Facing Emmett in the New Nadir

Lost amid the focus on the Dana Schutz debacle at the 2017 Whitney Biennial was Kevin Wilson Jr.’s remarkable student film, My Nephew Emmett. The film diverges sharply from the overwrought tone of Schutz’s Open Casket, which forces viewers into suffocating proximity with a painted abstraction of Emmett Till’s battered face. Schutz’s haptic amputation of Till from the aggrieved scene of his bereaving kin brings us close to an atomized figure dying and undying in an otherwise still frame. It rehearses the U.S. settler drama of knowing thy beneficent self via an encounter with black death.1 My Nephew Emmett departs from this well-worn path in cultural rehearsals of Till’s lynching to focus on the teen’s southern family in the hours leading up to and immediately following his capture, torture, and overkill in the summer of 1955.2

My Nephew Emmett does not show the teen’s alleged transgression, his lethal punishment, nor the recovery of his corpse from the Tallahatchie River. Nor is the film concerned with the politics of Till’s translation into a civil rights martyr by a mass Black audience responding to Mamie Till’s astutely political orchestration of her grief. The film orients us to Till’s great-uncle Mose Wright’s experience immediately before and after the lynching—as he reels from the rumor that his nephew has whistled at a white woman, as he confronts his incapacity to secure his family from violation, and as he swerves into an improper refusal of the governing grammar of Black suffering.3 In dramatizing Wright’s anticipation of the lynching from the evening of August 27 through the onset of the raid of his home several hours later, the film stages Black care in the face of terror as a problem for cinematic thought. My Nephew Emmett thus throws into quiet relief that which is belied by Schutz’s smooth and colorful rendering of Till’s form: the cruel, unruly fold of the subject and object of violence in lynching’s paradigmatic frame.

In the voluminous literature related to Till’s lynching, Wright is often presented as a parenthetical figure whose brave speech was critical to the course of the lynching’s aftermath. At the momentous historical confluence of Cold War civil rights and the photographic age, Wright took the risk of recounting, for a CBS news report, the facts of the August 28 night raid and his identification of the corpse that inexplicably surfaced from its liquid grave just days later.4 Wright’s refusal of the southern proscription on Black political speech was the first step in the family’s insistence that Till be mourned; his recognition of the remains at the river as an object of familial love was the opening gambit of Till’s reappearance to the living, under his mother’s commanding care, as a civil rights martyr. Wright’s actions in court—forthrightly identifying John William “J. W.” Milam and Roy Bryant at trial as the men who had charged into his sharecropping shack to discipline his nephew, refusing to accede to the rhetorical whims and procedural shenanigans of the legal defense—embodied, for many, the kind of risk that southern Black elders were increasingly being called to in the Second Reconstruction.

My Nephew Emmett challenges the intense publicity of the Till case, as well as its association in popular imaginaries with Black resistance. As a declaration of Mose’s avuncular authority over Till, the film’s title presents, as fact, Papa Wright’s claim on his niece’s son even as the movie, narratively and formally, troubles the effectiveness of that claim, casting it in the final instance as a necessary, if nonsensical, intervention that arrives too late to save Till’s life. The film thus centers the irresolvable opacity of the case, an enigma that Valerie Smith cogently symbolizes, after the ring that Till wore the night of his capture—and which had belonged to his father, Louis Till, himself a victim of U.S. settler violence when he was executed by military decree in 1945—as a “circle surrounding an absence.”5 In addition to the ring’s material importance to the recovery and outraged exhibition of Till’s corpse is its symbolic condensation of the rites of racialized masculinity and the generational reproduction of violence.6 It is this generational cycle of racial violence that is evoked throughout the film as a problem for thought that demands a radical form of affective labor—of attention and care—open to modes of suffering and forms of emergent political life that exceed the bounds of political and aesthetic representation.7 Mobilizing light and shadow to gesture to the ineffable and opaque effects of racial terror, the film confronts lynching’s disorganization of sensible and metaphysical life to expand the timescale of the violence that killed Till.

My Nephew Emmett runs a mere twenty minutes, yet it generates enough tension to fill a feature. The tension is produced by the formal quiet of the film and the cinematographer’s skill with light and shadow. The opening shot, low to the ground and languid, lingers on a windowed door from an indeterminate place inside the Wright home (Figure 1).

