Even if you wanted to, you couldn’t escape your father.
For most of your life, you were known as Little Him. Junior. Insert-your-father’s-name-here’s kid. You’re a chip off the ol’ block, maybe named after your pops, forever known as your dad’s offspring. But, as John Edgar Wideman indicates in “Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File,” that doesn’t mean that the supposed sins of a father should be laid at the feet of his child.
On a hot Chicago summer day in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till took a train south to visit family in Mississippi. He left with a sense of excitement and came home in a specially-ordered, glass-lidded coffin, because his mother wanted “the world” to know what had happened to him.
There was, of course, a trial for his murder, and 14-year-old Wideman watched it unfold. He’d always wanted to write “Emmett Till fiction,” but real-life turned out to be more compelling: two weeks before the Grand Jury convened, someone leaked Emmett’s father’s confidential military records, revealing that Private Louis Till had been hanged in Italy a decade earlier for the crimes of rape and murder.
The revelation changed the expected outcome of the trial.
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