Who Killed Emmett Till? E-book edition

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Introduction: The Delta

A river is a living soul that flows along, continually picking up and dropping off tiny pieces of rock and dirt from its bed throughout its length. Where the river slows, more are dropped than picked up and this becomes a place of alluvial soil or a flood plain. Such regions are the stuff of agricultural wealth  at least for the landowners who make their riches from healthy crops and the physical labor of others.

Nearly 18,000 years ago a continental glacier covered North America. As the frozen waters melted, the Mississippi River and its tributaries carved valleys and created flood plains giving birth to what is technically the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, an agricultural flood plain so filled with rich alluvial soil that you can smell the money through the morning mist.

"Yazoo" is said to be of Native American origin, meaning "River of Death." As evening comes to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, there is dampness in the air. When cotton is at its peak, if you take a deep breath, there is a smell that comes from just below the damp topsoil, an unsettling scent for those who know the regions history of enslavement and inhumanity. It fills ones nostrils as if cruelty has no trouble finding a direct pathway to the brain. Some who have spent time in the Delta, and who know its stories, say that ghosts of martyrs rise from the rich dirts faint mist. * * * * *

The Mississippi Delta is not a place I would have picked to live and if you had asked me a few years ago what I knew about the region, it would have been a puzzle since I knew nothing of its history or culture  Id never even heard of the Delta Blues.

My husband, Fred, was hired by a private group to be the mental health director for inmates in Mississippis state-run prisons, and so our lives took on a new dimension as we made a small, red-brick house on the grounds of Parchman Penitentiary our new Sunflower County home, in the heart of the Delta.

Eventually, I would enjoying smelling the richness of the alluvial soil and appreciate where we had been dropped. But not the afternoon of my arrival.

The air conditioning was broken and the house had not been cleaned by maintenance crews. There were cobwebs in every corner, dirt on the floor and it was at least 100 degrees plus beastly humid in the shade.

I was madder than hell when I arrived because the car broke down in Oklahoma, putting our three cats and myself into a dilemma. Fred had been living in Jackson, the state capitol, for a month and could only help problem solve by telephone as we drove in from Nevada.

One thing I learned following my self-serving fit of anger was that prisoners dont ever have air conditioning at Parchman, except in the hospital unit. All of the historic brick and buildings were replaced years ago by metal construction and the prisoners were living in what amounted to bake ovens. They were living in hell.

Summer left and on cooler fall mornings, I watched out the front window of our new home through the leaves of the ancient pecan trees as several prisoners at a time trotted rescue and misfit horses into the ripe cotton fields. They earned this privilege, working with a unique horse-care program, and I wondered how much it would hurt to enjoy and then relinquish such freedom when evening came.

ONE YEAR BEFORE we arrived, Mississippis Department of Archives and History, upon court order, made its second release of an online full-text version of the states secret Sovereignty Commission records. The commission operated as a private spy agency from 1956 to 1972 within the state government, with a mission to investigate and halt all integration attempts. The commissions second goal was to make Mississippi look good to the world, despite the frequent beatings and murders of its black citizens and outsiders who came into the state, trying to end racial violence and discrimination, and reinstate voting rights.

The year we moved to Mississippi, the FBI began re-examining the murder of Emmett Till and would exhume his body the following summer as one of more than 100 unsolved civil rights cold cases that occurred prior to 1969.

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