Ambiguous Adventure: African Americans and the American South

Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination examines representations of the relationship between history and memory in literary works produced since Till’s lynching in 1955. The eleven selections use essays, poetry, drama, and fiction as source material, while providing substantial evidence of the murder’s immediate and lasting impact on southern, national, and international cultural memory. The introduction recalls the 1998 James Byrd lynching in Jasper, Texas, before providing basic details about the Till murder and trial. Christopher Metress examines lynching as cultural trauma in “On That Third Day He Rose: Sacramental Memory and the Lynching of Emmett Till.” He also considers representations of Till as a redemptive figure whose murder is thus refigured as a sacrificial act.

Other essays consider Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), James Baldwin’s Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964), Aimé Césaire’s elegiac “On the State of the Union” (1960), Bebe Moore Campbell’s Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine (1992), and Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (1993). Suzanne W. Jones’s “Childhood Trauma and its Reverberations” examines Campbell’s process of using the blues to move beyond the collective trauma that Till’s murder and the public spectacle of his horribly abused body set in place. Taking a different approach, Donnie McMahand compares Nordan’s work to Campbell’s in “(Dis)embodying the Delta Blues: Wolf Whistle and Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine.” McMahand demonstrates how two such dissimilar works actually make use of very similar strategies in their representations of Emmett Till. Metress’s annotated bibliography of over 140 literary and musical titles completes the collection.

Some of the best essays focus on the work of such poets as Langston Hughes, Nicolás Guillén, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Excellent selections by Vivian May and Laura Dawkins analyze Brooks’s “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon” and “The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till.” May analyzes parallel constructions in each poem, while Dawkins considers how the poems revisit sites of memory to serve the project of counter-history that challenges the dominant society’s official history.

While some works receive more attention than others, resulting in a slightly off-balance volume, this flaw is offset by the better-than-average quality of the essays. Overall, the collection is a well-conceived and executed project that will be valuable for students and scholars across several disciplines. Indeed, it closes with a brief but important statement on the 464-page FBI report concerning the trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, Till’s alleged (and later admitted) murderers. The FBI report contains a retyped transcript from the original trial as well as that of the February 27, 2007 decision in LeFlore County, Mississippi, in which the grand jury declined to indict either defendant in Till’s 1955 murder. These primary documents remain important sources for research and scholarship.

Emmett Till’s name is not invoked as often as William Faulkner’s in Houston A. Baker, Jr.’s I Don’t Hate the South, but Till’s presence is palpable. The two epigraphs that open Baker’s text identify interconnected threads in the author’s reflections on modernity, his life, family, professional career, and the American South and establish ambivalence and kinship as tropes. The epigraph from Natasha Trethewey’s “Pastoral” in Native Guard (2006) recalls a dream in which the speaker is posing for a photograph with the Fugitive Poets when Robert Penn Warren directs the group to say “race.” The speaker, whose father is white and rural, is frozen in blackface. The other poets’ question—“You don’t hate the South?”—connects Trethewey’s poem to Baker’s second epigraph: Quentin Compson’s...