Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He savors the words— bitch, trash, whore, nigger, white, wife — punctuating each repeat of the lesson with a blow from his rod. He works meticulously, some stubborn stain of infidelity here he cannot beat out. He strips the boy, smashes him across his bare chest, shoulders, feet, thighs, cock, and balls. Every piece of this rule-breaking flesh must be made to respect his power.

We never had a problem with our niggers till you Chicago vermin come down to rile them up. Don’t you know nothing? Nobody never taught you can from can’t?

The boy has stopped answering. But even his silence defies them. The two men — the husband of the soiled woman and his half brother — work away on the naked body: in the truck, out of the truck, questioning, beating, questioning, patient teachers who’ve started their lecture too late.

You sorry about what you did, boy?Nothing. You ever going to do something so stupid again, the whole of what’s left of your life? More nothing. They look for compliance in his face. But by now, the impish bright oval from the Christmas photo has little face left. The boy’s silence drives the whites into whatever calm technique lies past madness. They poke their barrels into his ears, his mouth, his eyes.

They will tell it all later, to Look magazine, selling their confession for petty cash. They meant only to scare. But the boy’s refusal to feel wrong about anything drives them to their obligation. They throw him back into the flatbed and drive him out to Milam’s farm. They root around in the shed and turn up a heavy cotton-gin fan. Bryant, the snub-faced husband, begins to lift the fan into the truck. His half brother, Milam, stops him.

Roy, what the hell kind of work are you doing there?

Roy Bryant looks down and laughs. You’re right, J.W. I’m going crazy. It’s from not getting a good night’s sleep.

They make the boy pick it up. Bobo, who weighs little more than the fan. Emmett, whom the whites have beaten almost senseless. He staggers from the steel’s dead weight but manages to lift it, unaided, into the truck.

You know what this is for, don’t you, boy?

Still the boy refuses to believe. The drama is too broad, the cotton-gin fan too theatrical. They mean only to torture his imagination, to break him with terror. Yet lifting the heavy machinery is worse than everything he’s suffered until now.

Bryant and Milam make him lie down in the truck, naked, alongside the scrap metal. They drive him back into the woods, down by the Tallahatchie. In those last two miles, the boy lives through all creation. His thoughts collapse; no message can escape him to forgive the living. All law has aligned against him. Fourteen, and condemned to nothing. Even God gives him up.

The night is pitch-dark and filled with stars. They pull the truck far off the road, into a thicket by the river. Even now — the whites will tell the magazine that buys their confession — even now, they mean only to administer his due. They threaten to tie the fan around the boy’s neck with a loop of barbed wire. Bryant talks to him, slowly. You understand now, boy? You see how you’re making us do this?

Till says nothing. He has gone where no human need can reach.

Milam waves over the black water. We’re taking you out there, boy. Unless you tell us you’ve learned how to treat a white woman.

The boy didn’t show the proper remorse, they’ll tell the magazine. He refused to admit he’d done anything wrong.

Milam plays with the bloodied clothes while his half brother delivers the sermon. He wants to see what a black boy wears for underpants. He goes through Till’s pockets. He pulls apart the wallet and finds the picture.

Roy.Milam’s voice is metal. Look at this.

The men pass the photo back and forth, under a flashlight. Some unmeaning artifact. Some change in the fundamental laws. Bryant takes the photo to the riverside and forces it into the boy’s smashed face. How’d you get this, boy?

There’s not enough boy left to answer. The silence triggers another round of battering.

Who’d you steal this from? You better tell us everything. Now.

They might as well demand an answer from the earth they beat him into. Time melts like August road tar. The questions swell, each word unfolding its kernel of violent eternity. They hit him with a monkey wrench. Each blow is forever falling.

Who is this girl? What the fuck you do to her, nigger?

Emmett comes back from a place he shouldn’t have escaped. The house is burned, and it would be no use to him now, even if they let him live. The life they own means nothing to him. Sense has run down to a standstill. But somehow he comes back, finds the concussed brain, the caved-in throat.

She’s my sweetheart.

His crime swells past rape, worse than murder. It spits in the face of creation. What the whites must do, they do — no rage to their motion, no hysteria, no lesson. They exterminate by deep reflex, a flinch that comes before even self-defense. They put a bullet through the fourteen-year-old’s brain, as they might kill a rabid animal. A desperate protection, the safeguard of their kind.

They tie the fan around the corpse’s neck with the hank of barbed wire. They drop the body into the current, where it will never again threaten anyone. Then they return home to their families, a safety they’ve spent this night preserving.

When the boy doesn’t come home, Mose Wright calls the indifferent authorities. But he calls the boy’s mother, too, who phones the Chicago police. Pressed from outside, the law of Money moves. The local police arrest the two men, who say only that they took the boy but let him go after putting the fear of God into him.

On the third day, the weighed-down body rises from the river. It snags on the hook of a white boy, fishing, who thinks he has snared some primordial water creature. Landing the carcass, the fishing child needs several moments to recognize his catch as human. Every inch has been bludgeoned beyond recognition. Even Mose Wright can’t identify his grand-nephew until he sees the signet ring belonging to Emmett’s dead father, a keepsake the son wore on his slender finger, always.

The sheriff tries to rush a burial. But Emmett’s mother fights the police to get her son’s body returned to Chicago. Against the odds, she beats all obstructions. The body goes back north by train. Although the authorities order the casket permanently sealed, Emmett’s mother must have a last look, even in the Chicago station. She breaks the law, glances inside the casket, and faints dead away. When she comes to, she decides that the whole world must look on what it has done to her boy.

The world wants to look away, but can’t. A photo runs in Jet magazine and is reprinted throughout the black press and beyond. The boy has his white Christmas shirt on again, starched smooth, with a black jacket pulled over the top. These clothes are the only clue that the photo shows a human being at all. That the undertaker survived the corpse’s dressing is itself miraculous. The face is a melted rubber model, a rotting vegetable, bloated and disfigured. Below the midline, there’s nothing but a single flattened bruise. The ear is singed off. The nose and eyes have been returned to the face by hesitant guess.

This is the photo my parents fight over at the end, those two who never fought over anything. To a child raised on concord, every cross word is holy terror. A boy our age is dead. The fact leaves me, at most, confused. But our parents are arguing. And hearing their fight pitches me into the abyss.

“I’m sorry,” the one whispers. “No boy their age should be allowed to see such a thing.”

“Allowed?” the other says. “ Allowed?We have to make them look.”

Their voices whip back and forth like hushed scythes. These aren’t my parents, those two people who have trouble even singing the word hate in a chanson lyric.