1955 The Artist Reporter
The
oppressive, heavy air woke Dad before dawn. Not even the starlings had begun
their early gurgling, disjointed harsh chatter.
The sullen air over-rode the cheap and sputtering window air-conditioner
that strained to lift the humidity while barely puffing cooler air in lazy
circles through the thick and slow aura.
There it was. The first bird’s shrill sliding whistle of the day,
rhythmic, echoing and distant. Ahh, That’s the one that will get the worm.
In the dark, his bare feet stepped onto the worn carpet and opened the wide
mouth of his leather aviator’s bag. In
boxers and a v-necked t-shirt, Dad carried his toiletry bag to the sparse,
plastic-tiled bathroom. After a steamy shower, he wiped dripping condensation
from the tin-framed medicine cabinet mirror.
It’s just another job, he told
himself as he lathered the bar of shaving soap, leaned into the cracked mirror
to cover his jaws, chin and under his nose with white foam. He lifted his chin
and daubbed the foam above the jugular and back to the base of his ears. His
silver two sided and dulled razor scraped a red path through the stubble. The other side was not much sharper. Dad
recalled from last night that sideways look of the poker-faced night clerk as
he peered at Dad’s brown paper package under his right arm. “Wellllcum to
Summmner,” He’d been friendly enough, though his southern accent, with
elongated syllables, took a little concentrating to discern. His package had slumped into the front desk
when Dad set it on the toes of his oxfords to sign in at the motel.
“Ouch!”, a spot of red dripped through the foam as the razor nicked the edge of
his jaw. He dabbed the spot with some toilet paper, leaving it sticking out on
his face while the razor continued to graze through sequential paths.
“What
brings you to Mississippi?” the cab driver from the airport had tried to carry
Dad’s 2 by 3 foot flat, but bulging, brown package, into the lobby. “It’s a bit heavy,” Dad had coveted his package of drawing pads, pencils and ink pens while
keeping up a friendly banter about the heaviness of the night air. The cold splash of water stung his
freshly shaved face. Maybe, I’ll take the smallest drawing pad
and blend in with all the reporters. He sat by the waste basket pushing the
one-sided razor through the soon faceted wood and graphite of his veri-black
pencil, then lightly shaved a sharper point.
Another pencil and another were sharpened by hand until he filled the
breast pocket of his white dress shirt.
These would hide beneath his suitcoat.
The inside suitcoat breast pocket held his press credentials from Life Magazine.
It's too
early to call Irene. Maybe after
breakfast and before the kids are awake. He pulled
the rubber eraser apart, squished it together and pulled it apart to clean it
from yesterday’s erasure. As dawn
lightened the sky through the narrow blinds, Dad slipped on his suit, tightened
his knit tie and went downstairs for his continental breakfast of coffee, toast
and orange marmalade.
“It’s a bit sticky,” Dad summed up his impressions of Mississippi to Mom over the lobby telephone. She was too distracted by her oldest, elementary-aged son who had just spilled his cereal bowl to interpret what this might mean. The twins were stiff-leggedly climbing up, then jumping down the two living room steps. The middle boy had slid in his stocking feet down the concrete ramp into the kitchen, climbed onto the chair rungs and was staring straight into her face. By the windows, a pre-school daughter was quietly weaving nylon loops on a small red frame-probably making a potholder. Nearby a toddler was taking cautious steps from the coffee table to the couch, then to the cyprus window frame. He slipped down and began to cry looking at the splinter in his finger. Most had eaten breakfast already.
“You’re up bright and early! What time does the trial begin?” she asked. Mom didn’t know yet that she would miss this closeness, knowing where all her children were at a glance.
“I’m headed over to size up the place and see if I can get a start on drawing the courtroom,” he replied hearing the baby’s sobs in the background. The phone line started to crackled.
“Keep in touch,” she replied as the milk flowed off the edge of the table and across the concrete floor.
