First Close Reading Post
In “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” Huie primarily offers the bare facts of the murder of Emmet Till with more careful attention given to vital components such as the weapons utilized, locations visited, and timing within the story; however, he does focus in on one particular, seemingly insignificant feature attributable to Emmet.
“Bobo had been sleeping in his shorts. He pulled on a shirt and trousers, then reached for his socks.
‘Just the shoes,’ Milam hurried him.
‘I don’t wear shoes without socks,’ Bobo said: and he kept the gun-bearers waiting while he put on his socks, then a pair of canvas shoes with thick crepe soles.”
Huie specifically notes Bobo’s action of putting on his shoes with hefty soles when the two murderers first encounter the youth, and then again he draws readers’ attention to Bobo’s shoes which he removes when Milam and Bryant force him to strip near the Tallahatchie River, moments before firing the shot which robbed him of his life. Before concluding the article, Huie informs readers that Bobo’s body was discovered when some boys spotted his bare feet sticking out of the clear waters while fishing, and he once again mentions that Milam kept a fire burning for three hours in his backyard due to the fact that Bobo’s crepe soled shoes proved difficult to burn.
In an abstract sense, Emmet’s sturdy shoes represent his livelihood and firm resistance as well as bravery in the face of injustice. From testing the men’s patience by slowly dressing in full attire (shoes and socks included) while they wait on him in his bedroom to his shoes being inflamed for hours before finally disintegrating following his tragic death, Huie also notes that Bobo’s corpse was only found due to his feet visibly sticking out in the water. Emmet’s feet/shoes appear to be mentioned at pivotal moments throughout the account: when he first comes face-to-face with his kidnappers, moments before his death, when his body is discovered, and when his murderers are attempting to rid themselves of the evidence.
By focusing readers’ attention onto the commonplace action of putting on and removing one’s shoes, Huie manages to humanize Emmet’s character and by consistently drawing readers to this specific attribute of Emmet’s he allows readers to associate Emmet’s shoes with his own state of existence (he puts on his shoes when he first notices the dangers posed by his kidnappers, removes his shoes seconds before being killed, etc.). Thus, readers are able to closely follow the most important points in the retelling of Emmet’s murder with the use of this detail.
I think this post is fascinating. It’s a great example of a follow the trail. You did a good job of picking a small enough detail that you had time to trace it and talk about it. You provide quotes, but you also give us your own detailed explanation of how you read those quotes. You’re not leaving me to figure out what’s on your mind. If you were going to turn this into a paper, I would only ask you to keep pushing your thinking and see how your reading shapes up with other aspects about how the text are work. You begin by saying what the feet abstractly do. I wonder what would happen if you also think about what they concretely do, and then how what they concretely do and what they abstractly do are related. I also think b/c the genre is a weirdly mediated genre, it would be good for you to say more about what it means for the Bryants narrating the story to include this detail. Right now you think about this detail as if it were all on Huie, but Huie can only include it because it was a detail told to him, so it might be interesting to think about what the detail does in the first telling and then what Hui does with the detail. At any rate, you’ve done a good job here.