(1)
by Simeon Wright from Simeon's Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till (Lawrence Hill books, 2010)(pp.50-51) As we reached Bryant’s store, we continued our usual small talk and banter. We were still excited about the day’s events and happy to be in town together. We all got out of the car and were milling around in the front of the store when Wheeler went in to buy a pop or some candy. Bobo [Emmett Till] went in after him; then Wheeler came out, leaving Bobo in there alone. Maurice immediately sent me into the store to be with Bobo. He was concerned about Bobo being in the store alone because of what had happened on the previous Sunday, when Bobo had set his fireworks off inside the city limits. He just didn’t know the Mississippi rules, and Maurice felt that someone should be with Bobo at all times. For less than a minute he was in the store alone with Carolyn Bryant, the white woman working at the cash register. What he said, if anything, before I came in I don’t know. While I was in the store, Bobo did nothing inappropriate. He didn’t grab Mrs. Bryant, nor did he put his arms around her – that was the story she later told to the court. A counter separated the customers form the store clerk; Bobo would have had to jump over it to get to Mrs. Bryant. Bobo didn’t ask her for a date or call her “baby.” There was no lecherous conversation between them. And after a few minutes he paid for his items and we left the store together. We had been outside the store only a few seconds when Mrs. Bryant came out behind us, heading straight to her car. As she walked, Bobo whistled at her. I think he wanted to get a laugh out of us or something. He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was serious. It was a loud wolf whistle, a big-city “whee wheeeee!” and it caught us all by surprise. We all looked at each other, realizing that Bobo had violated a longstanding unwritten law, a social taboo about conduct between blacks and white in the South. Suddenly we felt we were in danger, and we stared at each other, all with the same expression of fear and panic. Like a group of boys who had thrown a rock through somebody’s window, we ran to the car. Bobo, with a slight limp from the polio he’d contracted as a child, ran along with us, but not as panic-stricken as we were. After seeing our fright, it did slowly dawn on him that he had done something wrong. Carolyn and Roy Bryant by Hugh Whitaker from A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case (Master's Thesis, Florida State)(1963)(pp. 103-105) On
Wednesday, August 24,5
a carload of eight young Negroes – seven boys and a girl – set out for
a “jook”
in a ’46 Ford.6 Since it was only 7:30 P. M., they stopped
in front
of Roy Bryant’s store in Money. Till and
the seven others got out to talk to the dozen or so Negroes who were
joking and
playing checkers in front of the country store which catered almost
exclusively
to the Negro trade.7
In the week he had
been in the Delta,
Emmett “Bobo” Till had excited his Negro cousins with his “Yeah” and
“Naw” to
local whites. But his “most fascinating
claim to distinction” was the picture of the white girl he carried in
his
billfold. Bobo insisted this was “his
girl” back in Chicago.8 That
night, he once again passed the picture around and bragged about his
relations
with this girl. His boasts caused one
Negro youth to taunt, “You talkin’ mighty big, Bo.
There’s a pretty little white woman in there
in the sto’. Since you Chicago cats know
so much about white girls, let’s see you go in there and get a date
with her.”9
Bobo
now had to act or lose face. While
fascinated Delta Negroes lined the store window, Till entered the front
door.10 Inside, alone, was
pretty,
twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant. She
was five feet, two inches tall and weighed 103 pounds.
Young Till, only fourteen years old, was four
inches taller and nearly sixty pounds heavier.11
Till
asked Mrs. Bryant for candy, and when she extended her hand for the
money, he
grabbed it tightly and said, “How about a date, baby?”12
She
jerked her hand away and turned and walked toward the living quarters
at the
back of the store, where her sister-in-law Juanita Milam was. Till caught her at the cash register, and put
his hands on her waist to restrain her. “You
needn’t be afraid of me, baby I’ve _____ with white
women before.”13
One of
Till’s cousins ran in and grabbed him and pulled him from the store. As he went out the door, he turned and said
“Good-by”. Carolyn Bryant ran out the
front door to get a pistol from under the front seat of her
sister-in-law’s
car. As she crossed the road, Till gave
what sounded like a long, two-note “wolf whistle.”
Then the Negroes drove away.14
Mrs.
Bryant told her sister-in-law about the incident. They
were determined to keep it from their
husbands.15 Roy Bryant was
then hauling shrimp from New Orleans to Brownsville, Texas:16
when
J. W. Milam picked his wife and Mrs. Bryant up an hour later, to take
them to
Glendora, they did not tell him what had happened.17
_________ 5Testimony
of Mose Wright, Official Transcript
of State of Mississippi v. J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, Seventeenth
Judicial
District of the State, September 19, 1955, p. 259. 6Huie,
Wolf Whistle, p. 40. 7Ibid., p. 19. 8Ibid. 9Ibid., p. 20. 10Ibid. 11Testimony
of Carolyn Bryant, Official Transcript
of State of Mississippi v. J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, Seventeenth
Judicial
District of the State, p. 258. 12Ibid.,pp.
268-69. 13Ibid.,pp.
269-272. 14Ibid.,pp.
272-274. 15Huie, Wolf Whistle, p.
21. 16Testimony
of Carolyn Bryant, Official Transcript, p. 276. 17Huie, Wolf Whistle, p.
21. |