Richard Powers (17 page)

This is the photo that flies along in the wallet in the trousers on the boy as he rushes down the aisle of the passenger train hurtling south. Another print sits in a silver frame on his mother’s dresser back home in the city, her keepsake from that magical Christmas eight months earlier. She has sent the boy off to visit his relatives in Mississippi, a last country vacation before he heads back to school.

By the time the train reaches his destination, the child owns it. Charmed strangers wish him well when he gets off at a tiny Delta town called Money. He steps off the platform into a crowd of boys, his instant friends. He appears to them as another species, a creature from another planet. His clothes, gait, accent: He walks among them full of jokes and boasts, floating on confidence, sharing nothing in the world with his blood relations. Except blood.

His mother has told him to mind his manners, so far from home. But so far from home, he no longer knows what minding manners means. This backwater town is slow and overgrown and easy to astonish.

Everywhere he walks along these melting tar roads, he’s the center of a circle of boys, hungry for a performance they didn’t even know existed until his arrival. They call him “Bobo.” They demand a show.

Bobo must sing for them, big-time songs, distant, urban kin of their own music they only barely recognize.

They want city tales, the stranger the better. Where I live, Bobo says, everything’s different. We can do anything we want. In my school? Blacks and whites have class together in the same room. Talk to each other, friends. No shitting.

His southern cousins laugh at this crazy-ass foolishness.

Here. Look!Bobo shows them a picture of his school friends, from his wallet, next to the Christmas photo. The Delta laughter crumples in confusion. The picture turns them stony. They can’t know that just this spring, the Supreme Court has declared that such craziness— with all deliberate speed—must become everywhere a fact. They haven’t heard the men who run the state capital in Jackson declare themselves, just this summer, to be proud criminals. For the boys on the dusty, weed-shot street in Money, this news is farther than the moon.

Look here,the boy Bobo says. He points out a girl with the nail of his thumb. Frail, blond, anemic—in a sickly way, almost beautiful. To the boys crowding around the photo, the face is animal, foreign. You could no more speak to such a thing than you could walk through fire. This girl here? Bobo tells his country disciples. This one’s my sweetheart.

The nigger’s gone mad. For all that he’s already overhauled their world, his audience can’t believe him.

Bobo and this girl of straw: It sasses God. It breaks the damn law of gravity. What kind of city—even up north—is going to let this black boy near enough such a girl long enough to more than mumble an apology?

You a soul-damned liar. You joining on us. You think we all don’t know nothing.

Bobo just laughs. I tell you, this here’s my sweetheart. Who’s going to lie about a thing that nice?

His listeners can’t even sneer. No point even letting this mojo into your ears. The picture, the girl, the word sweetheart taunt like some hopping round of the dirty dozens. Not even the north could truck with such lawlessness. The boy’s got a match in one hand and a fat stick of gunpowder in his mouth. He wants to loose some real evil on them. The others step away from the picture, like it’s dope, pornography, or contraband. Then, like it’s all of those, they circle back for another, longer look.

They stand in the street in front of the tired brick box of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, twenty of them, between the ages of twelve and sixteen. It’s a stale late August Sunday, hotter than human thought and drier than a dust-coated dead mule. The boy and his first cousin have come into town for a snack, taking a break from the long day of church where the boy’s great-uncle preaches. The crowd he draws wants another look. The picture of the white girl passes from hand to hand. Whatever small part of them fears it might be true, they know it’s just another city-boy performance.

You a jiving fool.

Uh-uh.The boy laughs. Nothing like a fool. She look good in this picture? Looks even nicer in life.

Get on gone with you. Truth, now. What’s you doing with a picture of a white girl in your wallet?

And that round, cherubic confidence—all of life in front of him—just grins.

It drives the others wild. You think you something, talking to white women? Let’s see you go inside this store, talk up that Bryant woman who runs it. Ask that white woman what she doing tonight.

The northern boy just smiles his world-beating smile. That’s exactly where he was heading anyway. He nods at these rurals, pushes open the grocery’s screen door, and disappears underneath theDRINK COCA COLA signs on the white-pine overhang.

