Wright Thompson’s Mississippi: Unearthing Truth in The Barn
In his new book, Wright Thompson explores the murder of Emmett Till and its lasting impact. John T. Edge interviews Thompson about confronting Mississippi’s past and envisioning a future for the state they both call home.
I’ve been thinking about what it takes to love the place you call home.
Some of that introspection was born of work on a memoir, House of Smoke, which publishes next year. That book required that I go back to Georgia and take a hard look at where I grew up. Another book—Wright Thompson’s The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, published this week—demanded I take a hard look at Mississippi, where my wife and I raised our son, the place we choose to live.
The Cost of These Dreams, Thompson’s first book, collected his profile writing for ESPN, where he is a senior writer. His second, Pappyland, weaves together the story of the Van Winkles, the first family of Kentucky bourbon, and his own family, rooted in the Mississippi Delta. For The Barn, Thompson goes deep on his homeland, focusing our attention on the “blast radius of shame” that spreads outward from a barn near the Delta town of Drew, where a gang of white men tortured and killed fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955.
Thomson’s story subverts that old trope that Mississippi has been cut off from the rest of the nation. Instead, he shows the forces of global capital that ensnared the Delta and led the world to prize cotton raised there while devaluing the women and men who live there. As Thompson bores down on truths about the murder, tracking the 1,300-year history of the land beneath that barn, he shows what it takes to love the place that made you.
I once pledged allegiance to the duality narrative of the South. That stance has long been the one to take for Southerners willing to embrace the fullness of our region: Yes, the South is home to Bull Conner, who, in 1963, turned water cannons and police dogs on Birmingham children. And, yes, the South is home to Leontyne Price, the Laurel, Mississippi-born spinto-soprano, who charmed the bella gente in 1969 when she sang Verdi’s Aida for the Metropolitan Opera.
Novelist William Faulkner introduced us to characters who embodied that duality. Chuck Reece, editor of this magazine, helped frame that idea for a new generation when he commissioned a 2013 essay by Patterson Hood, leader of the Drive-By Truckers. In that essay, and in one of his songs from the album Southern Rock Opera, Hood talks about “duality of the Southern thing.”
In the hands of Faulkner and Hood and a bunch of other smart writers, that duality is a complex and thorny reality to puzzle through. In everyday conversations, though, I’ve long heard myself reduce that complexity down to a simple polarity. One that Southerners have repeated across decades. Especially in our darkest moments when racism and its henchmen raise their hydra heads: I love this place. I hate this place.
That duality won’t stand, I now believe. A straddle will leave a soul unsteady. Owing to the thinking and writing of authors like Janisse Ray of Georgia and Kiese Laymon of Mississippi, I’ve recognized that love is the answer. But only if you accept the insight that Wright Thompson’s new book proves: criticism and truth-telling are acts of love, grounded in the belief that we humans can affect positive change in the places we call home.
The research and writing that Wright Thompson put into The Barn read like unrelenting acts of love, dependent on his willingness to sit with the hardest and ugliest of our stories. And then step forward to ask questions like, What if we knew the truth? What if we told the truth?
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Readers should know Wright and I live in the same town, less than a mile apart. For the past seven years, we’ve made a television show called TrueSouth together. In 2018, filming the first episode, a Tahoe hit the Mini I was driving. Wright was in the passenger seat when we slingshot backward into a ditch. That wreck nearly killed us. That wreck also knit us together. I tell you all this to say: 1) I’m not an impartial observer. And 2) I try here to leverage my knowledge of the author to serve readers of this interview and, ultimately, readers of The Barn.
John T. Edge: Where did this book begin?
Wright Thompson: I was grounded during the pandemic. In a separate conversation, perhaps with a therapist, we can unpack how I have basically been moving nonstop since I was sixteen years old, whether it was following a band or going on road trips or inventing a job that required me to pick up and move. You could testify to this.
