The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

Black citizens called the Tallahatchie the Singing River because of all the lynching victims who’d been thrown into its dark water. Their souls sang out from the water, a wellspring of Black death and white wealth.

Farming at its essence is just the practice of getting water onto land and then getting it off again, and the eighteen-county teardrop of the Mississippi Delta does this as well as anywhere on earth. On the eastern boundary between the flatland and hill country a series of reservoirs trapped the runoff and on the western edge levees kept the big river from flooding out crops and people. Humans had stopped the natural order of things, halting the patterns that created their fertile home, working with puritanical resolve to harvest the bounty that had taken a million years to create. Nothing about the physical appearance or ecosystem of the Delta carries any of the Creator’s fingerprints. This land is man-made. Not until learning about the barn had I considered the idea that removing God’s dominion from his creation might also remove his protection, leaving this corner of the world undefended from the impulses and desires of man, and the demands of commerce.

farmed. All of these places, and the history buried around them, aren’t disparate dots on a map but threads in a tapestry, woven together, so that the defining idea of the Delta is to me one of overlap, of echo, from the graves of bluesmen to the famous highways. Many times I’ve sketched these mother roads on a bar napkin. Which is to say that the Delta is my home, my family’s home, for generations now. I know it well, and I’d never heard about the barn until Patrick Weems told me I needed to take a ride, just as I had somehow never heard the story of Emmett Till until I went to college out of state.

The barn where Till was murdered, Patrick said, was just some guy’s barn, full of decorative Christmas angels and duck-hunting gear, sitting there in Sunflower County without a marker or any sort of memorial, hiding in plain sight, haunting the land. The current owner was a dentist. He grew up around the barn. When he bought it, he didn’t know its history. Till’s murder, a brutal window into the truth of a place and its people, had been pushed almost completely from the local collective memory, not unlike the floodwaters kept at bay by carefully engineered reservoirs and levee walls.

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. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it.

This land remains some of the most valuable in the world, snapped up at eight thousand dollars an acre by private wealth managers and pension funds. Bill Gates is the third-largest landowner in the state of Mississippi.

They had to install a bulletproof sign to remember 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 it. The third sign made it thirty-five days before it allegedly got shot by three Ole Miss frat boys. The ETIC launched what it called the Emmett Till Memory Project. A tug-of-war emerged, each side acting in the shadows, with some people trying to preserve a memory and others trying, with guns, to erase it. A fourth sign went up, the bulletproof one, and two weeks later a group of white nationalists gathered on the site to film a recruitment video.

An activist once described the Delta to me as the picture of Dorian Gray: a place that wore its sins on its surface.

There’s a bitterness that lives close to the surface even now, a feeling of white victimhood that bleeds into nearly every political and social urge. “It’s everybody from up north and shit that keep, you know, I mean, they still think of us as Mississippi Burning,” he said. “And that’s what chaps my ass, you know, hell, I mean, you grew up in the Mississippi Delta, too.” His dad never told him about the history of the barn even though they drove past it thousands of times. Never. Not even once, in passing, after a long day in the cab of a pickup truck. This omertà, even between fathers and sons, perhaps especially between fathers and sons, is the way the white people in the Delta have forged their lives in the years after the civil rights era. “It’s in the past,” Andrews said. His yellow lab rolled in the hot grass near the cornfields. Her name is Dixie.

Dockery Farms has been called the birthplace of the Delta blues by B. B. King and many others. It’s not an accident then that this land fueled the first protest music. The blues came from the land around the barn. From Charley Patton, the Black grandson of a white man. Patton’s music flowed from a place of rage about how he lived a small, threatened life because his grandmother was Black—“skin the color of rape,” the poet Caroline Randall Williams wrote. He became the first blues star, the man who taught Son House, who taught Robert Johnson, who taught Muddy Waters, who hailed from the same Delta town as Sam Cooke and Nate Dogg, all these genres making the same protest music against the same forces as Patton—Delta blues or G-funk, Muddy and “I’m a full-grown man” or Sam’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” or Ice Cube and “Fuck tha Police.”

Why did it happen to him? Which is a way of asking, Why did a bright, hopeful child get murdered for whistling in 1955? What about the intersection of Emmett and the Mississippi Delta at that specific time led to his death? The attitudes and intentions are why we should bring it up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.

Time is armor, too, namely the myth of comfort drawn from its passing.

The barn will not allow you to live free of the image of a tortured child. That, it turns out, is its curse but also its blessing. It will not let you go. Why was Emmett Till murdered? One cannot see the barn without being confronted with that question.

The secret history of how the Mississippi Delta came to be defined by its rich land and poor people, by extreme structural value attached to dirt and a corresponding worthlessness attached to life, is the story of how a group of people all ended up in the same barn on the same night in 1955.

Robert Ford had killed Jesse James before anyone grew a stalk of cotton in most of this part of Sunflower County. If the process of becoming America was about fulfilling the secular prophecy of Manifest Destiny, then I’d argue that the last bit of the continent settled was not the Wild West or the harsh upper plains but a pit of swamp and cypress trees where one day an unknown farmer would build a barn.

