The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground.

Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it.

Emmett Till on the banks of the Tallahatchie River. The first sign, paid for by Morgan Freeman, was stolen and thrown in the river six months after being erected. The second sign got shot 317 times in eight years, so riddled with bullets that the Smithsonian has approached Weems about displaying

The darkness of rural Mississippi remains a physical thing, heavy and alive, a sonic experience, too, loud with bugs and birds. There is no safety outside the civilization of headlights.

One of the standard attacks a white conservative southerner uses against a white liberal southerner is to mock them for being full of guilt.

One of the last bits of land to be pulled into the American experiment was the piece of land where Emmett Till was tortured and killed.

Buried violence is a perennial bulb that is fertilized by fear and watered by insecurity.

The southern farming class lived in mortal fear of Black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to Black women for two hundred years. The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.

The verdant grip of nature doesn’t take long to strangle a place in Mississippi.

“Nobody kills like America,” Wheeler said as he drove. “We’re raised on violence.”

Turns out, the only way for a segregation academy to survive is to integrate.

“At a time when there are those who seek to ban books, bury history,” Biden said as he made his own closing argument, “we’re making it clear—crystal, crystal clear”—the crowd’s applause stopped him for a beat—“while darkness and denialism can hide much, they erase nothing. They can hide, but they erase nothing.” —

Myrlie Evers-Williams said once that yes, Mississippi was, but Mississippi is.

Writing this book taught me clearly that our only hope is to create a new, unified tribe—all of us Mississippians, who share the history and future of our home—and no matter what we all might think about each other, or what scars or grudges we hold, we need to lay down those grievances and engage in a united act of defiant survival.

I read Willie Morris’s critique of the South, North Toward Home, which showed me that it was possible both to love and hate a place. It taught me to be suspicious of those who did only one of the two. These were the first roots of my identity, and the first I’d ever heard that writing magazine stories and nonfiction books could be a job.

The Delta has always stored its sacred tablets and ancient texts in the land itself. Or, rather, the tablets and texts are the land.

Emmett got out, she thought. She thought about how many countless other Emmetts never escaped that water. His death and civic resurrection are remarkable because he did come back into the light, and because of that he became a symbol for all those unnamed dead who rest uneasily in the singing river. Sharon stood for a long time alone at the bank.