And I think that’s been going on for twenty-five years. The pandemic made me stop. And I was working on stories. There’s a basketball player named Avery Bradley who played for the Los Angeles Lakers. I was trying to do a story about the family tree of every member of the Los Angeles Lakers and write about what a team really is, a collection of all these stories.
Avery Bradley is from Mound Bayou, Mississippi, so I started reading. One of the witnesses in the Emmett Till murder trial was a woman named Amanda Bradley, who had connections to Mound Bayou, so I operated under the brief assumption that they were related. They turned out not to be related. But in the process of chasing that down, Patrick Weems, who runs the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, asked me if I knew about the barn. And I said, “I did not.” And I got obsessed both with how this could have happened and how I could have not known about it. Those two parallel tracks, I think, are the book.
JTE: You’re talking about the interconnectedness of Mississippi, your ability to track a person across generations. You call this guy you know, then you talk to that guy you know. Mississippi is such an intimate state, and we talk about that with pride, almost, a recognition that there are no seven degrees of separation in Mississippi.
WT: You’re absolutely right. There’s a joke that I don’t make anymore because of how it lands on my ears, that Mississippi isn’t a state, it’s a club.
JTE: Right, right.
“One of the things this book uncovers is that a group of people didn’t kill a child in a barn. One tribe murdered a child of another tribe to send a message.”
WT: Some of it is that it’s small, but most of it is that these are the lingering connections of a mostly dormant caste system. There is a menacing civility: we’re just not going to talk about it. The easy Mississippi game of Kevin Bacon—I can get to anybody in three steps—is buttressed and greased by menacing civility, where we just don’t talk and we just don’t tell the truth.
JTE: More than the menacing civility or even civility in general, I’m interested in the genuine interconnectedness of lives here. Mississippians oftentimes celebrate that.
After writing this book, how do you think about that interconnectedness of Mississippi? Is that the promise of Mississippi? Or is that the peril awaiting?
WT: I think it is the promise of Mississippi. Unless we tear down everything, we have to think about our own particular tribes here and reinvest in the idea of a tribe of us. In a place with so many problems, so much poverty, so little corporate institutional wealth, if we don't figure out a tribe of us, then there is no Mississippi.
And I could not feel that more strongly, that if we don’t celebrate William Faulkner and Muddy Waters and Natasha Trethewey and Kiese Laymon and Elvis Presley and Eudora Welty and Conway Twitty as all being examples of the same thing and members of the same tribe, then we have no shot of still existing in a hundred years. I really believe that.
JTE: You write and think about the idea of tribes a lot. It shows up in this book; it shows up in the conversations you and I have. You describe us as a society of tribeless people in search of a tribe. So, where does that ideology come from?
WT: Mississippi is very tribal.
JTE: What does that mean?
WT: One of the things this book uncovers, for instance, is that a group of people didn’t kill a child in a barn. One tribe murdered a child of another tribe to send a message. That is, by every definition they teach at West Point or Annapolis, that is an act of war. That is not a murder, that is an assassination. That is an act of war. I think Mississippi is so...there’s so much blood in the dirt that it’s elemental.
The writer Charles Pierce said this about Louisiana, but it’s true about Mississippi: it’s not part of the United States in any way that really matters. There are older things going on here than law, and I think you can feel it. I think it feels tribal. I think one reason that this book, hopefully, works is that it had to come from within the tribe.
JTE: There’s a scene in the book where you describe Mamie Till in the courtroom testifying. She’s crying, and you zero in on the black fan she’s got in her hand. It’s dotted with red roses. What are you trying to tell us with that detail?
WT: That these people aren’t symbols. These are real people. This isn’t a symbol for the civil rights movement who was murdered, this was a child who liked comic books and Bo Diddley. This is his mother.
You understand what the jury said happened, right? They said that the NAACP and the Communist Party went to a morgue, got a body, threw it in the Tallahatchie River, hoping that it would somehow be discovered, which it was. And then, the NAACP and the Communist Party coached these witnesses who were lifelong sharecroppers to risk their lives for no gain. There was no paper trail of money.
