That call. Early Sunday morning. August 28, 1955. I can never forget that call.

As it turns out, Willie Mae had raised more questions than she answered. And I had so many questions to ask. What men? Why had they come? Where had they taken my boy? What was being done about it? But Willie Mae had been much too distraught. She just started crying and wound up hanging up the phone before she could explain anything more than what she had already said. Emmett was missing. Missing in Mississippi. Oh, my God. Oh, dear Lord, no. Please, no. Don’t let this be happening.

The thing I had feared most, the thing that had made me take so long to even think about letting Bo make the trip, the thing that had kept me immobilized all week long, the most horrible thing any mother could possibly imagine was becoming a reality. I tried to fight back all the things, all the visions that were playing out in my mind. I tried to deny all the things that I could not allow myself to accept.

The only thing I really knew was what Willie Mae had said, and that didn’t have to mean anything more than that. Somebody had taken Bo out of the house. Maybe that’s all there was to it. But she was crying so. What about her son, Curtis? And Hallie’s son, Wheeler? Where were they? Were they all right? And the other boys, Aunt Lizzy’s sons. What had happened? Aunt Lizzy, Uncle Moses. What was going on?

The thoughts were making my head spin, and my heart ache, and my breathing erratic. But I knew I needed to keep under control. I had to steady myself. I had to think. I had to call Mama, to tell her what Willie Mae had told me. I knew she’d have the same reaction I had. I knew my mother.

I knew she felt like she was Bo’s mother. And, as I talked to Mama, I realized I was right. She had always been so strong, the rock for all of us. But I could feel her cracking as she told me, or ordered me, or begged me, to come to her. Right then. I called Gene, told him, and he insisted on taking me to Mama’s. He wasn’t that far away, so okay, fine, I could wait for him. I probably didn’t need to drive anyway, not while I was in that frame of mind. So, yes, I would wait. Sit tight. But I couldn’t sit still. I needed to do something. I started making my bed.

And finally I stopped, I caught myself. Why on earth was I doing that? Of all things. What was I thinking? Was I just trying to keep busy, keep from thinking? Lose myself in work to stop me from losing my mind? I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stay there. Not one minute longer. I got ready to leave, picked up Emmett’s watch, wound it, put it on.

Gene drove up just as I was backing out of the garage. He parked and slid behind the wheel of my car. We had barely made it a mile when I had to take over. I just had to do it. I knew I was in no condition to drive. But he was barely going the speed limit, stopping for all the lights, all the stop signs, and I didn’t care about any of that. I drove through everything as fast as I could go. I needed to get to Mama’s place. I needed to get to Mama. And I needed to do it fast. The way I figured it, if I had been stopped by the police that morning, then I just would have had a police escort.

We weren’t much good for each other at first, Mama and I. She usually knew exactly what to do at exactly the right time to do it. But she was in such an emotional state. Not hysterical. Just very, very quiet, like she had closed down. It wasn’t long before Willie Mae came to Mama’s, too. She was crying, I was crying, and she told a little more of the story, as much as she knew at the time. They said Emmett had whistled at a white woman.

We knew we had to do something. We kept trying to contact Papa Mose, but we couldn’t get through to him. Somehow, we decided to call the newspapers. A number of reporters came out. I had hoped Mama would know what to say, but she couldn’t say anything that would have helped. I stepped forward, I talked to the reporters, I told them the only thing I knew at the time. My son, Emmett Till, had been taken away in the middle of the night by white men who came into my Uncle Moses Wright’s home in Money, Mississippi.

I kept hoping that Mama would chime in, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. I still was holding out hope for a lot of things at that point. I hoped that Emmett was all right. I hoped that whoever had taken him had let him go, or that he had escaped. I hoped that he was only hiding out somewhere, and that was the only reason why we hadn’t heard from him.

