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Abstract
In 1955, journalist William Bradford Huie interviewed Emmett Till's killers and published their confession in Look magazine. Titled “The Shocking Story of Approved Murder in Mississippi,” Huie's tale dominated the remembrance of Emmett Till for nearly fifty years. This essay argues that the power of the “Shocking Story” to control the memory of Till's murder resides in its recourse to the “expressive confession,” the distinctive power of which is a capacity to naturalize historical events and thereby constitute a master narrative of inevitability in which further rhetorical intervention seems unnecessary. So understood, the “Shocking Story” is not just one more recounting of Till's untimely death; it is also a treatise about the role of speech in the violence of the Mississippi Delta.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State, the staff of the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction at the Ohio State University Libraries, Professors John Lucaites and Ned O'Gorman, and QJS reviewers.
Notes
1. William Bradford Huie, Wolf Whistle and Other Stories (New York: Signet Books / The New American Library, 1959), 20.
2. “Nation Horrified by Murder of Kidnapped Chicago Youth,” Jet, September 15, 1955, 8. The wide-ranging impact of Jet's decision to publish the photographs of the beaten Emmett Till was the subject of a report by Noah Adams on NPR's Morning Edition. Noah Adams, “Emmett Till and the Impact of Images: Photos of Murdered Youth Spurred Civil Rights Activism” (MP3 audio file), from National Public Radio, Morning Edition, June 23, 2004, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyid=1969702/. Olive Arnold Adams claims that the murder of Emmett Till “put Money on the front pages of newspapers all over the world, and on the lips of every newscaster.” Olive Arnold Adams, Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till (New York: The Mississippi Regional Council of Negro Leadership, 1956), 12. Christopher Metress documents the various reactions of the foreign press. Christopher Metress, ed., The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), 138–42.
3. These years were 1961, 1972, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1981, 1984, and 2001.
4. The list could go on. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Mrs. Medgar Evers, Langston Hughes, and Eldridge Cleaver are among the scores of Americans who worked to ensure the circulation of Till's story. For an almost complete listing of the ways in which the story of Emmett Till has been taken up and circulated, see Metress, The Lynching of Emmett Till.
5. On the instrumentality of Beauchamp's work, Houck and Grindy write, “So compelling was his evidence that the Justice Department, with the cooperation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), announced in May 2004 that the case would be reopened.” They go on to note that although the FBI announced in March of 2006 that there would be no new federal charges levied, the reinvestigation was not without consequence: in September of 2005 the Senate passed the “Till Bill,” creating a federal unit dedicated to the reexamination of civil rights trials. See Davis W. Houck and Mathew A. Grindy, Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 5, 156.
6. For a careful review of Till's trial see Hugh Steven Whitaker, “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Murder and Trial of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 189–224. Excellent rhetorical analyses of the Till newspaper coverage include Houck and Grindy, Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press; Davis W. Houck, “Killing Emmett,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 225–62; and Maegan Parker, “Recognizing Regression: Coming to Terms with the Death of Emmett Till” (paper presented to the Rhetoric Society of America, Memphis, TN, May 26–29, 2006). On the role of the tortured and pictured black body see Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and the Case of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 263–86. For Houck's description of Till as the “moral warrant” for the civil rights movement see “From Money to Montgomery: Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and the Freedom Movement, 1955–2005,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 175.
7. William Bradford Huie to Basil Walters and Lee Hills, October 18, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction, Ohio State University Libraries (emphasis in the original).
8. Literary scholar Christopher Metress argues, “Huie's version of events [was] the most widely distributed.” Metress, Lynching of Emmett Till, 208.
9. David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, “Why It's Unlikely the Emmett Till Murder Mystery Will Ever Be Solved,” History News Network: Because the Past is the Present, and the Future Too, April 26, 2004, http://hnn.us/articles/4853.html/.
10. See Harold and DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse,” 265–66.
11. Christine Harold and Kevin DeLuca question the facticity of the “Shocking Story,” Hugh Stephen Whitaker accuses Huie of sensationalism, Paul Hendrickson notes that Huie's is just one of many stories telling of Till's last night, and Davis Houck characterizes the “Shocking Story” as a “creative and appalling fiction.” See Harold and DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse,” 270–71; Whitaker, “A Case Study in Southern Justice,” 195; Paul Hendrickson, “Mississippi Haunting,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8 (2005): 180; Houck, “Killing Emmett,” 255. This reading of the “Shocking Story” continues in Davis Houck and Mathew Grindy's recent Emmett Till, in which they characterize the story as “fantastic and southern.” Houck and Grindy, Emmett Till, 151.
