I read Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File <\/em>is a very personal meditation on, and investigation into, the other Till case. After Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, when his family was seeking justice, sources leaked his father\u2019s military file, which spelled out details which even his family had never been told: that Louis Till was executed by the military for rapes committed in wartime Italy. This leaked file was used to discredit the family and prevent any justice for Emmett\u2019s murderers. Wideman reads the file on Louis Till. He reads it backwards, he cuts it up and collages it, he visits Till\u2019s dishonorable and nameless grave in France; he tells us what he ate in France and what his friends there are like.<\/p>\n For a long time as I was reading this book it seemed like the more personal and meditative it was, the more often it turned vague or self-indulgent. (And I\u2019ll say that some of the passages speculating on the rapes for which Louis Till was sentenced seemed to me prurient and\/or stereotyped\u2013although Wideman also listens to the victims\u2019 voices with much more attentiveness, much more willingness to hear and imagine their reality, than the US Army ever did.) And yet toward the end I began to see something I think the book is doing, and it\u2019s a haunting, penetrating thing.<\/p>\n Wideman makes a lot of unusual analogies and associations: algae on a French beach is shorn hair on the floor of a black barbershop, or mounds of stolen warehoused hair for wigs. \u201cX is Y\u201d is poetry. Is it also dehumanizing? A lot of this book is about the identification, or deliberate confusion, of one black man with another. Wideman identifies his father with Louis Till, Till with his murdered son, St. Martin de Porres with a man he once feared who bore the evocative name of Clement. All of them are any black man. They\u2019re any black man to the prosecutors who have reasons to execute Louis Till even if another man committed the crimes. They\u2019re any black man to the highly-placed military men who made sure that Louis Till\u2019s shameful death was leaked to the press in order to discredit his widow after the murder of her child. Wideman\u2019s mother says he\u2019s selfish, just like his father; Wideman\u2019s brother sits in prison for a crime he didn\u2019t commit.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a moment where Wideman describes himself, \u201cAfraid that someone looking for Louis Till is coming to pry me apart.\u201d<\/p>\n But this identification of any black man as all black men is also how community works. It\u2019s how Wideman can see his own losses and his own family in the Tills. It\u2019s how he can see himself in both abusive parent and saint; and if he couldn\u2019t see himself in the former, how could he approach the latter? In the AA terminology, we \u201cidentify with\u201d someone else. We see his possibilities as our own. All are responsible for the sins of all.<\/i><\/p>\n I know this is only one thing the book is doing, and other aspects of its investigation into unknowable, necessary truths will be more powerful to others. But this was the thing that struck me. There are a lot of painful scenes in this book, as you might expect: the 4\u00d74 nameless, numbered graves of the American soldiers executed by their own country, a grave too small for a man in spite of their hidden cemetery\u2019s \u201cpreposterous dignity.\u201d There\u2019s the pain that comes from the fact that nobody at the time had any interest in determining the truth of what happened the night before Louis Till was arrested in Italy\u2014nobody with any power, that is. And so now the truth is fragmented and dissolving, misleading, impossible to know which story carries more of it. Wideman says that all the stories are true. That might be the closest thing the book can offer to hope, because it suggests that he is not only one of these men, but all of them. The hope is that a black man can open the door shaped like his shadow and find, on the other side, friendship and not destruction.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I read Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File is a very personal meditation on, and investigation into, the other Till case. After Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, when his family was seeking justice, sources leaked his father\u2019s military file, which spelled out details which even his family had never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[101,79,1480,18],"class_list":["post-13579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","tag-america","tag-moral-memories-of-the-past","tag-prayers-to-st-martin-de-porres","tag-race"],"yoast_head":"\n