This passage introduces the film’s concern with interdicted domesticity as the first of two intertitles appears on-screen to establish the day (August 28, 1955) and place (Money, Mississippi). For viewers familiar with the lynching and legacy of Till, the when and where affirm, Yes, we are here, we are returning again to this always and already nonplace: Emmett’s last day. We know by this minimal graphic framing that the film will bring us close to those last, excruciating hours of Till’s life. Yet this slow opening shot of the mysterious door is, despite the informative intertitle, temporally undecidable. Are the men on their way? Are Elizabeth, Simeon, Wheeler, and Robert in bed and in shock from the night raid? Is Mose on the porch, waiting to see if Emmett will walk back from a whipping? Positioning viewers at the barely visible intersection of three rooms, at floor level, and before a windowed door that leads to an unseen night, Wilson introduces his cinematic exploration of Till’s southern kin with an ambivalent opening image that sets the film’s hushed and intertemporal tone. Suspending us in view of the void the Wright family experienced in the wake of Emmett’s arrest, the opening image introduces the film’s concern with the psychology of racial terror and the often illegible metaphysical violence of lynching: the violence of growing up and growing old in Till’s shadow, of growing nowhere (and nowhen) in the shadows of the dead.8

Those familiar with the case may want to unsee Till to see him, at last and at best. And the film gives us a bit of that, fleetingly. Wilson grants spectators the gift of seeing a representation of Till alive and in loving relation in the first scene, before night falls (Figures 2 and 3). We spend time inside the Wright home as the family love each other, teach each other, and go about the ordinary work of the everyday.

But even the opening moments of intimacy between members of Till’s family—Emmett’s boastful exchange with his uncle about cologne and attraction, his lighthearted banter with his cousins, even Aunt Elizabeth’s and Uncle Mose’s tender embrace—are riven with dread. This is especially so for Black Americans reared in the wake of the Till killing and introduced to American white supremacy by way of Till’s image. When Emmett declares that he is a “big boy” and so it “takes a lot” (of cologne), we are at once heartened to see him in motion and at play (jubilant, expectant, a little sassy) and reminded that his body will be used against him. The frisson is enhanced tenfold when Emmett naughtily utters, “Now all the ladies in Greenwood can get some,” as he splashes too much of his uncle’s cologne on his arms. I delighted in this representation of Till’s storied humor even as I winced at the irony of the scene. No ladies can get some because the men are too fast. The cologne won’t stand a chance when the rot sets in.9 Emmett’s pubescent posturing is a challenge, a reminder that his performance of masculinity is disallowed, and a foreshadowing of the “hellish cycle” that will send him to his death.10

The relative ease of the first scene is shattered upon Mose’s encounter, at a nearby river, with a man named Young who tells him of Emmett’s facility whistling at white women. Whistling, we know, is not talk, though it does signify—in its nonmusical mode—according to the conventions of the dominant grammar: as a commandment to obey a man, look at a man, pay a man some attention. Mose knows that even this rumor of Black noise will jeopardize his capacity to care for Emmett through the end of his visit, that he will be greatly burdened by white antagonists eager to read the nonsense sign of a Black whistle issued in the presence of a white woman as an invitation—an injunction, really—to open wide the floodgates of the nation’s recursive libidinal fount. Having lived his entire life in Mississippi, in the “land of the tree and the home of the grave,” Mose knows what is at stake.11 After Young tells him of Emmett’s alleged transgression, the elder man’s face constricts in terror as he turns to Young and utters, “When?” (Figure 4). The screen cuts from a closeup of Mose’s face, contorted by shock, to a long shot of him walking against a vast backdrop of rural Mississippi at dusk (Figure 5). Mose walks with his pail at his side, the delta farmland and big sky stretching out behind him to underscore his vulnerability. By the time he is home, it is dark.

As Bridget Cooks notes, the rapidly darkening screen signals heightened risk and the urgent passage of time. It also calls attention to what we cannot know about the lynching of Till. Previous film treatments of the case have been solidly documentary and oriented around the genre’s truth claims. This is understandable, given the varying accounts of what happened in Bryant’s Grocery and the law’s denial that the body recovered from the river had ever belonged to Till.12 But commentators’ obsessive narrativization of the lynching, as LaShonda Carter writes, often involves rehearsing the child’s alleged transgression as the catalyst for his death. Evacuating Young’s response to Mose about the timing of Emmett’s whistle, My Nephew Emmett quietly disrupts this narrative ordering; there is no when because, in the antinomic slaver episteme, black personhood is always too late in the rigged machinery of History, appearing—only and always—as a blot on Human capacity.13 Moving suddenly away from the talk of talk frustrates the ritual rehearsal of the event of lynching to meditate on the violence’s recursive temporality and diachronic reach. Having grown up in the epicenter of the Black Belt lynching crisis of the early twentieth century, Mose is intimately familiar with the rote blood rituals resorted to by affectable white men in crisis. In the accumulated time of racial terror, he has been waiting—living against the constant, unpredictable threat of lethal violence—all his sixty-five years. In cinematic sympathy with Mose’s dissociative confrontation with the rebounding threat of racial terror, the camera cuts from a close view of his disturbed visage to his envelopment in a lonely landscape. The film’s heavy, chiaroscuro effect formalizes the metaphysical dimensions of lynching’s gratuitous and often illegible terror to call us into a discomfiting apprehension of intergenerational trauma.