12. In fact, Huie wrote that he would “refuse to testify as to sources or how I came by the truth.” Huie to Walters and Hills, October 18, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction. The emphasis on the secrecy of his informants is a leit-motif that runs throughout Huie's letters. In the same letter to the Chicago newspaperman Basil Waters, Huie promised that he would “protect the defendants by keeping ‘secret’ the matter of their cooperation with me, by not testifying against them, and by not writing the story in a manner in which it could be used as a confession” (emphasis in the original).
13. William Bradford Huie to Dan Mich, October 17, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction.
14. Huie paid Milam and Bryant's lawyers an advance of $1,260 as well as 10 percent of the net profits of the story for arranging a secret rendezvous in which the killers could tell their story. William Bradford Huie to Dan Mich, October 23, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction.
15. William M. Simpson, “Reflections on a Murder: The Emmett Till Case,” in Southern Miscellany: Essays in History in Honor of Glover Moore, ed. Frank Allen Dennis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 198.
16. “Ask New Till Probe,” Philadelphia Afro-American, January 21, 1956.
17. Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9.
18. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 144.
19. For this formulation I am indebted to Marc J. LaFountain, “Foucault and Dr. Ruth,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 6 (1989): 125. LaFountain, in turn, borrows his formulation from Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 131.
20. The notion of “distance” between a discourse and its speaker I borrow from Foucault. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 112. Ventriloquism is, rhetorically speaking, a function of this distance. Eric King Watts and Michael Warner talk explicitly about the politics of ventriloquism. See Eric King Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness’ in Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 179–96; Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 87.
21. “Murder thus demands that a community come to terms with the crime—confront what has happened and endeavor to explain it.” Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 1–2.
22. James L. Hicks, “Sheriff Kept Key Witness Hid in Jail during Trial,” Cleveland Call and Post, October, 8, 1955.
23. Ernest C. Whithers, Complete Photo Story of the Emmett Till Murder Case (Memphis: Withers Photographers, 1955). I accessed this book online in 2006 via the library website of the University of Mississippi. The text is no longer available online.
24. Adams, Time Bomb, 9, 17.
25. Ethel Payne, “Mamie Bradley's Untold Story: Installment VIII,” Chicago Defender, June 9, 1956.
26. “Dr. Howard to Tell of Mississippi Story,” Atlanta Daily World, January 22, 1956.
27. On the Baltimore speech, see “Terror Reigns in Mississippi: The Address of Dr. T. R. Howard,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 8, 1955. For a review of the lecture circuit nationwide, and for numbers on the speeches in Detroit and Chicago (and a different New York meeting) see “Lynch Case Verdict Stirs the Whole Nation,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 8, 1955. For the New York speech referred to, see “Mass Meet: Crowd Bitter, Sad, Sullen,” New York Amsterdam News, October 1, 1955. For the Cleveland speech, see Marty Richardson, “Clevelanders Rally Behind Mother of Lynching Victim,” Cleveland Call and Post, September 24, 1955.
28. Editorial, “Death in Mississippi,” Commonweal, September 23, 1955, 603; Harold and DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse,” 265, 267.
29. Houck, “Killing Emmett,” 228.
30. Huie, Wolf, 32.
31. Huie to Mich, October 23, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction.
32. John Whitten to William Bradford Huie, September 27, 1956, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction.
33. Huie to Wilkins, October 12, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction.
34. Huie to Walters and Hills, October 18, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction (emphasis in the original).
35. Huie to Walters and Hills, October 18, 1955, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction.
36. David Terry argues that we “tend to associate confession with feelings of guilt or shame.” David P. Terry, “Once Blind, Now Seeing: Problematics of Confessional Performance,” Text and Performance Quarterly 26 (2006): 210. Terry is hardly alone. Sharon Downey writes that, in confession, “one sought forgiveness for past transgressions and appealed for divine intervention in the future.” Sharon Downey, “The Evolution of the Rhetorical Genre of Apologia,” Western Journal of Communication 57 (1993): 49.
