PATRICIA SMITH<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nPrairie winds blaze through her tumbled belly, and Emmett\u2019s<\/span><\/p>\nred yesterdays refuse to rename her any kind of mother.<\/span><\/p>\nA pudge-cheeked otherwise, sugar whistler, her boy is<\/span><\/p>\n(through the fierce clenching mouth of her memory) a<\/span><\/p>\ngrays-and-shadows child.\u00a0Listen<\/i>. Once she was pretty.<\/span><\/p>\nWindy hues goldened her skin. She was pert, brown-faced,<\/span><\/p>\nin every wide way the opposite of the raw, screeching thing<\/span><\/p>\nchaos has crafted. Now, threaded awkwardly, she tires of the<\/span><\/p>\nsorries<\/i>, the\u00a0Lawd have mercies<\/i>. Grief\u2019s damnable tint<\/span><\/p>\nis everywhere, darkening days she is no longer aware of.<\/span><\/p>\nShe is gospel revolving, repeatedly emptied of light, pulled<\/span><\/p>\nand caressed, cooed upon by strangers, offered pork and taffy.<\/span><\/p>\nBoys in the street stare at her, then avert their eyes, as if she<\/span><\/p>\nkilled them all, shipped every one into the grips of Delta. She sits,<\/span><\/p>\nher chair carefully balanced on hell\u2019s edge, and pays for sanity in<\/span><\/p>\nkisses upon the conjured forehead of her son. Beginning with A,<\/span><\/p>\nshe recites (angry, away, awful<\/i>) the alphabet of a world gone red.<\/span><\/p>\nCoffee scorches her throat as church ladies drift about her room,<\/span><\/p>\nblack garb sweating their hips, filling cups with tap water, drinking,<\/span><\/p>\ndrinking in glimpses of her steep undoing. The absence of a black<\/span><\/p>\nroomful of boy is measured, again, again. In the clutches of coffee,<\/span><\/p>\nred-eyed, Mamie knows their well-meaning murmur. One says\u00a0She<\/i><\/span><\/p>\na mama, still. Once you have a chile, you always a mama.<\/i>\u00a0Kisses<\/span><\/p>\nin multitudes rain from their dusty Baptist mouths, drowning her.<\/span><\/p>\nSit still<\/i>, she thinks,\u00a0til they remember how your boy was killed<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\nShe remembers. Gush and implosion, crushed, slippery, not a boy.<\/span><\/p>\nTaffeta and hymnals all these women know, not a son lost and<\/span><\/p>\npulled from the wretched and rumbling Tallahatchie. Mamie, she<\/span><\/p>\nof the hollowed womb, is nobody\u2019s mama anymore. She is<\/span><\/p>\ntinted echo, barren. Everything about her makes the sound sorry.<\/span><\/p>\nThe white man\u2019s hands on her child, dangled eye, twanging chaos<\/i>,<\/span><\/p>\nthings that she leans on, the only doors that open to let her in.<\/span><\/p>\nFaced with days and days of no him, she lets Chicago\u2009\u2014\u2009windy,<\/span><\/p>\npretty in the ways of the North\u2009\u2014\u2009console her with its boorish grays.<\/span><\/p>\nA hug, more mourners and platters of fat meat. Will she make it through?<\/span><\/p>\nIs this how the face slap of sorrow changes the shape of a<\/span><\/p>\nmother? All the boys she sees now are laughing, drenched in red.<\/span><\/p>\nEmmett, in dreams, sings\u00a0I am gold<\/i>. He tells how dry it is, the prairie.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Mamie Carthan was born on November 23rd, 1921 in the small town of Webb, Mississippi.\u00a0 <\/span>Shortly afterwards, she and her parents moved to Argo, Illinois so her father could work in a corn processing factory.\u00a0 <\/span>They were part of a large exodus of African-Americans from the Jim Crow South who looked for greater opportunity up North.<\/span><\/p>\n Mamie was a hardworking and intelligent youth.\u00a0 <\/span>She was the first African-American student to make the A honor roll in the nearly all white Argo High School – and the fourth African-American to graduate from it.<\/span><\/p>\n At age 18, she met and fell in love with an amateur boxer, Louis Till.\u00a0 <\/span>Mamie\u2019s parents did not approve, but she married Louis anyway and nine months later gave birth to her first and only child – Emmett Till.<\/span><\/p>\n After a divorce two years later, Mamie raised Emmett as a single mother on the South Side of Chicago.