Walking on Our Knees Backwards Home
The shrill whistle of the teapot breaks the silence. Thankful for the interruption, she walks over to the stove, turns off the burner, pours hot water, and gently places the tea bag into the steaming cup. People gave her presents or consolation prizes after the death of her son. The oddest item, but the one she used the most, was this Desert Rose earthenware tea set crafted in England. A magazine reporting on her son’s death had mentioned her love of tea, and an anonymous donor sent her the set. The delicate roses on the teacups reminded her of her own fragility and echoed the potential for fractures if not handled gingerly.
Now she is sitting at her small kitchen table — a rectangle with four chrome legs and four matching chairs. The chair seats are red vinyl with silver piping and buttons with a gloss-white laminate. This is the first table she bought, and the only one her son knew. They ate their meals together here, but today she is sitting in his empty chair, writing a letter to Larcenia Floyd about another loss. The blue vein of the lined paper waits for her thoughts.
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Dear Larcenia,
I have thought of you since hearing about the death of your son. I am sitting with you in your sorrow as a mother who also lost her son. I understand the searing pain of loss, and the torturing game of “What if?” What if the store owner was there instead of the teenager? What if his girlfriend went instead of him?
How does one survive this loss? I wondered myself when I lost my only child. I have learned that grief is a natural reaction to death, and within everyone is the natural capacity to heal. The duration and intensity of grief are unique for everyone but let me assure you the pain eventually will subside, but the memories will continue to haunt. Even after 65 years, my imagination wades to the bank of the Tallahatchie River where my son died.
I know there was nothing else you could do. I imagine you are asking yourself, but finding the answers will take time. I have also asked these questions, but they will take time to be answered.
As I tell you these things, I am fearful I may be causing more sadness and pain. This is not my intention. Know that I am thinking of you and praying for the healing of your family.
Sincerely,
Mamie
/ / /
Dear Larcenia,
I am writing this brief note to acknowledge I received your letter today. I am relieved you found solace in my letter. Grief is like gum. Once it is stuck in your hair, it is difficult to pry loose. It is only after one pays attention and applies intentional effort that the gum gives way. Sometimes, however, we need to cut out a patch of hair.
I will write a long letter soon and answer the questions you posed. Right now I am preoccupied with baking pies for our church bazaar. I am baking my “world famous” peach cobbler, using my grandmother’s secret ingredients for the crust. I will send you a copy of the recipe in my next letter.
Remember to take care of yourself. How better to do that than with a strong cup of tea and a slice of pie!
Thinking of you,
Mamie
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Dear Larcenia,
Thank you for asking about the details of my son’s death. But before I tell you about that fateful night, I want to give you my pie crust recipe, just in case you are moved to bake.
- 2 ½ cups of all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon each of salt and sugar
- 4 tablespoons ice water
- 1 large can of peaches or 1 lb. of fresh peaches
- 1 cup of sugar
- 1 stick of butter
- ½ teaspoon of cinnamon and nutmeg
Mix 2 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour and 1 teaspoon each of salt and sugar in a medium size bowl, add 4 tablespoons ice water. Ice water helps to keep the fat cool and solid. This helps to keep the crust flaky. Work with your hands until the dough comes together. Pie dough fails when it comeut tough, not tender. Usually this is due to overworking the dough, which can happen either during the initial mixing or during rolling and shaping. Do not overwork the dough. Divide the dough in half and flatten the halves into disks, flour the rolling pin and the board and roll out half of the dough. Place half in the pie pan, add a large can of peaches, but fresh peaches are best if you can afford them. Add sugar, more butter, cinnamon, and nutmeg, then roll out the other half of the dough, cutting it into 1/4 inch strips and put the strips on top of the pie for the crust. Finally add three large cubes of butter and 1/4 cup of sugar. Put the pie in the oven for thirty minutes or until the top of the crust is browned.
Listing these ingredients reminds me of my last meal with Emmett. I remember baking a peach cobbler and putting it on the windowsill to cool. Emmett walked into the kitchen, smelling the pie. He hugged and kissed me. This was my reward for standing on my feet and cooking after working long hours for the Air Force as a clerk in charge of their secret and confidential files. And yes, it was worth it. Although our meal was pleasant, I regret, however, that we did not spend more time together before he left for his great uncle’s house in Mississippi. Instead, he hung out with his friends, saying his good-byes, and I spent the evening watching television. Those moments, we will never recapture.
I should have known that summer trip was a Recipe for Disaster. All the ingredients were present, and I imagine Fate was present that day, tossing the ingredients one by one into the cauldron of our lives. She throws in —
- 1 mother’s caution that Chicago and Mississippi were two different worlds, and one should know how to behave in front of white people in the South
- 1 Jim Crow South
- 1 great-uncle, Moses Wright, who is a sharecropper
- 1 teenage Negro boy from the north
- Bryant’s Grocery Store
- 1 white woman married to the proprietor
- 2 white men—Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, Bryant’s half-brother
- A moonless night
- 2 bottles of liquor
- A gun and a flashlight
- A tool for gouging out eyes
- The Tallahatchie River
- A large metal fan and barbed wire
- 14 curse words
I can see these white men walking through the house with one holding the flashlight and the other one the gun, going from room to room to find Emmett. I can hear Moses pleading with them for Emmett’s life, pleading for them to just give him a whipping. His wife even offered the men money, but they were determined to take my son.
