Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination (review)

Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago, said goodbye to his mother at a train station in his hometown. Having lectured Emmett on how to act down south, Mamie Till allowed her only child to set off for Mississippi to spend the rest of the summer with relatives. A few days after his arrival, Emmett, his cousins, and other young friends headed to a grocery store owned by Roy Bryant. Witnesses offer many versions of the story of what happened next, but the narratives that claim Emmett wolf-whistled or said “Bye, baby” to Carolyn Bryant, the white woman tending the store, are the most common. Within days, Emmett was taken from his great uncle’s house by two men. Three days later, his body was taken from the Tallahatchie River. The beaten and decomposing body was so distorted that his great uncle, Mose Wright, had to identify him by the ring he wore. Mamie Till insisted that her child’s remains be returned to her in Chicago; there she let his body lie in state for three days in an open casket so that the world could see what Mississippi had done to her boy.

The story recited above is undoubtedly familiar to all who read this. When Emmett Till was murdered in Money, Mississippi over fifty years ago, the resulting horror and outrage provided an emotional catalyst for the organized resistance that became known as the American civil rights movement. The brutality inflicted on Till for his alleged offense, combined with the injustice of a trial that essentially sanctioned the murder, caused what Christopher Metress calls a “cultural trauma” that has generated a continuous retelling of the story in both historical and imaginative forms. The Till lynching remains one of the deepest and most visceral racial wounds in Southern history though it is not the only one, as evidenced by the 2004 conference sponsored by Jackson State University, Tougaloo College, and Tulane University, “Unsettling Memories: Culture and Trauma in the Deep South.” The essays collected by Harriet Pollack, an associate professor of English at Bucknell University, and Christopher Metress, a professor of English at Samford University, in Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination are an outgrowth of a panel devoted to literary depictions of the Till lynching at the “Unsettling Memories” conference at Jackson State University, June 2004. Both individually and collectively, the eleven essays “explore how the Emmett Till lynching circulates through cultural memory and imagination” (1).

This is Metress’s second anthology of materials related to Emmett Till; he previously edited The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002), an indispensable collection of primary sources, both journalistic and literary. The collected materials provide little-known and often conflicting details about the events surrounding Till’s death and trial. The final section in the anthology is a collection of literary texts that respond to the murder and consequent legal injustice. The selection and arrangement of the material testify to the blurred boundaries between history and memory, which becomes an even more pronounced area of interest in Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination. Pollack and Metress contend that the “Emmett Till narrative” has become as recognizable as the passing, lynching, and segregation narratives in the African-American literary tradition. Although Till studies extend well beyond literary borders, the editors effectively limit the focus of their collection to scholarship on literary texts.

The content and form of Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination provide evidence of the editors’ assertion that the Till narrative haunts the imagination of both writers and scholars. The introductory essay provides a useful overview of the historical facts of the case and the narratives that followed. Pollack and Metress sift through multiple sources in order to provide a reliable historical ground from which to begin analysis of imaginative texts, “not to encourage readers to hold these literary artists accountable to the historical record; rather it is to give readers a...