The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

 The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Wright Thompson (Penguin Press, 2024)

Journalist Wright Thompson hails from the Mississippi Delta, from the privileged land-owning class. In the early days of the Covid pandemic, he went home to live for a while, and found his next subject, indeed, his next obsession: the barn where Emmett Till was tortured and killed on the morning of August 28, 1955. Thompson didn’t grow up hearing anything about that event, though it happened twenty-three miles from his boyhood home. But then, he didn’t encounter the concept of lynching till he was seventeen.

The Barn is partly about maps. “The barn sits on the southwest quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian.” This numbering comes from a scheme of Thomas Jefferson’s, to lay a grid across the whole country. This particular six by six mile township was home to one of the fathers of Jim Crow, and to Fannie Lou Hamer, who later worked to overthrow it. Confederate guerrilla chief Nathan Bedford Forrest traversed it while it was still thick with woods, the rich topsoil not yet put to commercial use. The mapping scheme enabled the acreage to be a commodity traded in Chicago and New York, somewhat in the manner of swampland in Florida. Wright follows the ownership of the land through various corporations, reaching all the way to Manchester, England, a global capital of textile production.

Wright deals in timelines, too. One reason the barn is important is that the narrative of Emmett Till’s last few days had a great gap in it. On Wednesday, August 24^th, Emmett and his cousins visited the Bryants' store in Money, where Emmett had fatefully whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was working behind the counter; he was in the store with her for barely a minute, so some of the story she later told was clearly a lie. In the early hours of Sunday morning, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, entered the home of Till’s great-uncle and made off with him, but what happened next disappeared from the record. The barn on the Drew-Ruleville Road was then in the possession of another Milam brother; witnesses saw a green and white truck arrive, full of men, and heard Till’s cries of anguish.

Wright’s timeline extends forward: “The police arrested J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. For a few news cycles the story got presented, even locally, as a pretty clear case of good versus evil, until the partisan political machine recast it as a battle between the NAACP and Mississippi white people.” Witnesses were intimidated, or taken offstage by putting them in jail under other names; those who did show up to say what they saw could never live in Mississippi again. After their acquittal, Milam and Bryant sold their story to Look magazine, in a version heavily influenced by the language of the defense lawyers.

Some of Wright’s companions in his research are activists who have been working to make the barn a place of memory. “The barn will not allow you to live free of the image of a tortured child. That, it turns out, is its curse but also its blessing. It will not let you go. Why was Emmett Till murdered? One cannot see the barn without being faced with that question.”

The last surviving people who knew him also want us to remember their friend Bobo, a funny, lively boy on the verge of manhood, who loved his mother. Mamie Till Mobley’s anger at his loss lit a fire under the civil rights movement, in ways that would not be stopped.

The Barn is a very fine piece of narrative journalism, and an even finer work of history. Wait for the paperback if you must, but read it.

 

Any Good Books, 

2 December 2024

 

This is your mind on Plants

This is Your Mind on Plants

Michael Pollan (Penguin Books, 2021)

       “The drug war’s simplistic account of what drugs do and are, as well as its insistence on lumping them all together under a single meaningless rubric, has for too long prevented us from thinking clearly about the meaning and potential of these very different substances. The legal status of this or that molecule is one of the least interesting thing about it.” Michael Pollan gives us a book in three essays about psychoactive substances, and our biological, social, historical, and legal relationships with them.

 

        The first essay is about opium. I clearly remember reading the original in Harper’s Magazine, more than 25 years ago. I’m glad to see it again, in a more complete form; in the1997 publication, Pollan censored his account of actually trying a tea made from the pods. The essay is partly about the determination of the US Drug Enforcement Agency to prevent citizens from discovering how easy it would be to obtain household supplies of opioids; in fact, the flowering plants found in our gardens are not botanically different from the dreaded opium poppies of Afghanistan and Turkey. 

 

         It’s also about Pollan’s awareness of the DEA, and the potentially serious consequences that could have befallen him. Those hinged on some constitutionally and philosophically knotty questions. How would the DEA determine that he had ‘knowingly’ or ‘intentionally’ planted the flowers to use them as drugs? Of course, confessing in a nationally published magazine might be considered something of a dead giveaway; but by now, the statute has run. As it turns out, of course, the opiates that were really destroying American lives were the pharmaceutically enhanced plagues of OxyContin and its ilk.

 

          The third essay concerns other mind-altering substances: those derived from cactus plants, such as peyote and mescaline. Pollan’s quest for information and experience was seriously disrupted by the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. It’s not impossible to use psychedelics alone, but the story he was after had more to do with the way indigenous people use them, at the intersection of religion and psychology. There’s politics, too; should the use of peyote be restricted to religious observances, and hence to indigenous people? Can white people use it without wrecking it, ecologically or socially?

