Before Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin, there was Emmett Till, a black teenager who was murdered in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman. The failure to punish his killers for their crimes—helped by a leak of his father's World War II military file—made Till an agonizing symbol of how the American legal system has been used as an instrument of racial oppression. Six decades after Emmett Till's murder, and seven decades after Louis Till was executed by the U. S. Army, John Edgar Wideman investigates whether the father, like the son, suffered a perversion of justice of the kind that remains one of the ugliest scars on America's soul.

Towards the end of the summer of 1955 I saw in Jet magazine a scary photo of a dead colored boy murdered in Money, Mississippi, whose mutilated face looked like a black bug somebody had squashed under a thumb. I was fourteen. Emmett Till's age that summer they murdered him. Him colored, me colored. Him a boy, me too. Him so absolutely dead he's my death, too.

I fell in love and had my heart broken the first time that same summer, but the big news on our end of Copeland Street, in Pittsburgh, where a few raggedy houses held a few poor colored families, was neither my aching heart nor the far-off Mississippi murder of Emmett Till, who we whispered about like it was our fault, a shameful, dirty secret. The big news that summer was a showroom-fresh, three-tone green Mercury docked alien as a spaceship at the curb on our end of the block. Like everybody else colored on the street I couldn't get enough of the spit-shined, fighter-jet-sleek car. Its owner was Big Jim the gambler, who people said paid cash he won on a single roll of the dice for his new car.

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One evening that summer my father with a scowl in his voice hollers from the kitchen: Get your tail in here, boy. Why didn't you come in the house when your mother called you last night.

Wasn't late, Daddy. Not hardly past ten o'clock.

Didn't ask you what the damn time was. Don't care what hour of night or day, when your mother tells you do something, you know you better do it. And quick.

I wasn't nowhere, Daddy. Just sitting downstairs right across the street in Big Jim's car where Mom could see me if she looked.

Since when you grown enough to be sitting around at night in anybody's car.

Wasn't going nowhere, Daddy.

Then what you two doing in the damned car.

Nothing.

What he say to you.

Nothing, Daddy.

Well, I'll be talking to Mr. Big Jim soon's I get home from work tomorrow. Meanwhile, you're grounded. Don't set your foot out the door without asking your mother. And don't you even think about going anywhere near that lard-ass yellow man or his shit green car.

The big news on our end of Copeland Street, in Pittsburgh, was neither my aching heart nor the far-off Mississippi murder of Emmett Till, who we whispered about like it was our fault, a shameful, dirty secret.

Three-tone green. Three colors were a fad that summer. All kinds of brand-new shiny rides in crazy color combinations dazzled the streets. Colors the future. Emmett Till's black-and-white photo in Jet the past, an old story of old-timey, terrible shit white men did to black boys down south. Changes coming fast but some things don't change. A long time after that summer of '55 and I'm still trying to make precise sense of my deep fear, my father's deep anger, my own deep anger, my father's deep fear, strutting peacock cars, fathers and sons afraid of each other. War and hate and terror and love.

Just in case you don't recall, I'll remind you that in 1955, Emmett Till, age fourteen, boarded a train in Chicago to visit family in Mississippi. A couple weeks later a train brought his dead body back to Chicago. Emmett Louis Till had been murdered because he was a colored boy and had allegedly wolf-whistled a white lady.

Today Emmett Till is generally viewed as a civil-rights martyr, but the shabby trial that exonerated his killers, and the crucial role played by Till's father afterward, have largely disappeared from the public's imagination. Silenced, the Till trial serves as an unacknowledged, abiding precedent. Again and again in courtrooms across America, killers are released as if colored lives they have snatched away do not matter.

Again and again in courtrooms across America, killers are released as if colored lives they have snatched away do not matter.

I was a bit surprised how much national and international attention the trial had attracted. Thirty photographers popping flashbulbs, seventy reporters pecking away at truth on their typewriters in the courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. The trial lasted five days, and the jury deliberated barely an hour—sorry it took so long, folks...we stopped for a soda-pop break—before it delivered a not-guilty verdict on September 23, 1955.

Sketch of the defendants in the Emmett Till case Getty Images

For an American government waging a propaganda war to convince the world of Democracy's moral superiority over Communism, the verdict was an unacceptable embarrassment. The state of Mississippi was pressured to convict Till's killers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, of some crime. Since abundant sworn testimony recorded in the Sumner trial had established that Milam and Bryant had forcibly abducted Emmett Till, the new charge would be kidnapping. Except, three weeks before a Mississippi grand jury was scheduled to convene, information from the confidential Army service file of Emmett Till's father was leaked to the press. Private Louis Till was not the brave soldier portrayed in northern newspapers during the Sumner trial who had sacrificed his life in defense of his country. His file revealed he had been hanged on July 2, 1945, by the U. S. Army for committing rape and murder in Italy.

