In an unpublished memoir obtained by The AP in 2022, Donham said she was unaware of what would happen to Till. An all-white jury acquitted the two white men in the killing, but the men later confessed in an interview with Look magazine. Wheeler Parker, a cousin of Till who was there, has said Till whistled at the woman, an act that flew in the face of Mississippi’s racist social codes of the era.Įvidence indicates a woman identified Till to Donham’s then-husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Donham - then 21 and named Carolyn Bryant - accused him of making improper advances on her at a grocery store where she was working in the small community of Money. In August 1955, Till had traveled from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral in their hometown of Chicago so the world could see her 14-year-old son’s mutilated body, which was pulled from a river in Mississippi. Her death marks the last chance for anyone to be held accountable for the kidnapping and murder that shocked the world. (AP) - The white woman who accused Black teenager Emmett Till of whistling at and accosting her in Mississippi in 1955 - causing his lynching, which galvanized a generation of activists to rise up in the Civil Rights Movement - has died at 88.Ĭarolyn Bryant Donham died in hospice care Tuesday night in Westlake, Louisiana, according to a death report filed Thursday in the Calcasieu Parish Coroner’s Office. This narrative - a love story and a mystery with a powerful sense of fable - is his confession.JACKSON, Miss. The tormented, self-dramatizing Hugo Delegate speaks from a prison cell where he is prepared to take the fall for his beloved Savage Girl.

Zimmerman's tale is narrated by the Delegate's son, a Harvard anatomy student.

A series of suitors, both young and old, find her irresistible, but the willful girl's illicit lovers begin to turn up murdered. Bronwyn hits the highly mannered world of Edith Wharton - era Manhattan like a bomb. Jean Zimmerman's new novel tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart 18-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society. A riveting tale from the author of The Orphanmaster about a wild girl from Nevada who lands in Manhattan's Gilded Age society.

Savage Girl by Jean Zimmerman