\u00a0 <\/span>She worked as a clerk for the Air Force and earned wages that placed her well within the middle class.\u00a0 <\/span>When Emmett was five, he contracted polio and was hospitalized.\u00a0 <\/span>He recovered but, as a result of the disease, developed a persistent verbal stutter.<\/span><\/p>\n Mamie\u2019s son was a happy, fun loving boy who loved doo-wop music and Jack Benny.\u00a0 <\/span>He was popular and the center of attention at school.\u00a0 <\/span>Emmett was also fiercely loyal to his mother.\u00a0 <\/span>Their relationship was loving, protective and close. <\/span><\/p>\n During the summer of 1955, Mamie\u2019s uncle, Moses Wright, visited Mamie and Emmett.\u00a0 <\/span>He was a sharecropper and part-time minister in the Mississippi Delta region.\u00a0 <\/span>Emmett, who had only known life in a big city, was captivated by Moses\u2019 stories of fishing and tromping through rural bayous and backwoods.\u00a0 <\/span>Mamie was pleased her 14 yer old son, who had never known his father, looked up to Moses.\u00a0 <\/span>When he suggested Emmett return with him for a vacation in Mississippi, Mamie reluctantly agreed.<\/span><\/p>\n Before he departed Chicago, however, she warned Emmett about how to behave as a black male in Mississippi.\u00a0 <\/span>She told him, \u201cIf you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person passes, do it willingly.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>In her book, <\/span>The Death of Innocence<\/span>, written years later, Mamie said she was anguished about allowing Emmett to visit Mississippi.\u00a0 <\/span>She was only two when she left that state but she\u2019d heard stories from her parents about white supremacy and lynchings of blacks in the state.\u00a0 <\/span>For her, Mississippi was an alien and dangerous place.<\/span><\/p>\n Mamie\u2019s fears for her son in Mississippi proved valid.\u00a0 <\/span>One Sunday morning, Emmett and other boys played hooky from his uncle\u2019s church.\u00a0 <\/span>They went to a local grocery to buy candy. \u00a0 <\/span>The store was owned by Roy Bryant and managed by his wife Carolyn.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What happened in the store is not fully clear, but most facts indicate Emmett encountered the young and pretty Carolyn. \u00a0 <\/span>Emmett may have been attracted to her, got nervous speaking with her, and began to stutter – due to his childhood bout with polio.\u00a0 <\/span>Mamie had taught her only child to whistle softly to himself when that happened – as a way to calm himself and speak more clearly.\u00a0 <\/span>His friends say Emmett never physically or verbally accosted Carolyn. \u00a0 <\/span>Forty-three years later, Carolyn admitted Emmett said and did nothing menacing.\u00a0 <\/span>Nevertheless, she acted offended at the time and quickly told her husband that a husky black teen had not only whistled at her, he\u2019d made sexual advances.<\/span><\/p>\n Late the next night, Roy Bryant and his cousin drove to Moses Wright\u2019s house and kidnapped Emmett Till.\u00a0 <\/span>They tied him, put him in the back of their truck and raced away.\u00a0 <\/span>Moses Wright spent the night searching for Emmett – hoping to find a beaten but still alive nephew.<\/span><\/p>\n Three days later, the body of a naked black boy was found floating in the Tallahatchie River.\u00a0 <\/span>It was unrecognizable.\u00a0 <\/span>It was later identified as Emmett Till because the body wore a small ring recently given to him.\u00a0 <\/span>Emmett was bloated, had barbed wire bound around his neck, he\u2019d been dragged behind a truck, had his tongue cut off, one eye gouged out, and the side of his head smashed in.<\/span><\/p>\n The local sheriff encouraged a speedy Mississippi burial.\u00a0 <\/span>Mamie refused.\u00a0 <\/span>She asked that Emmett be placed in ice and returned to Chicago.\u00a0 <\/span>Later, she instructed that her son\u2019s funeral be open casket.