Patricia Smith

Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure

Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered after allegedly whisding at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, the proprietor of a small store in Money, Mississippi. She also claimed that he showed her a picture of a white girlfriend he had back in his hometown of Chicago. The photo, which Emmett's mother insists came with the wallet, was said to have been of movie star Hedy Lamarr.

Turn to page 19 if Hedy Lamarr was actually Emmett's girlfriend.


His paltry age was never my concern—
I wrapped my pouting smoke around his heft
and crushed. The aim of our illicit burn
was sin, my purpose was the blatant theft
of everything that rendered him a child.
In shadowed rooms, my famous tongue was all
the blessing he could stand. I drove him wild,
I sucked him dry, my pudgy butterball.
Beneath my writhing sway, his color drained
and dripped its lazy drip onto the floor
till every surface of our tryst was stained.
I waved his boyish body to the door.
His mama simply had to send him south—
my rampant crime, my little blabbermouth.
 

*

That Chile Emmett in That Casket

Photo, Jet magazine, Sept. 15, 1955


Sometimes the page was tacked, flush against plaster with a pearl hatpin,
or jammed into a dime-store frame with a glowing Jesus. In some kingly

front rooms, its place was in the shadowbox, propped on one ripped edge,
or laid curly-cornered on the coffee table, smudged and eaten sheer

with the pass-around. In the kitchen, it was blurred by stew smoke
or pot liquor – blotched until somebody got smart enough to scotch-tape

it to door of the humming fridge, and the boy without eyes kept staring.
Mamas did the slow fold before wedging it into their flowered plastic

coin purses, daddies found a sacred place in pleather wallets right next
to the thought of cash. And at least once every week, usually on Sunday

after church or when you dared think you didn’t have to speak proper
to that old white lady who answered the phone at your daddy’s job,

or when, as Mama said, you showed your ass by sassin’ or backtalking,
the page would be pulled down, pulled out, unfolded, smoothed flat,
and you had to look. Look, boy. And they made sure you kept looking
while your daddy shook his head, mumbling This why you got to act

right ’round white folk, then dropped his smoke-threaded gaze to whisper
Lord, they kilt that chile more than one time. Mama held on to your eyes –

See what happen when you don’t be careful? She meant white men could
turn you into a stupid reason for a suit, that your last face would be silt,

stunned in its skid and worshipped, your right eye reborn in the cave
of your mouth. Look! she screeched. You did. But then you remembered

there weren’t any pictures of you in the house, pinned high on the wall,
folded up tight up against the Lord, toted like talisman in wallet or purse.

You’d searched, woe climbing like river in your chest. But there were
no pictures of you anywhere. You sparked no moral. You were alive.


*


10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, But She’s Fine


Dumbfounded in hospital whites, you are picture-book
itty-bit, floundering in bleach and steel. Braids untwirl
and corkscrew, you squirm, the crater in your shoulder
spews a soft voltage. On a TV screwed into the wall
above your head, neon rollicks. A wide-eyed train
engine perfectly smokes, warbles a song about forward.

Who shot you, baby?
I don’t know. I was playing.
You didn’t see anyone?
I was playing with my friend Sharon.
I was on the swing,
and she was –
Are you sure you didn’t –
No, I ain’t seen nobody but Sharon. I heard
people yelling though, and –

Each bullet repainted you against the brick, kicked
you a little sideways, made you need air differently.
You leaked something that still goldens the boulevard.
I ain’t seen nobody, I told you.
And at A. Lincoln Elementary on Washington Street,
or Jefferson Elementary on Madison Street, or Adams
Elementary just off the Eisenhower Expressway,
we gather the ingredients, if not the desire, for pathos:

an imploded homeroom, your empty seat pulsating
with drooped celebrity, the sometime counselor
underpaid and elsewhere, a harried teacher struggling
toward your full name. Anyway your grades weren’t
all that good. No need to coo or encircle anything,
no call for anyone to pull their official white fingers
through your raveled hair, no reason to introduce
the wild notion of loving you loud and regardless.

Oh, and they’ve finally located your mama, who
will soon burst in with her cut-rate cure of stammering
Jesus’ name. Beneath the bandages, your chest crawls
shut. Perky ol’ Thomas winks a bold-faced lie from
his clacking track, and your heart monitor hums
a wry tune no one will admit they’ve already heard.

Elsewhere, 23 seconds rumble again and again through
Sharon’s body. Boom, boom, she says to no one.



 

I. Incendiary
That Chile Emmett in That Casket
Enigma of the Shadowbox Swine
Incendiary Art
BlessBlessed
Incendiary Art: MOVE, Philadelphia, 1985
Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure
The Then Where
Incendiary Art: Chicago, 1968
Reemergence of the Noose
Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure
ReBirthday
Incendiary Art: Birmingham, 1963
Runaway
10-Year-Old Shot Three Times, but She's Fine
Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure
Hey, who you got in here?
Incendiary Art: Los Angeles, 1992
Black, Poured Directly into the Wound
No Wound of Exit
Incendiary Art: Tulsa, 1921
See What Happen When You Don't Be Careful
Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House
Incendiary Art: Ferguson, 2014
XXXL
Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure
How to Bust into a Black Man's House and Take a Boy Out

II. When Black Men Drown Their Daughters
The Five Stages of Drowning
Sentencing
Why the Verdict Just Don't Sound Right; or, The Bobbing Baby Blues
This is no movie
On every inch of me, there are rumors of fathers
Meanwhile, the Mother
When Black Men Drown Their Daughters
Blurred Quotient and Theory

III. Accidental
Sagas of the Accidental Saint
The Mother Dares Make Love Again, After

IV. Shooting into the Mirror
Sometimes
Elegy
The First 23 Minutes of the First Day Without
Requiem
And He Stays Dead
Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure
Incendiary Art: The Body

Acknowledgments


 

‘Patricia Smith is a masterful poet, performer, and pundit. And while her chosen field is the form and grace of language, her gift to the world that orbits the Black experience is truth.’ – Walter Mosley

‘Patricia is one of the poets writing today that I most deeply admire. Her work is always timely, powerful, necessary, and at turns heartbreaking.’ – Natasha Trethewey

‘Smith exhibits razor-sharp linguistic sensibilities that give her scenes a cinematic flair and her lines a momentum that buoys their emotional weight. Smith’s urgent collection lives up to its title, burning bright and urgent as a bonfire.’ – Publishers Weekly