The boy is fourteen. The year is 1955. The store’s screen door slaps closed behind him, pure child on a dare. He buys two cents of bubblegum from the white woman. On his way out, he says something to her, two words—“Bye, baby.” Or maybe he whistles: a quick, stolen trophy to bring back to his friends outside, to answer their challenge, prove he’s his own owner. He bolts out the door, but the hilarity he thinks is waiting for him outside skids off into horror. The others just stare at him, begging him to undo what he just did. The crowd disperses, wordless, in all directions.

They come for the boy four days later, after midnight, when time turns inside out and all-powerful force goes dreamlike. They come to the home of Mose Wright, this Emmett’s great-uncle preacher. Two of them, potent, blunt. One is bald and smokes a cigarette. The other has a pressed, thin face that knows only rage and feeding. They wake the old preacher and his wife. They want the boy, the nigger boy from Chicago who did all that talking. The men have guns. The boy is theirs. Nothing in the world will stop them from taking him. They move with clipped authority, beyond the authority of states. The steady work, the cold, damp method of after midnight.

The boy’s great-aunt steps up to plead. He just a child. He ain’t from around here. That boy, he didn’t know nothing. He don’t mean nobody no harm.

The balding one smashes her across the temple with his gun butt. The two whites overpower the old man.

They take the boy. This is how things operate. The boy belongs to them.

Bobo—Emmett—is the only one who’s calm. He’s from Chicago, the big city, up north. He did nothing wrong. He isn’t falling for this backwoods intimidation game, these couple of crazy crackers in their summer-stock play, banging around by the only light in which they can pull the performance off. They can’t hurt him. He’s fourteen; he’ll live forever.

The whites march Emmett across the night grass, twisting the child’s arm up behind his back. He tries to straighten, to walk normally. The snub-faced one knees him in the groin and the boy doubles over. He cries out, and the snub-faced one slams his gun down on the boy’s face. The skin above Emmett’s eye opens and rolls back. He puts his hand to the lake of his blood welling there. They tie him like a calf and throw him into the back of their pickup. The snub-faced one drives and the bald one rides in back, his boot pressing on the boy’s skull.

They ride him for hours on the potholed roads, his head banging against the metal truck bed. The boy can’t be properly corrected until he knows how serious a thing he did. They stop to pistol-whip him, beating him from his legs to his shoulders, setting wrongs to right.

Who did you think you were talking to?The question fills with fascination. The questioners have gained confidence all night, as the boy dissolves into a ball of blood and moaning. You blind? You think that woman was some black bitch? The snub-faced one’s eyes come alive under their flaps of turtle skin.

That’s my wife, nigger boy. My wife. Not some little trash-black whore.

He savors the words— bitch, trash , whore , nigger , white , wife —punctuating each repeat of the lesson with a blow from his rod. He works meticulously, some stubborn stain of infidelity here he cannot beat out. He strips the boy, smashes him across his bare chest, shoulders, feet, thighs, cock, and balls. Every piece of this rule-breaking flesh must be made to respect his power.

We never had a problem with our niggers till you Chicago vermin come down to rile them up. Don’t you know nothing? Nobody never taught you can from can’t?

The boy has stopped answering. But even his silence defies them. The two men—the husband of the soiled woman and his half brother—work away on the naked body: in the truck, out of the truck, questioning, beating, questioning, patient teachers who’ve started their lecture too late.

You sorry about what you did, boy?Nothing. You ever going to do something so stupid again, the whole of what’s left of your life? More nothing. They look for compliance in his face. But by now, the impish bright oval from the Christmas photo has little face left. The boy’s silence drives the whites into whatever calm technique lies past madness. They poke their barrels into his ears, his mouth, his eyes.

They will tell it all later, to Look magazine, selling their confession for petty cash. They meant only to scare. But the boy’s refusal to feel wrong about anything drives them to their obligation. They throw him back into the flatbed and drive him out to Milam’s farm. They root around in the shed and turn up a heavy cotton-gin fan. Bryant, the snub-faced husband, begins to lift the fan into the truck. His half brother, Milam, stops him.

Roy, what the hell kind of work are you doing there?

