I know travel is supposed to be broadening.  You go some place you've never been before, and you come back changed, with a different perspective, a new appreciation for things.

But, for me, a lot of times, it just doesn't work that way.

Like, last week, when I went to Mississippi.

Maybe a person is supposed to go to Mississippi and notice the ways it has changed since the bad old days.  How Jackson is practically a real city.  How the Confederate flag is actually only a portion of the state flag.  How the hotels take credit cards in addition to cash.

But I couldn't help myself.  The whole time I was there, I just wanted to come home. North.

In a world where only a few acceptable prejudices remain, there is something deeply comforting about smug Yankee superiority.

Calling Robert Stack

My bosses sent me down to the Mississippi Delta -- which was not, in fact, shining like a National guitar, thank you very much Paul Simon -- to look into the reopening of the investigation of the 1955 death of 14-year-old Emmett Till.  If you think that sending a Chicago reporter with a taste for soy milk lattes and long hair that doesn't do well in humidity down to Mississippi to solve a 50-year-old crime sounds like the premise of a very bad novel, I can't say you're wrong.  I'm thinking about writing that novel myself.

Still, my inner-princess notwithstanding, I am enough of a nerd that I wanted to do a good job.

I wanted to find someone who could tell me what really happened to Emmett Till and who was responsible for his death.

But if anyone knows all the details, he's not saying.

His cousins know that, a few days after he bought some gum from a white storekeeper, Carolyn Bryant, he was yanked out of bed by two armed men, Bryant's husband and his half-brother, who marched him out to their pickup truck and drove off.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, now dead, said they -- and they alone -- drove him around for a while, then took him to a steep hill above the river's banks with the intention of putting a scare in him and maybe beating him up a little for daring to "sass" a married white woman.  But his manner was so tough and unyielding that he basically goaded them into killing him.

Two-man mob

I arrived in Mississippi, hoping to fill in some of the blanks in a story that's never made a lot of sense.  If Till was alone in the back of the truck, the way Bryant and Milam said he was, why didn't he just jump out?

It has always been said there were more people in that truck. I was hoping that now, with the FBI re-examining the case and a local district attorney saying she'd be willing to prosecute it, the people who've passed that story along over the years would be willing to say more.  I wanted names.  Details.

But it was not, of course, that simple.  Rumors have swirled around and fed on themselves over the last 50 years.  Memories have been clouded and confused.

"How do you know there were more than two men in on it?"  I'd ask.  And my question would be met with a look of pity for my obvious white-girl stupidity:  "Whoever heard of a lynch mob with just two people in it?"

When I talked with African Americans about the case, they wondered how anyone could doubt that a massive conspiracy of silence has kept Till's killers from being brought to justice.

When I talked with whites, they wondered why, with so much else going on in the world, anyone could think it's a good idea to devote time and energy to worrying about who killed one smart-mouthed kid so many years ago.  I wondered what on Earth I was doing there.

Middle-age justice

If there is any hope of finding something close to justice in the Till case, that hope doesn't lie with a bunch of old people in the Delta.

Their minds are made up.

Among the younger people I talked to, cynicism -- tempered only by cluelessness -- was the rule.  Those who'd heard of the case, no matter their race, were pretty sure it would never be solved to anyone's satisfaction.  And those who hadn't, well, they had other things on their minds.

Like trying to get the hell out of Mississippi.

The only Mississippians I didn't spend much time with were the kids. They're busy with school, I figured, and far too young to remember or even understand what happened all those years ago.

It occurred to me only later, after I was back home and overdosing on Starbucks and expensive shampoo, that I'd done it all wrong.  It's the kids that matter: the 14-year-olds, especially.

So let me save you the trouble of taking the long, hot trip through cotton country that was required for me to have this revelation: If you care about justice, do something -- whatever you can afford -- to help out a kid.

That's the best way to honor the memory of Emmett Till.

And you don't even have to leave home to do it.

Lucky you.