CR Post #1- Emmett Till
In this article, Carolyn Holloway Bryant is described as a girl. The article says she is 21 years old, and is 5 feet tall and weights 103 pounds. This is contrasted with how they describe Emmett Till. Although he is only 14 years old, he is described as looking like a man. The article says that he is 5’4″ tall and weighs 160 pounds. The article also implies that Carolyn Holloway Bryant is very sheltered. It is stated that she dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to marry her husband. They run a store together, and they don’t go out much. It is also stated Carolyn Holloway Bryant was never by herself in the store at night. This makes her seem even more innocent. This is contrasted with Emmett Till talking with his friends about how he’s been with a white woman before and could get with another one. This makes him seem like he’s older and has more life experience then he actually does. It also makes him seem more threatening. In the article about the killing of Emmett Till descriptions are used to make Emmett Till seem like more of a threat, and descriptions are used to make Carolyn Holloway Bryant seem like a victim.
So I think you are doing a kind of side by side inside the text method. I think you bring our attention to a really interesting point that Carolyn is described as a girl even though she is 21 and married and about 7 years older than Till. I would have liked to have seen you been a little more explicit and thorough in y our discussion of that irony. What you do now is paraphrase the reset of the difference. Then in like one or two general sentences you posit what it all means. I think in future writings it would he helpful if you 1) quote actual text from the passage (with page number citations) and 2) follow these quotes with your explanation of how they are working independently and together.
I think the way your close reading is positioned right now leaves you on the boarder line of reading the details of the case and reading details and choices Huie employs in writing the story. For instance: perhaps it does indeed work for the Bryants and Milam to point out how much of a m an Till seemed, but what of Huie’s decision to include their exact ages and the heights? It’s part of what allows for us to resist the idea that Till was such a threat. We can see she’s seven years older, and he is only four inches taller than her (and certainly not tall by standards of a full grown man in the American south). Is giving us the details enough to resist Milam and Bryants’ attempts to frame the story??