37. Huie, Wolf, 37, 38.
38. James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie (New York: Vintage International, 1995), xiv.
39. James L. Hicks, “Writer Challenges Brownell to Act in Till Kidnap-Murder Case,” The Afro-American, January 21, 1956.
40. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John Kenneth Ryan (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960), 7.2.3.
41. “The particular object of my confessions is to make known my inner self.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions, trans. Angela Scholar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 270.
42. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 368–90.
43. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 307; Terry, “Once Blind, Now Seeing.”
44. Terry, “Once Blind, Now Seeing,” 213.
45. Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 92, 18, 103, and 18.
46. Roseann M. Mandziuk, “Confessional Discourse and Modern Desires: Power and Please in True Story Magazine,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 178.
47. George Gerbner, “The Social Role of the Confession Magazine,” Social Problems 6 (1958): 34, 36. In the second quotation, Gerbner is quoting an unpublished study done by Wilbur Schramm of the University of Illinois’ Institute for Communication Research.
48. Gerbner, “Social Role of the Confession,” 38 (emphasis added).
49. Gerbner, “Social Role of the Confession,” 40, 32.
50. Bob Ward, “William Bradford Huie Paid for Their Sins,” Writer's Digest 54 (1974): 16.
51. Cara Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 177–79. Confession magazines, it has been widely noted, were produced for—and productive of—a female and working class subjectivity. They were designed for what the Saturday Evening Post would call “MacFadden's anonymous amateur illiterates” (Gerbner, “Social Role of the Confession,” 29) and were conspicuously set against the genteel literary magazines such as Colliers or The Ladies’ Home Journal. See Gerbner, “Social Role of the Confession”; Regina Kunzel, “Pulp Fictions and Problem Girls: Reading and Rewriting Single Pregnancy in the Postwar United States,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 1465–87; Mandziuk, “Confessional Discourse and Modern Desires”; and Maureen Honey, “The Confession Formula and Fantasies of Empowerment,” Women's Studies 10 (1984): 303–20.
52. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, 181–82, 203, 214–15.
53. Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,” Political Theory 21 (1993): 219. It is no exaggeration to say that Foucault dominates the literature on the politics of confession. Anne Hartman writes, “Foucault's model of confession has dominated critical conversation so thoroughly that it is difficult to conceptualize confession in other terms.” Anne Hartman, “Confession as Cultural Form: The Plymouth Inquiry,” Victorian Studies 47 (2005): 537. Within communication studies broadly conceived, see Bonnie J. Dow, “Ellen, Television, and the Politics of Gay and Lesbian Visibility,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 18 (2001): 123–40; Mandziuk, “Confessional Discourse and Modern Desires,” 190; LaFountain, “Foucault and Dr. Ruth”; Alice Templeton, “The Confessing Animal in Sex, Lies, and Videotape,” Journal of Film and Video 50 (1998): 15–25; and Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, “Change Your Life! Confession and Conversion in Telemundo's Cambia Tu Vida,” Mass Communication and Society 6 (2003): 137–59. Outside of communication studies, Foucault still dominates. In cultural studies see Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject, Cultural Politics (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990); in sociology see Mike Hepworth and Bryan S. Turner, Confession: Studies in Deviance and Religion (London: Routledge, 1982); and in critical legal theory, see Brooks, Troubling Confessions.
54. Foucault, “About the Beginning,” 217; Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2 (New York: Vintage 1990), 92, 89. Foucault understands confession as a “hermeneutics of the self” (“About the Beginning,” 203–4) and it is this concept he is developing in the quotations from The Use of Pleasure.
55. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 21.
56. To the best of my knowledge, Foucault never uses the word “prediscursive” to describe the inner movements of the soul that confession interprets. But I still like it. The word was significant much earlier in Foucault's career, especially in The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he uses it as part of his argument that “madness” is produced. He claims that the designation of a particular person as “mad” requires a particular interpretation of “prediscursive experiences.” Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 47.
57. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 153. See also Carole Blair and Martha Cooper, “The Humanist Turn in Foucault's Rhetoric of Inquiry,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 162.
58. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 156, 159. See also: “[Y]ou will become the subject of the manifestation of truth when and only when you disappear or you destroy yourself as a real body or as a real existence.” Foucault, “About the Beginning,” 221.
