Failing Private Till: John Edgar Wideman’s Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File

Writing to Save a Life: The Louis Till File is John Edgar Wideman’s latest attempt at looking at a photograph that has been haunting him for decades: that of the dead face of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Wideman delves into the records of Emmett’s father, Louis, who was sent to Italy as a soldier during the Second World War and was court-martialed and executed for alleged rape and murder. Emmett’s torturers were acquitted and further absolved by the minutes of Louis’ trial: for the all-white jury, the father’s crime was to blame for the son’s faults. Wideman reopens the Louis Till file and pores over its probable lies in a memoir that fuses fiction, investigation, speculation and fact. Yet the writer repeatedly acknowledges his words’ failed attempt to grasp the fantom life that haunts America’s racial memory, so that in the end failure to represent disrupts the mere concept of historical investigation, exposing the ethical and methodological faultines of the official record. But the failure to produce a counternarrative intended to fill the gaps of the farcical trial is the poetic figuring of a life and History Wideman ceaselessly rewrites.