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.