Mamie’s Advice: For Emmett Till
Rent from DeepDyve- Mamie’s AdviceFor Emmett Till
Mind your manners with white folks,she’d told him, then gave him that last hugon his way to Great-Uncle Moses’ place in the Delta,far from everything Chicago and her embrace.
She’d grown up near there,knew the language of lynchings,the ill-conceived logicof white husbands and angry towns,but he was her “Bobo” and only fourteen,a jokester, ready seven days with a smile.
Mind your manners. All he wanted with white folkswas a soda Mamie said and some candy Mind your at Bryant’smanners Grocery and Meat Market Come on,his friends dared him, it’s just a whistle …
What did they know of the Mrs.,or accusations, and the way gossip gathers thornsuntil a traveling husband comes backon a sweltering day in Augustto a county immersed in scorn?He was fourteen and felt polite enough.
Kidnapped Mind eye gouged your beat manners shotwith white weighed down with a fan folks and droppedMamie said in the Tallahatchie Mind…. [End Page 83]
Mamie said, Bring him home. Back to Chicago.Keep the box open. Force them to seewhat they done. It was Mamie and her sonin September Take your pictures saying goodbye.Not polite. Not advice.Not at all. [End Page 84]
marjorie maddox is the director of creative writing and professor of English at Lock Haven University of Pennsylvania. She has published Local News from Someplace Else (2013); Weeknights at the Cathedral (2006); Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation (winner of the 2004 Yellowglen Prize); Perpendicular As I (winner of the 1994 Sandstone Book Award); five chapbooks; and over 450 poems, stories, and essays in journals and anthologies. A Sage Graduate Fellow at Cornell University (mfa), the coeditor of Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (2005), and the author of two children’s books—A Crossing of Zebras: Animal Packs in Poetry (2008) and Rules of the Game: Baseball Poems (2009)—Maddox is the great-grand-niece of Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers who helped break the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson. Her recent elegy for Fats Domino and Etta James appears at http://www.newyorkdreaming.net/after-notes-narrativeblues-now/. A native of Columbus, Ohio, she is a past finalist for Ohio State University’s Journal Book Award. For additional information see www.marjoriemaddox.com.