The film’s attention to the time of racial terror becomes most formally acute after the elder returns home from the river to prepare his bath. Beyond its baptismal connotations, the bathing scene signifies the permeable liquidity of Black life. A spill of moonlight through the curtained window casts Mose’s slight frame in relief as he lowers himself into the water. The tight, intimate framing of his face brings us close to the tension accumulating in his body; he is contemplative as he anticipates, in a tonal mix of black and blues, the situation and what is to come (Figure 6). His deliberation is accompanied by a low hum that crescendos to a gospel plaint.

As Mose sinks beneath the water, the placid layer above him seems to split his face in two (Figure 7). We are introduced to a striking formal contradiction as gurgling sounds surface from still water holding Mose’s unmoving form. A baritone emerges from the hum alongside the rapidly intensifying sound of water where water should not be: in airways, in lungs, against pneuma as bodies heave.

The distinctive sound of drowning coincides with the kind of breathing that mobilizes gospel form.14 The convergence of a distant plaint with the premonitory sonic image of Emmett’s temporary river burial creates, as Linette Parker incisively writes, a disjunctive tear in the film’s narrative order.15 Time splits as water babbles and stirs.

This tear is rendered visually by a direct shot of Mose sitting up in these troubled waters. (Figure 8). The camera tracks toward him as he sits before us, the lamp behind him at eye level lighting his still form while subtly directing viewers to the accumulating burden of Mose’s witness.

Mose, cast in sepia light, is caught at the aural edge of the surveillance image that structures the appearance of blackness in the ruling white imaginary. Wakeful Mose holds our gaze as we become earwitnesses to the liquid lynchings that grew increasingly common at midcentury as a backlash against Black revolutionary organizing; the elder has carried home the rumor of Emmett’s transgression along with the water and flesh memory of those drowned in the Mississippi delta’s waterways.16 The screen inexplicably cuts to a shot of blue Mose breaching the bath, gasping for air as sounds of struggle fade. Sepia Mose and blue Mose reconverge at the point of exasperated rememory.17 Mose, a multitude, keeps watch, recalling us to the historical violence that conditions our present. The nonconscious memories of violence that accumulate in the Wright home condition Mose’s anticipated witness while situating lynching’s physical violence at the edge of the film frame.

My Nephew Emmett creates a speculative interval between hearing the rumor of Emmett’s nonverbal transgression and the arrival of the white men at the door. After the boys return home and retreat to bed, Mose retrieves a rifle from behind the living room door. He stations himself by the front window to wait, tense and apparently trigger ready. Situating Mose in the position of watchful patriarch heightens viewers’ desire for a different outcome for Emmett, as well as the feeling that something else might occur.18 Mose stares somberly ahead before pulling aside the curtain. But there is nothing to see, and, in the next shot, Mose is in bed, staring at the ceiling. The image of Mose at the edge of home, his eyes and hands against a window he cannot seal from harm, suggests Wright’s captive interdiction from an authorial position he no doubt coveted. The cut from dark window to ceiling also suggests the penetrability of Black psychic space-time—including the sanctum of sleep and the memories that are its preserve. The camera lingers softly above Mose as he lies, vigilant and statue-like, beside Elizabeth’s sleeping figure.

Mose, here, appears oddly alone in his consciousness of the violence to come. My Nephew Emmett does engage in a troubling substitution in its focus on Mose as the sole relation who waits out the approaching punishment. In some accounts by members of the Wright family, it was Elizabeth who learned of the boys’ encounter with Bryant in the hours leading up to Till’s abduction. Elizabeth, according to her son Simeon, promised them she would not discuss the encounter with her husband. And yet, at trial, Mose insisted he had heard the rumors.19 There is no way for us to know whether Elizabeth told Mose, just as there is no way for us to know if anything other than gas came out of Emmett’s mouth during his visit to the Bryant’s grocery store. What matters is that we want to believe, as we watch My Nephew Emmett, that Papa Mose, had he known, could have prevented the violence. The film frustrates this desire for a defense as it underscores Wright’s disallowed paternity and draws attention to the racialized imbrication of love and harm that is one of the legacies of American racial slavery.

