MY LAST ENTRY, THOUGH I MAY EDIT/ADD UNTIL I DIE:

I am so glad I took this trip -- glad to see sites that I have studied much of my life, glad to spend time with Amity and James (and to have Amity travel back to North Carolina with me), glad to spend time pondering and writing about my experiences, glad to know that a few of you were actually reading what I wrote. I appreciate and admire your stamina.

SERENDIPITY happened on this trip:

1) A couple of days before I left for Austin, a co-worker recommended The Help by Kathryn Stockett. I bought the book on CD and listened to it as I drove to Austin. I just happened to hear the chapter about Medgar Evers's death the night before I saw his home in Jackson. And my niece Haley, who lives in Memphis, recommended the book to me just this morning, not knowing I had "read" it. (Again, I recommend this book to you. :-)

2) As I said in one of the first entries (July 1), my friend Lisa gave me a magazine article before reporting on the annual celebration of To Kill A Mockingbird in Monroeville, Alabama.
As I prepared to leave Nashville on Sunday morning (July 11) -- as Amity practiced yoga in a studio nearby -- I turned on CBS Sunday Morning and saw a segment about the annual celebration of To Kill A Mockingbird in Monroeville, Alabama. Nice "bookends" for the trip! Lee's book, and the subsequent movie, both speak to my considerations of race on this trip, and Monroeville is so typical of many small towns in the Deep South during that time.

3) The Medgar Evers home (and museum) is not open except by appointment. I happened to drive by at a time that the curator was there. She gave me a personal tour, we talked a long while, and she had known Medgar Evers in the early 60s. She is still in touch with his wife and brother.

4) While exploring Money, Mississippi I met an old gentleman who knew all about the Emmett Till case (though he "wasn't telling all he knew" :-) ) and who had knew the primary figures in that case.

5) I spent a wonderful five days with Amity, James, Ruby, and Holden -- and was lucky enough to have Amity beside me on the long trek home! I went to yoga class three times. I ate cupcakes and watched Ruby play in the dog park and helped Amity pick out a dress for a friend's wedding (September) and went swimming with James and drank a gin and tonic by the pool.

6) I think I drove about 3,000 miles on this trip -- many hundreds of it through land that was as flat as a pancake. As we drove on I-40 through Tennessee and I saw that first mountain in the distance, I realized anew the beauty of the place where I grew up and call home.

Thanks for reading these entries!

On Saturday we drove north from Money, Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee. There we visited the National Civil Rights Museum and the site of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I had seen the Civil Rights Museum in Birmingham, Alabama, which is across from Kelley Ingram Park and connected with the 16th Street Baptist Church (which was bombed in 1963, killing four young girls who were preparing for the church service on Sunday morning).

I had more time in the Birmingham site -- went through it twice, actually. I spent a much shorter time in the Memphis Museum, but found it equally informative and moving.

My impression from seeing both Museums is that the one in Birmingham focuses more particularly on the Civil Rights Movement (though it certainly contains other elements, as well), while the Memphis site speaks to the whole of the African American experience in America.

One photo on this page (if, indeed, I was actually able to get it on the page!) you will surely recognize. It is the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King was shot in 1967.

A part of the Museum is across the street -- the boarding house from where his assassin fired the shot.

The other photograph you may not recognize: it is part of a huge wall, in three or four parts, and is in the entrance of the Memphis museum. The wall depicts hundreds of bodies, climbing upward -- up a mountain? "I have been to the mountaintop . . . " Up From Slavery? The sculpture is beautiful and so moving -- and I wasn't supposed to be taking photographs of it. Before entering the museum proper I made the mistake of asking if I could take photographs, and the answer was (understandably) "NO." So I recommend that you travel to Memphis and see the Museum yourself. In it you will see thousands of images, so you'd better plan to stay weeks instead of hours. In it you will see exhibits about -- among other things:

The Integration of Little Rock High School

Marcus Garvey

W.E.B. DuBois

Martin Luther King (many of these)

Lunch Counter Sit-Ins

Voter Registration

Medgar Evers

Harriet Tubman

Sojourner Truth

The Scottsboro Boys

Freedom Summer

The Freedom Riders

Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman

Emmett Till and Mose Wright

The March on Washington

The Selma March

Ida B. Wells

Gandhi

Nelson Mandela

Letter from Birmingham Jail

And There's MORE!!!!!!!!!!

You name it: If it is about Civil Rights (in American or around the world), it is in there. Plan to spend five weeks, eight hours a day. And walk slowly.

Another view of "Main Street, Money, MS," which is about the length of a football field. Maybe shorter.

And now about my visit with an eighty-seven-year-old man who lived in Money at the time of the Emmett Till murder.