With this fact about Emmett Till's father in hand, the grand jury declined to indict Milam and Bryant for kidnapping. Mrs. Mamie Till, who learned about her husband's execution at the same time everyone else did, watched in dismay as the news erased the possibility that the killers of her fourteen-year-old son would be punished for any crime whatsoever.

A decade earlier, all hell broke loose near the Italian town of Civitavecchia. At approximately ten thirty on June 27, 1944, an air-raid alert sounded and searchlights leaped into the black sky. A thunderous barrage of antiaircraft cannons boomed. During the next hour and a half, two Italian women were allegedly raped, another woman shot in the belly and killed. American soldiers encamped in the vicinity were accused of the crimes. Two colored privates, Louis NMI (no middle initial) Till and Fred A. McMurray, who belonged to 177th Port Company of the 379th Port Battalion, Transportation Corps, were found guilty of rape and murder in a court-martial conducted by Army officers. They were hanged five months later.

Only a few of the tens of thousands of colored men who volunteered for military duty at the outset of World War II were inducted immediately into the armed services. Over three hundred thousand colored men drifted in limbo as late as 1943 while the War Department debated if it wanted them, if colored troops were worth the trouble. Louis Till was an exception, a lucky one snapped up in 1942 for active duty as soon as he enlisted.

War was mostly rumor and myth for men in the Transportation Corps. With few exceptions, colored men like Louis Till were assigned to Transport Corps units. Their war was a rumble of distant guns, distant cities burning at night on the horizon. War was most real for colored soldiers when they buried white guys, young guys far from home like them.

Louis Till was an exception, a lucky one.

Transport Corps troops pack up and ship out when officers bark commands. Private Louis Till winds up in the rubble of another town he's never heard of, never imagined, and he will stay there as long as officers say stay. Sometimes, Till must know he's in Italy. Knows it don't make no fucking difference but he knows sometimes. Knows it as well as he knows his own name, Louis Till. As well as he knows the number 2 plus the number 0 equals his age—20—when he enlisted. And knows he's not going to get much older. And so what. He's Louis Till. Him. Everything he always is.

There was a faint hiss, a whiff of staleness, when I slit open the large yellow envelope and extracted the copy of the record of trial of United States v. Louis Till, which arrived finally in the mail. My copy of the file begins with about thirty pages of miscellaneous correspondence, including notices certifying that Privates Louis Till and Fred A. McMurray had been charged, tried, and executed, as well as a newspaper clipping dated October 15, 1955, reporting that Louis Till had been hanged ten years earlier for rape and murder. Then comes a long, detailed narrative, composed after the court-martial by an Army board of review, that describes the crimes of June 27 and 28 near Civitavecchia, Italy. Death certificates of Till and McMurray follow. Next comes the initial report of alleged crimes, filed August 7, 1944. After snippets of administrative paperwork, two more post-court-martial narratives of the crimes appear, both written, like the initial narrative, by Army officers whose job was to determine whether justice had been served.

Slanting across the left middle of the file's cover, a dotted line bears a handwritten date, 14 Oct 55, followed by the initials RK. Each time the October 14 date appeared, I wondered if I had discovered a smoking gun. Doesn't a conspiracy to violate Private Louis Till's right to privacy originate there, on that day in October 1955, just after the Sumner trial, when Till's confidential military file is declassified and the way cleared for its contents to be leaked to the press. Just in time to sabotage any likelihood a Mississippi grand jury might convene in November and decide to try Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges.

The date reappears later on a memorandum addressed to the office of the judge advocate general (JAG). At the bottom of the memo an official seal certifies the memo's date of dispatch, 14 Oct 1955, and above it, typed, the name of Ralph K. Johnson, Colonel, JAG chief, Military Justice Division, the officer who facilitated the release of classified documents. In response to some unnamed but very powerful person's request, rules had been broken and the Louis Till file, buried ten years in an archive, had been disinterred, disturbed, the remains transmitted to the press.

But the October 14, 1955, date is not necessarily smoke curling from a guilty gun barrel. If Emmett Till's murderers committed no crime, then no conspiracy to cover up a crime exists. What would be accomplished if I were to shout the October date from the rooftops of New York City or Money, Mississippi. A redneck senator's vicious meddling and an Army officer's betrayal of a fellow soldier's privacy were minor trespasses, once I began to grasp the gravity of wrongdoing recorded in the Till file.

The literal last word on the last page of the Till file is Confidential, stamped at the bottom of a letter written in February 1945 by a Brigadier General Oxx to the commanding officer of the 359th Port Battalion and carbon copied to the infamous MTOUSA (Mediterranean Theater of Operations, United States Army) Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa. The letter releases Private James Thomas Jr., the snitch who doomed Till, from prison. Someone drew lines through Confidential, but you can still see the word at the bottom of the file's final page. Power transforming Confidential into a ghost word, dead and alive, invisible and present. Silenced and speaking like lynched Louis Till.