Faced with the impossible possibility of refusing the mob’s access to his nephew’s body while safeguarding his entire family from violence, Wilson’s multiple Moses converge around the stalled present of his family’s situation and the impending crisis that will extend that stalled present. He will have failed him. He will have been the last one to see him off. He will have had no choice. We are alerted to the men’s arrival by the cast of car headlights in the interior of the Wright home. Mose rises from his bed and walks into the children’s room. His dark frame contrasts the sinister spill of lights that dance through sheer curtains. The killers are at the window, dangerously proximate and peering inside, and the veil between them and Mose appears thin (Figure 9). When they move to the door, Mose meets them and calmly refuses their verbal denigration of his nephew as the “nigger” from Chicago. After the men threaten their way into the house, Mose offers himself up only after Elizabeth pleads for them to take their savings instead of Emmett. When Mose implores them to take him in Emmett’s place, he evokes his fungible transitivity—his prohibition, as a Black man, from owning self and home and his correlative usability by the propertied class—to wield the requisite interchangeability of Black flesh as the potential grounds for a last-ditch defense.20

My Nephew Emmett thus subtly focuses narrative attention on the capitalist processes of exchange that drive and perpetuate racializing violence. Mose’s belated intervention prompts the most sonically saturated moment in the film: Roy begs J.W. to take the money; J.W. orders Roy to put Emmett in the truck while Mose, losing his stolid cool, angrily reiterates Emmett’s innocence and questions the utility of “punishing someone who didn’t know.” J.W. brings the cacophony to a halt by shoving his gun in Mose’s face. He is here, he shouts, because Mose’s paternal incapacity necessitates the punishment. What appears as inaction or resignation on Wright’s part is the profilmic equivalent of an existential imposition on Black personhood; Mose is in a state of tense suspension because he, too, is caught in the hellish cycle.21

After the harrowing kidnapping scene, the second intertitle instructs us that Wright identified Emmett’s body at the Tallahatchie River three days after the abduction. Mose purposefully exits his house, his tie flapping in the wind as he walks toward the camera. Following a short exchange with the news crew, the screen cuts to archival footage of Wright’s CBS television interview as he introduces himself as the uncle of Emmett Till. The screen fades to black for a brief beat before the credits roll over a jarring montage of gospel and computer-generated animation. A jet-black hand reaches out from the shadowed background to beckon us back to the screen for the ironic denouement. Everything will be all right. Hold on just a little while longer. Everything will be all right.22 Suddenly, a long view of the back of a naked figure resembling Mose is suspended in liquid space (Figure 10). The form appears to float, at once amniotic and sunken, while a gospel choir sorrowfully urges listeners to “wait a little while longer.”

More CGI flesh appears in grayscale, lights dancing across grotesque, deindividuated skin (Figure 11) as we realize this figure is not one; hands, entwined with the suspended person’s feet, climb over shoulders and a torso (Figure 12). First, we are given the feeling of suspension. Then, we are given its infernal image, the one that spooks.

The striking assemblage images that appear on-screen in the closing credits are a powerful rendering of the demonic imago that structures fantasies of sovereignty.23 Reminiscent as well of the deindividuated “bodies without organs” of Deleuzian ethology, this grotesque figuration of Wright’s experience shares a visual register with Schutz’s expressionist rendering of Till in Open Casket (albeit with different political implications).24 The emergent image of communal care that appears at the end of the film’s closing sequence—the Janus circle of Black violability and monstrosity (Figures 10 and 11) broken by an image of the dark form cradled by hands and feet (Figure 12)—importantly distinguishes My Nephew Emmett from Schutz’s possessive view of Till.

The signal achievement of My Nephew Emmett lies in its evocation of lynching’s gratuitous disorder despite the frequently contingent and iconological composition of the Till lynching in popular memory. Encompassed in this disorder is the incommunicability of lynching’s injurious afterlife as well as the violence’s deformation of Black family life. My Nephew Emmett, in exploring Wright’s unwilling conscription into his kin’s lynching, invites viewers to keep unsettling watch with Mose in ways that trouble the melodrama of repair and historical distance that often soften the story of Till’s lynching and its bearing on our present. Indeed, the film shares with a tradition of Black feminist antilynching cultural production the refusal of the trope of the eviscerated black object in favor of a hard-hitting examination of lynching’s impact on the family members of the deceased.25 Rather than seek sentimental repair by closing the film with archival footage of Mose’s brave televisual address, Wilson confronts us with the ongoing rigging of black flesh in the ruling imaginary. It thus observes Mamie’s injunction that we see her son undone alongside his upright life image in its critical treatment of the communal dimensions of political witness.26

Dr. Erin Gray is a writer, educator, and activist living in occupied Huichin (Oakland, CA). As assistant professor of English at UC Davis, she writes and teaches at the intersections of critical theory and visual studies to interrogate the aesthetic production of racist and antiracist thought. Erin’s coedited anthology, The Black Radical Tradition in the United States, is forthcoming from Verso Press.