But, as I looked at Mama, I began to realize that she already had given up hope. Mama had lived in Mississippi. Mama knew what it meant when white men came in the middle of the night in Mississippi. She had a look that made me pause. It was the look of someone who could see something she didn’t want to see. It was as if she had already accepted something I couldn’t possibly accept. The unspeakable. She remained silent, and I had to shake it all off. At that moment, I had nothing left but my hope. To let that go would mean I would have nothing.

At some point, Papa Spearman, Mama’s husband, suggested we call on his nephew Rayfield Mooty. That wound up being a good call. Papa Henry Spearman was a security guard at Inland Steel Container Company. Rayfield also worked with Inland Steel, and was a union official, head of the Steelworkers Local.

He had good contacts. He knew all the big labor people, the steelworkers, the autoworkers, the sleeping-car porters, everybody. Because of his organizing work, he also knew politicians and civil rights people. But I had not gotten along very well with Rayfield. There was some distance between us. He was strictly business. He never seemed to be a man who showed much feeling and I had always found him to be especially cool toward me. In fact, I had always thought he was rather mean. He had taken sides with his uncle against my mother and he knew I did not appreciate that. So, when he came by that Sunday morning, our first moments together were a little tense.

I tried to explain things to him, but I couldn’t stop crying, blowing my nose. Everything was starting to come out of me by this time.

He was impatient.

“Why don’t you stop all this,” he said. “Just blow your nose, stop crying, and tell me what’s going on here.”

“They took Emmett,” I managed to say. “Some men, in the middle of the night. They took Emmett away.”

“Emmett? What, who’s Emmett?”

“My son,” I said. “Emmett Till. Mr. Mooty, that’s Bobo.

He stiffened and his face lost all expression. He said nothing, nothing at all. He just lowered his head, turned, and walked out of the room. I was puzzled by that. Rayfield Mooty was a man of action, and I couldn’t believe this would be his only action. To just leave us there like that. It seemed like he was away for about ten minutes. Then he came back. He looked like he was ready to cry. And it made me start crying again. Everybody knew Bo. Everybody knew him by that name. Everybody loved him.

He had even touched Rayfield Mooty, who was now prepared to do everything he could to help. Mama’s house was filling up with people, friends, relatives. Ollie was there. She was always there for me. She brought food and unconditional love.

Ollie also worked for Inland Steel Container Company. Her supervisor was the head of industrial relations. The company had offices in the South, in New Orleans and Memphis, and she would see if there was anything her company might do to help.

We still hadn’t reached Papa Mose. So we decided to try Mama’s brother, Uncle Crosby. Thank God, we were able to talk to him. Aunt Lizzy was there. The other boys were okay and Uncle Crosby was going to the sheriff with Papa Mose.

At the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, the church Emmett loved so much, the church his grandmother helped to found, the entire congregation stood and prayed. The members prayed for Emmett, they prayed for Mama and me. They prayed that their prayers had come in time.

Monday morning, August 29, Rayfield arranged for me to meet with the Chicago branch of the NAACP, and we were referred immediately to William Henry Huff. He was the Chicago NAACP counsel, the chairman of the organization’s Legal Redress Committee. He was a dignified man who spoke with assurance and experience. He had been involved in a number of Mississippi matters, getting people out of that state and out of danger. He promised to put his resources to work and immediately reached out to political contacts. Between Rayfield Mooty and William Henry Huff, things started happening.

The story was appearing in the Chicago papers and I was getting calls. Lots of calls. The local officials began pressing Mississippi authorities to find Emmett right away. Before I knew it, Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley was involved. And so was Illinois Governor William Stratton, and William Dawson, the powerful South Side congressman. Ollie’s boss at Inland Steel Container Company had talked to the president of the company, who was sympathetic. He contacted the company’s Southern offices to put their planes on the lookout as they flew over the area in Mississippi where Emmett had been taken.

I wanted to catch the first thing smoking to Mississippi, but Uncle Crosby convinced me to wait in Chicago while he took care of things down there. That day, Monday, in Mississippi, Leflore County Sheriff George Smith announced that he had arrested two white men on kidnapping charges. Roy Bryant, owner of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, and his half-brother, J. W. “Big” Milam, who managed cotton pickers for local plantations. They admitted they had taken Emmett, but said they let him go.