They just coached them to torpedo their own lives for no reason. And Mamie Till agreed to say that this body was her son, which it wasn’t because the jurors said, everyone knows Black men can’t grow chest hair. And so, there was no way this was a child, and that Mamie Till lied in exchange for a payment of a life insurance policy.
I think the jurors believed it. I think they were engaged in a mass psychosis that, honestly, feels very modern because it is easier to believe a super-complex conspiracy than to believe the easy truth in the mirror.
JTE: And you get there from that fan with the red roses on it.
WT: Not just that, but all of it, that these are real people and that this is a woman who...she had to stay in Mound Bayou in an armed compound to testify.
JTE: I’m trying to get at this idea of you as a writer and you achieve a kind of, I don’t know, it’s not omniscience, but you’re trying to get there. You’re trying to say, “I know everything I can possibly know. I know there are red roses on that fan. I’m not looking away. I’m, in fact, boring down on every damn detail.”
WT: Well, there’s a sign in my office that I will probably take down now, but it was for this book. It just says, “Everything is everything.” And so, it isn’t omniscience as much as it is an understanding that everything is connected, and I’m trying to see as many of those connections as I can.
“There is no history if you don’t have the history of cotton pickers and electric guitars talking to each other. There is no history if you don’t have English literature and the industrial revolution talking to each other.”
We live in a web of connections, and none of these things happen in a vacuum. One of the problems with the way history is taught in America is that it’s divided up into subject matter, so you can have experts in it. What’s the word the kids use, the “intersectionality”?
There is no history if you don’t have the history of cotton pickers and electric guitars talking to each other. There is no history if you don’t have English literature and the industrial revolution talking to each other. The entire way we teach everything in America, and probably the world, is designed to obscure the connections that make us see the world we’re really living in as opposed to teaching it. And the book is an exercise in connecting dots.
It’s like a historical math problem: this train leaves the station and two minutes after… Except that instead of two trains, there are dozens of trains. The trains are forces and systems. The trains are the Emmett Till family and the Milam and Bryant clan. It is a book about a collision. It’s a historical math problem.
JTE: You rely on a pretty simple structure to marshal a big cast of characters, including Willie Reed, who testified against two of the killers; Wheeler Parker, Till’s surviving cousin; Gloria Dickerson, a community organizer; Willie Williams, chair of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center board; and Patrick Weems, executive director of the same organization. Explain that structure to me.
WT: I tell the story of the murder, centered around Willie Reed, in which the energy is about how could this possibly have happened? In the process of telling that story, you become aware of where it happened. The second act of the book is a 1,300-year history of the land where it happened. Down the road [from the barn] is the ruins of an old Native American city called the Walford site. The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History started digging there in 1941. And what they have found is there was a monocrop culture who lived there. They farmed corn, they did it with slave labor, with their prisoners of war. They mutilated their feet so they couldn’t escape. That entire culture rose and fell, and we have no idea who they were.
We know they were fighting a war because of the archaeology. We don’t know who their enemies were. We don’t know who was right and who was wrong. We don’t know if those mounds we preserve are preserving heroic remnants of a beautiful society or that could be where some monster had his bunk. We could be preserving Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest and have no idea. And that entire world has been erased within eyesight of another world.
And then, I tell the story of the murder again, except this time, as opposed to it being unimaginable, it is menacingly inevitable.
The book was supposed to end there. And then, the last act, just because I met all these people in the process of reporting, is about the people who are trying to fight with memory, the forces of erasure. And so, the erasure... The arc of moral universe bends toward erasure. And so, it takes people like Wheeler Parker and Gloria Dickerson and Willie Williams and Patrick Weems, who stand in the breach of the erasure. And so, the last act of the book is chronicling these people who are, in some cases, risking everything to try to prevent this from being erased, too, like it was 1,300 years ago.
JTE: I think one of your superpowers is belief and possibility. “I can figure that out. I can get that done. I can write that.” And you spend some time with Gloria Dickerson.