On instinct, after taking photos of the Bryant Store, I drove down a small paved road opposite the store, over railroad tracks, and between two huge fields of -- cotton? (See past blog about recognizing nothing but corn if it grows in quantities bigger than a bread box.) We do know that these acres grew cotton in 1955.

A couple of miles down the road we passed a house on the right -- an older house with a tin roof and lots of big shade trees in the yard. A man was sitting out in his yard under a beautiful, old tree, repairing something. There was a modern vehicle in the yard, too, and three dogs under it, and a couple of cats lying in the sun. We had seen only one other human being since leaving Greenwood.

We passed the gentleman by and drove down to where I thought Wright's place would have been in '55, then turned around when the road started to turn from pavement to loose dirt. Nobody else anywhere, except for the man in his yard.

On the second turn I said to Amity, "I'm going to stop and ask that gentleman if he knows for sure where the Wright house stood."

I pulled over, stopped, got out of the car and approached the man, arm extended. "Hello, Sir!" The dogs loped toward me.

"Do your dogs bite?" I asked, smiling.

"Well, they have teeth," he answered.

"I'm Wanda Taylor. I'm traveling through here from North Carolina. I wonder if you might tell me where the Moses Wright house stood . . . ?"

"Oh, yes! I know where it stood . . . ." He pointed down the road. "It's the second house down. Just a few hundred feet down there."

If he had been at all unfriendly I would have thanked him and left, but he was welcoming and didn't seem to mind talking at all. "I know where his house was, and I knew Mo' Wright." (He called him "Mo'" instead of Mose or Moses.)

"You knew him! Did you ever talk with him?"

"Nope. Never had reason to talk with him. He worked on the Grove (Grover?) plantation, all this property around here. That was a bad time when that Till thing happened. It was bad around here."

"Bad -- for you?" (and for Emmett Till . . . ?)

"Bad for everybody."

He told me about how long he lived in this house ("fifty years"), about his two children and three grandchildren.

[Mose Wright left Mississippi as soon as he finished testifying at the trial.

"Do you see the man you say took the boy from your house?"

Wright stood up in that courtroom full of hatred and pointed to the defense table.

" 'Dar he." [There he is. That's the man. Those are the men.]

Wright couldn't have lived much longer had he stayed in Mississippi; he moved to Chicago and never returned to the South.

"How old are you, Preacher?" Milam had asked Wright the night he took Till from his house.

"Sixty-four," he answered.

"You make any trouble, and you ain't gonna live to see sixty-five." ]

I told the eighty-seven-year-old gentleman a bit about the mountains of North Carolina, and he told me he hated North Carolina -- had spent nine years in the military (World War II and the Korean War), and some of that time was spent at Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, Georgia. He hated Fort Benning, too. We talked about his military career (Algiers, Italy). We talked about his trees.

"You knew Moses Wright -- did you know J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant?"

"Yes. I knew 'em."

"They're both dead now, aren't they . . . ."

"Yes. And she is, too." [Carolyn Bryant]

He told me where he went to college, told me about his Black friends. "I never had any trouble with 'em. We got along just fine." (Hmmmm. Where have I heard that before? Most recently from listening to The Help on CD as I drove across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and east Texas.) He told me that Emmett Till was "full of himself" and that he "should have gotten his butt back up to Chicago when he had a chance." (Till had a three-day window of time that he could have escaped -- gone back to Chicago before Milam and Bryant came back to town. He just had no idea what he was up against.)

"I'll bet you have lots of people stopping to ask you about the Till case." I commented.

He said that yes indeed, he does. "You never know who you're talkin' to," he said. "Had one fellow come here, askin' questions, said he was from Florida. But we talked a while longer and I found out he was from New York! New York! People will lie, wantin' to get information."

I assured him that I'm from a small town in North Carolina, and as honest as the day is long.

We talked a while longer about nothing in particular. About the "damned casinos" they're putting up for the Choctaws. "Oh, those Choctaws are doin' fine now," he said. We talked about gambling in general.

I introduced him to Amity, who had sat in the car all this time. "Amity. That's a pretty name," he told her.

And then he said, "You know, I don't tell everything I know."

"You don't, eh?"

"No. You can't afford to tell everything you know."

I teased him, "You can afford to tell me anything, because I live in North Carolina and you'll never see me again!" (I won't publish your name on my blog. You have my word . . . .)

But he didn't tell all. And I didn't ask all that I wanted to ask. A thirty-minute encounter -- however friendly -- doesn't give me permission to pry into his secrets. Even if we had all day to talk, and even had I been inclined to argue some points of the Till case with him, there would have been no point. Even if he were my father, there would have been no point.