The Sherriff was still looking for Roy Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, and one other person in connection with the abduction.

They said they had let Emmett go. Maybe there was some reason to hope that my boy was okay and would be taken care of. Wheeler had been put on an early-morning train at Duck Hill, headed back to Chicago, back home to safety. In Argo, his brother William imagined Emmett making it through the woods after Bryant and Milam let him go. He imagined how Emmett could make it to the home of some nice colored people who would make sure he got back to his own home. If anybody could, he knew, Emmett could. I tried to imagine the same thing.

Things were so hectic at Mama’s with people coming in and out constantly, with so many calls coming in. We had to add a second line. That way we’d have one for making calls, one for taking them. We couldn’t let a moment pass without trying to reach out to somebody, anybody, who might help us. And we couldn’t take a chance that the most important call we could ever receive would get blocked by a busy signal. I spent so much of my time by the phone, taking down notes, dates, times, details. I had to keep busy. I had to keep my mind off my greatest fear, I had to focus on everything around me, all the bustling, all the energy. And the absolute joy when he walked through the door.

Wheeler was just sixteen, a boy becoming a man. He felt things that a boy cannot always express, and a man might try to suppress. I could see that as he began to approach me as I sat there by the phone. He loved Bo. Bo loved Wheeler. I loved Wheeler, too. But I knew there was someone else in the room with even stronger feelings “at that moment. I knew that the way only a mother can know such things. That’s why I stopped Wheeler in his tracks and said what I had to say: “Go hug your mother.”

Somewhere around seven in the evening on Wednesday, August 24, after supper, while Papa Mose was in church, Maurice, Wheeler, Bo, Simeon, Roosevelt Crawford, and Roosevelt’s niece Ruthie Crawford climbed into Papa Mose’s car and drove uptown. Although there were a couple of hundred people who lived around Money, the town itself was little more than one street. Not a street, really. It was more like what somebody once called “a wide place in the road.” A whistle-stop. It was a lazy place. Easy to feel relaxed there. In Money, there were no obvious signs of trouble. None of the things Emmett had been warned about.

No “White” or “Colored” drinking fountains, no segregated sections on buses, nobody stepping off sidewalks to let white folks pass. But that was because there were no drinking fountains, there were no buses, there were no sidewalks. Money wasn’t like other places in the Jim Crow South. It was worse. It was much worse. The dangers were hidden, and a lot more treacherous. It was a place with racial attitudes as rigid as an oak tree in the dead of winter. People who lived in the area knew where the lines were, knew not to cross them. They didn’t need signs to direct them. They didn’t need help abiding by the rules, just like they didn’t need help breathing. It was in them. A basic life function. For outsiders, things weren’t that obvious.

The kids had driven uptown to buy a few treats at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Roy Bryant, the owner, was out of town. His twenty-one-year-old wife, Carolyn, was working the counter alone that evening. On the porch, there was a checker game going on, as usual, with about four or five people involved. And there were other black kids hanging around. One at a time, the boys bought things in the store. Wheeler was inside when Emmett walked in. Wheeler left and then Simeon came to stand in the door to look out for Emmett, who paid two cents for some bubble gum and left. For Emmett, this little transaction was not all that different from any other one he might have had at Miss Haynes’s store back in Argo.

A few versions of what happened next would emerge and even more variations on the story would develop over time. The kids were standing around on the porch outside the store when they saw Carolyn Bryant come out and head for a car. They kept laughing and talking as Emmett told everyone what he had bought. That’s when the whistle was heard. Maurice would later tell reporters that Emmett made a whistling sound when he got stuck on a word. “Bubble gum” would have given him as much trouble in Money as “Moon Pie” once had given him in Argo. Roosevelt said he thought Emmett was whistling at a bold checker move on the porch. The others felt he was doing it as a joke, intentionally, to be playful. Whatever it was, it stopped all the laughter.

