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Wednesday
Yesterday President Biden announced the establishment of a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the 14-year-old who was brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi and whose death helped launch the civil rights movement. The monument also honors Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who made sure the world experienced the horror of the murder by choosing to have an open casket funeral.
Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is one of many literary works that mentions the lynching. In a barbershop conversation, we see the men of the community attempt to process the event.
As with any discussion, there are multiple perspectives. Freddie, a shrewd operator, blames Emmett for being (as he sees it) stupid. Walter, a character who only appears this once, naively believes that the law will intervene. The others push back.
As protagonist Milkman enters the barbershop, the others are listening to the radio:
It was some time before Milkman discovered what they were so tense about. A young Negro boy had been found stomped to death in Sunflower County, Mississippi. There were no questions about who stomped him—his murderers had boasted freely—and there were no questions about the motive. The boy had whistled at some white woman, refused to deny he had slept with others, and was a Northerner visiting the South. His name was Till.
Railroad Tommy was trying to keep the noise down so he could hear the last syllable of the newscaster’s words. In a few seconds it was over, since the announcer had only a few speculations and even fewer facts. The minute he went on to another topic of news, the barbershop broke into loud conversation. Railroad Tommy, the one who had tried to maintain silence, was himself completely silent now. He moved to his razor strop while Hospital Tommy tried to keep his customer in the chair. Porter, Guitar, Freddie the janitor, and three or four other men were exploding, shouting angry epithets all over the room. Apart from Milkman, only Railroad Tommy and Empire State were quiet—Railroad Tommy because he was preoccupied with his razor and Empire State because he was simple, and probably mute, although nobody seemed sure about that. There was no question whatever about his being simple.
Milkman tried to focus on the crisscrossed conversations.
“It’ll be in the morning paper.”
“Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t,” said Porter.
“It was on the radio! Got to be in the paper!” said Freddie.
“They don’t put that kind of news in no white paper. Not unless he raped somebody.”
“What you bet? What you bet it’ll be in there?” said Freddie.
“Bet anything you can lose,” Porter answered.
“You on for five.”
“Wait a minute,” Porter shouted. “Say where.”
“What you mean, ‘where’? I got five says it’ll be in the morning paper.”
“On the sports page?” asked Hospital Tommy.
“Or the funny papers?” said Nero Brown.
“No, man. Front page. I bet five dollars on front page.”
“What the fuck is the difference?” shouted Guitar. “A kid is stomped and you standin round fussin about whether some cracker put it in the paper. He stomped, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Dead, ain’t he? Cause he whistled at some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.”
“What’d he do it for?” asked Freddie. “He knew he was in Mississippi. What he think that was? Tom Sawyer Land?”
“So he whistled! So what!” Guitar was steaming. “He supposed to die for that?”
“He from the North,” said Freddie. “Acting big down in Bilbo country. Who the hell he think he is?”
“Thought he was a man, that’s what,” said Railroad Tommy.
“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”
“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.
“Well, he thought wrong,” Freddie said. “Ain’t no black men in Bilbo country.”
“The hell they ain’t,” said Guitar.
“Who?” asked Freddie.
“Till. That’s who.”
“He dead. A dead man ain’t no man. A dead man is a corpse. That’s all. A corpse.”
“A living coward ain’t a man either,” said Porter.
“Who you talking to?” Freddie was quick to get the personal insult.
“Calm down, you two,” said Hospital Tommy.
The conversation continues as to whether the law will hold the men accountable. As it happens, the cynics will prove correct: even though the murderers talked openly about their crime, the jury still set them free. Our knowledge of this makes the subsequent discussion darkly ironic:
“I’m serious now,” Hospital Tommy went on. “There is no cause for all this. The boy’s dead. His mama’s screaming. Won’t let them bury him. That ought to be enough colored blood on the streets. You want to spill blood, spill the crackers’ blood that bashed his face in.”
“Oh, they’ll catch them,” said Walters.
“Catch ’em? Catch ’em?” Porter was astounded. “You out of your fuckin mind? They’ll catch ’em, all right, and give ’em a big party and a medal.”
“Yeah. The whole town planning a parade,” said Nero. “They got to catch ’em.”
“So they catch ’em. You think they’ll get any time? Not on your life!”
“How can they not give ’em time?” Walters’ voice was high and tight.
“How? Just don’t, that’s how.” Porter fidgeted with his watch chain.
“But everybody knows about it now. It’s all over. Everywhere. The law is the law.”
“You wanna bet? This is sure money!”
“You stupid, man. Real stupid. Ain’t no law for no colored man except the one sends him to the chair,” said Guitar.
“They say Till had a knife,” Freddie said.
“They always say that. He could of had a wad of bubble gum, they’d swear it was a hand grenade.”
“I still say he shoulda kept his mouth shut,” said Freddie.
“You should keep yours shut,” Guitar told him.
At this point the conversation turns to personal experiences of how the men have coped with racism. Some of the men turn to comedy, knowing (as Jews have also known) that sometimes laughter is the only way of handling a reality that is stacked against you:
The men began to trade tales of atrocities, first stories they had heard, then those they’d witnessed, and finally the things that had happened to themselves. A litany of personal humiliation, outrage, and anger turned sicklelike back to themselves as humor. They laughed then, uproariously, about the speed with which they had run, the pose they had assumed, the ruse they had invented to escape or decrease some threat to their manliness, their humanness.
We later learn that many of the men in the shop, including Guitar, are members of “the Seven Days,” a group that kills an innocent White for every innocent Black who is killed by Whites. In imagining the group, Morrison is exploring what happens when murderous violence responds to murderous violence. Angry though she herself is—the Seven Days is a dark wish fulfillment—she realizes that such violence can spiral out of control. In fact, by the end of the novel Guitar is not only going after Whites but after fellow Blacks who don’t see the world exactly as he sees it.
In fact, his shooting of Milkman’s aunt Pilate, who earlier put on a black mammy act to spring him and Milkman out of prison, shows the hatred ideologues have for people who find other ways to deal with oppression. His attempt to kill Milkman grows out of the paranoid delusions that his violence has brought on.
Toni Morrison uses her novel to find a balance between angry Black separatism and identity-denying Black assimilation. Milkman finds out who he is by connecting with and claiming his rich Black heritage, which in turn shows him a way forward. There are good reasons why Song of Solomon is Barack Obama’s favorite novel.
These days, the struggle is between those who want to erase this heritage and those who want to honor it. Although racists have demolished three previous signs indicating the spot where Emmett Till’s body was retrieved from the river, a New York sign company has created and installed a fourth sign, bullet proof and monitored, that appears here to stay. And although figures like Florida governor Ron DeSantis are attempting to rewrite this country’s racial past—in his case by having his Education Department essentially claim that slavery was like an unpaid internship or a skill-building program (!)—others are setting up national monuments so that we will never forget. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow said Monday night, “It’s good to remember it’s not just the authoritarian right that is ascendant as a global trend. It is also ‘resistance’ to authoritarianism that can be a global trend.”
Maddow concluded, “The fight back is ascendant too. Resilience matters.”
Let us hope.