Nelson, Marilyn. A Wreath for Emmett Till. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.
Emmett Till was only fourteen in 1955, a friendly kid from Chicago on a trip down south to meet his relatives. He was probably like you in many ways. You may even have committed his crime yourself: whistling at a pretty girl. But where you might have gotten a cross look or a joking slap for your trouble, Emmett became the victim of one of the most notorious lynchings in American history.
“Pierced by the screams of a shortened childhood,
my heartwood has been scarred for fifty years
by what I heard, with hundreds of green ears.
That jackal laughter. Two hundred years I stood
listening to small struggles to find food,
to the songs of creature life, which disappears
and comes again, to the music of the spheres.
Two hundred years of deaths I understood.
Then slaughter axed one quiet summer night,
shivering the deep silence of the stars.
A running boy, five men in close pursuit.
One dark, five pale faces in the moonlight.
Noise, silence, back-slaps. One match, five cigars.
Emmett Till’s name still catches in the throat.”