I don't project anything onto this man's past. He was an old man who welcomed me and was willing to answer (some of) my questions. He had actually seen Moses Wright -- one of the most courageous men I ever encountered, in history or otherwise. And he had actually known J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant -- two of the most despicable, cowardly men I ever encountered, in history or otherwise.

All players in this drama were products of time and place; how do courage and cowardice grow in any person of any time and place?

I am one who feels a thrill of -- connection -- just being in the space where an important historical event happened. And that sense is enhanced -- sometimes even sanctified -- by a human connection.

Dear Reader (if, indeed, you are reading this): I can only begin to tell you how frustrating it is to attempt to post photos on this blog when I don't know what the hell I'm doing. In an early post I placed a photo of my friend Val near a paragraph about James Earl Chaney. They are not the same, nor should they be considered such. ("Why doncha jist write it acrost m' fore-head: F-A-Y-L-U-R!!!" ) I am terrified of writing for two hours, playing around with this thing, and then accidentally erasing everything I've written, deleting all my photos of the trip, and melting my monitor.

LET US CONTINUE AS BEST WE CAN UNDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES:

On Saturday, July 10, Amity and I drove north, through the town of Greenwood, and then drove Hwy #7 to Money.

I knew that Robert Johnson's grave was supposed to be around Greenwood somewhere -- and though I wasn't specifically looking for it, there is a marker (above) on the road between Greenwood and Money. I also took a photo of the little churchyard and graveyard near the marker, but don't know where to post it.

"I have all of Robert Johnson's recorded songs on CD at home!" I told Amity. She was only mildly impressed. Listening to those in the car would have greatly enhanced my Delta experience, if I had only thought of it.

The photo to the right (above) is what is left of Bryant's Grocery in Money, Mississippi.

It seems strange to me that everyone wouldn't know every single detail of the Emmett Till case, as long and hard as I have studied it -- but then many of us wear blinders where our own interests are concerned. My idea of heaven (and hell) is to stand in the spot where some monumental historic event happened and to imagine the place at the time of the event. Can't help it; I was born that way.

HISTORY LESSON: In the summer of 1955 a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, went to Money, Mississippi, to spend some time with this great-uncle, Moses Wright. Wright worked cotton on the Graves plantation outside Money.

Emmett ("Bo") was an only child, big for his age, a prankster, and completely oblivious to the cultural differences between the city of Chicago and the very rural South. Before he left Chicago, his mother (who moved to Chicago when she was a child but who had strong family links to Mississipppi) warned him to be extremely careful in dealing with White people in the South.

On Wednesday, August 21, after having worked half a day in the cotton field, Emmett rode with this cousins into Money to hang out at Bryant's Store.

In 1955 the town of Money had one street and only five or six stores. Bryant's Store was owned by (and was the residence of) Roy Bryant and his wife, Carolyn, and served as a grocery and "hangout" for the sharecroppers living nearby.

On August 21st only Carolyn was working in the store; her husband was out of town. According to one of Emmett's cousins, as they drank Nehis on the porch Emmett bragged about his White girlfriend(s) in Chicago, and another young man in the group dared him to go inside the store and "make a date" with the White woman there.

Nobody knows exactly what happened then; the only two people in the store when it happened are dead. Some say Emmett bought gum and then turned at the door and whistled at Carolyn as he left. Others say he grabbed Carolyn's hand as she handed him change. Others say he blocked the door as she tried to go to her living quarters through a back door.

At any rate, what he did seemed serious enough to his companions that they feared Mrs. Bryant was going to get a gun, and they jumped into Wright's truck and drove away as quickly as they could. (Of course, even a Black man's failing to step off a sidewalk to let a White person pass was a "serious offense" in that time and place.) As they drove away, Emmett begged his cousins not to tell Wright about the incident.

At 2:00 AM Sunday morning (August 25th), J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant -- who had been out of town on the night of the incident -- showed up at Wright's place, entered with a gun and a flashlight, and demanded to see Emmett Till.

They threatened Wright and the rest of his family, forced Till into their car, and left.

Three days later Till's body was found in the Tallahatchie River, severely beaten, shot in the head.

Surprisingly, Milam and Bryant were arrested immediately. Not surprisingly, they were tried an acquitted by an all-white, male jury after just a few minutes of deliberation.

Immediately upon learning of her son's disappearance, Mamie Till notified Chicago authorities and the newspapers. She insisted that Emmett's body be returned to Chicago (the local authorites were eager to bury him in Mississippi immediately), and she displayed his body at the funeral in Chicago.

She -- and numerous northern photographers, reporters, and a Black Congressman -- were in Sumner, Mississippi for the trial. The case became a huge national story and (some believe) was the catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.

