"It could've been me" (196)

When I climbed onto the bus Monday with "Stuck Rubber Baby" in hand , I noticed a woman reading a copy of a book titled:" The Lynching of Emmett Till". It was a lengthy, dense looking novel. It got my blog-post process going as I once again thought of the similarities between our two stories: between Sammy's death and Emmet's, the effects of the deaths, and the culture surrounding them.

The ending of the book harkens back to the beginning section mentioning the Till case. As Toland is remembering the scene of Sammy's death, we see the same depiction of a face exploding that we saw when he was describing Emmet Till's head wounds (pg 2). Toland is hit in the skull while Sammy is murdered, the same part of the body where he draws such pain from Emmet's murder. Also, Toland's grief over having physically touched Sammy's body runs in the same vien of the haunting received from Emmet Till's skull, and the crooked cops who care about Sammy's justice about as much as did the cops for Emmett's.

It's clear the author thickens the strings tying the two cases together. Sammy's murder was Toland's Till case; it propelled him forward through the pain of loss. But the question I'm left wondering is how far the similarities go.

Q: Would Toland have come out publicly had Sammy not been murdered? Was his death a necessary evil for the spark of bravery?

-Hunter