\u00a0 <\/span>His death had become national news – a young African-American boy lynched in the deep South for doing nothing more than whistling in the presence of a white woman.\u00a0 <\/span>Fifty-thousand people came to Emmett\u2019s funeral.\u00a0 <\/span>Many were overcome by the sight and smell of his body.\u00a0 <\/span>Photographs of Emmett\u2019s horribly disfigured face were published in newspapers around the world.<\/span><\/p>\n Mamie told the press that the world needed to see what had been done to her son. \u00a0 <\/span>In her book she wrote, “Have you ever sent a beloved son on vacation, and had him returned to you in a pine box, so horribly battered and water-logged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son, lynched?\u00a0 <\/span>People had to face my son and realize just how twisted, how distorted, how terrifying race hatred could be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n One month later Roy Bryant and his cousin were put on trial in Mississippi.\u00a0 <\/span>Mamie flew down to testify.\u00a0 <\/span>Emmett\u2019s uncle also testified and, in doing so, displayed the kind of courage few black men in the South dared show.\u00a0 <\/span>Defense lawyers questioned whether Emmett was dead by claiming the body pulled from the Tallahatchie was not him.\u00a0 <\/span>The ring had been placed on it.\u00a0 <\/span>Emmett, they suggested, had run away and was up to no good.\u00a0 <\/span>The all-white jury spent 67 minutes deliberating – with the foreman stating that if it weren\u2019t for a soda-pop break, it would have been much shorter.\u00a0 <\/span>The two defendants were found not guilty.<\/span><\/p>\n One year later, now immune from prosecution under double jeopardy laws, the two were paid by Look magazine for an interview.\u00a0 <\/span>They admitted they murdered Emmett saying he\u2019d still be alive if he hadn\u2019t acted equal to whites.\u00a0 <\/span>He and other black boys needed to be taught a lesson.<\/span><\/p>\n Emmett\u2019s lynching is credited with igniting the modern Civil Rights movement.\u00a0 <\/span>Langston Hughes wrote a poem soon after.\u00a0 <\/span>Toni Morrison wrote a play.\u00a0 <\/span>Bob Dylan composed a song and only three months later, Rosa Parks said that when she was ordered to the back of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, she thought of Emmett Till and thus refused.<\/span><\/p>\n Gwendolyn Brooks wrote her famous poem \u201cThe Last Quatrain of the Ballad Of Emmett Till\u201d as a tribute.\u00a0 <\/span>Brooks is considered by most scholars to be one of the foremost 20th century American poets.\u00a0 <\/span>She was the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize.<\/span><\/p>\n This past March, an assembly of poets continued an annual tradition called the Golden Shovel Award in which writers are asked to honor a deceased poet by taking a line from their best poem and incorporating its words into a new and freshly written poem.\u00a0 <\/span>This year they honored Brooks and her poem about Emmett Till.<\/span><\/p>\n Patricia Smith, an acclaimed contemporary African-American poet, then wrote the poem I consider today – Black, Poured Directly Into the Wound<\/i><\/b>.\u00a0 <\/span>This message is the second in my August series I\u2019ve entitled “Summer Poetry for Reflection.”<\/span><\/p>\n What I find poignant in Smith\u2019s poem is its focus on Mamie and <\/span>her <\/b><\/span>grief.\u00a0 <\/span>The poem is immediately relevant because it captures not just the feelings of every grieving mother, but more importantly of today\u2019s black mothers whose sons have been unjustly murdered. \u00a0 <\/span>The poem is neither political or angry. \u00a0 <\/span>Instead, it goes beyond surface emotions to plumb the depths of grief felt by a black<\/i><\/b> mother – her pain, her struggle to make sense of horrific tragedy, her obligation to grieve in ways that transform a son\u2019s killing into a cause.<\/span><\/p>\n In Smith\u2019s poem, Mamie\u2019s world is turned upside down. \u00a0 <\/span>Images in the poem evoke that kind of ironic <\/span>inversion<\/b><\/span>.