Emmett Till: The Face of God

If you have never seen the face of Emmett Louis Till as he lay in his coffin in 1955, you should. It is an unforgettable face. One glance, and it will no doubt burn its impression into your brain like Moses staring into the burning bush; for like that bush, it is the face of God.

Till was a 14-year-old African-American boy - did I say "boy"? because he was more appropriately just a child - who was lynched in Mississippi, after offending a woman in her family's grocery store. Till's offense was that he had apparently dared to wolf-whistle at a white woman, and in so doing, he would fall victim to that horrible truism, captured so presciently in that Latin proverb "homo homini lupus," that "man is a wolf to man."

What happened to Till extends far beyond the evils of racism, however, which has always been a monster built as much from pseudoscience as from pseudo-religion and employed everywhere simply to divide and control, and always in the rapacious pursuit of "the love of money." And his face is a far greater representation of what humanity has always done to each other for the sake of its sacred "truths," than even the shroud of Turin.

When one first sees his face, they must strain as much to believe it is a face at all, as to believe that people who saw themselves as good, God fearing Americans, could be capable of unleashing such pure evil for any reason at all, let alone for something as harmless as the whistle of a child. Only with great difficulty can one look at such a face and even begin to imagine - and they are indeed forced to imagine as the image itself gives no indication otherwise - that what they are looking at was in fact once the face of a healthy bouncing teenage child, who mere days earlier, was laughing with friends and thinking about girls, as he stopped at a convenience store on his way home.

But with the all the simplicity of a single whistle, Till unwittingly called forth the hounds of hell that, as young Hamlet exclaimed, would "do such bitter business as the day would quake to look upon," and he was swallowed up by the ugliness of a reality that lives just beyond the veil of own our comfortable lives. That ugliness was something the vast majority of people not only denied was salivating everywhere in the shadows of the 1950s, but people continue to deny even more today, from refugees abroad to racism at home, and so much more.  

In many ways, Till is young David standing before the Philistines, with the image of his face being cast like a stone around the world at the Goliath of racism which has always adorned itself in the royal robes of religion and science, and been used everywhere to conjure fear in the service of power. And like Christ, Till's death would rise again, and unite the hearts and minds of people from all creeds and colors across the globe, to fight for Civil Rights.

In this respect, the African Americans had indeed become the Jews of Old, for what united the Twelve Tribes of Israel before David took the throne, had never been bloodlines or uniformity of beliefs, nor conformity to creeds or even ideas of a single God, but the covenant that united an ever expanding and diverging  collection of people, who were all committed to seeing themselves as one. 

And also like the Tribes, the Civil Rights movement was without a centralized system of power or authority, but was an organic collection of people, who rallied behind people who were as charismatic as Moses or Christ, to overcome the bondage of other peoples hatred and fear, in the land to which they had been brought, bought, and enslaved.

Indeed, it is the face of the Earth itself, brutalized by bombs and wars from the trenches of Verdun and The Somme to the oil fields of Iraq, and littered with corpses by the tens of millions by butchers who are everywhere applauded as the emissaries of peace for ordering our children to murder and die fighting the children of others, almost all of whom are barely a handful of years older than Emmett Till; and each of whom is convinced, much like Till's attackers, that they are fighting for their moral convictions and their God.

And when it is all over, the butchers celebrate with parades the commencement of the Olympic orgy of death and destruction they presided over, congratulate themselves for their benevolence and wisdom, sweep away the broken bodies with as much ease as they exempt themselves from blame, and ignore the countless broken families who are left forever devastated in their wake, as they carve up the spoils for themselves, like soldiers casting dice for a seamless garment.

That is what is written on the face of Emmett Louis Till. It is the story of human history, written writ large, and it speaks more clearly than in any verse in any Bible or Koran, or any prayer or ritual sacrifice.  And when you see it, you know that you are only looking into a mirror. For only when you are able to see your face in that mirror, will it be possible for you to see the face of God, looking back at you.