In the darkness of a Mississippi night, a 16-year-old boy listens to voices outside his grandfather’s farmhouse and believes he is going to die.

“They come to me first. You’re so scared. It was so dark you’re stretching your eyes. You think you’re going to get killed. You’re 16 and you don’t want to die.”

The men with pistols moved past Wheeler Parker’s room, stopping at the one where his 14-year-old cousin slept.

They took the boy, a visitor from a Chicago suburb where the rules of racism and bigotry were very different, and they made an example of him. They brutally beat Emmett Till. They shot him, dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River and figured that would be the end of it.

It wasn’t.

More than five decades later, a 67-year-old pastor named Wheeler Parker boards a plane for Nebraska, summoned here by an unlikely connection of history and family.

He came because a teacher asked him. And he came because he was there when a mother refused to let the horror of her son’s death be buried in an anonymous grave, when family and friends chose courage over safety, stood up in court and accused two white men of murder.

And he will sit in the darkness tonight and watch the story he knows better than anyone unfold on stage at the Lied Center.

“It’s history,” Parker said, “and I think people need to know history.”

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Wheeler Parker, a child of the Mississippi Delta, who left with his family when he was 7 for better fortune in the north, will tell you what happened 52 years ago if you ask, though for years, no one did.

It amazed Parker — and the others who were there — how the story changed over the years, how they could hardly recognize the events they had lived.

He talks now because it’s important to get it right, he said. To understand how Emmett Till, who lived in Argo, Ill., next to his older cousin Wheeler, wanted to visit relatives in Mississippi and persuaded a reluctant mother to let him go.

Mississippi was the place to go in the summer, Parker said, the prejudice palpable but the camaraderie among blacks unparalleled. They picked cotton in the morning and chased snakes from the river in the afternoon so they could swim.

One afternoon, a group went to a grocery store in a town called Money. When Carolyn Bryant, the white woman whose husband owned the store, walked out, Emmett whistled at her.

“We couldn’t even believe it,” Parker said. “He had no idea of the repercussions or consequences.“

They ran to their car, afraid she would chase them down with a gun, but the car following in the cloud of gravel dust behind them drove on by. They didn’t tell Wheeler’s grandfather, Emmett’s great uncle, what happened, for fear they’d be sent home.

For two days, nothing. Then, at 2:30 on a Saturday morning, Parker heard voices in the darkness.

“It was such a gruesome, awful thing. So much terror, when they came to that house.”

Parker went home to Illinois the next day. They found Emmett’s body in the river three days later.

Mamie Till fought to have her son’s body returned to her and insisted on an open casket. A picture of Emmett’s body ran in Jet magazine and galvanized the civil rights movement.

Fifty thousand people filed past the open casket. And four months later, a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus. Later, she would say she was thinking of Emmett Till.

In September 1955, it took a jury just one hour to acquit the two white men accused of killing Emmett. Months later, they would admit in a Look magazine interview that they killed him, knowing they were safe because they could not be tried twice for the same crime.

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Chris Maly knew the Emmett Till story, and kept a mural of the boy in his Lincoln High School office. Students were captivated by the painting, by the smiling face and the big brown eyes.

“They started asking me very specific questions. I didn’t know the answers,” said Maly, chairman of the school’s performing arts department.

He started doing research, and an idea began to take shape.

He spent the next four years writing a play, focusing less on the horror of Emmett’s death and more on the courage of his mother, his uncle and a man who identified Emmett’s killers in court.

“The story of his mother is one of the great untold stories in history,” Maly said.

Originally, he wanted to perform it on the 50th anniversary of Emmett’s death in 2005. He wanted Mamie Till to be there, but she died in 2003.

He shelved the play but picked it up later, unaware another connection to Emmett Till was sharing Lincoln High’s hallways with him.

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About a month before his students performed “This Unsafe Star: The Emmett Till Story” at Lincoln High School in October, Maly had a visit from a Lincoln High security officer named John Goodwin.

He had his own story. He had grown up in Chicago suburb, and his grandfather and father were longtime pastors of a church founded in the house where Emmett grew up. The stories of Emmett Till were family stories.

When he was 13 or 14, he said, his teachers told the Emmett Till story. He mentioned it to his dad.

“My dad said, ‘You know, (Emmett) grew up with us.’”

Ask Wheeler, his dad said. He was down there.

Years later, Goodwin moved to Nebraska to go to school. Two of his aunts live here, too, one of whom was Emmett’s teacher. Both women remember the boy’s pretty eyes and mischievous streak.

“I said, ‘I know all of them, and they were down there when this happened,’” Goodwin said.

About 20 seconds later, Maly was on the phone with Wheeler Parker in Illinois.

He visited Parker after his students performed the play at school. The pastor showed him pictures, took him to the elementary school he and Emmett Till attended, to the cemetery where Emmett and his mother are buried.

Everything, including the way Mamie Till lived her life, was so humble, Maly said. He took that notion with him when rehearsals began at the Lied Center this month for a performance of his play as part of Black History Month.

“The show doesn’t need fanfare or glitz. It just needs to have truth. The story is enough.”

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For years, Wheeler Parker said, Emmett Till’s story stayed alive because of his mother and grandmother’s efforts, but the larger world seemed unaware.

Mamie Till created the “Emmett Till Players” to help young people improve their oratorical skills.

Then, slowly, interest widened. More biographies. A “60 Minutes” piece. In 2004, the Justice Department in Mississippi reopened the investigation. The Till Bill was introduced in Congress to fund efforts to bring others suspected of civil rights crimes to justice.

And then this play in Nebraska.

“When the time has come, it’s like a steamroller,” Parker said. “If you don’t get out of the way, you’ll get run over.”

Emmett’s death changed his life. Parker couldn’t forget the promises he had made, praying for his life in the early morning darkness. He became a minister, pastor of a church founded many years earlier in the house where Emmett had lived.

What happened is always there.

“You can never wash it out of your mind.”

But change comes from sacrifice and, he said, Emmett speaks louder in death than he would have had he lived.

Tonight, he’ll watch a play unfold on stage. Emmett’s story, one whose time has come.

Reach Margaret Reist at 473-7226 or mreist@journalstar.com.