Till is directed by Nigerian-American filmmaker Chinonye Chukwu, based on the true story of the lynching of Emmett Till, a black teenage boy from Chicago who visited family in Mississippi one summer. As he planned to leave the north and visit his cousins in the south, his mother Mamie Till-Mobley warned him of the ways that Mississippi was different than Chicago, Illinois, in its treatment of black people. She told him that he would have to be more careful in the way he spoke and acted around white people while in Mississippi, that white people would look at him differently—with less respect and dignity. He would have to be excessively humble in their presence and mostly, stay silent.
There is a reason that we hear the term “mother’s intuition” and “a mother knows.” We watch the way Danielle Deadwyler portrays this character of a mother worried about her son before he leaves, and how she agonizes after he has gone, even before anything destructive happens. She doesn’t have a good feeling about him in Mississippi, even though everyone tells her it is a good thing for Emmett to visit family. Mamie is deeply uncomfortable with her beautiful boy being in a state where lynching is common, where not adapting to the social norms can result in a black person’s swift murder. Even behaving according to the norms can result in murder, if a white person is mad or backwards enough on a particular day. Black families could not expect justice for a crime committed against them for the color of their skin. Lawmakers and jurors were usually white, and knew each other, and had friends of friends and kids on the same sports teams, in church pews, things like that. It’s all in who you know, isn’t it?
How much is different in American courtrooms today?
While 68 years have passed since the murder of Emmett Till, and while some think lynchings just don’t happen anymore like that, we often see black men—young and old alike—lynched in broad daylight, all the time, by perpetrators found not guilty for the crimes.
Emmett Till (1955)
Trayvon Martin (2012)
Eric Garner (2014)
George Floyd (2020)
History repeats itself until we get the message. And even then.
What if we saw, more often, images of the Mother Mary as a black woman, holding her dead son in her arms, because he had been slain and left to rot by those in positions of power?
Maybe that image would change the way we talk about religion and politics and race and sex in America. Maybe it can infuse art and our art museums, too. Because mothers want to know why the violence doesn’t stop. Mothers are continuing to grieve without justice. And mothers don’t have to be white to hold the space of the divine, to birth children who matter.
At some point, all humans will have to stand in front of that Essence, that Source of All, and account for themselves. This doesn’t mean it happens in a court hearing, because as this movie shows, a court is not the judge and the authority over conscience and dignity. Sometimes a court works, and sometimes a court does not. Courts are subjects of the broken systems that created them. We have too many historical incidents of judges and attorneys missing the mark on what is right and wrong, and courtrooms can unfortunately become theater and child’s play rather than uphold the ideals that were intended for them. This is what democracy is—it goes on and on.
God and Goddess? They is a different judge altogether.
It is life itself that will force us to face the mirror of who we are, and what we have done or not done. Life will ask us to look at the chances we had that we did not take, the paths we chose, the people we turned away from when they asked for help. Life will show up for us, and reveal the ignorance and the destruction we caused when we could have planted something otherwise. We are made to see, even if it takes a long time. No word-smithing and justification, or holding a bible, or saying the name of a sacred saint or God, will get us off the hook when we meet our Maker, and so it is better to be alignment with divine will and teachings than to take part in the parade of spectacle and illusion.
It is better to act from love. Even love of one’s enemies, hard as that may be.
And this is why Jesus—in my feeling—was infused throughout this movie Till. Jesus is in the face of this mother Mamie Till-Mobley, and this actress Danielle Deadwyler, able to stand up and speak, and comfort others even in the midst of her heartache. She maintains her composure, and her gentleness, and her honor, even as people in the court system dismiss her and overlook the death of her son.
And Jesus is in the son killed, whose life becomes a memory and reminder of the Highest Law, the Highest Truth, and how out of alignment our systems have been and can continue to be.
The seeds of hate, if nourished with more and more energy and fire, will grow. It can be hatred related to race, related to gender, related to class, related to appearance—hate is hate. One motivated by this sin is in a living hell, and will never be satisfied, because hate only leads to darker and more restricted corners.
The seeds of love, on the other hand, open up doors and windows of the soul that are so vast and so wide, one’s inner world is plentiful and abundant even in the depths of despair. Love’s seeds and blossoms become an inner heaven, and provide inner peace that cannot be destroyed in a storm. This inner garden may become a bit disarrayed at times, when the winds blow in. But love, when it is true, cannot be uprooted. It wins. It glows. It takes its time.
What we need to acknowledge about this movie, and about our lives now, and about the wider country and system we live within, is what the light can do.
The Light is not vengeful. It does not violate or manipulate. It just shines. And it shines in a way that you cannot deny its power, even if you’d prefer to hide away and cover it up in some fashion or form, because it makes you uncomfortable in seeing what you see.
Mamie Till-Mobley made a wise and difficult decision to ensure the world saw her murdered son in an open casket, to witness what was done to him. She did not seek revenge on the murderers, or enact violence. She just let the light show the truth and the way. This is how the civil rights movement worked, and this is because it was grounded and rooted in deep faith and understanding of Jesus’s true words, not a backwards government’s authority.
The team who made Till carry on this beautiful legacy and tradition of light. It is heartbreaking that the movie was not recognized with an Oscar nomination this year, but winners and losers are quickly forgotten when we know and feel at one with the real judge of our lives. Fanfare falls away when we know who and what offers the greatest reward.
And then you just make a different academy!
Bisous,
Ms. Wonderful
*Till is streaming now on Amazon Prime.