In this cocoon she revised her “memories” of that August night in the store. She felt bad about the killing, but she was now kept more or less in purdah by Roy’s family and his defence team. Her role in the murder trial, which drew global attention, was equally confused. Only after that did she imagine that the tree was trying to hide the shame of its past. She thought it looked great for climbing. A boyfriend had once shown her a “hanging tree”, with the old frayed rope half-swallowed by new bark. Nothing Emmett Till had done, she said, could possibly justify what followed. In fact, according to her, when they brought the boy to the store she said he was not the right one, and begged Roy and J.W. Several witnesses at the murder trial said she went along to Mose Wright’s cabin that night to identify the boy they heard a woman’s voice in the car. What part did Carolyn play in all this? Perhaps the obvious one of telling Roy, but not necessarily.

From that picture, in large part, the civil-rights movement sprang. His mother insisted that the horror was photographed for America and the world to see. He was found some days later, bloated, decomposing, and with a 75lb cotton-gin fan fastened with barbed wire round his neck. He was taken to Milam’s tool house, beaten and pistol-whipped, then shot through the head, with his body dumped in the Tallahatchie river.

His name was Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago where the rules were different. Milam, found out where he was staying, with his great-uncle Mose Wright, and abducted him at gunpoint in the small hours. When it came to the “insulting” black boy, however, the matter could not be kept quiet for long. But she would never dream of setting foot in one. Black church services sounded fun, with all that stomping and those Praise the Lords. Occasionally she played with black children, and even ate their green mush and cornbread with her fingers, like them. They had a hired help, Annie, whose warm hugs could take all pain away, but naturally Annie did not go with them on family outings.

She had grown up on a plantation near Cruger where her father managed the workers with brisk efficiency. Of course she and Roy in no way socialised with them. A line of heavy farm-workers’ gloves was strung across the plate-glass windows, and round a board on the porch her customers liked to play chequers with bottle-caps. Almost all the goods were sold on credit. Most of the tiny population were black sharecroppers and field workers whose shacks lay along the farm roads. Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market was one of only three businesses in Money, not counting the gas station and the cotton gin. They lived, all four of them, in two small rooms behind the store.

Rose madder novel