59. Huie, Wolf, 24 (emphasis in the original).
60. Huie, Wolf, 22, 13.
61. Huie, Wolf, 22.
62. William Bradford Huie, “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Look, January 24, 1956, 48. I include the term “nigger” in this quotation with much trepidation. While I am disgusted by the hatred and the history of oppression recorded and effected by the term, I nonetheless use the term in this and following quotations. I do so not only as a matter of historical fidelity, but also because my work in rhetorical history is motivated by the need to fight the hatred that the term registers. On the history and politics of the term, see Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).
63. Watts argues that it is the ethical “challenge” to the status quo that “invigorates voice.” Thus, he reasons, voice is endowed between the “polarized constraints of muteness and ventriloquism,” for neither quiet muteness nor a ventriloquistic rehearsal of the status quo has the capacity to “challenge” society and “invigorate voice.” Watts, “‘Voice’ and ‘Voicelessness,’” 179–96. Elsewhere, Watts argues that “voice” depends on thinking outside of “dominant cultural perspective on ‘truth.’” Eric King Watts, “Cultivating a Black Public Voice: W.E.B. Du Bois and the ‘Criteria of Negro Art,’” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (2001): 181–201. In both cases, the capacities of voice are opposed to the ventriloquistic rehearsal of cultural values.
64. Huie, Wolf, 35.
65. William Bradford Huie, Wolf Whistle, produced by Louis de Rochemont (New York: United Artists Release, 1960), 47. Louis de Rochemont Associates, Inc., New York, May 21, 1960, the William Charvat Collection of American Fiction. As Huie titled a book and a screenplay Wolf Whistle, I distinguish the screenplay hereafter by noting that it was produced by United Artists.
66. Huie, Wolf, 36.
67. Huie, “Shocking,” 50.
68. Huie, “Shocking,” 50.
69. Warner describes “reflexive circulation”: “I don't just speak to you; I speak to the public in a way that enters a cross-citational field of many other people speaking to the public.” Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 95.
70. Foucault, “What is an Author?” 119.
71. This observation is central to a great deal of Warner's work. In Letters of the Republic, 42, he refers to this as the “principle of negativity.” Warner explains the principle of negativity as such: “What you say will carry force not because of who you are but despite who you are[0].” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 165. And Warner is insistent that the “principle of negativity” that he developed in his study of eighteenth-century America is still operational: “the bourgeois public sphere continues to secure a minoritizing liberal logic of self-abstraction.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 169.
72. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe, Warner describes the interchangeability of the speaking subject as the “negativity” of the speaker. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 42.
73. Warner, Letters of the Republic, 87.
74. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 167.
75. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 102.
76. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 167 (emphasis added).
77. Huie, Wolf Whistle (United Artists), 19.
78. Huie, Wolf Whistle (United Artists), 19.
79. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 152–53.
80. It is important to note that by “sexuality” Foucault is not referring to particular actions, functions, parts, or combinations. He is referring to a “domain” or “field of truth” constituted by the discourses of sexuality. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 68–69. “Sex” in this sense is comparable to Foucault's notion of the Christian soul, a fiction created through discourse that controls us. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), 29.
81. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 147–48. Nietzsche is perhaps the clearest on the “control of abstractions”:
For something is possible in the realm of these schemata [abstractions] which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, 2nd ed., ed. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001), 1171–79. This process is entirely consistent with Foucault's argument in Discipline and Punish that once a prisoner has been objectified (abstracted from particularity), power “made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.” Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 190–91.
82. The language of “general categories” is from Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 183.
83. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 169.
84. James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie, xiv (emphasis added).
85. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1963), 15.
86. Baldwin's argument against “recounting” in “Notes for Blues” is thus very similar to his argument against “protest fiction” in Notes of a Native Son. There he argues that standard-issue protest literature—from Stowe through Wright—preserves ignorance through the deployment of fictitious stereotypes. In contrast, Baldwin argues that “the [true] business of the novelist” is an “acceptance” of reality. James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (Boston, MA: Bantam Books, 1968), 11, 17.
87. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 21; Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie, xiv.
88. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 21. The following is Baldwin on his reason for writing Blues for Mister Charlie: “We are walking in terrible darkness here, and this is one man's attempt to bear witness to the reality and the power of light.” Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie, xv.
89. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 13.
90. Baldwin, Fire Next Time, 139.