The shack or barracks or shanty, as it was variously identified in the file, where the rapes took place consisted of two small rooms, both opening onto a passageway or corridor that led to the single entrance. The larger of the rooms was divided by a partition. Frieda Mari slept on one side of the partition; her parents, Ernetto Mari and Guila Persi, on the other. Benni Lucretzia and her daughter, Elena, refugees who'd just arrived in Civitavecchia from the village of Allumiere, occupied a negligible space behind the Mari-Persi room. The cramped barracks afforded little or no privacy.

Though no enemy planes transgressed the night skies above Civitavecchia on June 27, 1944, antiaircraft artillery rumbled and searchlights probed, frightening civilians, scrambling the American troops garrisoned at camps nearby. Frieda Mari, closely trailed by the girl Elena, bolted from her bed to the shack's door, flung it open to escape falling walls or to see for herself what new terror war was delivering.

She never got beyond the door. Masked men shooed her and Elena back inside the darkness. Colored men she was sure, because the intruders lit matches. One of them was tall. Dark-skinned, five foot, ten inches. Another shorter, light-skinned, five foot, six inches, and the third, the shortest one, a mulatto, whitest of the three. Later, while the shortest, whitest one is on top of her, Frieda Mari testified, she lifts the hoodlike mask off his face. The glimpse she steals leaves no doubt in her mind, she told jurors at the court-martial. Her attacker was a mulatto. Asked by a juror what color exactly she had seen in the darkness, Frieda Mari replied: He wasn't very light. He was sort of a light dark or a clear dark. The juror (looking around the courtroom where Till and McMurray sit) goes on to ask: Is there anyone in the room that would have the color of this person. Frieda Mari answers: There aren't any.

Louis Till

No, witnesses agree: Too dark to tell what color clothing the attackers wore. Yes, all witnesses agree: We could see the color of the invaders' skin.

Three intruders. Three colored men...negroes...niggers, swore the inhabitants of the raided Mari residence in Civitavecchia.

Four of us raided, swore two of the suspects in their statements. This major discrepancy—were there three or four assailants—is never questioned by defense attorneys during the court-martial of Louis Till and Fred McMurray.

Testimony in the Till file may seem to come from many voices, but all voices are mediated by Criminal Investigation Division agents. These agents, fellow officers of court-martial jurors, gather evidence, take statements from witnesses and defendants, and submit their findings. The only authentication required is a second signature beneath that of the officer who files the reduction. Routinely this signature is supplied by a fellow agent.

This system provides agents ample, perhaps irresistible, opportunities for abuse. Limited only by conscience and ingenuity, they can manipulate, freelance, bypass entirely the words of a witness. But witness statements enter the record and are treated as if they are taped depositions, the exact words of witnesses. Maybe CID agents simply reported what they heard during interviews. Maybe not. The statements are in English. Presumably the victims spoke Italian, so the statements have been translated. Measurements expressed in inches and feet are conversions from centimeters and meters. Spoken words have been reduced (CID agents' term of art) to typed summaries. Translation. Conversion. Reduction. Each process transforms a witness's words. Each creates a step away from the words of live encounters between CID agents and witnesses.

This system provides agents ample, perhaps irresistible, opportunities for abuse.

All three of the review-board narratives in the file tell the same story. From one text to the next, alleged facts pick up speed and weight, become an avalanche. Not surprising since they all depend solely, uncritically, on information contained in the original investigative report and testimony recorded in the court-martial transcript. Three repetitions of more or less the same story asserting violent details have a chilling effect. Why would anyone reading the tale today challenge its impartiality. It's a convincing account unless a reader understands that the scenarios presented by the words of review boards are not eyewitness reports of unbiased spectators present during the action, but reductions of reductions.

I grant the agents the benefit of the doubt. I was not present, so I can't claim to know what transpired in a specific interview or sequence of interviews. Assume they did their best to render accurately the words of people they interviewed. Still—translation, conversion, reduction produce at best problematic, at worst unreliable, corrupted representations of conversations.

Telltale signs of reduction are abundant in both structure and content of victim statements. In Captain Barnes's version of what Benni Lucretzia and Frieda Mari said to him in their second recorded interviews, the last words of both statements deliver a punch line to remind the reader each woman was pregnant when assaulted. Both statements repeat identical phrases and words. Push must be one of Barnes's favorite words; it appears six times in eleven lines of one statement, seven times in nine lines of the other.

When a witness speaks to court-martial jurors, it's fair to ask whose words issue from the witness's mouth. Off-camera interrogations allow agents to plant information, coach, coax, censor, coerce. The original recorded statements of Lucretzia and Mari are each less than two hundred words. At court-martial each woman's testimony expands to include the classic elements necessary for conviction of capital rape—violence, coercion, duration of the act, depth of vaginal penetration, sightings of the offender's penis, assertion of the victim's resistance, the aggravating presence of deadly weapons.

In spite of darkness broken only by an occasional match or flashes from antiaircraft guns and searchlights, in the file the victims provide uncannily consistent and precise physical descriptions of the intruders. Witness statements in the file establish minute details—an intruder's exact height—and leave major issues unsettled, such as how many men raided the Mari residence.