She had barely finished sanding the cyprus beams of their newly built home when Dad landed in Sumner County Mississippi for Life Magazine to cover, with drawings, the Emmett Till Trial. These Southerners are still peeved about last year’s Brown vs. the Board of Education decision he thought as he stepped out into the dusty dawn. He was only a few blocks from the red-brick county courthouse with a clock tower that was sounding 6:30. A few police were chatting by the front door but were not letting reporters in until seven. Across the street, Dad drew, from a coffee shop, the arched windows and doors of the courthouse on a small sketch pad that fit in his suitcoat pocket. As soon as the doors opened, he flashed his credentials and found a seat in the middle of the still empty, white press section. With his sharpest pencil, he drew the juror’s seats, the witnesses stand, the door to the chambers and judge’s seat with American and Mississippi flags on either side. He was drawing the stage set for the what would become five days of court theatrics and sixty-seven minutes to a jury decision.
He was jostled as the press section began to fill and the spectators shuffled into the courtroom and gallery seats. From a lone crow to a sparrow amongst a flock of birds, he mused. Dad erased a stray line caused by a reporter who bumped his elbow. We’re perched here like a flock of sparrows on a wire. “Eh Mac, sorry”, the reporter said in a distinctly Chicago accent. The less said, the better with us sounding like that. He redrew his line, then glanced around to see several reporter friends from Chicago settle into seats.
Ok, relax. Let it flow, stay alert. Where’s the story? Nah, the segregation in the courtroom or the press sections is not news. His pencil captured the body language of a coifed and elegantly dressed, Mrs. Bryant in his hand-sized spiral notebook. The heavy heat in the crowded room evaporated. He focused. Fourteen non-sympathetic and arrogant white male jurors set the tone with a wash of ink. Their likeness and lackadaisical body language slumped in wooden chairs. Leave out the juror’s beer, it’s judgmental. He didn’t feel the heat though he’d already soaked his t-shirt and dress shirt as the hopeless fans noisily churned above. Accused of flirting with a young, white female grocer, Emmett was abducted from Mose Wright, his uncle’s home, and cousin’s bed, a few nights later. Sighs were breathed in the upper balcony seats. Chairs moved on wood. The nephew, son, still-a-boy, Emmett was beaten in Leslie Milam’s shed, shot and mutilated, then found in the Tallahatchie River. Pencils slowed in the negro press section. Rustling of fabric from the gallery was almost a squirming silence. Not a breath was drawn from those in the rear seats.
Then it happened! “Can you identify the men who came to your door?’ Graphite that scratched the texture of paper interrupted the vacuum of breathing as Mose Wright stood up. With a shaking arm he pointed to a the white men , Roy Bryant and J.W. Milan, “There’s he.” Dad’s pencil flew to capture the tension in the air. He just shucked 300 years of United States history. Dad’s lines captured the electricity in the room in the form of the shaky, outstretched and elongated arm, the force of gesture in the stance, the suspenders on the pants. Then, a loud lurching thud. Mose Wright sat. That told what strength it took him to stand, point his finger and state two words. The Judge’s gavel echoed in the thick air as he called a recess. After coming out of his drawing, Dad folded up his pad, tucked his pencils in his breast pocket. He and another reporter silently walked across the street for a cup of coffee. At the coffee shop door they were surrounded, closely, by a few white male citizens, “You Northerners go back home and leave us Sumner folks alone.” Shirking off the comment, he decided to get coffee at his hotel.
In his hotel room, Dad redrew the sketches on larger sheets of Arches paper. Got to get the quiver from the rear gallery in his spine. His hand shook. Life had a tight and strict Saturday night deadline. Getting the art finished on time took long nights and early mornings, then days for the mail. Dad mailed the notebooks and drawings in the brown, flat package from the hotel desk directly to a New York City address. He sees from the corner of his eye the Times on the desk with the headline, “The First Time in Mississippi History a Negro testified against a Sumner County citizen.” Ahh, They beat me to it. The cab picked him up at the motel door for the airport with only his aviator’s bag in hand, not knowing if his drawings would be published.
Franklin McMahon realized then that art could effectuate social change. The Life Magazine Emmett Till Trial article also changed a cartoonist father into an Artist Reporter, a chronicler of his time. A few months later, when Rosa Parks built up the courage to remain seated in the back of the bus, she thought of Emmett Till. Her one phone call from jail was to Reverend Ralph Abernathy. He called Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The Civil Rights Movement peacefully began with the month long bus boycott when Blacks walked to work interrupting the bus system's income.
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