Jake Adam York

And the way the jury chose to believe the ridiculous stories of the defense. . . . — Mamie Till, 1955 . . . with truth absent, hypocrisy and myth have flourished. . . . —Look, January 1956 The sheriff says it wasn't Till we pulled from the river, that man was as white as I am, white as cotton blowed by the cotton gin fan that weighed him down, looked like he'd lain there weeks, not a kid at all. He was a stranger just out of Money, recalled by a store clerk, a hobo, and a crossroad guitarist. The reporter finds them at the once abandoned crossing. They say it's like the sheriff says, came up one night, headed Clarksdale way, another one, hat pulled down, right behind. Three days later, the bluesman says, a plague of starlings gathered into little boys those who fished and found the dead man's foot. The reporter stares into his cataracted, cotton eyes. He cannot find them, no matter where he looks.

State of Alabama v. Robert E. Chambliss, 1977 When they come filling the yard with their overheard, broke-glass catastrophes of voice, overcrowded party line, he lets the screen door clap to see them plume the settle back to the fence, aftershocks of crowd and wail. When they come he says again he was home at breakfast radio preacher doing love thy neighbor and then the bomb, just ask the wife. The silence in the TV's cathode glow slowly fills with questions as starlings shutter light then weigh the lines, voices tangled in their claws. • They had him buying dynamite, a case he says he passed along, then the other's car behind the church, four men dome-lit in early dark. Now all they have is years of brag and noise and alibi, a quiet in which the trail's confused. At times it seemed he wasn't real, that he was no one, a story everyone had heard, just not the end, that he was different men, one arm with a bomb, another making calls miles outside of town, a fog, an exhalation, scattering when seen.

May 4, 1959 for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959, recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959

Natchez Afternoon burns everything off Franklin Street. Even the birds, even the flies. Or iced-tea sugar and chicken grease weigh everyone into a doze, all indoors, in a cool they said would never come eighty years ago when this was still the center of business and the civilized left these high hours to the dogs, ice in a highball, and let each house close its lids a while. They've kept their quiet, so I'm alone before the windows, the radiant panes, each with its scrim of clay, the finish the river gives everything, so nothing, not even glass, is clear. It's almost painful, this saturation, this street and its stores of rugs and signs and flags, bright and strange as a magazine photo you'd find in an attic or an antique store, hard to believe the color was ever real. The teacups, the painted china and jeweled eggs, even the bottles, medicine vials and flasks each with its ounce of dirt, even the smell of the prolific earth, the sedimentary atmosphere of empire chairs and oak armoires and mantles that survive their tall, white homes, like the plantation house where, later, I'll witness again the marriage of gray suit and hoop skirt that still feels like a dream, where I'll walk out of—or is it into?—myself, the maitre'd's small, solicitous voice proffering another julep—cotton-leaf hand, silver cup—though even he must be a reenactment or a revenant, a hanger for the clothes of memory. I will take it, I would, a handful of refuge in unthinking weather, will take the same lethargic joy in a breeze, any chill in the throat, any kind of shade— so I enter the dim of one old cotton house, its air-conditioned maze of hand-tools and quilts, corn cribs and cotton gins, and of course the owner's smile, porcelain, bright, almost blinding, blooming in welcome and how-you-do and what-brings-you. We talk amid rows of cook-stoves, stew-pots, and cast-iron skillets about the wedding I've come to see on the famed estate, the time the town exploded, the Rhythm Club's inferno, and then she ventures she knows the accent, knows I'm from Alabama, and soon she's eloquent on our lakes and rivers, where the mister takes her every chance they get. She's seen it all, so she asks where I'm from, and when I say she starts to glow, gushing over mountains all the way to Gatlinburg. She's walked each one, even skied the state's one slope, which conjures not the "Southern snow" that required almost everything around us, but snow, cold snow, a thought that cools me further, so my sweat is nearly dry when the smile tightens across her teeth and she leans in to say Ijust love it you know—there are no darkies there. Then afternoon is a conspiracy of color, an echo the heat or the history in our voices draws us into— someone else's version of ourselves— and the inevitable, painful quiet in which an answer must arrive. What can you say? And how long do you have to wait before you can leave, before you can walk out of yourself and down the cotton-trading streets into the smother of trees on some more recent lane? How long do you have to wait before you can leave and not be followed, and how long do you have to walk before the mockingbirds drown in bass and drum and anger, before you can cross back into the proper century? The smell of the river stays with you, maybe even grows as you move so you don't know where you're going, and the key in your hand could open a car door or a plantation room or nothing at all, some door that's vanished in the air, June's shimmer from the asphalt and the roofs of every house, so you walk toward that moment when the sun starts burning and the magnolias' thick perfume washes all around and you find yourself on a corner, all linen and sweat, again the only one who'd walk in a heat like this. You have no idea where you are, so you cock your head as if you might hear your way through the afternoon, and when you raise your head, you see, across the street, two men hunched in shadow on a barbershop's stoop, ties dangling like smoke in the solid air. They've seen you and now their brows sharpen as if they know, too, you're not from here, and in the space between you anything could pass, the ghosts of Farragut or Grant or a hot white Caddy rattling New Orleans Bounce, you're waiting to see, it seems like years or centuries, then one rises, ties his tie, and steps back in, leaving the other, who keeps your eye a moment longer then looks into the distance through that lace of smoke that seems etched in the air for something far behind you, something you don't even know how to look for, something that may never arrive.

