The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson; Penguin Press, 448 pp., $35
Initially, some readers might be puzzled by the subtitle of Wright Thompson’s new book—“The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” The torture and murder of Emmett Till on August 28, 1955, in a barn outside Drew, Mississippi, made headlines around the world—as did the acquittal weeks later of his killers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant. The event, which galvanized the civil rights movement, has been the subject of numerous books over the past seven decades, including Timothy B. Tyson’s 2017 bestseller, The Blood of Emmett Till. The murder likewise inspired a critically acclaimed 2022 film. So what secrets could Thompson be referring to?
To begin with, he shows how in the decades following the murder, white Mississippi politicians, legal authorities, parents, and teachers managed to keep news of it from their own children. I was born 30 miles from Drew, exactly one year and one day after the murder took place, but I first learned of it only after I began graduate school in another state, at the age of 24. Thompson, like me a native of the Mississippi Delta, took a required ninth-grade class in Mississippi history. But the textbook I studied in 1971 omitted any mention of the murder, and that book was used throughout the 1960s and into the mid-’70s. When Thompson took the class in the early 1990s, he studied from a text that devoted a single 117-word passage to the episode, labeling Till “a young black man from Chicago” who “allegedly made a pass at a white woman.” The passage concludes that media coverage of the murder and trial “painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.”
Drew became famous in the late ’60s and early ’70s as the hometown of the football star Archie Manning. One of the most revealing passages in The Barn comes when Thompson, a senior writer at ESPN, hears Manning say that growing up in Drew was like living in Mayberry, the idealized southern town from the popular 1960s television comedy The Andy Griffith Show. “Archie,” Thompson writes, “never knew Emmett Till had been tortured and killed 3.1 miles west of his childhood home.”
But Thompson is after an even bigger secret, and though it’s one that I know the truth of in my bones, I have never before seen it laid out so methodically. The secret is of the land itself. In a museum in Seville, Spain, Thompson studies a map drawn by Alonso de Santa Cruz in 1544—the first to depict the land on which the barn stands. He pores over records in the Sunflower County Courthouse in my hometown of Indianola, tracing the ownership of “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2,” a phrase repeated so often in this narrative that it achieves incantatory powers, as if Thompson intends to burn it into our memory. He discovers “lenders from New York and England and the Netherlands dropping money all over this square of Sunflower County,” even turning up a connection to the company that produced Zyklon B for use in the Nazis’ extermination chambers. “Money’s only ethic,” he tells us, “is to reproduce itself, and it keeps on moving, circling, finding the best margins. Once upon a time it found those best margins in the Mississippi Delta.”
That time, of course, coincided with the cotton boom. In 1919, when a loaf of bread cost a dime, Delta cotton often sold for a dollar a pound. Fabulous fortunes were made overnight. But cotton is a labor-intensive crop. To produce the kind of wealth that they had come to consider their birthright, Delta planters required a ready supply of cheap Black labor. By the summer of 1955, when Mamie Till-Mobley overcame her fears and allowed her son to travel to Mississippi to help his sharecropping uncle get his cotton crop in, Delta planters could feel control slipping from their grasp. The previous year, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled “separate but equal” schooling unconstitutional, and Black Mississippians understandably demanded that the state integrate its schools. They were also beginning to demand voting rights. What might they demand next? An actual living wage?
Throughout the state’s tortured racial history, poor whites like Roy Bryant, J. W. Milam and his brother Leslie—who, Thompson alleges, took part in the murder but was never charged—had been the ones who enacted the violence that perpetuated the status quo. “Emmett Till died in Section 2,” Thompson writes, “because that’s where Leslie Milam farmed, and Leslie Milam farmed there because for a very long time human beings have been trying to extract wealth from this square of land. The secret history of how the Mississippi Delta came to be defined by its rich land and poor people, by extreme structural value attached to dirt and a corresponding worthlessness attached to life, is the story of how a group of people all ended up in the same barn on the same night in 1955.” Some readers may instinctively recoil from the deterministic tone of this and other passages in The Barn, but to me they ring true.
I would be remiss not to acknowledge that this is an artfully constructed book. The barn where Till was tortured and killed was officially recognized by the town of Drew as the site of Till’s death only in 2022. Yet the building and the date of the killing serve as the focal point to which Thompson always returns after journeys into the past and the future, across oceans and continents, in relentless pursuit of connections to that plot of Delta soil where a child was murdered. In this way, it reminds me of another swirling narrative, by Mississippi’s greatest novelist, who wrote a book that also deals with race and murder and the blurring of time. I am thinking of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! I suspect Wright Thompson will be untroubled by the comparison.
