Emmett Till James Emanuel I hear a
whistling Through the water. Little Emmett Won't be still.
He keeps floating Round the darkness, Edging through The silent
chill. Tell me, please, That bedtime story Of the fairy
River Boy Who swims forever, Deep in treasures, Necklaced in
A coral toy.
James Emanuel was born in Nebraska in 1921. He
served in the army during World War II, and after his discharge he
attended Howard University, eventually earning a doctorate at Columbia.
He was teaching in Europe when his only son committed suicide after a
brutal police beating. After that, Emanuel vowed never to return to the
United States. He died in Paris in 2013. The poem Lisa read is
an elegy for Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Black boy from Chicago who
was brutally lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of
whistling at a white woman in a store. He was beaten, mutilated, and
shot, and his body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. Till’s mother
insisted on an open casket at his funeral, so that the world could see
what had been done to her son. Till’s murderers were found not guilty,
though they admitted to the crime a year after their acquittal. Emmett
Till’s death became a turning-point in the Civil Right Movement.
James Emanuel knew he wanted to write a poem about Emmett Till, but he
struggled for a long time, because, as he said, “the subject was such a
terrible thing.” In fact, he worked on the poem for seven years, before
it finally came together in less than twenty minutes. Emanuel
drew on his wide reading in building the rich imagery of this poem. He
remembered “The Prioress’s Tale” from Chaucer, a story in which a boy is
murdered and thrown into a cesspit, and yet continues to sing. He
certainly remembered Shakespeare’s “Full Fathom Five,” one of the songs
in The Tempest, in which a drowned man is imagined as transformed—“those
are pearls that were his eyes; / Of his bones are coral made.” And he
remembered, too, something Yeats had said—“in time, people will not
react to violence; but, if you turn your subject into a legend, then
they will remember.” In his poem, Emanuel does just that—he
remembers Emmett Till with the language of poetry and myth. Here
Emmett—like the murdered boy in Chaucer—will not lie still. Instead of
singing, those passing by the water where his body was thrown hear the
sound of whistling, the echo of that alleged whistle which was the
pretext for Till’s lynching. Emanuel evokes the fear and horror of the
place: “He keeps floating / Round the darkness, / Edging through / The
silent chill.” The end of the poem, with its use of childlike
diction, is perhaps even more chilling. Emanuel imagines a child asking
for “That bedtime story / Of the fairy / River Boy.” Nothing could be
less like a bedtime story, nothing could be less childlike—but then we
remember that Till himself was a child, just fourteen years old. Emanuel
turns Emmett Till into a legend, because he knows, as Yeats did, that
people who have learned to ignore violence will pay attention to legend.
It was not until fifty years after Emmett Till’s death, in
2005, that markers were placed in Money, Mississippi, to honor Emmett
and acknowledge what happened to him. These markers have been repeatedly
vandalized, sprayed with bullets, knocked over, and even thrown into the
Tallahatchie River where Emmett’s body was thrown. Just last September,
another sign was knocked down. Some in America would like to forget
Emmett Till, but, as Emanuel writes in this poem, “Little Emmett / Won’t
lie still.” When asked why poetry is important, James Emanuel
said: “A person reading a new poem expects to encounter unusual
combinations of familiar words; thus he has agreed to accept changes,
however small—and hence however vast—in his being…. we might claim that
reading or writing poetry could lead to revolutionary thought. Dictators
keep their eyes on libraries, and in our truly thoughtful moments we
know why.” As we conclude this reflection, here’s James Emanuel
himself reading “Emmett Till.”
https://youtu.be/YnZFPSPugNk
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