Not only did I enter high school with a new name, but also with a completely new insight into the life of Negroes in Mississippi. I was now working for one of the meanest white women in town, and a week before school started Emmet Till was killed.
Up until his death, I had heard of Negroes found floating in a river or dead somewhere with their bodies riddled with bullets. But I didn’t know the mystery behind these killings then. I remember once when I was only seven I heard Mama and one of my aunts talking about some Negro who had been beaten to death. “Just like them lowdown skunks killed him they will do the same to us,” Mama had said. When I asked her who killed the man and why, she said, “An Evil Spirit killed him. You gotta be a good girl or It will kill you too.” So since I was seven, I had lived in fear of that “Evil Spirit.” It took me eight years to learn what that spirit was.
I was coming from school the evening I heard about Emmet Till’s death. There was a whole group of us, girls and boys, walking down the road headed home. A group of about six high school boys were walking a few paces ahead of me and several other girls. We were laughing and talking about something that had happened in school that day.
However, the six boys in front of us weren’t talking very loud. Usually they kept up so much noise. But today they were just walking and talking among themselves. All of a sudden they began to shout at each other.
“Man, what in the hell do you mean?”
“What I mean is these goddamned white folks is gonna start some shit here you just watch!”
“That boy wasn’t but fourteen years old and they killed him. Now what kin a fourteen-year-old boy do with a
white woman? What if he did whistle at her, he might have thought the whore was pretty.”
“Look at all these white men here that’s fucking over women. Everybody knows It too and what’s done about that? Lock how many white babies we got walking around in our neighborhoods. Their mama’s ain’t white either. That boy was from Chicago, shit, everybody tuck every body up there. He probably didn’t even think of the bitch as white.