Right away, someone said that Carolyn Bryant was going to the car for her gun. Everyone scrambled. The kids jumped into the Ford. But Maurice didn’t get it moving quickly enough. Maybe it was that nasty gear problem again. And that made everyone nervous. They yelled at him to get going. Finally, he did, and they started on their way back home down Darfield Road. About two miles out of Money, a mile away from home, the kids saw something that upset them all over again.

There were headlights in the rearview mirror. It had gotten darker by now and the headlights behind them were getting brighter, moving closer. Everybody knew right away what that meant. Somebody was coming after them. Maurice had a choice to make. But he knew he couldn’t outrun another car in that forty-six Ford on that dusty road on that night. Without really thinking about it, he pulled over and jumped out of the car. Everybody jumped out after him. Everybody except Simeon. He just slid down on the seat to hide.

The others ran through the cotton field hoping they could disappear into the darkness. Hoping whoever was following them wouldn’t find Simmy in the car. As the kids ran, the bolls—the ones that hadn’t opened yet—kept hitting against their legs. Cotton may be soft, but those bolls were kind of hard when they hadn’t opened yet. They hurt and they made Wheeler and Bo trip and fall to the ground. The boys looked back over their shoulders and watched. They saw the car continue moving down the road, right on past the Ford, where Simmy finally felt it was safe enough to sit up again.

Everyone agreed not to tell Papa Mose about the incident. Everyone agreed that would be the best thing. Nothing had happened. They didn’t get in trouble, and Bo didn’t want to make trouble for himself by making Papa Mose angry with him. By the end of the week, the kids weren’t really thinking about that incident anymore. They even drove into Money again and nothing more was said about any of it. Then there was the night they drove to Greenwood and got back home very late. Saturday night.

That’s when it happened. Somewhere around two in the morning, there was a violent beating on the front door of the Wright home, and a call from the front porch.

“Preacher. This is Mr. Bryant.”

Papa Mose opened the door, stepped out onto the screened-in porch. He saw two white men standing there, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. “Big” Milam, towering over Papa Mose at six-foot-two and 235 pounds, balding. Papa Mose thought he could make out one other man standing outside, a black man, it seemed, who held his head down, probably so he couldn’t be recognized. It was hard to get a good look at any of them, really. There was that flashlight beam that kept jumping in his face. Papa Mose had no trouble at all making out what else the big man was holding in his other hand. A Colt .45 automatic.

Papa Mose knew what it meant when white men came banging on the door at two in the morning carrying guns. This was a terrorist assault, a surprise attack, and these men were moving quickly to take control of the Wright house. Bryant and Milam moved inside. It almost seemed darker inside than it was outside. The lights had gone out. So Milam flashed his light in Papa Mose’s face. He asked Papa Mose if he had a couple of boys from Chicago there. Papa Mose said he did. The men told him that was why they were there. They had come for the boy from Chicago, the one who had done the talking.

“Wheeler awakened. He was in the first bedroom with Maurice. He could hear the loud, angry voices coming from the front of the house. He heard “boys from Chicago.” He was horrified. The two men were yelling and cursing by this time, and they were demanding to see Emmett. Aunt Lizzy came out and pleaded with the men to do no harm to the boy.

Get back in bed,” Milam told her. “I want to hear them springs squeak.”

Papa Mose still didn’t understand what they wanted from Emmett. But even though the boys had kept their promise not to tell, he had heard some mumblings about some talk a few days before in Money that didn’t seem to amount to much If Emmett had done something wrong, Papa Mose could take care of it, even whip him, if need be. Milam kept waving the gun around, the threat heavy in his hand. He demanded that Papa Mose take them to Emmett right then. All the yelling and cursing kept things off balance. Papa Mose had a shotgun in the house, but he didn’t know how far this was going to go, who that was outside, how many more there might be, what they might be prepared to do. He thought he might still be able to reason with these men. And he would keep trying.