Roy Bryant looks down and laughs. You’re right, J.W. I’m going crazy. It’s from not getting a good night’s sleep.

They make the boy pick it up. Bobo, who weighs little more than the fan. Emmett, whom the whites have beaten almost senseless. He staggers from the steel’s dead weight but manages to lift it, unaided, into the truck.

You know what this is for, don’t you, boy?

Still the boy refuses to believe. The drama is too broad, the cotton-gin fan too theatrical. They mean only to torture his imagination, to break him with terror. Yet lifting the heavy machinery is worse than everything he’s suffered until now.

Bryant and Milam make him lie down in the truck, naked, alongside the scrap metal. They drive him back into the woods, down by the Tallahatchie. In those last two miles, the boy lives through all creation. His thoughts collapse; no message can escape him to forgive the living. All law has aligned against him.

Fourteen, and condemned to nothing. Even God gives him up.

The night is pitch-dark and filled with stars. They pull the truck far off the road, into a thicket by the river.

Even now—the whites will tell the magazine that buys their confession—even now, they mean only to administer his due. They threaten to tie the fan around the boy’s neck with a loop of barbed wire. Bryant talks to him, slowly. You understand now, boy? You see how you’re making us do this?

Till says nothing. He has gone where no human need can reach.

Milam waves over the black water. We’re taking you out there, boy. Unless you tell us you’ve learned how to treat a white woman.

The boy didn’t show the proper remorse, they’ll tell the magazine. He refused to admit he’d done anything wrong.

Milam plays with the bloodied clothes while his half brother delivers the sermon. He wants to see what a black boy wears for underpants. He goes through Till’s pockets. He pulls apart the wallet and finds the picture.

Roy.Milam’s voice is metal. Look at this.

The men pass the photo back and forth, under a flashlight. Some unmeaning artifact. Some change in the fundamental laws. Bryant takes the photo to the riverside and forces it into the boy’s smashed face.

How’d you get this, boy?

There’s not enough boy left to answer. The silence triggers another round of battering.

Who’d you steal this from? You better tell us everything. Now.

They might as well demand an answer from the earth they beat him into. Time melts like August road tar.

The questions swell, each word unfolding its kernel of violent eternity. They hit him with a monkey wrench. Each blow is forever falling.

Who is this girl? What the fuck you do to her, nigger?

Emmett comes back from a place he shouldn’t have escaped. The house is burned, and it would be no use to him now, even if they let him live. The life they own means nothing to him. Sense has run down to a standstill. But somehow he comes back, finds the concussed brain, the caved-in throat.

She’s my sweetheart.

His crime swells past rape, worse than murder. It spits in the face of creation. What the whites must do, they do—no rage to their motion, no hysteria, no lesson. They exterminate by deep reflex, a flinch that comes before even self-defense. They put a bullet through the fourteen-year-old’s brain, as they might kill a rabid animal. A desperate protection, the safeguard of their kind.

They tie the fan around the corpse’s neck with the hank of barbed wire. They drop the body into the current, where it will never again threaten anyone. Then they return home to their families, a safety they’ve spent this night preserving.

When the boy doesn’t come home, Mose Wright calls the indifferent authorities. But he calls the boy’s mother, too, who phones the Chicago police. Pressed from outside, the law of Money moves. The local police arrest the two men, who say only that they took the boy but let him go after putting the fear of God into him.

On the third day, the weighed-down body rises from the river. It snags on the hook of a white boy, fishing, who thinks he has snared some primordial water creature. Landing the carcass, the fishing child needs several moments to recognize his catch as human. Every inch has been bludgeoned beyond recognition. Even Mose Wright can’t identify his grand-nephew until he sees the signet ring belonging to Emmett’s dead father, a keepsake the son wore on his slender finger, always.

The sheriff tries to rush a burial. But Emmett’s mother fights the police to get her son’s body returned to Chicago. Against the odds, she beats all obstructions. The body goes back north by train. Although the authorities order the casket permanently sealed, Emmett’s mother must have a last look, even in the Chicago station. She breaks the law, glances inside the casket, and faints dead away. When she comes to, she decides that the whole world must look on what it has done to her boy.