On The Barn, the Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

Outtakes from my interview with Wright Thompson

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking with Wright Thompson about his new book, The Barn, the Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. Wright’s new book is about the murder of Emmett Till, where and why it took place, why it was erased from the white community’s memory, and so much more.

Wright and I are both Gen X whites from the Mississippi Delta, though different parts. We’re both also obsessed with the Delta’s erased history. We ended up speaking an hour for an interview which will be published soon by Electric Literature. Following are a few quotes from Wright which didn’t fit.

About The Barn

“I tell you the story of the murder. Then I tell you the 1,300 year history of the 36 square miles of land underneath the barn, and the full family tree history of the Milams and Bryants and Emmett Till. And then I tell the story of the murder again, except this time, instead of wondering how this could possibly be happening, it's almost menacingly inevitable.”

ROLE OF MISSISSIPPI IN AMERICA

“I didn't realize the degree to which Mississippi, from its founding until the 1930s, was a colony of London, Manchester, Liverpool, and New York. And then ever since it’s been a ward of the United States government.

Mississippi has never ever in its whole history been governed for the benefit of the citizens of Mississippi, white or Black, rich or poor. It has always been governed for the channels of capital flowing into it and then back out of it. Very few people in Mississippi have gotten rich off of Mississippi. Almost none of that money stayed there.

One of the reasons Mississippi is so poor is it basically was strip-mined for capital.  it's difficult to understand, but until 1933, for 200 plus years, cotton was oil—the most dominant commodity in the world. And so the best way to think about Mississippi is, Mississippi was Saudi Arabia. It's the very bottom of a commodity chain. I think one of the magic things, hopefully, of this book is that it takes all of these things which, in the beginning all might seem unrelated, but by the time you get to the end, you wonder why you weren't taught all of this in school.”

On Congressman William Whittington, from Greenwood, my hometown

“When the Roosevelt administration bought the Sunflower Plantation from the New York lumber barons, and were going to turn it into a New Deal farm, they were finding farmers from all over the south to bring in— essentially what they were doing is they were kicking off all of the sharecroppers who had worked the Sunflower Plantation and replacing them with white farmers. That was the very progressive Roosevelt administration doing that, and the only person fighting them was the guy who owned the barn where the murder would happen. He was sending letters to Congressman Whittington, basically saying, “Can you fight this? These people are great farmers, they're good neighbors, they've been here for 60 years, they've got churches, they've got cemeteries. If somebody's going to get this land, why isn't it the people that are already on it?

And so, it's just this bizarre thing, where you have someone (Whittington) who was clearly for segregation, fighting on behalf of the Black sharecroppers against the very progressive Roosevelt administration. Those letters were all in Will Whittington's papers.”

More Wright Thompson

Thompson will be in Athens, Georgia, tonight, October 1, at 7 pm at the Morton Theater. More information at his website. You can purchase The Barn here or at Avid Bookshop.

More on Erasure and White Male Violence and Mississippi

A few weeks ago, a 14-year-old boy shot and killed two 14-year-old children and two teachers 26 miles from Athens, where I live now. I recently published “After Apalachee: How America’s Gun Violence Epidemic Affects Us All” at Literary Hub. Everything of course for me ties back to Mississippi. Would love to know what you think.