 

           The middle essay is not about use of a drug, but about abstention: caffeine is one of the most widely used psychoactive materials, though one of the latest to come along. Coffee and tea reached London in the 1650s. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the arrival of caffeine in Europe changed...everything.” However hyperbolic that sounds, Pollan makes his case: “Coffee and tea ushered in a shift in the mental weather, sharpening minds that had been fogged by alcohol, freeing people from the natural rhythms of the body and the sun, thus making possible whole new kinds of work and, arguably, new kinds of thought, too.” 

 

          This was the chapter in which I took the most interest, since I’m as implicated as the 90% of adults who use at least some caffeine; we always know when the next dose is due, and where we’re going to get it. How much of my brain power is owed to the magic stuff, and what would happen if the sleep deficit ever came due?

 

         Be that as it may, it’s always a pleasure to linger with Michael Pollan over a cup of tea, both for the sharp writing and for the wide-ranging view. 

 

 

Any Good Books, November 2024

 

A Stranger in the Kingdom

 

A Stranger in the Kingdom

Howard Frank Mosher (1989, Mariner edition 2002)

The late Howard Frank Mosher had a fine long career as chronicler of a fictionalized Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. You may think of downstate Vermont as rural and remote already, but the upper corner tucked between the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the Green Mountains of Vermont is significantly more so. Mosher populates his background history with indigenous people, escaped survivors of the Underground Railroad, the occasional Gypsy, and six or so generations of the Kinneson family. 

 

Kingdom County would be renowned, if anyone had ever heard of it, for deer hunting and fly fishing. In spring, when the mayflies hatch, the county judge “had been observed wearing waders in court under his judicial robes in order not to waste precious seconds getting onto his beloved river.” Mosher has a tender appreciation for such seasonal details; his meadows bloom with the flowers in their turn.

 

For this book, our narrator is thirteen-year-old James Kinneson. His father, Charles, is owner and editor of the local weekly paper; his brother, Charlie, is a feisty young lawyer in town. The Charleses are hard-headed and prone to argument “...over history and literature, politics and religion, current events and what they were pleased to call ‘the King’s English...” It’s their habit to put young Jimmy in the middle, yelling their points at him for the other’s benefit. Since Jimmy adores them both, it’s vexing, but it’s an amusing narrative device.

 

Into this bucolic backcountry comes the church’s new minister for the United Protestant Church of Kingdom Common, “one Walter Andrews from Montreal, Canada, a former chaplain in the Royal Canadian Air Force.” The Rev. Mr. Andrews is the first minister the church has contrived to call in two years, since the previous incumbent’s unfortunate experience at the local cock fights. Mr. Andrews is extremely well educated and well spoken; he’s also black, which is a subject of considerable interest around Kingdom Common. He brings his son, Nathan, who’s a few years ahead of Jimmy in school. They form a friendship of sorts, but Jimmy knows that Nathan would rather be back in Montreal, even if it meant moving back in with his grandmother. He’s not destined to fall in love with trout fishing.

 

The other new face in town that summer is Claire LaRiviere, a young woman who left Montreal after answering an ad for a housekeeper, placed by the senior Charles Kinneson’s disreputable cousins. Such a position is not a workable plan in any way, and Claire doesn’t have the money to get to Hollywood, which is her dream, so she winds up taking refuge in the minister’s house. That’s a touchy situation, and meat and drink for every gossip in town (none of whom, naturally, offer to take Claire in.)

 

She comes to a tragic end, and Walter Andrews is accused of killing her. Charles, Jr., puts on his best Perry Mason defense, including a large dash of good luck in his witnesses. Walter and Nathan leave town, leaving young James with a story for the ages. He will grow up to take over the newspaper, but he’s a novelist at heart.

 

This is a magnificently old-fashioned book, which tells of a time we can never otherwise come back to. The people are the ordinary run of scoundrels and saints, in interesting ways. I’m glad I’ll have a few more chances to visit Kingdom Common, if Thriftbooks doesn’t let me down.

Any Good Books, October 2024 by email

Tabula Rasa

 

Any Good Books, September 2024

Tabula Rasa

John McPhee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023)

        If you (somehow) don't already know John McPhee's work, this is perhaps not the book to start with. If you do, consider it a tasty lagniappe to his very substantial career. Some of his thirty-odd books are on single subjects (Oranges!) that outgrew their origins as New Yorker pieces; others are collections of such pieces. Tabula Rasa could be thought of as a collection of bits and bobs swept up from the cutting room floor, but if a man who was born in 1931 wants an ‘old people project’ to help him live a while longer, I say he's entitled. The stories about why certain stories didn’t pan out are pretty interesting in themselves. And lest it sound too valedictory, a friend advised him, "just call it 'Volume One.'"

