If you seek a powerful piece of micro-fiction, you might need look no farther than the source of the question: “What was thrown off the Tallahatchie bridge?” You might discover a deep parable there too.
The inquiry comes from the 1967 b-side record by Bobbie Gentry Ode To Billy Joe. The cross-platform country ballad she wrote and performed became a hit during those turbulent late 1960s. Still, almost fifty-five years later, people still ask that question. The answer is generally, you miss the point if you focus on seeking a solution to the unsolved mystery.
The real world envelopes the song
The Vietnam Era raged on and in the United States, some of the great division you see in the country now is similar to the violence and revolution then. Fights for civil rights were fierce in the 1960s. Remember, this decade began with the US Government under John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy demanding the Democratic Governor of Alabama to allow black students at his state University. He refused and the students had to be escorted onto the campus by the National Guard walking by the governor himself as he literally stood at the door of the university campus in protest.
There were protests for civil rights regularly. I was nine then and still remember the news video of government forces turning water cannons on protesting members of the black communities marching for the rights many of the white community took for granted.
Martin Luther King, Jr. led marches for freedom and ended up in prison even though he advocated non-violence. He even suffered being beaten for his cause and ultimately died the day after the protest for equal treatment of Memphis garbage workers.
Malcolm X also fighting for the same civil rights was assassinated two years earlier.
1967 in the midst of what we know now as the Summer of Love but that was more in San Francisco and certainly was not reflected in the rest of the country. The nation also split over those who criticized the American involvement in Vietnam and others who supported the war, telling critics to leave if they did not like the country.
A powerful portrayal of a dispassionate dinner conversation
Bobbie Gentry’s song may have seemed to have little to do with all of this but, in fact, it encompassed it all with this simple story of dinner conversation about a young man who threw himself off the Tallahatchie bridge.
In the midst of the song, we learn that the narrator, a contemporary teenaged girlfriend, was with him not long before his death and they threw something off the bridge. Bobbie Gentry never tells us what it was and to this day many still ask.
A movie based on the song came out in 1976 and seemed to answer the question but the script was not written by Bobbie Gentry. It is a dramatized version of maybe a theory behind the fictional story. The movie by the way was produced by Max Baer, Jr, starred Robbie Benson as Billy Joe MacAllister and Glynnis O’Connor as the narrator of the song.
Gentry, often asked, explained that what was actually thrown off the bridge is not the issue. The key is that this young man the narrator loved so much threw himself off the Tallahatchie Bridge and in the dinner conversation and no one cares about him or her even though she is sitting right there.
“Everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge — flowers, a ring, even a baby. Anyone who hears the song can think what they want, but the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. They sit there eating their peas and apple pie and talking, without even realizing that Billie Joe’s girlfriend is sitting at the table, a member of the family.”[1]
The ballad portrays a total lack of empathy as the family, filled with their own self-importance, brush this off as an incident as irrelevant as a dust devil that runs across the crops for a minute or two.
This technique, so key to the whole story, focuses on the dispassionate and apathetic dinner table discussion. The discourse is so haunting which is why even today the song is discussed in reaction videos on YouTube.
A careful study of every word
We learn by studying every word that the characters are church-going members of the community. They focus on doing the right thing as Christian men and women. They miss the point.
Jesus calls for people to love. Many teach that the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. This is the focus of the song — Church people who just did not care about the suffering of another. The people appear to be good but they are indifferent to the suffering of Billy MacAllister and his girlfriend.
The late Father Rufus Pereira an internationally known Catholic preacher and exorcist from India explained the worst pain a person can suffer is abandonment which is why Jesus yells from the cross My God, My God why have you abandoned me. In the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, we find empathy as the defining point of whether someone is saved or not. (Mt 25:31–40)
Suicide is a call for help, someone so desperately lost in pain sees no alternative. The response of those in the family surrounding the narrator seems to confirm the narrative.
The narrator is simply relating the scene to show how little her family cared about her feelings about her boyfriend Billy Joe MacAllister and, one can assume, anyone else in the town. They were self-absorbed in their own needs and did not have time to consider anyone else.
A true story just even more shocking behind the scenes
There is a side note to the story that makes the narrative more relevant to us today. Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the bridge crossing the Tallahatchie River in Money, Mississippi. What he and his narrator girlfriend threw off the bridge we understand to be irrelevant. The date may also be irrelevant. The location is not.
Twelve years earlier in August of 1955 Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black teen visiting relatives from Chicago was brutally beaten and murdered in that same town. His killers threw his body into the same river near that point and most likely near or off that bridge. Bobbie Gentry never mentions this but others did not miss the reference.
Bart Anderson commenting on the lyrics at PerformingSongWriter.com writes that he was a DJ who interviewed Gentry previously and in 1969 met her at the airport in Shreveport, Louisiana. He was on his way to Viet Nam. He proposed the theory that the underlying basis for the song was the murder of Emmett Till. “While she did not confirm that theory,” he writes. “She did smile and say that I must be a very learned student of history.”
Jesus answering the question “who is my neighbor?” tells the story of the Good Samaritan. If someone asked the meaning of Matthew 25:31–40 today, he could have easily answered in story as well encouraging the inquirers to listen to Ode to Billy Joe.
[1] https://performingsongwriter.com/bobbie-gentry-ode-billie-joe/
Emmett Till Memory Project: https://tillapp.emmett-till.org/
Wikipedia: Martin Luther King, Jr. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
George Wallace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace
IMDB.com: Ode to Billy Joe https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074995/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1