For Army officers at court-martial or serving on review boards, the cumulative weight of victim statements establishes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Louis Till and Fred McMurray as perpetrators, even though each individual victim admits that darkness, hoods, masks, shock, confusion made it impossible to identify the men who attacked them. Seated across the court-martial chamber from Till and McMurray, no victim could identify or accuse either man. Including Ernetto Mari, Frieda Mari's father, who had claimed in a previous statement recorded by CID agents that he had seen the three colored intruders outdoors, in broad daylight, near a waterpoint in Civitavecchia, the day after the night they'd raided his home and knocked him unconscious: I saw the three men—the same three—hiding behind the house of a neighbor.

Army officers began their investigation of Anna Zanchi's murder unaware that two Italian women had been assaulted nearby, on the same night Zanchi had been shot. With no murder weapon recovered from the shooting, no motive, no suspects, the investigation of the Zanchi homicide was floundering and probably would have languished indefinitely unless someone stepped forward to confess or accuse. However, once CID agents heard rumors of rapes by colored men occurring the night of the Zanchi shooting, their murder investigation proceeded rapidly. Rape and color paved the way. Saved the day. All the investigating officers needed were colored suspects, and the segregated 379th, a battalion full, was handy. Even better, agents already had in custody a bunch of colored sugar thieves.

Louis Till

Three days before the rapes and murder, several colored soldiers had attempted to sell thirteen ten-pound bags of stolen sugar at the waterpoint. Investigation of the theft eventually produced four suspects: Private William J. Hite; Private John (NMI) Kinchen; Private James Thomas Jr.; and Private Louis (NMI) Till, all of the 379th Port Battalion. During interrogation Private Kinchen quickly turned, admitting his knowledge of the scheme and implicating the other three suspects. Till, Thomas, and Hite chose to remain silent.

The fact that Till, McMurray, and the other alleged perpetrators were colored, plus the fact that Till and McMurray were reported in the vicinity of Civitavecchia the night the crimes occurred, is enough to convince Army officers the accused are guilty. No further burden of proof is demanded. Privates Till and McMurray are sentenced to death on the basis of being the wrong color in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wrong color, wrong place, wrong time, a mantra. A crime that over the course of our nation's history has transformed countless innocent people of color into guilty people.

The remainder of the case against Till and McMurray consists of conflicting, ambiguous hearsay evidence that defense lawyers, except for a few timid objections, allowed to stand. On one rare occasion when defense lawyers did challenge the prosecution's case—a defense contention that Fred McMurray's statement naming Louis Till as the ringleader of the fatal raid should be excluded because it was obtained by grilling McMurray for ten consecutive hours—a court-martial judge quickly overruled the objection.

A crime that over the course of our nation's history has transformed countless innocent people of color into guilty people.

Energized by rape and color, the investigation bulldozed ahead, more mission than inquiry. Color and rape provided a motive. Explain and link crimes on the night of June 27 as a single, predictable outburst of the well-known lust and violence that seethes barely suppressed in the dark blood of colored soldiers. A drunken, murderous spree. A riot of uncontrollable, atavistic impulses. Colored soldiers whom the Army considered second-class citizens were suspects who possessed no rights investigators need respect. The logic of southern lynch law prevailed. All colored males are guilty of desiring to rape white women, so any colored soldier the agents hanged could not be innocent.

No doubt about it. Some brutal, ugly shit went down in Civitavecchia. No counternarratives contest the accuracy, the veracity of what review boards report. Guilt of Till and McMurray a foregone conclusion when the court-martial transcript appears at the end of the Till file. Pretrial publicity with a vengeance. The court-martial transcript doesn't serve the reader as an opportunity for unbiased weighing of evidence. A guilty verdict arrives as a kind of I-told-you-so. A tail positioned in the file to wag the dog.

But what if the crimes of June 27 and 28, 1944, in Civitavecchia were not exactly rape, the criminals not exactly colored. CID agents, determined to prove color and rape, chose not to ask those questions. None of the obvious trails leading away from rape and color are pursued. No witness statement establishes the fact elaborated on by GIs' comments in the Till file that the assaulted shacks were situated in a cluster of hovels frequented day and night by American troops of all colors shopping for women and wine. No victim statement records whether sex for money was offered, requested, expected, or obtained the night in question. Apart from accusations by the accused of other accused, no witness claims to have seen the same individuals present at both the rape and the murder scenes. Only the perpetrators' color (or alleged color) links the assaults in one household with murder in another.

Only the perpetrators' color (or alleged color) links the assaults in one household with murder in another.

