Seeking Meaning in the Life of Carolyn Bryant
The woman at the center of Emmett Till’s lynching is alive and finally telling the truth after half a century. What does it all mean?
Reading these paragraphs was, for me, the psychological and emotional equivalent of being hit with a sledgehammer. I closed my eyes and took a laboured breath in an effort to parse these feelings out, and push through them all.
Blinding fury. Knee-buckling grief. Terror bleeding into horror, which gave way to a lip-curling, nose-crinkling revulsion. Somewhere, deep down, there was a gnarled, twisted pity. And always, inexorably, a cold creeping dread.
Carolyn Bryant had enabled the gruesome murder of this child, and then she lied again to ensure that no one involved — not her, nor the two men who shot, and beat, and mutilated 14 year old Emmett Till — would ever be held responsible. I knew, of course, that this was the case, beforehand. I knew the word of this woman, and the avowed murderers of children couldn’t be trusted. But for her to be alive today, and to say it on the record?
I felt like an inmate forced to choke down some vile concoction, only to find it bubbling up again, rising back up my throat in a tide of sickness.
But why feel this persistent dread over the events of a dark night seemingly so long ago?
In the popular imagination, the lynching of Emmett Till is eons removed. People see the black and white photos, the archival footage, the old magazine covers. It feels distant. This perception is a boon to their consciences. It helps them to keep the trauma at arms-length. This, they tell themselves, happened long ago. In the distant past when lynching was something black people lived in constant fear of, and not a turn of phrase for some thoughtless, hysterical white man to use when someone’s stupidity is being pointed out to him online.
But the revelation that Carolyn Bryant is alive — and at the age of 82 may yet have another decade of life in her — is startling. Suddenly the specter has leaped out of the film reel and into our living rooms. The monster takes on flesh and blood, and as it turns out, she is very familiar.
She is, of course, not racist. But only insofar as not being racist is convenient and requires no effort on her part. She is not one for apologizing — even if it means repenting for the most horrific deeds in the most perfunctory manner.
“She could have fit in at a family reunion — even at its local church…She was glad things had changed [and she] thought the old system of white supremacy was wrong, though she had more or less taken it as normal at the time.” She didn’t officially repent; she was not the type to join any racial reconciliation groups or to make an appearance at the new Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which attempts to promote understanding of the past and point a way forward.”
Most tellingly, the only way that she can begin to feel anything about the pain, death and loss that is visited upon others (by her own actions, mind you), is when she finds its pale reflection in her own experience.
“When Carolyn herself [later] lost one of her sons, she thought about the grief that Mamie [Emmett’s mother] must have felt and grieved all the more.”
But this description of the monster is too close to home for many. Luckily people are nothing if not innovative in the quest to preserve their own comfort. If they cannot distance themselves from the monster, then perhaps they can find some way to exorcise its monstrosity. After all, if the monster seems so familiar, then surely they can’t be that bad? So excuses are made. More favourable narratives are constructed. If necessary, a few alternative facts are deployed.
“Tyson does not say whether Carolyn was expressing guilt. Indeed, he asserts that for days after the murders, and until the trial, she was kept in seclusion by her husband’s family. But that “tender sorrow” does sound, in its way, like late-blooming regret.”
Then, satisfied by this ritual cleansing, it is easier to turn back to the question of ongoing progress, seeking a meaning for this event in the context of a worldview that is comfortable.
“Her changed attitude, if genuine, might have real meaning today, what with a polarized electorate, renewed racial tensions, and organizations and Web sites promoting white supremacy.”
Never mind the fact that the real meaning of Carolyn Bryant’s ghastly deeds, her late confession, her lukewarm conversion to right thinking, and her ability to walk free to this day without consequence is visible all around us, should we care to see it.
A host of Carolyn Bryants are still out there calling down violence and death upon the heads of the innocent and unsuspecting. Ask Lawrence Crosby, who was beaten by police for the crime of being spotted (by a white woman) trying to enter his own car. Her response? “I don’t know if I’m, like, racial profiling. I feel bad.”
The list of butchers who willfully snuffed out Black, Brown and Indigenous lives in the past years without consequence is too long for me to stomach relating it.
And if the whirl of the 24 hour news cycle has caused us to feel distant from this tsunami of suffering, we need only remember (for example) that the 45th President plans to deploy the terrible might of the American war machine at home to bring “law and order” to our cities.
The truth is, you see, that we have never stopped cultivating Carolyn Bryants. We have never stopped coddling, insulating and even elevating them.
And because of this horrific but obvious truth, many more Emmett Tills will be made in the coming weeks, months and years.
I ponder all of this as I walk up the sidewalk to work, the dread ebbing and flowing in my gut like a cold current. I focus on this familiar feeling and try to remember a day when it wasn’t my constant companion.