Bryant and Milam moved through that house like animals stalking their prey. There was nothing, it seemed, that could stop them. Wheeler knew from the tone of the voices that this was about as bad as it could get. He looked toward Maurice, who was still asleep. He said a prayer. He asked to be delivered from that place, from that night of terror. Then they came in. Milam flashed the light at Wheeler, and held it for a moment.

They moved on, the only light in the house that night coming from the flashlight that jumped and jerked from one spot to the next. The second room was the one Robert was sharing with Curtis. The men kept going, finally down to the room where Emmett and Simeon were. Simmy looked up at them and they told him to go back to sleep. He lay back, but didn’t close his eyes.They woke Emmett, lying next to Simmy, and told him to put on his clothes and his shoes. He was still half-asleep. Every time he tried to speak, he forgot the rule. He forgot to say “sir.” Milam became violent, yelling and cursing and threatening Emmett about it.

Emmett wanted to put on his socks. They told him he didn’t need socks. But he stopped. He said he didn’t wear shoes without socks. To everyone, he seemed so calm about it all, standing there at the center of all the tension. He couldn’t possibly have known what it meant for white men to come for you late in the night in Mississippi. Maybe it was the sleep in his eyes. Maybe he thought something would be done about this. Someone would call the police, the sheriff. Somebody. That’s what I had told him to do. Call somebody when there’s trouble. Don’t try to handle it yourself.

“Maybe he thought he’d be able to talk his way out of it, as he had done with so many other problems he had encountered. Maybe it was his faith that, somehow, he would be okay. Whatever it was, he didn’t seem nervous. And everyone remembered that. Aunt Lizzy, though, was frantic. She even offered to pay Bryant and Milam if they would leave Emmett. But they hadn’t come for money. They continued to march Emmett out. Uncle Moses asked where they were taking him. Nowhere, they said, if he was not the right one.

Outside, they brought Emmett over to the truck, a green Chevy pickup with a white top. Uncle Moses could hear a voice from inside that truck. It was a light voice, a female voice.

“Yeah,” came the voice from the shadows of that cab. “That’s the one.”

Emmett was put in the back of the truck, where it looked like that third man was holding him down. Then Milam turned back to Uncle Moses and warned him not to tell anyone. “Preacher,” he added, “do you know any of us?”

“No, sir,” he said. He had never seen these men before.

Milam had a second question. “How old are you?”

“Sixty-four.”

“Well, if you know any of us tomorrow, you won’t live to be sixty-five.”

The men got in, drove down the path to the road out front, with the truck lights off.”

Papa Mose stood there, frozen in place, watching the road. Aunt Lizzy ran right away to the home of some white neighbors nearby. The woman of the house was concerned about Aunt Lizzy. But the man of the house was slow to respond. That seemed to explain everything. Papa Mose and Aunt Lizzy figured the man must have known something about what had happened, even before it ever happened.

There was panic. The whole family could be threatened and people nearby could be a part of that threat. Finally, Aunt Lizzy couldn’t take it anymore. She insisted that Papa Mose drive her to her brother, Uncle Crosby, and he did. Back at their home, there was no more sleep for Simeon or Wheeler. Simeon waited up, watching every car that drove past their house, believing his cousin Emmett would be brought back. Wheeler waited up, too. He got dressed just in case the men did come back. Looking for him. He would be ready, if need be, to run out the back and into the woods.

There is going to be hell to pay in Mississippi.” Dr. T.R.M. Howard had stopped to talk to reporters, including the Chicago Defender, at Chicago’s Midway Airport before he went back to his Mississippi home in Mound Bayou, not far from Money. It was Wednesday, August 31, and Dr. Howard, a wealthy and influential black leader in Mississippi, had been in Chicago as part of his organizing work. He stopped long enough to talk to reporters about Emmett’s disappearance and about other things, horrible things.

“It was these other things that caused so much concern about what might be happening to Emmett. Two murders had been committed not long before Emmett’s disappearance, and not far from Money. There were things going on in Mississippi I had never known about. In Belzoni, the Reverend George Lee had been organizing blacks to register to vote before he was shot to death that May.

