With its time-hops in narrative, poetic wordplay and blurred lines between fact, fiction and memoir, reading John Edgar Wideman's new book, "Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File," is to ride shotgun in his tricked-out time machine to a familiar destination: the jagged fault lines of America's racial divide.
Yet by looking at the life and death of Louis Till — the father of Emmett Till, 14, arguably the nation's most famous lynching victim — in the era of Black Lives Matter and the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans, the trip is very much rooted in the present.
Through flashbacks and self-examination, however, Wideman also wrestles with notions of black masculinity, race and justice in America, as well as the bitter truths and consequences of his own abusive, no-account father. That includes two of the author's own relatives now serving hard time in prison: his younger brother and his son.
The book is largely centered on the eerie, sins-of-the-father parallels between Louis, whom the U.S. Army tried, convicted and executed in Italy during World War II for the rape-murder of a local woman, and Emmett, who was kidnapped, beaten and killed by a gang of white men in Jim Crow-era Mississippi on a rumor he'd wolf-whistled at a white woman.
While his son's brutalized, disfigured corpse helped ignite the civil rights movement, the hanging of Louis largely went unnoticed; capital punishment for African-American soldiers in World War II was so common that in a remote French cemetery for dishonored U.S. troops, most of the deceased are black. But his surprise resurrection helped snuff out justice for his son and put both of them back in their places, subjugated to whites even in death.
"As a writer searching for Louis Till, I choose to assume certain prerogatives — license might be a more accurate word," the author writes in an early disclaimer, warming up the time machine. "I assume the risk of allowing my fiction to enter other people's true stories. And to be fair, I let other people's stories trespass the truth of mine."
The search begins with the lesser-known aftermath to the 1955 trial of Emmett Till's killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, who were acquitted by an all-white jury. International demands for justice, spurred by photos of Emmett Till's mangled face photographed through a glass-topped coffin, grew louder on news the jury deliberated less than an hour, including a lunch break.
As federal investigators prepared to step in, Louis Till's criminal file was leaked to reporters. The disgraced soldier's execution a decade earlier triggered like-father, like-son victim blaming, pouring cold water on the Mississippi case.
