Novelist Bebe Moore Campbell was only five when Emmett Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. But in Your Blues Ain\u27t Like Mine (1992) she seeks to answer the question that black teenagers in Mississippi, and indeed many people from all over the United States, asked after seeing the photograph of Till\u27s mutilated and bloated body: How could they do that to him? He\u27s only a boy (Dittmer 58). Campbell embraces the view that Lillian Smith expressed in Killers of the Dream (1949): The warped, distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child also. Each is on a different side of the frame but each is pinioned there (30-31). Campbell\u27s decision to open her novel with the white woman\u27s perspective and then move on to the black youth\u27s consciousness signals her determination to name all the sources of pain and powerlessness that led to Till\u27s murder. Your Blues Ain\u27t Like Mine explores the consequences of being psychically abused during childhood, whether because of race or class or gender or color, and the possibilities for reconciliation between blacks and whites, between men and women, and across class lines. In a departure from the earlier literary chroniclers of Emmett Till\u27s story, Campbell begins her novel with his murder but then writes hope into the aftermath. To accomplish this feat she widens her focus from Mississippi to Chicago and fast-forwards her narrative into the present