Statements that might impede the agents' rush to blame color and rape are adjusted. John Masi, an Italian citizen who spoke English and asserted that he could distinguish colored voices from white voices because he'd lived a dozen years in Brooklyn, had sworn in an initial statement, on June 30, 1944—only forty-eight hours after the Zanchi shooting—that one of the two masked men who had pounded on the Zanchi door was white: "The tall man did most of the talking. From his actions and manner of speech I am of the opinion that he was white." Masi said that he had argued with two hooded, armed men on the porch of the Zanchi house for several minutes before they ordered him back inside and bullets blasted through the door, killing his girlfriend's mother.

In a second interview, on October 27, 1944, Masi reversed himself: "The American soldiers I talked to and who fired their pistols at the door of the casa of the Zanchi family were colored Americans." In this second version of events, the version he repeated in his testimony at court-martial, not only has Masi become certain that he recognized a colored man's colored voice, he swears in effect that while lying on the floor he could see through a closed door the color of the man outside who fired fatal shots through it.

U.S. Troops in Milan, 1945 Getty Images

Everybody in the Till file lies. It's easy to recognize situations that might compel lies. Fred McMurray's last-ditch attempt to keep his neck out of a noose; Junior Thomas's blaming of others to exonerate himself; CID agents' desire to construct an open-and-shut case. If a reward is enticing enough, does the temptation to lie become irresistible. Do extreme circumstances mitigate lies. Do all questions deserve true answers—is that boy from Chicago in there—are you hiding Jews in your cellar—Tutsis in your attic. It's not easy for a reader of the file to figure out if a false story is being told because the teller believes it's true. Or if a story is suppressed because the person not telling it believes it's false.

In the file, until a court-martial passes judgment and decides which version of events wins, all lies are equal. All lies except colored lies. Colored lies (or truth, or fiction) are invalid unless they substantiate white lies. Lying is a weapon nobody in the Till file can afford to surrender. The collective enterprise of lying creates a sort of stock market trading solely in worthless commodities. Like everybody else I'm invested in my own little portfolio of lies, set aside for rainy days.

Cut to the chase. Lights. Action. Camera. As in blockbuster movies and novels. Bam. Bloom. Boom. Guns snatch half-naked Frieda Mari from sleep, drive her to the door of a shack in Civitavecchia, a door she flings open to escape the terror of ceilings and walls crashing down. What Benni Lucretzia sees first from her bed when cannon fire shakes the flimsy wooden shack is a blur of white nightgown, then her daughter, Elena, running towards the door, a little ghost trailing the big ghost of Frieda Mari's nightdress. Then Frieda and Elena are flying back through the shack, men chasing them who must have piled through the door when Frieda unlatched it.

Another world bursts into the dark barracks. Men have fallen from the sky, rushed through the open door. Screams. Shouts. A hand grips Benni Lucretzia's arm. Grunted words she doesn't understand. The room's full of huge, dark wings battering the air. A herd of panicked sheep, wolves in pursuit, wolves growling, barking, teeth snapping. The snarl of wolf language.

She's grabbed, shoved back down on her bed. Door slams. A match flickers. Shadows lift, lurch, spin. Black masks. White eyes gleam through eyeholes. A blinding flash snuffs the match, restores utter dark. Benni Lucretzia screams, Where is Elena. Where is my girl. Run, Elena. Run and hide. A heavy hand over Benni Lucretzia's mouth, another hand inside her nightgown. Gown rips when she wrenches away. She struggles to stay upright, her back wedged against the wall. Fights. Tries to flee. Nowhere to go. Loses the fight quickly. Gown a noose. Claws dig into her bare shoulder.

Another match flares. Black bugs dart back and forth across white eyeballs. A huge, hooded head looms over Benni Lucretzia. Heavy legs straddle her. Bed too small. Bed's caving in. Elbow digs into her breast. She squirms free enough to kick, to pedal her legs furiously. Going nowhere. Hard hand over her mouth muffles her scream. Takes her breath away. She can't shout her daughter's name. Elena. Hide, run, Elena.

She stops twisting and flopping. She's pinned to the bed. A great weight crushes down. Stone hand cuts off breath. Don't kill my baby. Please. Please. Baby inside me. I won't fight. Won't run. Tiny heels kick, kick inside her all day long. Don't scare the baby.

Mountain sits where it wants to sit. Speaks her language. Bianchi. Tedeschi. Rides her. Yanks her nightdress up to her shoulders. Fistful of hair he pulls if she bucks and twists. Fikey, fikey. Lavorare.

Another flash freezes the shape above her. Black an instant before white light blinds her. Hands grip her legs, stretch her wide open. She's being torn to pieces. She bites down on her tongue. The big one on top grunts. He's inside her. She lets him. Lets him stay. Run, Elena. Run. Too tired to fight. Lets him. No fight left. Is the baby asleep. Don't hurt my baby.

Where are you, Elena. Light bright as day an instant, then black as storms on summer nights. Elena's legs a blur behind Frieda's pale blur. Elena hides under the bed. Black wolf after her. No. No. Please. Let it be Frieda. Frieda down there on the floor eaten by a wolf. Lavorare. Lavorare. Where is she, Frieda. Is my baby dead. Where is my daughter.

