A Wreath for Emmett Till Read online

  III.

  In this sonnet the tree speaks, describing its long life of witnessing natural deaths and killings, and the one unnatural killing, which was so horrible that it made part of the tree die.

  IV.

  This sonnet takes us back to the human voice of the poet. Emmett Till was a stutterer; his mother had encouraged him to whistle when he could not get a word out. He was lynched because a white woman in Money, Mississippi, said he had whistled at her.

  The White Sox were one of the two major league baseball teams based in Chicago in the 1950s. Because the White Sox home field was on the south side of the city, near the area where most of the African-Americans in Chicago lived, most of them were White Sox fans. If Emmett Till was a baseball fan, he would probably have wanted to wear a White Sox cap.

  V.

  This sonnet compares the pain of Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, to the pain of Mary, the mother of Jesus, who is also known to Christians as "the Mother of Sorrows." Mary was "proclaimed blest" by the angel who came to her at the Annunciation, when she was pregnant, and said, "Hail, Mary, Mother of God. Blessed art thou among women." Mamie Till Mobley insisted that her son should lie in an open casket so the world could see how savagely he had been murdered. His naked body was horribly mangled, his nose severed, his head cleaved nearly in two, one eye gouged out. For the rest of her life, Emmett's mother was an activist for civil rights. She died in 2003 at the age of eighty-one.

  VI.

  Some scientists now believe that there may be an infinite number of parallel universes and that we just hap pen to live in one of them. Superstring theory, hyperspace, and dark matter made physicists realize that the three dimensions they had thought described the universe weren't enough. There are actually eleven dimensions. Some physicists now think that our universe may be just one "bubble" among an infinite number of "bubbles" that ripple as they wobble through the eleventh dimension. The universes parallel to ours contain space, time, and matter. Some of them may even contain us, in a slightly different form. Science-fiction writers have enjoyed speculating about what a parallel universe might be like.

  The biblical Cain, one of the sons of Adam and Eve, committed the first murder when he killed his brother Abel.

  In physics, a wormhole is a tunnel in the geometry of space-time, postulated to connect different parts of the universe or to enable time travel.

  VII.

  This sonnet considers the lives Emmett Till might have lived in several parallel universes. Would he have grown up to marry and be a father? Would he have been a great man? Would his memory have been mourned and honored? Would he have died on September 11, 2001, saving people from the monsters who caused so many deaths in the World Trade Center?

  VIII.

  The thought of "monsters" leads to the thought of monster movies, in which we identify with the trapped and powerless victims. The "blind girl" described here alludes to the 1967 film Wait Until Dark, which starred Audrey Hepburn as a blind girl trapped in her apartment and terrorized by a psychotic killer. In the poem, the monsters turn out to be the same kind of "monsters" who attacked Emmett Till: ordinary people, neighbors, friends. Mob mentality transforms ordinary thinking and caring people into an entity with no mind, no heart, and no God.

  IX.

  Awakening from the scary movie, we enter a real-life nightmare, more horrible than a scene from a movie. Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American lynch mobs often took photographs of their victims, burning heaps of human flesh or hanged naked men, surrounded by grinning crowds. These were sent as postcards to friends and relatives. A recent book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (edited by James Allen, Twin Palms Publishers, 2000) includes some eighty of these. The descriptions of lynch mobs in this sonnet are based on that book.

  This sonnet is all one sentence, the speed of which accelerates as it lists details of lynchings and other real-life nightmares in which neighbors slaughtered their neighbors. "Machetes" is a hinted reference to the genocidal attacks on Rwanda's Tutsi people by their Hutu neighbors; "piles of shoes" hints at the Nazi gas chambers; "bulldozed mass graves" hints at the genocidal attacks of Serbs on ethnic Albanians in the land once known as Yugoslavia.

  "The broken towers" alludes to the World Trade Center and to the towers of Troy, the city-state destroyed in the Trojan War.

  X.

  There are several literary allusions in this sonnet:

  "Lilacs from the dooryard" alludes to Walt Whitman's great elegy for Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed."

