A Boy's Life

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

How many deaths will it take ‘til we know that too many people have died?

The list of those killed in racist violence in the United States is long. One particularly heinous death stands above them all: the murder of Emmett Till. Emmett’s mother, Mamie, insisted that her son’s mutilated body be visible so the world could see what white violence had wrought. Murdered about a month after his fourteenth birthday, today, July 25, 2026, would have been Till’s eighty-fifth birthday.

As part of a series of short stories I’ve written that have canine narrators, A Few Whiles imagines Emmett’s dog who waits at home for him to return and his uncle’s dog who does his part to help Emmett. Recently, this dog story and several others were posted together as DOG TRIPTYCH on TORCH Literary ARTS. If you’d like to read more of this series of tales/tails (Hee, Hee), become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. Free or paid, thanks for your eyeballs.

A Few Whiles

A dog waits at home in Chicago for five years

Where is the elegy for the dog named Signal who waited at home in Chicago, in a backyard in a working-class neighborhood for the return of a boy from a Mississippi vacation?

He went to spend some summer weeks with his cousins. We didn’t want him to go – me and Mamie Mommy. But he was head-up and happy and excited to go on a trip for fun with his cousins.

Summer vacation is our time. We long for it all through the long, tedious months at McCosh Elementary School. We earn our summer frolics because we are good, we behave, we do what Mamie Mommy tells us. We long to be hot and sticky with popsicle drippings. He promised we’ll have summer when he’s back. He promised.

Waiting at the fence, on the porch. Waiting is the most of that dog’s life if truth be told. There is much running and romping and digging and all. But waiting for that boy is the largest part of it, of us. Longing. Dog longing is different. It’s perhaps less sorrowful without the realization, the certainty, that the boy will not return. Poor exhausted fool animal to wait and grieve and wait beside the back gate for five years after the summer that he didn’t come back. A couple of times she has considered putting the animal down to ease the misery of its waiting. Surely, it is more kind to ease it away from that fence, those sticks and balls and caps and jackets and sneakers, those beloved sneakers of his. She could not do that. To touch that animal’s head, to smell him, to be tugged down the street with him, was to have a fleeting feel of the boy. Let him wait if that’s what he wants. She left him to it.

My tender, sweetheart boy child. He was a tender aged child still. He wasn’t a man.

“It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.” — Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP

Signal:

Why doesn’t he come home?

Bobsey:

The crackers who tied his body to a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan know. They know that Signal’s boy won’t be home and they know why.

Moses Wright’s dog, Bobsey knew what he didn’t know. Bobsey figured it. Mr. Moses was scared for himself. His ass was on fire with scared. Who could blame him? Maybe he figured the milk of human kindness would keep them from killing a child. Bobsey knew better. Bobsey smelled him that last time. And Boy’s life and limb and luster was the very last thing Bobsey smelled. Bobsey understood it all. For when Bobsey ran at the man’s leg to save the boy, to slow the vicious acts, a kick came and then a bullet. Bobsey’s life oozed onto the ground. Bobsey’d set her essentials into his leg, the fat part of his calf and he had to shoot her to take her off. * Mr. Moses and ‘em cried, “Bobsey, come off!” They tried to call Bobsey off like they’d call her off a possum. Bobsey ignored ‘em.

Let me explain it this way. I smelt it all. I smelt the entire outcome. Mr. Moses and ‘em can only imagine. They’re free to hope for the best. But I smelled each and every murderous intention in the base souls of the crackers that came for Boy that night. Every muscle in me acted with the instinct to protect Boy from this horror. I put myself between Boy and ‘em killers because I knew the odor of their purpose. I did what I was able before I died. I was in The Place of All Dogs forthwith. And I witnessed the ascension of Boy’s magnificent, unblemished soul a short time later.

*Subsequent accounts of the events of August 24, 1955 do not include the fact that Roy Bryant sustained a dog bite that night.