WT: Real hero, yeah.
JTE: And you talk about her students, how she’s trying to address this hardwired sense of limitation among her students. And that also speaks to a fatalism that is part of the Delta ethos that informs Mississippi. Does that begin in ’55 or does that begin sometime previous?
WT: I think it’s always existed here. I think Mississippi was a place that was literally founded on corruption. It existed from its founding until 1933 as a colony of Manchester, Liverpool, London, and New York. And then, it has existed since then as a ward of the United States government.
“I would say that the famous Faulkner quote is misinterpreted a lot of times. ‘The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.’ What he’s saying is that the past isn’t past because we haven’t dealt with it.”
Mississippi has never been independent. If you’re looking for the reason why this place tries to strip freedom away from so many people, maybe more than any place in the United States, it’s because it has never been free. And you can feel that the people in power are acting out of their own insecurity and powerlessness, because Mississippi has always been a place where wealth was extracted and sent to other places. And that gets in the water somehow.
JTE: There’s a scene in the book, an imagined scene where you write about Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Confederate general and future leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is leading his troops down a road and he passes the Milams in a pickup truck. Talk to me about how you manage time in this book and the imprint of time in this book, because in that case, you’re setting up a time neither past nor present, a time immemorial where this thing happens.
WT: I genuinely believe that the Great Mississippi Novel remains unwritten because it would have to be magic realism.
JTE: How do you see that beyond the bounds of this book?
WT: You can’t understand Mississippi unless you can see Nathan Bedford Forrest’s cavalry marching down a road and passing a green and white two-tone 1954 Chevrolet pickup truck. You can’t see it unless you understand that there is no past or present yet, because it doesn’t get to be the past until you collectively deal with it and put it there.
The past requires a burial, but we are forever reenacting these things. And so, they are passing each other every day on that road. And if you don’t see them, you don’t actually see Mississippi. And I would say that the famous Faulkner quote is misinterpreted a lot of times. “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” What he’s saying is that the past isn’t past because we haven’t dealt with it.
We haven’t even started in Mississippi to figure out who we’re going to be.
JTE: There’s another truck on that road, yours.
WT: Yeah.
JTE: This book is you driving with Gloria Dickerson, with Patrick Weems, with your own thoughts, with the history of Mississippi in your head. Why are those drives important to you?
WT: The Delta is best seen on the long drives because you cover ground. And in that case, you realize that the Delta is not one place, it’s all of them together. And if you’re not seeing all of it together, you’re not seeing it. There are those mother roads of the Delta.
At this point in the conversation, Wright holds up his hand as if it were a map of Mississippi.
WT: That’s the Mississippi River. That’s Highway 1, that’s Highway 61. This is Highway 41 West. This is Highway 41 East. And lay that over the whole teardrop of the Delta and follow the old railroads. It’s just a way to understand that people shouldn’t be here. This was a hardwood swamp after Geronimo was captured. Until about 1900, you couldn’t get a life insurance policy in the Mississippi Delta. People shouldn’t be living here.
And if this were a real market economy, it would’ve returned to waste, and we wouldn’t be here. It’s interesting that Mississippi was created by capitalism, and it is trapped in this stasis by the lack of capitalism. I know that’s brutal, but it shouldn’t be here. And so, until we acknowledge that and try to figure out what we’re going to do about a place that is so separated from its reason for existing that we have not yet come up with a new reason.
I follow [Mississippi Governor] Tate Reeves on Instagram and he’s always posting about a new factory Mississippi is getting. Every governor of Mississippi was trying to bring in a factory. Nobody seems to be asking the big question: we don’t need a factory; we need an entire new way of thinking about ourselves. And that might be too big a question for someone who has to run for office. The kind of person who wants to have that power might not be able to see the whole board like that. We’re just trapped in amber. That’s one of the things I feel like I learned. I didn’t know any of this shit before I started doing this. This is all new to me. It might be obvious to someone reading this, but none of this was obvious to me.
