Now the coffin lay open on the South Side, the wrong side, and we sit in the church’s mouth and watch things in reverse. Daddy shakes for the Lord, his long hand propped against the steel spine of his thigh, plays it like a guitar, steady-slow, mouth wide to take in all the shouts and sobs. How does he sleep at night with all that sadness inside him? He reads the Bible for hours, Mama says. I’ll be he lets those clean words burst open in his throat, make him sing. Great wings are taking Emmett’s body into the ground.
Our side of the street backs pop against the walls like corn. Cornblack, blackback, nickelback sit back throw back. In the theater we watch moves in the other direction. So swollen, they said, he bobbed to the surface with that 70 pound fan attached to his neck like some terrible bird. And when they pushed him to the river he was already going forward. Even the cops noticed. Even them. He went to see his grandma in Mississippi and what the white woman say – she said he nigger or something and he hand her the money and he whistled and hours later the mean steel of a .45 is digging a new hole in his scalp – the first of many. He drowned in a river we can hardly say its name: Tall-a-hat-chie.
Mama corrects me. They didn’t beat him with a pistol, she whispers. They beat him with their hands.
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