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