From TWO TRAINS RUNNING (twotrainsrunning): 1959 October 06 Tuesday 18:29 ----------------------------------------- “You know what a pilgrimage is?” Rufus said. “A holy journey,” Moses answered, as if he had been expecting the question. “That’s right,” Rufus said, surprised. “And I took mine on September 3, 1955. On that day, I went to Chicago. So I could see that little boy, Emmett Till. See him in the coffin where the white man had put him.” “I remember that.” “His mother left the casket open so people could see—so the whole world could see—how they had tortured her child before they murdered him,” Rufus said, his voice throbbing. “It was supposed to be because the boy had whistled at a white woman. Not raped her, not killed her—whistled at her. Men came in the night and took him; didn’t make no secret about it. Everybody knew who they were. And they bragged about it all over town, too. Took some cracker jury about ten minutes to find them not guilty. Probably some of them on that jury, they were along for the ride that night themselves.” “Mississippi,” Moses said. “Yeah, Mississippi. And then the men who did it, they got paid for it. I read it in Look magazine, the whole thing. After that jury cut them loose, some reporter paid them to tell the true story, because you can’t try a man twice for the same crime. Every cracker’s dream, kill a black boy and get paid for it, too. Like a bounty on niggers.” “I read that story,” Moses said, evenly. “Didn’t it make you want to … kill a whole lot of whites?” “I don’t believe in killing by color.” “What do you mean?” “I mean, if I could pick, there’d be a whole lot of whites I’ve met in my life that needed killing. But I wouldn’t go kill a bunch of white men for what some other white men did.” “You mean, like they do us?” Rufus said, every syllable a challenge. “That’s not why they kill us,” Moses said, a teacher correcting a pupil. “Not for anything we ever did. That’s just their excuse. Like that ‘wolf whistle’ the Till boy was supposed to have done to that white woman.” “There’s plenty of them would kill all of us, they had the chance,” Rufus said. “Sure. Or put us back on the plantations. Or ship us back to Africa. But no matter how much they hate us, things is never going back to the way they was—the way they liked it.”
Posted on: Mon, 19 Jan 2015 10:30:57 +0000
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