JTE: So many people think about Mississippi as a cultural and economic and social isolate. It is different from everywhere else.
WT: It’s either number one or number fifty.
JTE: Part of defining Mississippi as an isolate disassociates Mississippi from its global tentacles, both the ones Mississippi has in other places and the ones other places have in Mississippi. That’s a big theme of this book, that this is not an isolate.
WT: What’s the Malcolm X quote? Everywhere south of Canada is the South? I’m not excusing in any way the perpetrators of severe racial violence, but the reason there was racial violence in Mississippi is because investors in boardrooms in New York and in London and in Manchester and Liverpool wanted their ten percent and didn’t care how they got it.
“The blood is on the hands of everyone who benefited from the status quo. One of the things I hope the book does is draw expanding concentric circles of blame around that barn.”
And by the time that pressure got to the bottom of the commodity chain, everybody understood what was required. This didn’t just happen. Sharecropping didn’t just happen. After the Civil War, you can go read the minutes of global textile conferences meeting in Brussels, which must’ve been like the Las Vegas of its day, trying to figure out what they’re going to do.
You can watch people invent sharecropping in real time. You cannot tell the story of the caste system and race in Mississippi, and therefore in America, without also telling the story of capitalism and global commodity chains. And one of the things that is so interesting—and a terrible window into the true nature of the human soul—is that the violence in Mississippi got worse after the commodity chain collapsed. In the book, you’re watching it curdle as 1955 gets closer and closer and closer. Emmett Till didn’t understand that he was arriving literally into the death of a culture. The violence was not just against him…1955 was a terrible, terrible time to be in Mississippi, really.
That [gubernatorial] election campaign, that’s one of the most rhetorically violent elections that’s ever been held in the state. And what most people don’t realize is that the election was on a Tuesday, and Emmett Till whistled [at Carolyn Bryant] the next day on a Wednesday. The Milams and Bryants were listening to the radio. They heard what these guys were saying night after night.
JTE: Which makes me think about someone like Will Campbell [the Mississippi-born preacher, writer, and activist], who would say the blood is on the hands, certainly, of the killers, but the blood is also on the hands of the people who manipulated the killers.
WT: The blood is on the hands of everyone who benefited from the status quo. One of the things I hope the book does is draw expanding concentric circles of blame around that barn. First, I would be like, “How can this guy [Jeff Andrews, who today owns the barn where Till was murdered] drink Bud Light so close to this barn?” His pool is right there. You start asking yourself, How far is far enough from the torture and murder of a child? Is Jackson far enough? I really started wrestling with how far is far enough. There’s almost nowhere it doesn’t lead.
JTE: The barn is this physical place that you take readers back to again and again, that you remind us of again and again. And there’s guilt stamped onto that place and into that land. Would you read this, from page forty-eight?
(Thompson reads the following passage from The Barn.)
The courthouse in Indianola, Mississippi, a few blocks from the juke joint where BB King played whenever he returned to his hometown, has a room full of old heavy books. They sit on long tables and hold the history of every section of land in the country. I began with the present and looked to see who currently owned all the land in the township around the barn.
One of the standard attacks a white conservative Southerner uses against a white liberal Southerner is to mock them for being full of guilt. Everyone will say that the past is the past, that they didn’t own enslaved people or employ sharecroppers, and they aren’t responsible for the sins of their fathers and grandfathers. Nobody will admit to guilt.
“I don’t ever drive anywhere in Mississippi now where I don’t see a barn or a collapsed building and wonder, ‘Well, I wonder what happened in there I don’t know about.’”
But I noticed something as I penciled in current landowners onto a map. Most of the land around that part of Sunflower County was owned locally. There were two huge swaths of land, however, that were not. As I shaded in the map with locals and outsiders, a pattern emerged. At first, I didn’t believe it was real, so I checked and then checked again.
The two big plots of land owned by out-of-state investors were both shaped like cones and both spread out from the barn, a literal blast radius of shame, so that a map with local owners in green and absentee owners shaded yellow looked exactly like an hourglass with Jeff Andrews’s barn sitting in the middle.