In August, only two weeks before Emmett left for Mississippi, Lamar Smith was shot to death on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven—in broad daylight—for his political organizing work. Dr. Howard spoke about threats that had been received by his organization, threats that “blood would pave the streets of Mississippi before Negroes would be permitted to vote.” Blood for something so basic, something we had come to take for granted in Chicago. This was the environment Emmett had walked into when he stepped off that train. It wasn’t clear why Dr. Howard was tying Emmett’s disappearance to these murders, but it was chilling to hear it.

Just the day before, Tuesday, August 30, I had to leave Mama’s place to take money out of the bank to send to Uncle Crosby. I also had to talk to Attorney Huff, who gave me an update on his progress and showed me the telegrams he had sent to Illinois Governor Stratton and to Mississippi Governor

Hugh White. Things were moving, people were on top of this, two men were in jail, and we were being heard. At least that.When I got back to Mama’s, there was something strange in the air. It was—I don’t know, a sense of relief. It struck me as so odd. Then Mama told me that Bo was coming home. He was on his way home. That was incredible to me. How could that be? My heart wanted to believe, but my head wouldn’t accept it.

I had just met with Attorney Huff. He had shown me the telegrams. Surely he would have known if something, if anything, had developed. Especially this. I called the police and got referred to the criminal investigations branch and to people handling missing persons investigations. No one knew anything about it. It was a hoax. We had to accept that. And that was going to be only the first phase in discovering the full measure of human cruelty. It was like torture to us.

I talked with Uncle Crosby again and he advised me to wait another day before trying to make a trip to Mississippi. He was working with the sheriff. I started making plans to catch the City of New Orleans, the same train I had rushed Emmett to catch only eleven days earlier. Now it was Wednesday and there was a warning of “blood in the streets” and so much uncertainty. I don’t remember sleeping at all between Sunday and Wednesday. There was no way I could rest until I knew where my baby was, until I knew what was happening to him, until I knew what had happened to him.

Then the reporter called.

I answered, but he didn’t want to talk to me. He wanted the telephone number of someone else he could talk to. He really didn’t have to say any more than that, but I gave him Ollie’s number. And when I saw her later standing in the door, I had confirmation. Her being there said most of it. Her look said the rest. It felt like an arrow had been shot through my heart as she approached me and Mama and pulled us aside, took our hands, told us what she really didn’t have to tell us anymore. Emmett was dead. They had pulled his body from the Tallahatchie River, about twelve miles from Money.

A fisherman, a white teenager, had found him there. His body was weighted down by a heavy gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Mama broke down. I started taking notes. I had to get everything down. I had to get everything right. All the details. I was the one who was going to have to explain to people. Oh, God, how would I be able to do that? Please, tell me how? What was I supposed to do now? A moment from now?

All I could do right then was write it down. It was like making up my bed all over again. Trying not to let it take me. Writing, keeping busy, would keep it from me. Over the weeks and months to come, I would try to keep busy, to keep it from me. But there really was no way to keep it from me. It kept hitting and hitting in waves. The reality was overwhelming. I began to cry. Oh, my poor sweet baby. Gone. What had they done to him?

How was I going to live without my baby? I looked at Mama, and she was in even worse condition than I was. I moved over to try to comfort her. Other people started doing the same thing. And then I began to feel something, like a transfer of strength. It was coming from her to me. I was afraid at that moment of what might be happening, that I might draw too much from her. Oh, God, I couldn’t lose Mama. I moved back and I told everybody else to move back, to give her room, to give her air. People cried and prayed.

Slowly, I began to pull myself together. I saw that Mama was in no condition to talk to anyone. It was going to fall on me. I could see it all around me: Everyone in the place was falling apart emotionally. The whole house was crying. I had to do what Mama had always been there to do for me. I had to take charge.

In a way, life had been too easy for me. Always someone there to look out for me, to take care of the hard things. Even Bo. I could see that things were about to get very hard, more difficult than they had ever been. Impossible, really. And the only one I could count on would be myself.