I was not there. I am not Louis Till. Not Mamie Till. I'm guilty of imagining pictures, sounds, words. Mine. I make them up. They could or could not be the way. It happened. Truth.

Mamie Till Getty Images

Fred McMurray, Louis Till's codefendant, hanged with Till near Aversa, Italy, testified on July 19, 1944: "After we were inside, Till and the English soldier both said, 'fiky-fiky' to the women who were inside. The two (2) who were in the front room said, 'sì.' One of them caught me by the hand and the other caught the English soldier by the hand and both said: 'Vieni Qua.' The old man was lying across the foot of the bed crying, so we all went into the back room where we found another woman in bed. Thomas asked this woman to 'fiky-fiky' and she said 'sì,' so she and Thomas went into the front room. The woman I had got in the bed and pulled up her dress. I got on the bed and was trying to get my rod out. Just as I got my rod out, Till came up to me with his cock in one hand and the .45 automatic in the other. He told me to get up and after a little argument I did as he said because I was afraid of him (Till is bigger than I am and he also had the gun on me). The Englishman was fucking his woman on the floor, so I went back into the front room where the old man, Thomas, and his woman were . . . Till, Thomas, and the English soldier all got some tail, but I didn't. The English soldier stated that he was laid twice."

Junior Thomas named names. Nods Uh-huh. Louis Till. Yes, sir, he says again after the officer reads out Till's name and serial number. Yes, sir. Put on Navy hoods and masks. Carried guns. Yes, sir. They busted in, fucked those Italian women at the waterpoint. Yes, sir. Till and them did just what you say they did and I didn't do nothing. Till said raid and it's four us, not three, creep up on the shack. Louis Till don't talk much, so when he says something you best listen. Till's wild crazy. Got a .45 automatic in his pocket. Took it from a whiteboy sailor he punched out that night. No, sir. Swear to God it was the others inside the shack done it and I didn't do nothing but watch. Just like you say it happened. Yessir. Lit a match so I could kinda see. Four of us through the door, sir, not three like them Italian peoples say. They wrong, sir. The others run in when the door opened. Went after the women in there, beat down the old man. But I stopped at the door.

Must be near morning before they brought the statement to sign. No lunch, no dinner, not a fucking Coke for Thomas, just questions all night. The more he says, the more he can't remember from one story to the next and the white boys pick at each story as if he knew, as if he cared. Like any bit of truth anywhere in any of it. Don't matter what the fuck he say or don't say. One story same as another. Like Till always said it don't mean shit no way.

Louis Till don't talk much, so when he says something you best listen.

When they bring a paper to sign he play-reads the words because they say read. Signs because that's what CIDs order Private Thomas to do. Second statement no hassle. Three weeks or so after the first statement another CID in charge and then another one who bops in a second at the end to sign on the line below the line Junior Thomas signs. A fan moves the air, moves officer stink. Minute all it takes the CID to say, We cleaned up your first statement, Private. You forgot a few things we put in. We took out a few things we know you don't want to say. Read it if you want to read it, but I've just told you everything you need to know.

Yessir. Thank you, sir.

Good. You're doing yourself a favor, Private. Sooner we finish this business, better it will be for everybody. Dismissed.

Let it go. Resist temptation. Let poor James Thomas Jr., dead or not, rest in peace. He's a man, not a lesson. Lessons aplenty every minute of every day of each person's life. Let each of us teach ourselves, speak for ourselves, fabricate our file of lies. No fiction of evil James Thomas on the gallows or Saint Louis Till on the cross can spare us.

According to a report filed by agents L. H. Rousseau and J. J. Herlihy on August 7, 1944, Louis Till didn't open up to any extent when Herlihy, posing as a fellow prisoner, confined himself in the brig with Till to gain information about the crimes—assault, rape, murder—of June 27 and 28 in Civitavecchia, Italy. Another attempt to secure a statement from Till, the report continues, also met with negative results. Till remained adamantly silent, offering no information about the crimes nor providing an alibi to establish his whereabouts on the night of June 27. A stubborn silence that must have puzzled and frustrated his Army interrogators, since all the other accused colored soldiers were busy accusing one another.

Breaking his silence once in response to the agents' repeated demands for a statement, Louis Till allegedly said to Rousseau, "There's no use in me telling you one lie and then getting up in court and telling another one," a remark that clearly conveys to me, and should have conveyed to Rousseau, Till's sophistication, his resignation, his Old World, ironic sense of humor about truth's status in a universe where all truths are equal until power chooses one truth to serve its needs.

"There's no use in me telling you one lie and then getting up in court and telling another one."

Louis Till understood officers and gentlemen. He understood the code whose uniforms and insignia they wore. Till's silence in their presence is not ignorance or fear, but proof of his unspeakable clarity. Beyond his cell he hears voices, barks, grunts, drums, whistles, bugles, horses, thwats of an officer's big stick across some fool's back. He hears the prophecy of his guilt drawing closer each day, as he never doubted it would.