Hear Wright Thompson read this passage from The Barn
JTE: How did this book change you?
WT: I don’t ever drive anywhere in Mississippi now where I don’t see a barn or a collapsed building and wonder, “Well, I wonder what happened in there I don’t know about.” I don’t know what to do next because it feels like excavating this place is a life’s work. Maybe think about moving. Would those little girls over there be better just living in a suburb?
JTE: Those little girls, meaning your daughters?
WT: Yeah. Is there a future here? If Mississippi had never had a single racial problem ever, it would still be a deeply corrupt place. I don’t know. Here’s what I would say…real talk: I don’t know how, but it certainly doesn’t feel like my book. It feels like something I was a shepherd of.
JTE: You were a witness to, in a bunch of different ways.
WT: I look forward to the next person coming along and stripping it for parts and pushing the story forward. I felt very powerfully that I was a cog in a machine, or a link in a chain, or that I was standing on many people’s shoulders, trying to inch the ball forward a little. And that’s not normally how I feel. I normally feel like, “All right, well, that thing’s done. I did that. Good luck following that.” And this is like, I welcome the next thing and the next thing and the next thing because I feel like this is a collective effort. I don’t feel competitive with the other people who are doing books about this place or have books going right now. I don’t think they feel competitive with me. I have found a tremendous amount of collaboration and sharing within the community of people who are trying to write about Mississippi.
And I think everybody understands that this is nobody’s thing. This is everybody’s thing. I feel changed. I feel like I know too much. There’s no blissful ignorance.
Everything is contextualized for me now. I feel like I’ve opened Pandora’s box a little, and…
JTE: Everything is everything, still.
WT: Everything is everything. You also caught me, what’s today? The eleventh? So, you also caught me thirteen days before publication. The person who wrote the book has been briefly replaced by a deeply craven person who’s trying to sell as many copies of it as possible for a variety of reasons. I want as many people as possible to read this because I genuinely believe that you will, if you’re from Mississippi, you’ll see Mississippi. If you’re from Oregon, you will see the United States of America. I genuinely believe that everybody who reads it will fundamentally understand our country better and also understand how the mapping of this one crime offers a map back into the light.
Every middle-class and upper-middle-class, sixteen- to twenty-two-year-old white kid in the South, I want to mail the book to their house and say, this is the world you are inheriting.
What are you going to make of it? And all of Gloria Dickerson’s students, I would like them to read it as a road map out of the oppressive limitations that she talked about. I want people who feel trapped to know how they got there.
JTE: I got one last question for you: what version of this story have you told or do you imagine telling to [your children] Wallace and Louise?
WT: They’re going to inherit land in the Delta. I hope this book is an owner’s manual.
JTE: How old’s Wallace now?
WT: Six.
JTE: Louise?
WT: Three.
JTE: So, you were robbed of this story. You were not told this story. At what point during their growth as children do you tell them this story? And what version of the story do you tell them? Do they already know it from being in the house with you?
WT: No. That’s a great question: when I think they’re old enough to understand, but young, fourteen.
JTE: Why fourteen?
WT: “This child was your age. He was tortured and murdered for whistling.” It’s crazy. And his mother, they should put Mamie Till on a monument. This woman’s unbelievable. The thing people don’t realize is nothing that had ever happened in her life indicated that she would be capable of the kind of sustained courage and public life that she took on. And one of the throughlines of this book is the power, the unstoppable, almost Nimitz-class power of a Black mother.
But I don’t know how I’m going to tell them. But if you’re going to live here and claim to love it, you better know it. Otherwise, you don’t know it, and then therefore you don’t love it. You might lust it, but you don’t love it.
About the author
John T Edge writes and hosts the Emmy Award-winning television show TrueSouth, now in its seventh season. He directs the Mississippi Lab and serves as a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. He also serves as a mentor in the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia. Edge and his wife, artist Blair Hobbs, live in Oxford, Mississippi.