Holding the Memory of Emmett Till, Dr. Glory Van Scott's Cousin In Our Hearts. Written by Dr. Glory Van Scott, from her Memoir GLORY: A Life Among Legends:
For My Cousin, Emmett Till
Dear Emmett,
More than sixty years later and I am still looking for answers, so I am writing this missive to you and sending it out into the universe. I’m wondering if, on the other side of life, there is a beautiful field of flowers that has sections divided up according to the way that a person lived. If so, you, I am sure, are where the fourteen-year-old Archangels live.
Fourteen—that’s how old you were on August 28, 1955, when your mother Mamie called to tell her cousin, my mother, that you weren’t coming home to Chicago from your vacation. You had been killed by racists while visiting family in Sunflower County, Mississippi.
We were seated around our dining room table in Chicago when my mother told me of your death. I stood up from the table, looked at her and crystallized my gaze, and then turned and walked out of the room without saying a word.
My mind couldn’t take in the trauma and shock of that moment. I let the news slide into a safe holding space, and that is where the horror of your death stayed for decades.
In 2017, the newspapers printed a story about an artist, Dana Schultz, who had drawn a painting of the casket in which you took your final rest. Some people protested the displaying of this picture in the Whitney Museum, but, for me, the art was what broke down the walls of the safe space I’d carved out decades before.
As I sat that morning reading about the painting in the New York Times, time seemed to slow and the silence in my apartment suddenly seemed deafening, and sixty-two years of held-back tears made their way down my cheeks in a pilgrimage that startled me. My immediate thoughts went to Carolyn Bryant, the woman who had lied about you and set the wheels in motion that caused your death.
I thought of how she still hides from the world.
But, I want Jesus to turn His face to the clouds, way off yonder, so that He does not have to look at her and see how she wasted the precious gift of her life by setting up the taking of the life of a child, Emmett.
I want Jesus to turn His face to the wind, where His winged creatures soar, so that He does not have to look at her and see her lack of human feelings as she wraps herself in her tangled maze of soulless identity.
I want Jesus to turn His face to the sun, where beauty and love and humanity abound, so that He can see I did not succumb to the depths of despair and hatred because of Emmett’s death.
I want Him to see that I became a warrior for peace, and brother and sisterhood, and that I know my success in life is my refusal to spew hatred, and that my challenge continues to be to eradicate racial and religious prejudice.
Yes, turn your face to the sun,
Sweet Jesus!
Dr. Glory Van Scott
May 26, 2017
GLORY: A Life Among Legends, available from Amazon.com.
Photo credit: Family photo.
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