Not only did I enter high school with a new name, but also with a completely new insight into the life of Negroes in Mississippi. I was now working for one of the meanest white women in town, and a week before school started Emmet Till was killed.
Up until his death, I had heard of Negroes found floating in a river or dead somewhere with their bodies riddled with bullets. But I didn’t know the mystery behind these killings then. I remember once when I was only seven I heard Mama and one of my aunts talking about some Negro who had been beaten to death. “Just like them lowdown skunks killed him they will do the same to us,” Mama had said. When I asked her who killed the man and why, she said, “An Evil Spirit killed him. You gotta be a good girl or It will kill you too.” So since I was seven, I had lived in fear of that “Evil Spirit.” It took me eight years to learn what that spirit was.
I was coming from school the evening I heard about Emmet Till’s death. There was a whole group of us, girls and boys, walking down the road headed home. A group of about six high school boys were walking a few paces ahead of me and several other girls. We were laughing and talking about something that had happened in school that day.
However, the six boys in front of us weren’t talking very loud. Usually they kept up so much noise. But today they were just walking and talking among themselves. All of a sudden they began to shout at each other.
“Man, what in the hell do you mean?”
“What I mean is these goddamned white folks is gonna start some shit here you just watch!”
“That boy wasn’t but fourteen years old and they killed him. Now what kin a fourteen-year-old boy do with a
white woman? What if he did whistle at her, he might have thought the whore was pretty.”
“Look at all these white men here that’s fucking over women. Everybody knows It too and what’s done about that? Lock how many white babies we got walking around in our neighborhoods. Their mama’s ain’t white either. That boy was from Chicago, shit, everybody tuck every body up there. He probably didn’t even think of the bitch as white.”
What they were saying shocked me. I knew all of those boys and I had never heard them talk like that. We walked on behind them for a while listening. Questions about who was killed, where, and why started running through my mind. I walked up to one of the boys.
“Eddie, what boy was killed?”
What happened in the conversation of this fourteen year old boy
“Moody, where’ve you been? he asked me. “Everybody talking about that fourteen-year-old boy who was killed In Greenwood by some White men. You don’t know nothing that’s going on besides what’s In them books of yours, huh?
Standing there before the rest of the girls, I felt so stupid. It was then that I realized I really didn’t know what was going on all around me. It wasn’t that I was dumb. It was just that ever since I was nine, I’d had to work after school and do my lessons on lunch hour. I never bad time to learn anything, to hang around with people my own age. And you never were told anything by adults.
That evening when I stopped off at the house on my way to Mrs. Burke’s, Mama was singing, Any other day she would have been yelling at Adline and Junior them to take off their school clothes. I wondered If she knew about Emmet Till. The way she was singing she had something on her mind and it wasn’t pleasant either