END OF LESSON

(written Monday morning, July 12, 2010 morning after my return home)

regarding: SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2010

from Vicksburg to Memphis to Nashville

THIS WILL BE A LONG ENTRY BECAUSE IT WAS A LONG, EVENTFUL DAY. I fear that the familiarity of home and the preparation for getting back to work will make me forget everything, so I write at length today. For those who have faithfully "followed" me on this trip, remember that there is no way for me to check if you read the whole entry, and there will not be a test at the end.

VICKSBURG, MISSISSIPPI: We (Amity, my sidekick and I) stayed in the hotel in Vicksburg -- arriving very late on Friday night and leaving very early on Saturday morning. I did want to drive the few miles back from the hotel to the Welcome Center, mostly because I wanted to see if there was printed information on the Delta -- mostly Greenwood and Money -- and to take a photograph of the mighty Mississippi.

I admit that I haven't even glanced at the copy of Twain's Life on the Mississippi I brought along -- too busy reading The Eyes of Willie McGee; Letters from Mississippi : Personal Reports from Volunteers in The Summer Freedom Project, 1964; Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case; and The 2011 Rand McNally Road Atlas.

When I went to the Welcome Center and asked about information on the Emmett Till case, the older White lady behind the counter looked at me funny and said she didn't know about that. My guess is that she -- and many other people of her generation in Mississippi -- would rather forget that case. (Or, hey. Maybe her memory is like mine and she actually has forgotten it .)The same thing happened to me in 1974 when I was in Fall River, Massachusetts and asked about the Lizzie Borden case: it was either forgotten or everyone was trying to forget.

I probably would have visited the Vicksburg battlefield near our hotel -- especially would like to have visited the caves where people hid during the seige -- but there was so much to explore, and only days, not years, to explore it.

We drove northward on Hwy #3 and 49E -- through Satartia, Crupp, Yazoo City, Eden, Tchula, Cruger, and Sidon. I wanted the Delta Experience, and this was it. We drove for many miles on the two-lane road and hardly ever saw another car -- just hundreds of thousands of acres of cornfields and (I assumed) cotton and soybean fields. I recognize corn; cotton and soybeans, not so much.

After seeing these vast fields spreading out for miles on either side, I can understand how it would have taken hundreds of people per-farm/plantation to harvest so much cotton.

HISTORY LESSON (Todd, are you paying attention? You're the one who asked for this!) : The invention of the cotton gin, which separated the cotton fiber from the seed, made growing cotton much more profitable for the landowner and therefore increased the need for workers to grow and harvest it. The demand for human beings -- used exactly like machinery, used until they were broken -- increased dramatically after the invention of the cotton gin. The plantation owner could buy thousands of acres for cotton and use his slaves to plant, chop, and harvest, while the gin (short for "engine") could prepare the cotton for shipping much faster than by hand. I saw the very fields where this cotton was grown and where these people were used. LESSON ENDED.

GREENWOOD, MISSISSIPPI: I wanted to visit Greenwood, I told Amity, because it figures in my study of the Civil Rights Movement, Freedom Summer, Black voter registration, Emmett Till.

SATURDAY, JULY 10, 2010, EXTREMELY LATE .... NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE


I have had some really amazing experiences on this trip, but today was extraordinary!
I can't do full justice to this subject tonight because I am exhausted and I am still "digesting" everything I experienced today.
The photo here was taken by Amity from my car today. I didn't know she was taking it at the time -- but I am so glad she did!

I had just seen "downtown" Money, Mississippi -- where the Emmett Till "whistle" happened (more photos later). After seeing Bryant's Store, I drove down the road to the site where Moses Wright (Till's great-uncle) had lived, and from where Emmett Till was kidnapped that summer night in 1955. (I knew from my studies that Wright left Mississippi soon after the murder and that another house now stands where his house once stood.)
I stopped my car and introduced myself to this older gentleman who lives just a few hundred yards down the road from the Wright house site. The man not only knew Mose Wright -- he had lived in / near Money all his life -- but he also knew Milum and Bryant (the men who went on trial for Till's murder) and Carolyn Bryant. Mr H.T. (in the photo above) was a young man -- a young White man -- in his thirties when Emmett Till was killed, and he had a lot to say.
I can't do justice to our discussion now; I'll write more very soon.
How could I have gotten so lucky, to have met two people (Minnie Watson at the Medgar Evers home, and then this gentleman today) who have direct lines to the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi?

FRIDAY, JULY 9, 2010
LATE, LATE EVENING

A bit of advice to anyone who may consider traveling from Austin, Texas to Vicksburg, Mississippii, in one day, and you plan leaving Austin say, a little after noon: Don't be a fool.
More tomorrow.