Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) by Jesse Rev (FRW) Christopher; Jackson Mamie; Benson Till-Mobley Page A

to clinics. I would have to take him on Saturdays, and we had to travel quite a way by streetcar. Oh, that was rough. But it was for Bo, and we kept at it. In the end, the doctors couldn’t find a remedy, although speech therapy helped. They said he would outgrow it. It seemed we had little choice but to wait. Even so, we would never stop trying to help. In the meantime, we would do everything we could to keep Emmett’s outlook strong and positive. That wasn’t hard at all. It was becoming clear to us that there was no problem Emmett wouldn’t try to solve, no difficulty he wouldn’t try to overcome. And, somehow, he would always maintain his sense of balance, and his sense of humor.
    From the very beginning with Emmett there was laughter. He could find a way to enjoy himself in most situations. He was always trying to entertain me with jokes he picked up, early on from his uncle Emmett, who lived across the alley. Uncle Emmett would tell him a joke, then he would run back home to tell me. Oh, gee, I heard about more chickens crossing more roads, and knock-knock this and knock-knock that. All those tired, old jokes that were still so new to him. Sometimes, he would tell riddles that he seemed to have been making up, because they didn’t make sense. Or maybe you just had to be six years old to get them. He had the right style of joke telling. He would raise his voice just at the right time and punch the ending like he must have heard Uncle Emmett doing, and then it just didn’t make sense. But you would laugh just as he must have been laughing at jokes that weren’t making sense to him yet. After all, it was thelaughter that was important. For Emmett, life was laughter and laughter was life-giving. There was so much joy in his carefree world that he just wanted to share with everyone around him. He did it the only way a young boy knows how to do it. He made people laugh.
    Emmett couldn’t wait to start school, and we were encouraged by that. As it turns out, he wanted to be with his friends who were going. Wheeler was ahead of him by a couple of years, and Bo just had to be with Wheeler. After all, Wheeler was his idol. Almost every day, Emmett wanted to know why he couldn’t go to school. It wasn’t enough to explain to him that he wasn’t old enough, that he would be going in September. What sense does that make to a little boy? But when school was ready for him, he was ready for school. Mama had been tutoring him all along. My mother had been a teacher in the South. She didn’t have a college degree. She came up in a simpler time. Among black people back then, if one person was ahead of the group, that person became the teacher. Mama was that person. And although she hadn’t been trained, she had strong values and she recognized the value of good education. And that’s the way it worked.
    When Bo was about to start, we talked to him. We always stressed discipline. And we told him what an important thing it was to start school. We let him know that he was getting to be a big boy now. He had to take it all seriously; he was not going to school to play. We told him he was going to school to learn all he could learn so that, when he became a man, he would have something to depend on. This was the kind of encouragement we kept giving him. And we figured that it would sink in over time. But, at that moment, just before his first day of school, an excited boy as young and playful and sociable as Bo had to be thinking that school was the place where he could see all his friends most of the day. And that was all that mattered to him.
    Mama and I had really enjoyed shopping for Bo’s clothes for the start of school. Mama talked me into getting some blue jeans, and we bought him shirts and shoes. I got him everything he needed. Of course. And then, when winter came, we had to fight. The boots and the heavier coats and sweaters, they were all fine. But the long underwear? No way. Oh, he complained, he protested. He