I can see the white men setting aside half the liquor, the gun, the gouging tool, the seventy-five-pound metal fan, and barbed wire to add later. I imagine them mixing in the first eight ingredients, along with half the liquor, stirring violently, while their hands punched and kicked as needed. When they are limp from anger, fear, or exhaustion, they pour in more liquor, and then add the gun. The recipe is set. They dragged my son to the riverbank, gouged out his eyes, tied him to the metal fan, with barbed wire wrapped around his neck, cursing, and threw him in the river.
The scene, the intensity, will not evaporate. At least you know your son called out to you with his dying breath. I wonder if mine did the same. I wonder who heard his pleas. Were those men’s hearts softened by his cries? Or emboldened by them? I imagine this was the first human lifetime for these men. I imagine in their last life they were hyenas, hunting and killing in a pack.
With a broken heart,
Mamie
/ / /
Dear Cissy,
I know your nickname is reserved for friends and family. I am honored to call you friend. I hear your family is planning to hold funeral services in Houston, Minnesota, and North Carolina, and Floyd Mayweather is paying for all of them, including the procurement of a horse-drawn carriage to carry your son’s casket to Houston Memorial Gardens.
You asked about my son’s service. It was not as elaborate. His rites were held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago. The official cause of death: lynching. When I went to the train station to retrieve his body, it was swollen beyond recognition. My son took immense pride in his teeth. When his body was returned, his teeth were missing, his ear was severed, and his eyes were hanging out. The only thing that identified him was a ring of his father’s that I gave to him before he left for Mississippi that summer. Something in me rose up when I saw how they treated my son. I wanted the world to see the barbaric act committed against my son. He was mutilated, disfigured. For the funeral, I dressed him in his best suit with a white shirt. His face showed the beating he had taken. His gouged-out eyes were a warning to other Negro men.
In ancient times, people all over the world sent their loved ones off with songs, prayers, and their prize possessions to use in the next world. I wrapped wisdom in my son’s handkerchief, the one he always carried to church, kissed it, sealed it with a prayer and tucked it in his suit pocket.
Fifty thousand people in Chicago saw his body. There was outrage. As we sang “Swing Low,” I realized Emmett got to Jordon before me, but as in the fifth verse, I am relying on him to tell our ancestors I am coming too.
Mamie
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Dear Friend,
With all the talk of funerals, I had this dream last night. I see your son get into his blue SUV and crank up his music and drive through his urban neighborhood, passing friends and graffiti sprawled on brick walls. The warmth of the sun caresses his arm, which lay in the open window. He parks, crosses the street, opens the door to the convenience store and walks to the counter.
He orders a pack of cigarettes and places a crisp, clean, unsmudged $20 bill on the counter. The store clerk, newly hiredand barely trained, takes the money from this tall black man in a black wife-beater shirt, and hands him the cigarettes. He needs this job, and he is worried he just accepted a counterfeit bill. He follows the black man to his car and asks for the cigarettes back. The man refuses. The clerk walks back into the convenience store, reaches for the phone. Calls 911.
There is a crowd now. Seventeen minutes after the first squad car arrived at the scene, the black man is unconscious and pinned beneath three police officers. He said he could not breathe sixteen times in less than five minutes.
I woke — sobbing. How does one lose their humanity? What acts make us so desensitized that we have become deaf to the pleading of a man gasping for breath?
This is why I do not hunt. When one becomes predator, one needs prey to be defined. One needs to kill, to draw blood, to feel present and worthy. The police officer smiles as the black man’s eyes glaze over and he goes limp. I imagine a cheer filled the air from the lineage of hunters who brag about bagging the big one.
This morning I staggered to my altar and prayed to the officer’s lost God, prayed for him to show him the way home.
In Great Sorrow,
Mamie
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Dear Cissy,
In response to your questions, I do not know why people are so mean why they hate us so much. When people saw what was done to my son, men stood up. Men who never stood up before. People became vocal. Emmett’s death galvanized the Civil Rights movement. On December 5, 1956, a hundred days after the death of my son, Rosa Parks boarded a segregated Montgomery bus.
Tired after working all day, Rosa sat down in an empty seat on the bus. I see her staring out the window as the street scenes unfold before her. Then the bus filled with riders, and suddenly there was no seat for a white person who enters the bus. The bus driver barked orders for Rosa to give up her seat. Feet hurting, tired, and preoccupied with her day, she refused, and the Montgomery bus boycott was born.
Like my son’s death, your son’s death spurred the largest civil rights protests in decades. A wave of reform was initiated. The police officer was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. Although it seems that we are walking on our knees backwards home, as we fight for justice, our sons sacrificed themselves showing the inhumanity of the world and the world rose in outrage.
Mamie
/ / /
Good morning,
Last night I dreamt I saw Emmett. He greeted me. We immediately went to the Tallahatchie River, bowed our heads, and prayed for the souls lost. Sitting on the bank with Roy Bryant, and Roy’s half-brother, J.W. Milam, we remembered that day. We know in their next lifetimes, sadness awaits them.
After this dream, I woke unsettled.
Thoughtfully,
Mamie
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She walked to the stove and made herself another cup of tea. She sat at her small kitchen table, with the steam from the tea rising into the chilled air of her apartment, she reflected on her letters to Larcenia and on Emmett’s and George’s lives.
She was finally able to return to bed just as the sun came over the horizon.
Belinda, your story is phenomenal. Thank you, Elizabeth