“Jimmy was only ’bout seventeen or eighteen, still a young fool who didn’t know better. Well, he did know better but was too much a fool to stop himself—he took up with a white girl in town, daughter of Roger Wilcox. I caught them kissing once, in his woodshed. He bribed me with a peppermint to keep my mouth shut, and I did, never told a soul. But then Roger caught them one afternoon, and they said he raped that girl and took Jimmy to jail.”
I know exactly how this story ends. Now it’s me squeezing Gigi’s frail fingers inside my own. I ease off before I hurt her.
“They tried to go visit him that night—my parents and Aunt Mabel and Uncle Donny—but they couldn’t. The sheriff wouldn’t let ’em. Our parents went about gathering money for a lawyer, a good colored lawyer someone knew up in Montgomery, but…”
A bout of dry coughs leaves her struggling to catch her breath. I pick up a glass of water, maneuver a long straw to her lips. Gigi takes another full minute to recover, or maybe it’s to gather her strength before telling me the rest.
“That night, they got him. Just took him.” She’s crying in earnest now.
“It’s okay, Grandma.”
“It’s not okay, it’s not.” Her words drip with anger. I know it isn’t directed at me but at everything else. At all the ways it has not been okay. “They dragged him through the town. Roger and his friends. They did terrible things to him. Terrible.” I don’t need the horrific details; she can spare us both. I can already picture them. I have a vivid memory from my own childhood of coming across a copy of the 1955 issue of Jet magazine with Emmett Till’s mutilated corpse right there on the cover. I found it in Daddy’s desk drawer, tucked away like a keepsake. There was Till’s face, bloated beyond recognition, flesh mottled with deep purple bruises, swollen slits where his eyes should be. You couldn’t even tell he was a young boy, only a few years older than I was at the time; the savage beating and drowning had left him horribly disfigured. I couldn’t tear myself away from the picture, or the article. I read it over and over, like it could offer an answer to the question that most vexed my young mind: Why do they hate us so much?
When I learned a few years later, in my sixth-grade history class, during our requisite one-week unit on the civil rights movement—in February, of course—that the white men who’d lynched Emmett Till were acquitted, I’d slumped in my seat in disbelief. I couldn’t believe how naive I’d been, how shocked I was to learn this, like I had somehow missed some essential truth, like I should have known better.
The week before, when we’d covered slavery, our teacher had avoided looking at me the entire time—at all the Black kids—speaking about its horrors in this singsongy voice she never used otherwise. Mrs. Trager came from New York, a master’s program at Barnard. She was completing a one-year teaching fellowship in the Philly public school district, and even though she tried too hard, I liked her.
As she spoke, I busied myself writing in my notebook （“Dred Scott,” “Underground Railroad,” “Middle Passage”）， hoping to avoid the uncomfortable glances of my white classmates, even Jenny. I knew she wouldn’t get it either. Why did I feel so ashamed and self-conscious when I hadn’t done anything wrong? A sickening realization had dawned on me: my good grades didn’t matter, or the extra credit, the proper English, how faithful I was, how kind. None of it could ever erase the fact that people were going to hate me. My head felt heavy. I let it drop to my desk, hiding from the burden of it all. In that moment, tucked into the dark haven of the crease of my elbow, more than anything in the world, I wanted to be cute and white and blond and have the whole world find me precious. I wanted to be Jenny.
By the time Gigi starts talking again, my jaw has worked itself into a tight knot. “My daddy went to go about cutting Jimmy’s corpse down from the tree, but everyone said it was too dangerous. It was too dangerous for us to stay. I remember the adults sitting around the table. No one knew what to do. Everyone was so scared… and when you’re a kid and adults are scared, well, that’s the worst feeling. No one cared if we went to bed, so we stayed up all night. We packed what we could, left the next morning in two caravans. Early as it is right now, we set out, my father and uncle driving two cars, with all of us cousins and everything we owned that could fit in the back. We drove all the way to Philly without stopping. Aunt Mabel wailed the whole time. That’s what I remember most. And no one could make her stop. No one even tried. Aunt Mabel was never the same. You don’t recover from that. Losing a child. Especially like that. Hand me a tissue, will you?”
I jump to grab her a pack of Kleenex, happy to have something to do. I wish I didn’t know this story. It’s like I’m in sixth grade again. I want to hide my face in my arms on my desk.
“I don’t get it; why didn’t you ever tell us, Gigi?”
“What’s the point? My momma told me we should try to forget about it. The hurt was too much. It was easier to never speak his name again, Jimmy’s name, to block out the pain. Better to seal it off, like a room you stop goin’ into. And the shame. We all felt so much shame. Ain’t that something? We felt bad even though they’s the ones that strung him up and left him to die. And he didn’t rape that girl.”
Gigi dabs at her eyes some more.
“God help him, he loved that girl.”
Y’all need to stay away from those white girls, ya hear? All those times Gigi had said this to Shaun. To her it had been a matter of life and death—someone she loved had died because he loved a white woman. That kind of fear follows you for your entire life. I think of Shaun and Staci, and all the Stacis who came before. Every fiber in my body feels flush with adrenaline, a response to a threat I can’t quite pinpoint, thinking about all the ways my brother and dad are unsafe in this world. But deeper than that, bone-deep, there’s a dark hum, pain like a shadow, the ancestral trauma that lives in me. Meanwhile, Roger Wilcox probably has grandkids of his own walking around somewhere right now. I wonder if they know what their grandfather did, or if they’re oblivious to the fact that the sweet old man they remember for giving them crisp $2 bills for Christmas or for flirting with the nursing-home staff was a ruthless murderer.
“Do you know what happened to them? To Roger Wilcox? To the girl?” They’re probably long dead, and I wonder something else too: How the hell did they live with themselves?
Gigi only shakes her head slowly, full of weariness.
“We don’t know what happened to Jimmy either. I mean, where they put him. When we left, Mabel said she would never set foot in that state again until she died. She wanted to be buried near her son, even if she didn’t know exactly where that was. Uncle Donny too. He died before your time. I’m thinking that’s where I wanna be too.”
“Grandma, it’s not time—”
She cuts me off with a look. A Don’t even try it, so I don’t bother. I can give her that.
“I want to be buried in the family plot too—with them. Y’all make that happen, ya hear? And you bring Grandpa Leroy’s ashes and scatter some around me so he there too. God knows why that man wanted to be cremated. I want to be in the ground, dust to dust, like Jesus. Right where I was born. Sometimes you gotta go home. You promise you’ll take me there.”