On Life, Death, and Memory: The Ballad of Emmett Till by Ifa Bayeza

Ifa Bayeza in The Ballad of Emmett Till

Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014

As I read The Ballad of Emmett Till, I was most affected by how well Ifa Bayeza captures the tone and rhythm of a vibrant life remembered largely for its brutal demise. By all intimate accounts, Emmett was a daring boy filled with an adventurous spirit. He was astonishingly precocious and industrious. From the tender age of six years old, he took every odd job that came his way, including making deliveries for the milkman, running errands for the ice man, and collecting and selling spilled coal. Shrugging at inexperience and youth, young Bo (Till’s family name for Emmett) installed the linoleum on his mother’s dining room floor without any doubt that the outcome would be anything less than satisfying. He painted walls and loved cooking and baseball. He took great pride in preparing for his mom a special dish, spicy pepper corn. He was a conscientious dresser with a well-defined sense of personal style for his age. His confidence, curiosity, and joy were boundless, and nothing made him happier than learning and laughter. Ambitious and undaunted, Bo thrived on the power of accomplishment. He celebrated whenever he moved to a new phase of his short life that required more responsibility and trust, such as when his mother included his name as a cosigner on her car loan application. Most of all, he loved as much as he was loved by a large community of family and friends.

Emmett Till comes alive and stays alive in Bayeza’s dramatic rendering, much like in the memoir of Mamie Till-Mobley, Death of Innocence. Bayeza’s depiction is deeply resonant. Reading her narrative and watching her one-woman performance of The Ballad confirmed my own impression of the vivacious boy known almost entirely for the iconic Jet magazine photo of his stiff, bloated body and badly mutilated face. Bayeza bounced and strutted across a small stage containing little more than a box and a chair. She bobbed to fitting guitar music—part folk, part blues—on familiar background rhythms that were several degrees more jaunty than sorrowful. She was playful, energetic, and masterful in recreating the way that Emmett moved through the world, forever carefree and confident. At moments, she even dared to whistle and stutter, pointing us to the speaking gestures used by the murderers and a white woman to justify the slaying of Bo the talker. Bayeza reclaimed the effects of his bout with polio; to stutter and whistle belonged to him, not his murderers.

With such focus on the living Emmett, Bayeza’s poetic narrative gives his life fuller dimension. As such, her faithful depiction makes his death even more tragic. Every day he woke up looking forward to life. Our encounter of him in The Ballad is a less distant or impersonal experience. Every victim of a lynching was knowable beyond their murders. Bayeza’s well-researched creative work demonstrates this all too well. Considering that there are more than 140 works on Emmett Till, I am struck by how our ritualized emphasis on the manner of death continues to flatten his shortened but active life. This is an ironic feature of memorializing the dead, and, more often than not, this is unintended. The death of Emmett Till holds a large, protected space in our collective civil-rights era memories. We—the public that did not know Bo personally—have commemorated his last moments because his death, in all of its savagery, was so consequential for the movement and undeniably metaphoric for black pain and suffering, past and present. For his gruesome death to become our sole connection to Emmett feels like another theft—a kind of postmortem theft of life carried out by his vicious murderers (Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam), the white woman (Carolyn Bryant) who made the explosive allegation that Bo whistled at her, and the all-white jury that acquitted Bryant and Milam. Emmett Till...