“How old are you, Essie?” she asked me after a pause. They think they can get away with anything . . . Negroes up North have no respect for people. A boy from Mississippi would have known better than that. “He was killed because he got out of his place with a white woman. “Do you know why he was killed?” she asked and I didn’t answer. “No, I didn’t hear that,” I answered, almost choking on the food. “Essie, did you hear about that fourteen-year-old boy who was killed In Greenwood?” she asked me, sitting down in one of the chairs opposite me.
“Just do your work like you don’t know nothing.” Burke’s that evening, mama’s words kept running through my mind. Just do your work like you don’t know nothing . . .” And don’t you let on like you know nothing about that boy being killed . . . These white folks git a hold of it they gonna be in trouble . . . “Eddie them better watch how they go around here talking. “. . . I heard Eddie them talking about it this evening coming from school.” “Where did you hear that?” she said angrily. “Mama, did you hear about that fourteen-year-old Negro boy who was killed a little over a week ago by some white men?” I asked her.
I was now working for one of the meanest white women in town, and a week before school started Emmett Till was killed . . . In her memoir Coming of Age in Mississippi, she recalls her attempts to make sense of Till’s murder and the responses to her questions from the adults in her life. As a student at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, Moody engaged in grassroots civil rights activism, participating in lunch counter sit-ins and voter registration drives. 1940), born Essie Mae Moody, grew up in Centreville, Mississippi, and was 14 years old when she learned about the murder of Emmett Till.
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