The Power of Words

When I was a little girl, I cut off a good portion of hair from the shaving brush my father had inherited from my grandfather, who had died a few years before that. Scared of my parent’s anger, I claimed that it wasn’t me and my little brother was blamed for it — under enormous pressure from my parents, he caved in and admitted to it. All the while, I was sitting next to him, silent, feeling extremely guilty.
To this day, neither my parents nor my brother know that it was me. And sometimes, I still feel guilty about it. I can’t even explain why I destroyed the brush in the first place. But of course, I feel guiltier for letting my brother take the blame.
This is only a small story, but sometimes it’s better to break something huge down into a small fraction.

Here’s that huge story: A fourteen-year-old boy went into a shop, where he met a twenty-one-year old woman. Later, the woman told her husband that the boy had touched her and spoken to her rudely. The husband and his half-brother kidnapped the boy, tortured and killed him. This happened in Mississippi in 1955 and the boy was black. His name was Emmett Till and his murderers were later acquitted by an all-white jury.
The woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, repeated her story in front of the court, but it has been widely disputed if her version of the events was the truth. Some eyewitnesses reported that Emmett wolf-whistled at her, others said that maybe he just looked at her.
Whatever happened, one woman’s account was enough to sentence a boy to death. And for the next 60 years, Carolyn stuck to her story. While Emmett Till became a symbol for the Civil Rights Movement and is to this day talked about in schools in the USA, she remained silence.
Now, however, she has admitted that she lied.
What truly happened, she says, she can’t recall. But she did lie in front of the court.

This truth comes too late for Emmett Till, or for his mother, and even for most of his relatives. It also comes too late to punish his murderers for their crime.
And it probably comes too late for Carolyn Bryant Donham, too. While I cannot imagine the tremendous guilt one must feel to have caused such an atrocity, I really do hope she has been haunted by that guilt since then. At least, that would have been a tiny shred of justice. At the same time, it would have destroyed her life, too. If she’d spoken up earlier, perhaps she’d have felt a little later.
However, this truth does not come too late for everyone.
On the contrary, I think it’s extremely important for this truth to come out now, of all times. Because these are the times of police brutality towards black people. These are the times of the “All Lives Matter” movement. These are the times of a Muslim immigration ban. These are the times of “alternative facts”. Because these are the times of a Trump presidency.

This blog post isn’t so much critical of the news article I’m basing this on, which I thought was actually pretty good, but an attempt to spread the news even further. I want this story to be everywhere; on every front page of every newspaper or magazine, as a topic of a political talk show, discussed in homes, schools, unis, offices, busses, cafés, parliaments, etc. etc.
Not only as a cautionary tale, although that is definitely part of its morale, but also as a motivator. I don’t just want people to think about how one woman’s lie got a boy killed, but more generally, how words have power. The truth is rarely pure and never simply. But words change people, and people change the world.
This seems so simplistic and naïve, and maybe it is. But if words can kill people, words can also save people. Of that, Carolyn Bryant Donham’s story is a great reminder. One’s words can have dramatic and unforeseen effects. They are incredibly powerful. And especially in times like these, to merely do no harm with one’s words isn’t enough. Speaking up and being true to one’s words in one’s actions is now more important than ever.

Maybe tomorrow, I’ll tell my parents and my brother what really happened to my father’s shaving brush.
Maybe next week, I’ll join the protests and make my voice heard.