Don’t look away
Emmett Till had three coffins. When his body arrived in Chicago, it was nailed into the first of these: a pine box, anonymous and utilitarian, indifferent to the significance of what it was carrying.
Till had been killed by racists in Mississippi in 1955. He was beaten and shot, his body tied to a fan from a cotton gin and thrown in the Tallahatchie River. He was 14 years old.
The men who killed Till believed he had whistled at a white woman, or flirted with her, or touched her arm. Decades later, the woman involved recanted some of her testimony. She said, “That part isn’t true.”
For his funeral, Till’s mother chose an open casket. She wanted the world to see the crimes it had committed against her son. A photograph of his face, horribly disfigured, ran in Jet magazine, and then elsewhere.
The photograph changed how people saw the world. Likely it changed the course of the civil rights movement. The poet Claudia Rankine wrote that Mamie Till Mobley forced on America “a new kind of logic”. She had insisted that “we look with her upon the dead”.
In another picture, just as powerful, Mamie Till Mobley stands beside her son’s coffin. She grips the timber ogee, the light catching on her keening face. There is a tissue in her hand. An unseen person leans into frame, helping to steady her grief. Inside the casket are pinned pictures of her smiling son, his eyes bright with youth, above a face that is now featureless and unrecognisable.
Two weeks after Till was murdered, an all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding his killers not guilty. The state chose not to pursue the lesser charge of kidnapping. A year later, with the benefit of double jeopardy, the men who murdered him were paid by a magazine to recount the story of what they had done.
A third coffin was necessary after Till’s body was exhumed in 2005, his family still hoping that new evidence might reopen his case. State law prevented them from burying him in the same casket and so the original was given to the Smithsonian.
This week, a 21-year-old man was charged with murder following the killing of Cassius Turvey in the suburbs of Perth. The Noongar teenager was 15. It is alleged he was beaten with a pole as he walked home from school. After five days in hospital, he suffered two strokes, was placed in a coma, and died.
Again, his family gave permission for a photograph to be published. There is a tube taped in his nose and another in his mouth.
His ears and skull are bound in gauze. He has the long eyelashes of a child.
There is little that can be said about this case, which is before the courts. What can be written is that occasionally an event will change the course of a country. Occasionally an image will so trouble the people looking at it – so appal them with its curdled familiarity, its stolen innocence, its senselessness – that it will bring with it Rankine’s “new kind of logic”.
Irrespective of what happens in court, the last picture of Cassius Turvey should do this. No country should be able to look at his unmoving face and not call into question all the structures and prejudices and privileges that went into his death. No country should accept that a boy could be killed walking home from school because of, as police have blandly speculated, “a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time”.