Should I argue Till's silence was a mistake. What can someone like me, a fence straddler, fence climber, scrambler-up of unsurmountable stone walls, teach Louis Till. As if I've made it over the top, as if I'm ensconced inside the circle of officers and gentlemen. Fair. Fair enough. Fair because sooner or later I will lose my grip, slide back down where I'm supposed to be. Next to Till. Me and Louis. Louis and me. Till death do us part.

What if the person who prepared the Till file to be read by others had decided not only that Louis Till's voice must be heard, but that it must be heard first. What if the file included statistics documenting the stunningly disproportionate number of colored soldiers accused, convicted, and executed for rape. Or the fact that systematic discrimination limited the number of colored soldiers in the officer corps and thus very few were available to staff court-martials and review boards. Voices recorded in the file have been orchestrated to engage in a conversation solely among themselves, a conversation condemning Till by excluding his voice, a conversation not acknowledging, let alone pondering, the meaning of Till's silence.

What would have happened if Louis Till had spoken, denied James Thomas's story, challenged it when interviewed by CID agents. What if Till had accused his accuser, Thomas, in a sworn statement of his own. What if, during the investigation of the sugar theft that became an investigation of rape, color, and murder, Till had scared Junior Thomas, shut him up with an evil stare or wasted him in a dark alley in Naples the moment Till caught the hangdog Iago smirk of complicity and betrayal in the eyes of Junior Thomas. The innocent, imploring look of determination and helplessness in the eyes of a man who's fallen hopelessly in love and understands he is not loved in return and that nothing the loved or unloved can do will ever unknot unrequited love.

If Louis Till had been around to school his son about the South, about black boys and white men up north and down south, would Emmett have returned safely from his trip to Money, Mississippi, started up public high in Chicago, earned good grades like I did, eluded the fate of his father, maybe even become president of the United States. But the flame of his father's fate draws Emmett like a moth. Son flies backward and forward simultaneously like the sankofa bird because part of the father's fate is never to be around to protect, advise, and supervise his son, the fate of father and son to orphan each other always. Fathers and sons. Sons and fathers. An eternal cycle of missing and absence. Bright wings flutter like a dark room lit suddenly by a match.

Till's crime is a crime of being, I decide after spending hours and hours one afternoon, poring through the file, an afternoon not unlike numerous others, asking myself how and why the law shifted gears in its treatment of colored soldiers during World War II. Asking why colored men continue to receive summary or no justice, a grossly disproportionate share of life sentences and death sentences today. Whether or not Till breaks the law, his existence is viewed by law as a problem. Louis Till is an evil seed that sooner or later will burst and scatter more evil seeds. Till requires a preemptive strike.

Till's crime is a crime of being.

A fair person might interject that Louis Till's capital conviction was scrutinized by three separate reviews, a process strictly adhering to Army regulations. A vetting at least as thorough as most death-penalty convictions receive today. Didn't colored Louis Till enjoy every legal benefit of the doubt to which any citizen is entitled. In response to this fair interjection, I offer a phrase from one of my favorite novels, Toni Morrison's Sula, describing how a guy in the Ohio town of Medallion copulates with a woman he intends to abandon first thing next morning: with the steadiness and intensity of a man about to leave for Dayton. A funny, disturbing line even though I never could exactly figure out if the fucking was good or bad, fake or authentic. Probably all of the above, Ms. Morrison winks. In Till's court-martial, as in the case of that fuck in a bed in Ohio, all the details are managed scrupulously— every t crossed, every i dotted. But seamless, careful, by-the-book performance provides no evidence of what the spider's thinking about the fly enmeshed in its web.

No matter how efficiently I maneuver through the file, I won't find Louis Till. Till is not asleep in there, waiting for my magic wand. I'm reporting imagination as fact. Unscrupulous as any Army investigator. Worse because I claim to know better. Want my fictions to be fair and honest. As if that desire exempts me from telling truth and only truth. The United States Army's not exempt, either, even if the Army's duty to win a war and keep peace after war is a more admirable excuse than mine for bending facts, inventing truth.

Why not work for live prisoners, my wife has asked me. Millions of people are locked up this very minute. I do. I am, I want to say. Want to explain to her, to myself. I work for my incarcerated son and brother. They are locked inside me. I am imprisoned with them during every moment that I struggle with the Till file. No choice. Trying to find words to help them. To help myself. Help carry the weight of hard years spent behind bars.

In 2007, I flew to France to find Louis Till's grave. From The Interpreter, Alice Kaplan's biography of the French novelist Louis Guilloux, I had learned that Till was buried in Plot E of the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial. My second day in France, my friend Antoine drove me to the cemetery, 120 kilometers east of Paris. We parked across the road from the imposing stone portals of the main cemetery, in a lot next to an administrative building. After a brief browse through two small rooms of artifacts and photos, we exited a rear door. We walked about a hundred yards in the wrong direction towards a combination garage and utility shed beside which some workers were finishing lunch, others loading equipment, a crew of groundskeepers in striped coveralls.

