by Carol Jago
Contrafactual hypotheses have always fascinated me. In this poem Eve Ewing imagines that Emmett Till wasn’t murdered in Mississippi but lived, breathed, and shopped on the southside of Chicago. I love the details she depicts: Till’s porkpie hat, Roosevelt Road, and of course the candy bar. Among other things, the poem is an invitation to learn more about Till’s death and funeral, a landmark in the history of civil rights.
Eve Ewing’s 1919 is both a poetry collection and a history lesson. Drawing from events in the “Red Summer” when racial tensions erupted into violence across the nation she presents poems, photographs, and primary documents in conversation that invite the reader to reflect upon current events.
You can provide a print copy of "I Saw Emmett Till This Week At the Grocery Store" and then listen as a class to Jonny Sun read the poem for the Poetry Foundation’s Ours Poetica project.
Invite students to:
- Read the poem identifying compelling details (“whistling softly,” “his hat, one of those fine porkpie numbers,” “Roosevelt Road,” “candy bar in hand”).
- Brainstorm people from history or from the news (a celebrity, a sports figure, a politician, etc.)
- Choose one of these people to learn more about.
- Do a quick online search for information about the individual, looking for compelling details.
- Write a poem modeled after Eve Ewing’s in which the individual is suddenly observed in a familiar contemporary place (at a bus stop, in the woods, on a Zoom call, walking down the street).
Further Reading:
Carol Jago has taught middle and high school for 32 years and is past president of NCTE. She is associate director of the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA and the author of The Book in Question: Why and How Reading Is in Crisis. (Heinemann 2019).
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