By JIM BEAUGEZ
With The Barn, Clarksdale native Wright Thompson traces the true story of an infamous Delta murder and examines the global forces that set it in motion.
Time will eventually reveal all things, or so goes the adage. The question becomes, will anyone care when time is ready to show its hand?
With his new book The Barn—a journey into the history of one specific plot of Mississippi Delta land as a way to comprehend the torture and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955—author Wright Thompson threads together a litany of revelations some folks worked hard to keep hidden, and others that were lost to time.
“One of the things I find troubling, especially in the Delta, is that people’s love for it feels a mile wide and an inch deep,” Thompson says. “And if you’re gonna really love a place, if you’re gonna be from a place, you better know it.”
When Thompson graduated from Lee Academy in Clarksdale in 1996, his knowledge of his homeland was limited to surface facts. As a journalism student at the University of Missouri, though, he began to recognize through the work of playwright Tennessee Williams, whose time in Clarksdale inspired his most memorable characters, how the region’s “fading memory of wealth” had tinted his memories.
“My whole early life was surrounded by a fable of lost grandeur,” he writes in The Barn, subtitled The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. “The mythic ascendency of that fable, I’d learn as a grown man, stole the oxygen from any other stories that might have been told, that needed to be told.”
While the story of Emmett Till languished many years from that lack of oxygen, it came to life for Thompson while he was reporting a story for ESPN that aimed to trace the Great Migration origins of Los Angeles Lakers athletes. Naturally, those family trees led back to places like the Delta, and he learned about the barn where Till died while chasing a lead in Mound Bayou. And as the COVID pandemic shut down the professional sports industry, he suddenly had time to follow Till’s trail.
What happened next was “a parallel track of obsession” in which Thompson traveled between the barn, located at Township 22 North, Range 4 West, and Chicago’s South Side, and as far as Seville, Spain, in hopes of answering two specific—and seemingly simple—questions.
First, how could he have grown up twenty-three miles from the site of the most notorious lynching of the Civil Rights era without knowing about it until he went to college?
And then how, considering all the media coverage and books written on the subject since 1955, was it possible to not know the actual place where the murder was committed still existed?
Yet for all those years, while Thompson grew up, left home, and started a career, the barn where Till died quietly sat near Drew, miles from better-known scenes of the saga like the former Bryant Grocery in Money, where Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant. In the decades since that interaction set his tragic death in motion, the building has been allowed to collapse into itself. And like a dying star morphing into a black hole, it, too, sucked energy away from the barn into the heart of its ruins.
In Thompson’s telling, the barn is the true nexus of the brutal—and wholly inevitable, as he posits—scene.
During his research for the book, Thompson’s worldview on the subject broadened quickly. For the first time, he heard names like Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin, who awoke to a flashlight’s gaze and a strong smell of liquor on the breath of the men who took Till into the night. Willie Reed, who overheard the murder that morning and witnessed J.W. Milam outside the barn with a .45 pistol strapped to his waist; Clint Shurden, the man who owned the farm Reed lived on and drove him to the Sumner County courthouse to testify against Milam and his half-brother, the co-defendant Roy Bryant.
There were more familiar names, too. Hernando de Soto, whose arrival in the Delta in 1541 led to the first mapping of the region, and whose clashes with native tribes foretold its violent future. Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, owned land in Coahoma County and pushed his cavalry through the Dougherty Bayou area on a run from Friars Point to Yazoo City. And Medgar Evers drove Reed from Mound Bayou to Memphis under cover of night, where he caught a flight to Chicago and eventually restarted his life as Willie Louis.
By the time Thompson factored in the deep history of the Dockery plantation, where Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Son House put Township 22 North, Range 4 West on the map for blues music, and the nearby Walford site, where a Native American city once rose above the swamps, the confluence of world-shaping people and events resembled a complex math word problem.
“Except in this book,” he says, “there are a dozen trains, and each one of them is a system or a force, and they’re all barreling across history, and then they all collide in August of 1955 in this barn.”
“The forces that the book is mapping—capitalism, the industrial revolution, the settling of the American continent, manifest destiny, hate, fear, cotton, commodity, chains—there are many moving parts that all end up feeling load bearing by the end.”
There is a selfish parallel world, Thompson says, where The Barn has an audience of two—his own young daughters, who will inherit the same Delta dirt their father did. But instead of learning an incomplete history where facts and context are glossed over or omitted, they will have a compendium detailing the global forces that brought Westerners to settle the Mississippi Delta and the history of what followed.
They’ll know that at one time, a group of men kidnapped a young African American teenager, and a community protected them just long enough to get the scrutiny of the FBI and national media out of their backyard. Then, they turned their backs on the two men, Milam and Bryant, who confessed to the murder for money after a jury acquittal—and as they ushered those men into deserved obscurity, they also swept the chapter from their history.
But nothing can escape time, not the lies people convince themselves are true nor the omissions made to protect the status quo. Eventually, someone will come along to piece together the real story—someone like Thompson, now one of the curators of this saga and a father of the region’s next generation, who is invested in finally getting it right.
“I felt like this book is a story about the Delta and its people,” he says. “This is the story of a tribe of people of which I am one. I wanted it to at least read accurately to me. There are many different audiences for this book, but the Delta audience, I hope, sees their home.” DM
