Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [119]
I asked him if he thought the jury had reached the correct verdict. “Under the circumstances, I don’t know if correct would be the right word,” he told me. “But I think it was sustainable.” Had he since come to believe the defendants guilty? “I expect, yes,” he said. “If you had to put me down as—if I had to say one way or the other what my belief was, it would be that the body was that of Till and he had been put in the river. These people either did it or knew of it.”
I raised the subject of his having helped get a loan for Milam—who, like Whitten, was a veteran of World War II, and a highly decorated one at that—after the trial. Huie had quoted Whitten as saying: “Yes, I helped him. He was a good soldier. In a minefield at night, when other men were running and leaving you to do the killing, J.W. Milam stood with you. When a man like that comes to you and his kids are hungry, you don’t turn him down.”
“Did you really feel that he was a good man?” I asked.
“Yes, I did. Now, I don’t say I felt like he was a man I wanted to know and be with every day. But I felt like he was honest. I felt like he was—could be counted on to do things and look after his family. I never changed my mind about that.”
“Well, how is it possible that he did this, then?”
He was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.
I asked him if he didn’t see a conflict there: how could he believe both that Milam was a good man and that he was a murderer? “Well, if that’s what you’re to judge by,” he said. “I don’t know whether doing this means he’s bad or not. I can’t—I’m sure I would have done differently, but I don’t dismiss him in every respect because he made one mistake—bad mistake, but his children are still—he’s still entitled to work and feed his children.”
He was clearly feeling uneasy now, and I could see that it was not merely with this line of questioning; his discomfort, I suspected, mirrored the way he had felt forty years earlier when he had been called upon to defend men of a type he did not associate with, men who had committed a crime he no doubt considered distasteful, to say the least. People of John Whitten’s background, his station, did not do such things, or embrace those who did. And yet, in killing Emmett Till, Milam and Bryant had drawn fire from the outside world, not just upon themselves and their crime, but upon their state and their region and nothing less than the entire Southern way of life. And John Whitten, as one of the chief beneficiaries of that way of life, had been called upon to defend it by defending them.
Adding to that burden must have been the knowledge that, in the process, he had become something of a spokesman for white resistance: his final entreaty to the jury was the most notorious utterance of the whole affair. “I’m sure,” Whitten told the jurors, that “every last Anglo-Saxon one of you men in this jury has the courage to set these men free.”
“Why ‘Anglo-Saxon’?” I asked him.
At first he offered something about Anglo-Saxons having “a reputation for being a little harder against people who get out of line than do others,” but he quickly set that aside and explained: “You said ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ the jury would understand what you were talking about. You’re talking about a white man.” He added, making a pointed reference to another trial that at that very moment was also polarizing the country, “I guess you could say I was playing the race card.”
And it occurred to me, right then, just how much the defense of O.J. Simpson owed to the defense of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and how little, in some ways, the country had changed in the past forty years. The issue of race was still so potent that it could overwhelm evidence and hijack a jury, even when the case at hand was a brutal, savage murder. I found it interesting that Whitten made the connection; I wondered if anyone in that courtroom in Los Angeles had.
THE PREACHER
Sometimes, when you set out to find answers to what you believe are simple questions, what you actually end up with are more questions, the kind that are