Chapter 1 I will always remember the day Emmett was born. It was July 25, 1941. A Friday. But I''m getting a little ahead of my story, because this is not where it really begins. You see, my mother had brought me to the hospital on Wednesday. And the fact that it was my mother and not my husband who took me to the hospital to have a baby probably tells you just about everything you need to know about Louis Till. He was at work that day, I think. He worked at the Corn Products Refining Company in Argo, Illinois, where we lived, just outside Chicago.

I guess you might call Argo a suburb, but it didn''t have anything at all in common with the big city, except for being close to it. It was a sleepy little town where whites called blacks by their first names and where blacks would never dare do the same thing. It was a place where most little black girls dropped out of school by age sixteen to get married and where I was considered an old maid because I had waited until I finished high school to marry Louis at age eighteen. That was just the year before. Argo was also a place where it seemed the greatest ambition of most black men, like my father and my husband, was to work for Corn Products, and the greatest ambition of their wives was to take care of things at home for their husbands. So it was with my mother, who did what my mother always seemed to be there to do. She took care of me, and on that Wednesday when she drove me to Cook County Hospital in Chicago, I really needed care. I was going into labor and I didn''t understand much about that except for this: those pains were talking to me.

They were saying: "Any minute now, Mamie Till. Any minute, girl." Now, Cook County was a public hospital and it was one place you were sure black folks could get treated. That''s not to say that we were treated well. The nurses decided right away that this was not an emergency. But, then, of course, they were feeling no pain. They put me into a room with another lady and it seems that I was the only one who noticed that this woman was screaming and hollering and cursing and she was going through every four-letter word she could think of, teaching me a few in the process. That was about the time my pain stopped.

I felt so sorry for her that I forgot my own troubles. I got up out of my bed after everyone left and started trying to comfort her, help ease her pain. I didn''t understand a lot of things back then. I mean, I was so naive it wasn''t safe for me to walk the streets alone. And listening to the screams of that poor woman really frightened me because I didn''t understand any of it. My God, was this what was in store for me? No one had prepared me for any of this. Why hadn''t my mother talked to me about these things? And why on earth did this woman want to kill her husband? I guess it was her husband. "That man," I think is what she kept saying.

Anyway, she told me that I would soon find out why. Over the next couple of days, I was in and out of pain-terrible pain-and my mother was in and out of the room checking on things, taking care of me. That room always seemed dark, like a government office, not cheerful the way I thought it should look for such a blessed event. But that was Cook County Hospital. Louis never came to see about me. I would have thought that he would be excited about the baby, but he didn''t seem to care. On Friday during one of my mother''s visits, I told her what I had been telling the nurses: that I needed to go, that if the pain was a sign, then it was definitely time. I didn''t think I could take another minute of it.

But they weren''t paying me any attention. Mama asked if my water had broken. I told her I thought it had and that I had asked somebody to come and change my bed. But when they didn''t, I just pulled the blanket up and got back on top of the bed. Well, Alma Gaines was having none of that. My mother called the nurse, who checked my situation and quickly got me into the labor room. And that''s where things really got serious. The doctor there began to examine me.

He said something that I didn''t get, but I could hear the urgency in his voice. What I understood was that they had to get busy. They had to take my baby. The baby was coming butt first. It was a breech birth. I had no idea how serious that could be, but even I understood the anxiety I heard in the doctor''s voice, and the tense way things were moving in that room. "What have you been doing?" he asked, like he was accusing me of murder. Now I knew; it was my fault.

Whatever was happening to my baby was all my fault. The only thing I could recall was that Louis and I had moved into a new place not that long before all of this. As the medical team rushed to prep me, I thought about that move from my mother''s house to a little apartment down the street. I was so proud of that little place, our first apartment. I had bought curtains. Everything had to be perfect. I mean, I was such a perfectionist. And now, of course, I know better, but I didn''t know anything then.

I was hanging curtains and I was cleaning cobwebs high up on the windows. And somebody came by and saw me and told me I shouldn''t reach overhead like that. So, it was my fault that all this was happening, all because I wanted a nice, clean place for the baby to live and play. Now, in the delivery room, I was being punished for it, but I didn''t want my baby to have to suffer for my mistake. The agony was so severe, I finally understood why that woman back in the room wanted to kill "that man." Somehow, though, I didn''t think that would help. At that moment, I thought there could be no greater pain than giving birth to a child. I couldn''t imagine then how much more pain a mother might have to endure.

Someone placed a cone over my mouth and told me to count backward from one hundred. The last thing I remember was ". ninety-nine ." When I finally awakened, it seemed as if I had been dreaming. I was back in the room, but there was no baby there. In fact, I had never even seen my baby. I wanted to know where they had taken the baby. All they told me was that I was very sick, and they really didn''t want to bring him to me and they had taken him to do whatever it is they do to babies.

"Him." A boy. I kept insisting on seeing my baby boy and, finally, they gave in and brought him to me, probably just to keep me quiet, knowing how mothers are. But I didn''t care. I was so happy to see my baby, all six and three-quarters pounds of him. Happy, that is, until I looked down at him in my arms. I reacted right away with a frown. "Oooh, no .

"I said, before thinking much about it. His skin color was very, very light and he had blond hair and blue eyes. I looked up at the nurse, but I was assured that they had handed me the right baby. There was more. It had been such a difficult birth that they had used forceps and clinched him at the temples. He was scarred on his forehead and on the nose, and his little face looked distorted. My reaction must have startled him. His eyes grew wide, and he began to cry.

I pulled him closer to my bosom and rocked him gently. "Oh, honey. Mama loves you." That was our first connection, mother and son. I was so contrite after that and I would remember all of my life how my son looked when he came into the world, and how I reacted to it. The attending nurse needed a name to complete the birth certificate form. I had been ready for some time. Now, this was long before you could tell what sex a baby was going to be ahead of time, the way people do these days.

But I just knew I would have a boy. After all, I had decided, a boy first, then a girl, then another boy and then another girl. So, weeks before I went to the hospital, I asked my husband what he wanted to name our son. He just shrugged and sort of brushed me off. Then I thought about my favorite uncle, who didn''t seem much concerned, either, when I asked him. That''s when I decided myself on the name Emmett Louis, after my favorite uncle and my husband, because they didn''t care and I did. We didn''t have long together during that first visit. Emmett was taken from me again right away.

I was running a temperature and at a certain point, I think I became delirious. It''s all a blur. They had given me eighteen stitches inside and I don''t know how many outside. But I began scratching at the stitches and, in my state of mind, I guess I was causing problems, making things worse. Infection set in and I had to be looked after. Emmett was in even worse shape. His neck, right knee, and left wrist had been constricted by the umbilical cord. He could have choked to death.

Thank God, he didn''t. His wrist was swollen and his knee was swollen even more. It was as big as an apple. The circulation had been cut off. Apparently, that was what kept him from being delivered normally, what caused the breech birth and what forced the doctors to use the forceps to help him into the world. And it was why that doctor seemed to be accusing me of being a bad mother even before I became a mother; all because I hadn''t been taught how to prepare for such an important part of my life. There are certain things that a parent owes a child. One is to prepare him for the world outside.

I know this, not only because I became a mother, but because I learned so much from what my mother hadn''t taught me. My mother was good at a lot of things. She was a good teacher and once kept me up until three in the morning drilling me on my multiplication tables, then got me up to make the 8 a.m. school bell that same morning. She was a good nurturer, making sure that I and just about everybody else in our neighborhood was well fed. She was a firm disciplinarian, with strong Mississippi-bred church values. But she wasn''t so good at opening up to me and telling me.