Still Breathing

Protean Magazine 1, no. 3 (Summer 2021): 68-77.

The sound of Black grief—hot and sticky as pitch—is the image of Mamie Till-Mobley collapsed beside her son’s coffin. In the photograph, Till-Mobley is surrounded by a small group of people, several of whom are men in clerical garb, the others bystanders or close friends and family. They’ve all gathered at Chicago’s Illinois Central Railroad station to await the arrival of the body of her son, her “Bobo,” her Emmett. He’d been dead several days already.