A Play on the Murder of Emmett Till Brings to Mind Faulkner

 In 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till, down from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi, was abducted and killed for allegedly flirting with a 21-year-old white woman named Carolyn Bryant who was working in a family grocery store. The two men, her husband and brother-in-law, who mutilated Till, shot him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River were acquitted by an all-white jury. Protected by the decision from being charged for the same crime again, the two men admitted about a year later to having done it.

Because of his age, the nature of the trail and the fact that Till's body was found and put on display in an open casket in Chicago, the atrocity was of great significance to the civil rights movement.

Ironically, Till's father,  Louis Till, separated from Till's mother, was executed for the rape and murder of an Italian woman in 1945 when he was in the Army. That's according to Wikipedia.

I mention this because "The Carolyn Bryant Project," a 2018, two-person play on the subject is currently available for view via streaming, and also because I recently read, for a seminar, a 1931 short story called "Dry September" by William Faulkner, which you can read by clicking on this link.

In some respects, Faulkner's story, illuminating what had long been happening in the South, also foreshadowed what happened to Till. As a New York Times review of the play put it, at issue is "the potent, poisonous myth of fragile white womanhood — in particular, the Southern belle as damsel in distress."

Neither Bryant nor Minnie Cooper, the woman in question in Faulkner's story, were Southern belles in the sense of "Gone With The Wind," which is to say plantation-owners' daughter flouncing about in crinoline dresses. But no matter: its the illusion that counts. While there appears to be no mention of what Bryan was wearing when the incident with Till occurred, Faulkner repeatedly depicts Minnie as going to town in a new voile dress, voile being a lightweight, sheer or semi-sheer fabric suitable for the very hot weather, but arguably also a bit provocative.

In both cases what actually transpired was beside the point. The maintenance of a caste system was at stake.

"Happen? What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  So says a man named McLendon in Faulkner's story as he leads a rapidly formed gang of men out of a barber shop to get the Black suspect.

Has much really changed? "The ritual we watch (in the play) Emmett and Carolyn repeat is emblematic of an American cycle that shows no signs of stopping," Laura Collins-Hughes, who reviewed the play for the NTY said.