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When Mamie Till’s 14-year-old son Emmett was executed by savage racists for whistling at a white woman, she bravely had his battered body shown in an open casket. It forced the world to witness the depths of its depravity and hatred.
Sixty-seven years later, the movie “Till” continues Mamie’s work of shining a light on what can happen in a modern society still too comfortable in flexing its hatred.
It’s important. People should see it. I just don’t know if I can be one of them. Not yet. I, like Mamie Till, have a Black son who is my everything. And every time I think about what they did to that boy, I think about my child, and my heart starts to disintegrate.
I find myself in a conundrum. I want to support this film, as a Black woman, a devotee of the medium, a student of American history and a person who knows that Hollywood will stop making these movies if they don’t make any money. I also know that there are people fighting very hard right now to make sure our kids don’t learn about these stories in school, so we have to tell them somewhere.
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Because I am Black, a former film critic and a member of the media who ruminates on these issues for a living, I have felt like it’s my job to champion these films. In the before times, I tried to see them on opening weekend to contribute to the numbers being good enough to encourage a longer run.
But sometimes it’s so hard. I still have not seen “12 Years a Slave,” for instance, and I used to feel bad about it. As compelling a story as it is, something we need to know about, I couldn’t get past that the lead character was free and still kidnapped into bondage. I was reminded that as Black people, our status, our education and what we own does not protect us. I didn’t want to immerse myself in that claustrophobia, something I already feel. So I didn’t.
It’s not just on us as Black people to receive and spread the word, and we shouldn’t feel the need to experience trauma to do so.
Christa C. Gilliam, chairperson of the Department of Social Work at Coppin State University, understands my conundrum. She’s already arranged for her husband to take their children, one in high school and one in college, to see “Till.” Even though she’s not in the headspace to see it now, “we have the responsibility to tell these stories,” she said.
“This is American history. This is an American history movie,” Gilliam said. “It’s the responsibility of Americans to go to the box office. But if you experience racial trauma by seeing it, it’s not our responsibility to take one for the team. There are some movies I’m never going to see, but I invite other people to see them.”
It’s fair to say that these are stressful times, in general. The CEO of the American Psychological Association described 2020 alone as a “collective trauma,” exacerbated by the pandemic. And for those whose job it is to mitigate and parse that trauma for others, whether they’re mental health professionals, teachers or journalists, it’s hard to get away from it. Engaging in it again on your off-hours is not always attractive. My own mother, a social worker, got the Disney Channel on our cable in the 1980s when it was a premium offering, “because after everything I hear every day, I want to come home and watch cartoon ducks.”
When the material is specifically about the trauma we experience racially, those ducks seem more enticing.
Sabrina Taylor, chair of Coppin’s Department of Psychology, Counseling, and Behavioral Health, said she will choose to see “Till” “over my break, when I am not working and thinking about other things. I have to be in the right mental space.”
Taylor — who is part of a group of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) therapists who meet monthly to safely process their own issues — said that we as Americans, specifically Black Americans, have observed so much disturbing news that it’s hard to get away from.
“So much has happened in the media in the past several years, with [the murder of] George Floyd and the insurrection in Washington,” she says. “I have friends who live there who were scared to leave the house, who feared for their lives. And then you add films like this into the mix that are triggering.”
You see, these stories aren’t fiction. They’re our history. They are my history. Like Emmett Till, my great-grandfather was killed by a white man in the South who thought he’d overstepped the boundaries of his race. His son, my grandfather, fled South Carolina with the rest of his family, including my mother. I asked him once if he ever watched civil rights movies.
“Why would I watch that?” he said. “I lived it.” Reliving those things wasn’t entertaining to him. It was reliving trauma.
Gilliam also suggested that some movies are made for audiences who might not know these stories, and wouldn’t learn them any other way. And their existence is a good thing. This reminded me of fans of HBO’s “Watchmen” series, many of them white, who were stunned not only that the show’s depiction of the devastating 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre told a true story, but that they’d never known about it.
“These stories must be told, must be seen. Myself, as the parent of high school and college-aged kids, they know about Emmett Till, but not as much as I did growing up reading Jet magazine and things that are no longer available,” she said. “We want to make sure they are told responsibly.”
After my conversation with Gilliam and Taylor, I started rethinking my stance on “Till,” because I think that it’s something I’d like to see so I can talk about it with my son. I don’t know if I can do it in the theater, so I might wait until it streams and I can be safe at home to cry, to rage, and to pause it and leave the room if I need to.
And I want to be able to talk about it with you, the readers, too. If you can find the emotional bandwidth for it, I hope you do, too. We can lean on each other, and process it together.
leslie.streeter@thebaltimorebanner.com
Leslie Gray Streeter is a columnist excited about telling Baltimore stories — about us and the things that we care about, that touch us, that tickle us and that make us tick, from parenting to pop culture to the perfect crab cake. She is especially psyched about discussions that we don't usually have. Open mind and a sense of humor required.
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