The savage murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till at the hands of a group of white men outside the small town of Drew, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, stained the nation and galvanized the Civil Rights movement. In The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, noted sports journalist and Mississippi native Wright Thompson brilliantly recounts the story of that lynching, while deeply exploring the history and culture of the Mississippi Delta out of whose soil it emerged.
Wright made an estimated 100 visits to the barn where Till died, a site whose location has long been shrouded in mystery. To recount the terror of Till’s final night, when he was kidnapped, tortured and shot for supposedly whistling at a white woman (a report disputed by many), Wright relies on the vivid memories of Till’s cousin Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., who accompanied Till on the fateful trip south from Chicago and was fortunate the killers did not take his life as well.
Midway through The Barn, Thompson detours from Till’s story to excavate the vivid history of the Delta’s “gumbo mud,” which includes the birth of blues music in the person of Charley Patton on a plantation some 10 miles from the barn and the activities of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Wright painstakingly traces the rise and fall of a hardscrabble agricultural economy, which produced both men like Till’s uncle Moses Wright, a sharecropper whose home the teenager was visiting at the time of his murder, and J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, the two people tried (and acquitted) for Till’s murder.
Thompson was raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi, near the farm Wright’s mother’s family first owned in 1913 and that it maintains to this day, and by parents who taught him to reject the bigotry that infected his home state. And so, he is acutely sensitive to his own ambivalence about what it means to be a Mississippian. “We spend so much time in the past here and yet so little time learning the history of who we are and how we got here,” he writes. The Barn is Thompson’s brave, forthright effort to begin the process of eradicating some of that ignorance.
