Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [116]
I talked to four of them. They’re all dead now.
THE KID
Ray Tribble is easy to spot in the photographs and newsreel footage of the trial: whereas eleven of the jurors appear to be staid middle-aged or elderly men, Tribble is wiry and young, in his twenties. Later he became an affluent man, a large landowner, president of the Leflore County Board of Supervisors. Whenever his name came up—which it did fairly often, at least when I lived in Greenwood—it was uttered with great respect. I was in town for six months before I learned that he had been on the Emmett Till jury.
Six years later, I called Tribble to see if he would talk to me about the trial. He didn’t really want to, he said, but I was welcome to come over to his house and visit for a while. He might discuss it a bit, and he might not, but in any event, he didn’t feel comfortable with my bringing a tape recorder, or even a note pad.
Tribble lived way out in the country, about five miles north of the crumbling building that had once been Bryant’s Grocery. He met me on the front lawn and ushered me inside, where we talked a good while about everything, it seemed, but what I had gone there to discuss. Then, I recall, he suddenly offered, “You want to know about that thing, do you?” I did.
He had first suspected it might not be just another trial, he said, when reporters started showing up; then the camera trucks clogged the square, and the jury was sequestered, lodged in the upper floor of a local hotel. He recalled one member managed to bring a radio in so the men could listen to a prizefight. And then, without any emphasis at all, he added, “There was one of ’em there liked to have hung that jury.” One juror, he explained—not him, but another man—had voted twice to convict, before giving up and joining the majority.
I was stunned. I had always heard, and believed, that the jury’s brief deliberation had been a mere formality. This news forced upon me a belated yet elementary epiphany: the Emmett Till jury was not a machine, an instrument of racism and segregation, a force of history. It was just like any other jury—a body composed of twelve individuals. One of whom, apparently, was somewhat reluctant to commit an act that history has since ruled inevitable.
Tribble told me he couldn’t recall which juror, but said it in a way that made me wonder if he truly couldn’t remember or if he could but didn’t care to say. I ran some names by him, but he would neither confirm nor deny any of them, and fearing that the conversation might soon be coming to an end, I changed the subject and posed the question I had wanted to ask him for six years: Why did he vote to acquit?
He explained, quite simply, that he had concurred with the defense team’s core argument: that the body fished out of the Tallahatchie River was not that of Emmett Till—who was, they claimed, still very much alive and hiding out in Chicago or Detroit or somewhere else up North—but someone else’s, a corpse planted there by the NAACP for the express purpose of stirring up a racial tornado that would tear through Sumner, and through all of Mississippi, and through the rest of the South, for that matter.
Ray Tribble wasn’t stupid. He was a sharp, measured man who had worked hard and done well for himself and his community. How, I asked him, could he buy such an argument? Hadn’t Emmett Till’s own mother identified the body of her son? Hadn’t that body been found wearing a ring bearing the initials LT, for Louis Till, the boy’s dead father?
Tribble looked at me earnestly. That body, he told me, his voice assuming a didactic tone, “had hair on its chest.” And everybody knows, he continued, that “blacks don’t grow hair on their chest until they get to be about thirty.”
THE BOOTSTRAPPER
In 1955 Joseph Wilson