The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

Teoc was home to the McCain Plantation, which is where Marvel McCain Parker grew up before she and her family moved to Chicago. It’s forty-eight miles southeast of the barn. Marvel didn’t grow up working on a white man’s plantation; her dad owned and farmed his own small square of dirt. Her people had been on this land, as enslaved people and then sharecroppers and finally owners, since before the Civil War. Most of what you can see down below from the bluff belonged to a plantation owner named William Alexander McCain, whose white descendants still own the large plantation that dominates the flat land below the Teoc bluffs. He had a white son and a Black son, splitting the family into two. The white son, named John Sidney McCain, had a son who became an admiral, who had a son who became an admiral, who had a son who became a Vietnam war hero and a senator. John McCain is the same rung on the family tree as Marvel’s father. In Teoc there are the white McCains and the Black McCains, all of whom share a common ancestor, which of course makes them one family. The mental and emotional gymnastics it takes to obscure that fact is roughly the amount of exertion that makes the modern state of Mississippi possible. During Senator McCain’s run for president he claimed he never knew his family owned slaves, which is absurd.