Sometimes I wonder where God was when Emmett cried out that night.
Young Willie Reed testified (terrified) that he heard a boy scream for God and for Mama from the barn
God is supposed to be everywhere.
But I know if Mama were there, she would have intervened.
Dr. James Cameron survived a lynching when he was 16 years old.
Years later he would remember watching as the mob took his friends Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith (both 19)
and strung them from an Indiana tree
(they broke Smith’s arms to keep him from resisting the noose).
Cameron was next. He prayed. The rope was around his neck, but a woman cried out, claiming his innocence
and they let him go with a scar and a testimony.
Cameron believed that God had saved him
and lived to 92, founding the Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
telling our story in America.
As I went through the exhibits, I saw Cameron’s old, humble face
and Emmett’s, young for all time.
On the screens I watched Cameron affirm his belief in God, touching his neck
and I wondered why God saved one and not the other,
or the many, many others.
Surely they all believed in God
cried out to Him on the road, in the water, from the tree,
and hoped He would hear them.
But what should we expect?
God did not intervene for Abel
who must have cried out to Him
hoping He remembered his last pleasing sacrifice.
And then, when God was silent, and the world went dark, he finally remembered Eve
who had always been there.
In those last moments, do Black children realize
that only Mama was real?
(Even if she, too, believed in God?)
But who am I to say that God didn’t save Cameron
Tt live to tell the truth
and had some higher purpose for Emmett
to die to expose it?
To start the Movement?
(Isn’t that what we tell ourselves?)
After all Emet (אֱמֶת) in Hebrew means truth
carved into the clay forehead of the golem
and across the dead boy’s face in the casket.
And doesn’t He work in mysterious ways?
And isn’t this, too, for His glory?
But dare I say, all glory aside,
wouldn’t we all rather another way,
where Emmett made it out of the box, out of the history books,
out of the haunted, horrified memory of a people,
and become an old, old man sitting with Cameron in the northern shade,
remembering the train ride home back to Mama?
How I wish God were bigger than a perfect plan.
How I wish God were as fierce as a mother
with a love stronger than death
and rage that protects like the womb.
Like Mama, who let the world see.
Like Mama, who still believed.
Like Mama, who would have saved him.
