Murder In Mississippi -- Black Youth's Death Inspires Nordan's `Wolf Whistle'

----------------------------------------------------------- "Wolf Whistle" by Lewis Nordan Algonquin, $16.95 -----------------------------------------------------------

The 1955 news report from the Mississippi Delta still has the power to chill:

"Roy Bryant, 24, and J.W. Milam, 36, half-brothers, were acquitted September 28 by an all-white jury in Sumner, Mississippi, of the murder of Emmett Louis Till, 14, of Chicago, a Negro youth who allegedly had whistled at, embraced and obscenely insulted Bryant's wife, Carolyn, 21."

The report added: "Jurors said that their verdict was based on a defense contention that the body taken from the Tallahatchie River August 31 (identified as Till by members of his family) was too badly decomposed for positive identification. Governor Hugh White . . . said that authorities `did all we could do' to insure a just trial."

In Lewis Nordan's 1991 short-story collection, "Music of the Swamp," he wrote about "the tragic limitations of a society defined by racial hatred and alcoholism and geographical isolation." While on a publicity tour for that extraordinary book, he surprised himself by telling an all-black audience in Atlanta that his next book would be about the Emmett Till murder, which took place when Nordan was 15 and living in Itta Bena, Miss., a Delta town just down the road from where Till died.

Clearly, the idea had been percolating a long time. It was foreshadowed, in fact, in the title story of "Music of the Swamp," when two boys view a body "snagged upside down in a drift of brush" in a lake. That book, and Nordan's other works of short fiction, "Welcome to the Arrow Catcher Fair" and "The All-Girl Football Team," introduced us to the circumscribed world of Arrow Catcher, Miss., a sweltering backwater that exists at a time when a radio was "as big as a Frigidaire" and an 11-year-old boy could hop a freight, travel five miles and have his ideas of distance and possibility forever transformed.

A segregated world

"Wolf Whistle," too, takes place in Arrow Catcher, where the social order allows no breach of expected behavior, no surprises. In 1955, white people live in the neighborhood of Balance Due, and the Negroes live in a section of town called the Belgian Congo.

A word of warning to the terminally politically correct: yes, racial slurs and words considered racially offensive are used throughout. Nordan doesn't flinch from the fact that people in 1955 spoke to one another in ways we find reprehensible today - or at least say we do.

The town gathering spot is Red's Goodlookin Bar and Gro., where black men sit on the front porch in cane-bottom chairs, plucking guitars and talking about their hero, Robert Johnson, King of the Blues, and black children are "teasing and messing, all time messing, their parents would say." White locals gather inside to brag and complain and drink their way through another steamy Delta day.

Into this carefully balanced equation strolls Bobo (Emmett Till's actual nickname), a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago, visiting his Uncle and Auntee for the summer. He is the exotic here, full of high spirits and big-city bravado. The others dare him to ask a white woman in the store, Lady Sally Montberclair, for a date since he has passed off a wallet photo of Hedy Lamarr as his Chicago girlfriend.

What really happened that day at Red's, when Bobo walked in to buy two pieces of Bazooka bubble gum? Some maintain he said "hubba-hubba" and some say he actually touched Lady Sally; most everyone says he "wolf-whistled" her.

Nordan's stylistic and storytelling genius is in re-creating a time and a place inhabited by real people - people such as Alice Conroy, an idealistic fourth-grade teacher who tries to broaden her students' horizons with bizarre field trips, and her "Uncle Runt," a little sot abandoned by his wife but capable of surprising even himself with an occasional epiphany (You are drinking yourself to death with violent men), while suddenly requesting he be called by his given name, Cyrus.

Finally, there is Solon Gregg, a thief, wife-beater and the white-folkmiscreant who eventually kills Bobo at the request of Lady Sally's husband. Nordan doesn't judge, polemicize or proselytize; he lets these characters' own stories explain or indict them.

Beyond murder, but leading inexorably to it, is the other tragedy he shows us: the dangers of living an ingrown life, in a place where change is not countenanced, where responses are instinctive and never reflected upon, where the most ignorant and callow wreak havoc because their hatred has found focus.

Mesmerizing moments

Nordan's style is pure bliss and never better than in the courtroom scene when Bobo's uncle is being asked to identify the killer.

In a sequence that could be straight from Garcia Marquez, Cyrus' parrot gets loose and circles the room while Alice's class chants poetry to charm the bird; instead, it lands atop the head of the accused, Solon Gregg.

Covered with "bird dooky," the frenzied Solon screams curses at Bobo's uncle, whose "hand was light as air, lighter, a peaceful, small floating balloon. Uncle pointed his finger straight in Solon Gregg's face. He said, `Thar he.' "

It is a mesmerizing moment, and we know for certain that the balance of power in this hardscrabble bastion of the Old South has moved ever so slightly. Some things will never be the same in Arrow Catcher, Miss.

Valerie Ryan, a former bookstore owner, is a Seattle media consultant.