\u00a0 <\/span>The world is no longer blue and green.\u00a0 <\/span>It\u2019s red and full of doom.\u00a0 <\/span>Mamie is no longer pretty, pert and golden skinned.\u00a0 <\/span>She\u2019s raw, red eyed, screeching, and threaded awkwardly.\u00a0 <\/span>She\u2019s gospel – or good news – revolving into a symbol of bad news.\u00a0 <\/span>She\u2019s a victim and yet she\u2019s not.\u00a0 <\/span>Emmett’s friends blame her as the one who sent him off to be lynched.\u00a0 <\/span>She\u2019s thus emblematic of how too often our culture blames black victims for their injury.<\/span><\/p>\n Mamie is still a mother, \u201conce you have a chile, you always a mama,\u201d the poem says.\u00a0 <\/span>And yet Mamie isn\u2019t.\u00a0 <\/span>She, with a hollowed womb, is an echo of what she once was.\u00a0 <\/span>She\u2019s nobody\u2019s mama anymore.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The once golden hued boys who played with her son, she sees them as drenched in red.\u00a0 <\/span>They too await a bloody end.\u00a0 <\/span>And Emmett, whose body is <\/span>literally<\/b><\/span> fat meat, he inhabits her dreams wreathed in gold – a halo wearing son marching through a dusty eternity.\u00a0 <\/span>Mamie\u2019s grief wound is thus aggravated not by salt<\/i><\/b> poured into it – but by all the history of <\/span>blackness<\/i><\/b><\/span>. <\/span><\/p>\n I often encourage empathy.\u00a0 <\/span>Patricia Smith\u2019s poem does the same.\u00a0 <\/span>Her poem cries out with the anguish of a black mother – emotions nobody but she can feel. \u00a0 <\/span>We\u2019re asked to not just understand those feelings, but literally feel her confusion, anger, disconnection, numbness, and gut wrenching grief.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n It takes all I can muster to imagine the worry and grief of a black mother. \u00a0 <\/span>When tragedy comes to the Mamie Tills, Sabrina Fultons (mom of Travon Martin) or the Samaria Rices (mom of 12 year old Tamir – killed by Cleveland police as he played with a toy gun), they are expected to be the face of every mom\u2019s grief – all the better for whites to feel empathy.\u00a0 <\/span>And yet whites can\u2019t fully offer that.\u00a0 <\/span>Our experiences of sorrow and prejudice and fear is too limited.<\/span><\/p>\n Black mothers and their sons have a distorted relationship due to centuries of racism.\u00a0 <\/span>Mother\u2019s who were slaves had to watch as their beloved babies – particularly their sons – were ripped away and sold for profit.\u00a0 <\/span>Solomon Northrup\u2019s narrative in <\/span>Twelve Year\u2019s a Slave<\/span> describes seeing the mother Eliza plead and cry hysterically for her master not to sell her son – and then be threatened with whipping unless she stopped.<\/span><\/p>\n The same scene was replayed under different circumstances, but identical context, when Leslie McSpadden, mother of Freddie Gray who was tumbled to death in the back of a police van, collapsed with anguished cries after hearing her son was dead.\u00a0 <\/span>She later said the news made her feel as if <\/span>she<\/b><\/span> had been killed.\u00a0 <\/span>\u201cThere was,\u201d she said, \u201ca feeling that there was no respect, no sympathy, nothing for my son.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n Black mothers are often blamed for their tough discipline of boys, for their seeming lack of tenderness, for their often angry attitudes toward men.\u00a0 <\/span>Patricia Smith reminds us, however, of the love a black mother has for her sons, for her keening grief at their deaths, and for their obsessive protections over them – yelling, cajoling and even encouraging their emasculation – all to somehow save them from tragedy.<\/span><\/p>\n My relationship with my mom – and that of other gay men with their moms – is nowhere near as fraught and pained as it must be for black men and their mothers.\u00a0 <\/span>But I believe there are faint echoes of similarity.\u00a0 <\/span>Reflecting on Smith\u2019s poem, I can hear those faint echoes in <\/span>