We waited until all the workers walked or drove off, then poked around in sparse woods below the shed and garage, me gradually realizing that I had no idea how distant or disguised a graveyard for dishonored dead might be if its custodians wished to conceal its presence. After we had circled through the trees and wound up more or less back where we'd entered them, we mounted a slight slope. At the top of the rise, confronted by a high, thick mass of trees and shrubbery, we hesitated again, unsure what to do next, until one of us decided to push aside some branches, slip inside a small break in the dense barrier of greenery to see what might lie beyond it.

One, two, three cautious steps, and there we were inside a circle of pines and laurel at the edge of a serenely green, set-aside space that contained one small, freestanding stone cross and ninety-six identical, four-by-four-inch, flat white stones arranged in parallel rows, each stone bearing a number just as The Interpreter had informed readers they would.

Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial

Beneath each white marker embedded in the slightly sloping, meticulously groomed lawn, if Kaplan and other sources I'd consulted were accurate, lay the remains of dishonored American soldiers who had been executed by the U. S. Army during World War II. They'd been transported here for reinterment sometime around 1949 from various countries that once constituted the Mediterranean and European theaters, so to speak, of World War II. Louis Till's grave, The Interpreter said, is number 73, at the corner of Plot E's rectangular arrangement.

Till's grave is exactly like all the others. Marked by a small flat stone with probably an underground zinc liner beneath it containing a wooden box containing another wood box containing remains. Eighty or so of the ninety- six graves hold colored remains. Each of the ninety-six is allotted approximately half the room allotted to each of the 6,012 graves for the honored dead across the road. In the official Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, a thirty-five-acre expanse constituted by Plots A through D, the headstones of the honored dead are tall crosses of white marble, imported from Carrara, Italy.

Inside Plot E, I had stepped away from Antoine to be alone. Moved closer to Louis Till's marker, close enough to speak privately to Louis Till on this, our first meeting, this first chance to say hello, goodbye, whatever. A silent exchange, of course. Like silence Antoine and I had maintained since entering Plot E, as if a sign forbidding talk on pain of death had been posted beside the gap we found through the thicket of greenery enclosing the dishonored graves.

Louis Till's Grave at Plot E of Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial

No conversation with Antoine. None with Louis Till, either. I could not pretend Louis Till would hear a greeting, a benediction spoken or unspoken. Nor pretend Till's silence signified anything other than Till's absence.

No Louis Till. No man under marker 73. Full-size, grown men laid out properly on their backs would not fit into the cramped spaces defined by Plot E's grid of stones. Then what the fuck was under each marker? Inside a zinc liner, inside wooden boxes. What did the Army find in 1949 when they dug up and pried open the original coffin containing Louis Till's remains? A uniformed or naked corpse folded up like a fetus. A skeleton wearing rags of flesh. After you tie a man's hands, blindfold him, put a noose around his neck, drop him through a trapdoor, let him swing in the breeze, shitting and pissing on himself, neck broken, heart stopped, was it possible to inflict more injury, more insult and dishonor on his body?

After you tie a man's hands, blindfold him, put a noose around his neck, drop him through a trapdoor, was it possible to inflict more injury, more insult and dishonor on his body?

I wanted to rip Till's plaque out of the ground. Hurl it far away. A scream, growl, curse, moan, howl wanted to leap from my throat. Something, anything, to disrupt Plot E's preposterous dignity. Why the obscenity, the madness, the irony of special handling, costly attention devoted to a man after he's been reduced to dead meat. Rotting meat and bones exhumed, then trucked, shipped, riding a train, flying through the air to wind up in hole number 73, one of ninety-six holes more appropriate in size for burying large dogs than men.

If you stood beside Louis Till's grave today what would you hear. Probably not the cries I kept inside myself. Would you hear blood. Blood's loud flow a river dividing humankind. Blood of crimes in Italy. Crimes in Mississippi. Blood deep. Blood guilt. Till blood. Evidence loud and clear in the stillness of Plot E. The Till father condemned by dark blood at birth. An orphan no one claims. Origins unknown. Probably not quite human. A beast to be penned, tamed, worked, slaughtered. The son's fate differs only slightly. False innocence his crime. Blood chose Emmett Till. His time was cut short to demonstrate what bright blood must be willing to do if it wishes brightness to live on and on. To thrive and prosper uncorrupted.

Till's story, his son Emmett's, mine, my father's, my family's, could begin or end there. With a story of stolen sugar. With a blood price exacted for theft. With rage. With resignation. With grief. Mourning. With ancient bloody lies twisting inside me. A scream I suppressed. Silent screams of the dishonored dead filed in boxes at my feet. Lost names. Lost faces. If I return to Till's grave, I will confess to him first thing that the Louis Till project is about saving a son and brother, about saving myself.