  "Pathless woods" alludes to Robert Frost's poem "Birches."

  "Choirs of small birds" alludes to Shakespeare's sonnet #73.

  "In my house there is still" alludes to a speech by the mother in Lorraine Hansberry's 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun.

  "Ice shards of hate" alludes to Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen."

  XI.

  Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings and of gates, lent his name to the month of January. He was depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions, both forward and backward.

  "Speaks with forked tongue" alludes to a Native American saying about the whites who made treaties with tribes, then broke them.

  XII.

  "Consciencelessness," or lacking a conscience, in this sonnet describes the simple innocence of the natural world, which transcends human morality.

  XIII.

  This sonnet continues the description of the "consciencelessness" of the natural world, but then leaps to consider how and when the human world displays similar "consciencelessness." It suggests this happens when a nation forgets right and wrong and tries to wage war against fear itself. The sonnet alludes to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 inauguration speech in which he said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

  XIV.

  "Orators denouncing the slavery/to fear" alludes to the abolitionists (including William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, and Susan B. Anthony) of the middle nineteenth century, who risked their reputations, their safety, and their lives by speaking out against slavery.

  XV.

  This last sonnet is composed of the first lines from the preceding fourteen sonnets.

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  Artist's Note

  This poem is structured much like a painting. It has symbols, layers, colors, geometry, and even a sense of space. I have tried to translate these elements into paint and to render the poem's rhythm through a succession of small and large images. My approach was to emphasize the contrast between the delicate and decorative natural elements, such as flowers, with the sheer horror of the crime. I divided the poem into three parts, demarcated by "interludes" of green, a calm and remote color.

  I named the first part "the crime." Using the color red, I painted a tree cut in half to symbolize Emmett Till's suffering. I did not want to be too literal here, showing his actual body, since I felt a symbol would be more thought-provoking. For me, the tree becomes both the place of Emmett's execution and the symbol of his corpse. On the tree stump, the mandrake plant, with its anthropomorphic shape, is a metaphor for Emmett's victimhood (traditionally, the mandrake was depicted as growing under gallows).

  The crows surrounding the scene have a double meaning. For nineteenth-century Romantic poets, crows represented death and had a strong negative connotation. In this sense, the crows are Emmett Till's murderers. But in many civilizations, such as the Native Americans and the Egyptians, crows are a positive image. In ancient Egypt, the crow led the soul on its journey from life to death. In that sense, the birds serve as guides.

  Emmett's face is surrounded by a wreath of wires, chains, and thorns. This depicts the means of his murder, but is also a biblical reference to Jesus' crown and martyrdom.

  I used the elliptic shape to unite the elements of the first part, alluding to the wreath's shape; the stage on which the action takes place; and the "cos
mic egg," the mythological origin of the universe.

  I call the second part "the mourning." In this section, I used earthy mineral colors for loss. The brown background represents earth and death, but also transformation into new life, new meaning.

  In contrast to the other parts, the rectangle was used throughout this second section: it is a coffin when placed horizontally, an evocation of the World Trade Center when tilted vertically. Flowers are placed in these dark settings, for hope and transcendence. The double-page spread depicts a number of coffins, one of which holds the image of Emmett Till. This stands as an icon of all anonymous victims.

  The third part, what I call "the lesson," uses plenty of orange and yellow-for hope. Ellipses overlap here, fusing black and white within one's own consciousness, reflecting the contrasting forces present in the poem-subtle and brutal, ideal and destructive. A Wreath For Emmett Till challenges us to recognize these forces within ourselves, our cultures, our governments, and the way we treat our environment. I have tried to illustrate this challenge and the poem's assurance that by bringing to light the hidden forces behind our actions, we can change the world.

  —Philippe Lardy

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  References

  WEB SITE

  The Murder of Emmett Till: www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till.

  The PBS site feature is a companion to the PBS film about Emmett Till and includes primary sources, stories, a timeline, and a teacher's guide.

  BOOKS

  Crowe, Chris. Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. New York: Dial, 2003.

  Metress, Christopher. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

  Till-Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. New York: Random House, 2003.

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