From The Till Trilogy
- By Ifa Bayeza
The Ballad of Emmett Till explores the life and afterlife of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who takes a fateful trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1955.
He goes by the nickname Bo or BoBo and he stutters. Like the African bata “talking drum,” his stammer is percussive, a rapid-fire repetition, without hesitation. His is not a stammer of insecurity but a physical disability which he has chosen to ignore and even to exploit. He is in a hurry to say everything. He whistles in a variety of ways. These moments in the script are indicated with variations of the sign ((o)). He is both a youth who never ages and an old soul, longing for death.
He is accompanied by a troupe of fellow travelers, a quintet composed of two women and three men, a chorus of shape-shifters, trapped between life and after. Lost souls, who cannot find their way, they cling to life and the shadows of it, awaiting trial, release, a hearing, justice, judgment.
As they wait, Emmett entertains the group with scenes from his brief life, the group taking on the roles of his family, friends, tormenters— any souls that, like the quintet, have been drawn into his sphere.
It feels like a coffin, the waiting. The landscape is cold, barren, the darkness close. The overlapping chorus of voices shifts easily from idle babble around a campfire or kitchen table to the tight, shape-note harmonies of a Negro spiritual. From the bent blues harmonies of a juke joint to the fast-moving currents of river water, a humming becomes a song, a psalm, a ballad.
Read the excerpts of the first two plays in The Till Trilogy from MR's Summer Issue here.