Perhaps, this morning, we’re there, normal and soon forgotten, as news is when it’s passed over breakfast, like love, something that’s always cast, too heavy to hold for long. We breathe it in, the bacon, the coffee. We listen to the little quavers as the local tongues, water over rock, rise and fall, like stones skipping soft into the white that smoothed them. The women speak like grandmothers, softly opening their mouths, opening and drawing advice from themselves, like biscuits, and offering in kindness a little more than anyone could ask, more than anyone can take. I know their pitying. It looks like patience, the look on everyone’s faces as the peddler shuffles in his blindness, black hand held open, everyone awaiting the hiss of door, the whisper in everyone’s throats, breaking from patience into pleasure.

15 September 1963, Birmingham Later he will say he did not do it, he was home at breakfast, just ask the wife, say they heard some radio preacher doing love thy neighbor while birds filled up the yard. Later, he will say he did not do it then tell how he didn't, lean in close to say if he would have done it it wouldn't have been alone, he would have had a driver and a man out west to phone in threats to draw the cops away. They'd ease through empty streets to plant their package then glide away, their route thick with friends, a thousand ways to disappear. • The DA will lean, will see his would have dashboard-lit, driving Dynamite Hill, headlights, radio dead. Would have in the shotgun seat, sticks sweating in his grip, shadow steering through the city's sleep. Will see them driving, out before the paperboys, ready to throw when the dark is right. See him Christmas, few years back, outside the preacher's house, thin fuse of cigarette, newspaper spread on the bus protests. See flash, shock push him from the dark, burn his shadow where anyone could see. Something dark in the lenses of the bottle trees. • The photographer spots him eyeing the bombed-out church, minutes after, a face he's seen before, flash on the shards of phone-booths and broken windows he'll follow through the horrid and the horrified while the cops arrive, the state patrol arrives with bayonets instead of hoses, bayonets instead of dogs, while congregants arrive between firemen and plainclothes Klansmen and the children, the children arrive and depart, and there, the smirk he'll follow through uniforms and Sunday black, into the park, then lose him as it fills. • Will stand in the blur of what arrives and wonder where he could have gone. Whether he'd cut toward the depot, through the railyards to wind back home, or north through the nervous blocks, or circle back for another view, maybe shadowed in a doorway, japing in a storefront window, listening at a sandwich stand while everyone is talking, his work on every tongue. Maybe he could drift through the crush of lookers in cigarette smoke, in the breath of many lungs, common, innocuous, a cloud about to disappear. • Will stand imagining him split at each intersection, now four of him working the city's riot, one with a bomb in his Sunday Herald, one with a gun hung out the window racing to a segregation rally, one with a bullhorn and a speech for the news if they want it right, and one just waiting for some midnight's cool when he can stand beneath the vacant windows and search for that fire in the face of Christ before driving out past the mills. On the ridge he'll see Vulcan's torch is red, but not for them. Shadows reel from the furnace sheds, birds exploding, blown from molten light. • The mayor says all of us are victims, innocent victims. The lawyer kills his radio. When folks ask later who did it, the lawyer says I'll tell you who. Who is everyone who talks of niggers. Who is everyone who slurs to his neighbors and his sons. Everyone who jokes about niggers and everyone who laughs at the jokes. Everyone who's quiet, who lets it happen. Now his voice flaps in the rafters of the meeting hall, and everyone is quiet. I'll tell you who did it, he says. We all did. • The photographer keeps his beat, past the crater in the church foundation, through the park, into the midday rush, just where he lost him. In the darkroom, he kept arriving, his face framed between elbows, caught in the thrall, or his crewcut, his smile cropped by arms. Now his haircut, half-rolled sleeve, cigarette lip, his eye pass by a dozen times, and more. He could be anyone, could be everyone wandering the storefronts, spying behind his News. The photographer follows each one, cocked and ready to shoot, but his lens can't catch them all so he just stands, tracing their paths, he just stands, lost in the crowd he becomes.

Welcome to Jackson: City of Grace and Benevolence City of Grace, you open, you part your curtains and smile like a hostess when we call your name, you tender what any traveler needs, a call to ease, a balm, a kindness, whatever storm. You take us in. City of Grace and Benevolence, you say you know what solace means, burned so often they called you Chimneyville, and now you can't forget, you've written it in bronze outside the City Hall the War made a hospital for the Yankee and for your Rebel sons, like the one who is always dying outside the Capitol. City of Fame, you hold him still, laurel on your crown, fan making a hand of wind to soothe his face and fill the eagle's wings spread above to promise, Virtute et armis, to say again just how far you'll go. City of Remembrance, you keep so well, you show us where Welty lived, the house still there, how she skated to the library, through the Capitol, the book now cast and open in her hands. Tell me now, City of Embrace, of the newsreels' children rounded from their march, flags gathered, the children trucked to the fairground cages, the ones who peer out through the chicken wire. City of Richard Wright and Ross Barnett, tell me not just where the Governor pled I love Mississippi, I love her people, her customs,