The Street Sweeper Read Online Free PDF Page A

his mother’s hand resting on his shoulder. In August 1955, Emmett left his home on the south side of Chicago to visit relatives in Money, Mississippi. Armed only with a speech impediment bequeathed to him by a bout of polio contracted when he was three, the fourteen-year-oldblack boy went into Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy some gum. As he was leaving he said, perhaps shyly, perhaps not, ‘Bye, Baby’ to the older white town beauty, Carolyn Bryant. When Emmett’s body was found three days later in the Tallahatchie River, he was recognisable to his southern relative only by his initialled ring. Barbed wire had been used to hold a cotton-gin fan around his neck, one eye had been gouged out, a bullet had been lodged in his skull and one side of his forehead had been crushed. Adam Zignelik’s sleep took in the image of Emmett Till with his mother’s hand resting on Emmett’s shoulder as well as the later one, the last one, of Emmett’s bashed, bloated, river-soaked head, the one that his mother, Mamie Till Bradley Mobley, allowed to be published in
Jet
magazine so it could be seen as widely as possible. Adam saw these images flicker by and falter before him and then for a moment he saw his own father, also in black and white. Then his father too disappeared.
    He saw the images of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins – three fourteen-year-old girls, and eleven-year-old Denise McNair, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, smiling – four little black girls who, one Sunday in September 1963, had, as they had every Sunday, gone to Bible class at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. But on the 15th of September these little girls attained national prominence when the church was bombed by segregationists. Fifteen people were injured. All four of the girls were killed. It was estimated that in Birmingham, Alabama, at the time of their murder one-third of all police officers were either Klansmen or had a Klan affiliation. Though the girls were killed before he was born, Adam Zignelik knew them and saw them in the minutes before waking in a sweat around 4.30 am that Monday morning. He saw his father briefly then too, a white man, in black and white.
    He saw fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford alone on 4 September 1957 at the centre of a crowd outside Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth was one of nine black students attempting to become the first students of their race to attend the school. All nine students were meant to be arriving together. They were to have met at 8.30 am on the corner of 12th Street and Park Avenue where two police cars were to takethem to school. That had been the plan. Elizabeth’s father, Oscar, worked as a dining car maintenance worker and her mother, Birdee, taught blind and deaf children how to wash and iron their own clothes at a segregated school. But in September 1957 the Eckfords didn’t yet own a telephone. No one had told Elizabeth the plan.
    Elizabeth got up that morning to go to her new school. She put on a new black-and-white dress that she and her mother had made for the occasion. It was perfectly pressed. Adam Zignelik could see the pleats that flowed down from Elizabeth’s waist where the dress tapered in. The television news was on in the Eckford house. Before Birdee Eckford could switch it off, she and her husband, Oscar, who was walking the floorboards of the hallway to a rhythm in his chest, an unlit cigar in one hand and an unlit pipe in the other, both heard the newscaster speculate, between the weather report and a series of advertisements, about whether the nine coloured children would be going to school that day, the day after Governor Orval Eugene Faubus had warned that – if they did – ‘blood will run in the streets’. Elizabeth had heard it too. ‘Don’t let her go!’ Adam Zignelik called out but no articulate sound, nothing resembling language, came out of him. And, anyway, he was in an apartment