 

        One thing McPhee is well known for is writing about science, making the intersection of geography and geology more interesting than I’d ever have thought possible. There’s method in it: “In writing about science, one is always aware that the reader may know a good deal more about the science than the writer does, or a good deal less, and that both categories of reader are always going to be there, in some ratio or other. So, as I’m suggesting, you look for ways to put things that would inform the unknowledgeable while not irritating the knowledgeable.”

 

         Another favorite subject is Princeton, the University and the town. He spent a cheerful childhood there; his father was a staff doctor, so he and his friends made the whole college their playhouse. Looking back even farther, he revisits the history of a squabble between Woodrow Wilson, in his role as President of the University, and one Andrew Fleming West, Dean of the Graduate School. “The basic issue had to do with the construction of residential quarters for graduate students...People took sides, thought became anger, and bitterness developed that went much deeper than the question that began it.” In the 1950s, when McPhee was an undergraduate, there were still people who could give him a first-hand account, though it sounds like he never found an unbiased one. In 1910, Wilson lost the battle to a timely bequest that favored West’s position; he resigned his office and went into politics, and the rest is history. 

          McPhee has now taught writing at Princeton since 1975, two spring semesters out of three. “In the teaching semesters, I wrote nothing of my own. It was like crop rotation. I was fallow.” He teaches a small group, including a good deal of individual instruction: “We sit side by side looking down at printouts, which are covered with notes, marginalia, transpositions, nouveau commas, purged commas, structural revolutions, and low hanging redundancies that I, pretending to be an editor, am offering in the spirit of suggestion.” He forebears, in general, to write about his students and their work, but he makes an exception for the spring of 2020, when the university closed, on the third Wednesday of March. He had to figure out Zoom and .pdfs, which not every eighty-nine-year-old would have attempted. But since the sophomore students suddenly had nothing but time, the results are dazzling.

 

         Some subjects seem to come out of nowhere. McPhee couldn’t pull together an article about Meredith Willson, the Music Man man, but the residue is this gorgeous sentence: “As a composer, Willson was so prestidigitational that the trombone march and one of the love songs (“Goodnight My Someone”) were so different in texture and tempo that you blinked once or twice before realizing that they were the same tune.” Nice! And I bet it has you humming.

The Color of Law

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein (2017, Liveright)

       I can recommend this book as a deeply comprehensive history; as a reading experience, however, it’s not for the faint of heart. It’s the history of de jure segregation in the United States, which extended for a solid hundred years after the end of the Civil War. Black people were denied equal access to both public and privately built housing; this occurred all across the country, in cities and (especially) suburbs. Sometimes the mechanisms were local, such as private covenants and local ordinances; at least as often, the Federal government put its giant thumb on the scale.

     Richard Rothstein argues that this was both illegal and unconstitutional, the entire time it was happening. The Thirteenth Amendment, when it abolished slavery, empowered Congress to enforce abolition. “In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.” One hundred and two years would go by before the Supreme Court would uphold a claim based on that law.

      What could make more of a statement of second-class citizenship than a declaration that having you in a neighborhood made the whole area less ‘desirable’? The idea that racially integrated neighborhoods were less ‘harmonious’ actually had a deeply perverse effect: the more people lived in segregated enclaves, the less likely they were to feel neighborly toward one another, guaranteeing an inharmonious cast to many future interactions. The idea that Black people entering a neighborhood would lower property values was not a mere superstition, but a self-reinforcing mechanism: if mortgages were available at all, they came at higher rates. Worse yet, Federal lending insurance wasn’t available in Black neighborhoods, so people bought property on contracts that gave them no equity at all till they made the last payment.

       Just as Social Security was rigged to omit people whose occupations were domestic or agricultural, so the G.I. Bill made offers to returning servicemen that only white men could take advantage of. The suburban building boom was accompanied by propaganda about how much your family would benefit from your own little acreage, but everybody knew that only some people could enjoy it. When governments built housing directly, sometimes demolishing mixed neighborhoods for the land, the projects were nearly always designated for one race or the other; you get one guess about which ones came with parks, playgrounds, and swimming pools.

       Rothstein’s writing is clear and comprehensive; he makes a dry, airtight case. The result is a book I wanted to throw across the room many times per chapter. The cycle of poverty begins right here, with the inability to build generational wealth in home equity, in contrast to every Levittown family whose investment provided college tuition and home down payments for their children, and their children’s children. The mortgage interest deduction is an entitlement, pouring billions of dollars into the pockets of suburbanites. School investments followed property values, with predictable results. And if a neighborhood was already undesirable, why not site waste dumps and dirty industry there too? You can’t wonder why the children who grow up there have asthma and lead poisoning far out of proportion to their numbers.

      It didn’t need to be that way. 

 

 

 

Any Good Books, August 2024