uncle's house at gunpoint. In 1956, the two men cut a deal with Look magazine in which they admitted murdering Till and throwing his body in the Tallahatchie River. They were paid about $4,000 each for their stories.
This was too much even for the town that exonerated them. The men became pariahs; they lived sad and peripatetic lives before each died in their early 60s. They went to Texas, then skulked back into Mississippi. Neither of them ever accepted that they were actually guilty.
Carolyn Bryant, the woman who accused Emmett of grabbing her and making sexually menacing and crude remarks, divorced her murdering husband. She told a Duke history professor in 2017 her allegations "were not true."
I suppose it doesn't matter; "Till" ends before Louis Till's file is leaked to the newspapers. Not every detail fits the narrative. The storyteller's allegiance is to the story, not to some stickler's version of the truth.
My movie would have started in the U.S. Army Disciplinary Training Camp in Pisa, Italy, with 60-year-old Ezra Pound imprisoned outdoors in a six-by-six-foot cage made of the welded steel mesh used to lay down aircraft runways, open to weather on all sides and covered by a metal plate, for the crime of having made pro-Fascist wartime broadcasts to America on Radio Rome.
In an identical nearby cage is a young Black soldier, a condemned man, destined to be known as the father of a martyr.
The two men talk; Louis Till asks the poet questions about the Bible, the only book the incarcerated are allowed.
"Hey Snag, what are the books of the Bible?" Till asks.
And when they hang him, the old poet weeps, and scribbles down some lines which will become his "Canto LXXIV," a long and complex poem perhaps best understood as the old fascist's anti-fascist rant, in which he compares Till to a sacrificial ram.
And that, I guess, is the rest of the story.
pmartin@adgnewsroom.com