The cotton gin, invented in 1793, turned cotton into the most valuable commodity in the mechanizing world, a place atop the global financial food chain it would maintain until the 1930s. Without it there would have been no Mississippi, no Delta, no sharecropper family for Till to visit in the late summer of 1955. The gin was one of many new machines unleashed on the world at roughly the same time. It was a new age. This explosion of technology and capital shrank and connected the world, accelerating the spread of corruption and convenience in equal measure. When my mother was a girl, her father subscribed to The Manchester Guardian, historically the newspaper of the British cotton and textile industry, and it got mailed across the Atlantic Ocean once a week. He wanted her to understand the link between their world of dirt and the world of machines across the ocean. The Mississippi Delta has long been deeply connected with Manchester and Liverpool. Slave narratives report the connection between the “Liverpool price” for cotton and the severity and frequency of violence.

The industrial inventions around textile production killed home weaving, a thousand-year tradition that allowed the yeoman farmer to clothe his family and make a little extra. In just fifteen years an eight-spindle machine became a thousand-spindle machine, still run by one person. This was a century of unrelenting change. The first piano. The first mercury thermometer, invented by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. The fire extinguisher. The telegraph machine, threshing machines, and self-winding clocks. The parachute and guillotine. Doctors found a new mental health crisis: people driven insane by trying to keep pace with machines. Every living thing adapted or died.

American. Land-hungry southerners eager to replicate the old wealth they saw in the original colonies needed to wait until George Washington died, which he did in 1799. Washington had believed the native tribes should remain independent nations within the United States but he could tell this was a losing battle. His correspondence is full of his fear that the nation he’d helped found would erase these tribes. “If the same causes continue,” his friend Henry Knox wrote in a letter, “the same effects will happen and in a short period the idea of an Indian on this side of the Mississippi will only be found in the page of the historian.”

In the fall of 1805 Pushmataha had traveled north via boat to meet with Thomas Jefferson. That meeting shook the great Choctaw leader, who’d been forced to trade four million acres to settle a $46,000 debt to the Panton Company. The government had figured out how to clear the South of the people who had been living there so the new grid could be laid atop all that newly emptied land. Pushmataha came home and gathered his people. The sun set and the stars lit the sky. Sparks rose from the fire. Pushmataha began to tell a story about a bird whose song filled the trees with beauty. This forest music sounded like a beam of light shot through a cloud after a morning rain. The bird was small but strong and his song nurtured all the living things in the forests and the swamps. But it needed food and one day a creature arrived and promised abundance for a price. “If you bring me the flowers of the field,” the creature said, “I will feed you.” The bird traded and traded until all the flowers were gone. The creature let the bird continue to eat but warned of a coming reckoning. “Finally the day came when the creature demanded payment,” he said. “In payment of your debt, I demand your song.” The stars twinkled in the night sky and the air turned cool. “Please do not take my song,” the tiny bird begged. Nobody spoke. “As with the tiny bird, the day has now come when payment is due. The white trader demands that what he is owed be repaid. But the Choctaw has no ability to repay. The de...

Virginia politicians began seriously contemplating freeing enslaved people to get them off the plantation payrolls. Then the Yazoo lands opened at the moment the cotton gin was invented. These two events directly caused a doubling then tripling of the enslaved population of the United States. A system that had briefly looked like part of an old economic order suddenly became the foundation for the entire global economy. Had the Yazoo lands not been sold to speculators, who formed them into enormous plantations that were financed from London and New York—as opposed to the small forty-acre farms that would have likely populated the South had the Yazoo sale not been validated—there never would have been a King Cotton. A train of humanity stretched down the muddy and winding southeastern roads. Hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were “sold down the river” from the areas where rice, sugar, and tobacco couldn’t promise the same kind of wealth. They came chained and manacled, on what historian Ira Berlin has called “the second middle passage.”

The Klan was a well-planned terrorist organization, run by former high-ranking military officers who understood the power of fear and secrecy, who strategically used violence against unarmed civilians to achieve a political goal. Jim Crow segregation was built on the people killed in the years immediately following the Civil War.

“Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the n—— from politics.” The constitution accomplished its goals with brutal efficiency, and ten years after it was ratified the number of registered Black voters had dropped from more than 130,000 to just around 1,300. The new constitution reframed Reconstruction as an act of northern aggression. Soon the state passed textbook laws that controlled what information the children of the state could learn. That fight continues today. A dozen generations of students, including me, learned that Reconstruction was a violent military occupation run by corrupt and vile men intent on enriching themselves at the expense of the broken South. The Black citizens in our textbooks were described as naive, inferior pawns being used by outsiders. No consideration whatsoever was given in class to the idea that Black Mississippians might have enjoyed their newfound agency after the war.

In 1874 the Mississippi state legislature had sixty-four Black elected officials. A Black man, Thomas Cardozo, was chosen to be superintendent of education. The next time the state went to the polls, which would signal the practical end of Reconstruction, the election was won at gunpoint. The Klan patrolled the registration places and the voting precincts. Baring Brothers in London closely followed the campaigns via its New Orleans partners. The newly elected white representatives and their supporters had a name for this new era of Mississippi history: the Redemption.

There is a strong case to be made that the settling of the continent came to its conclusion in Township 22 North, Range 4 West. The physical closing of geography was accompanied by a wider closing of human possibility. All the land had been surveyed, mapped, owned, put into operation, harvested according to interconnected global markets. 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.

Down in Mississippi, politicians took away the Black right to vote but added payments to Confederate veterans and their widows. The pervasive idea of the Lost Cause reframed the Civil War to be about states’ rights and not slavery. It turned the Confederate soldiers from traitors into American patriots defending the original ideals of the nation. This mythology took root as those old soldiers began dying in droves, another one every day, and their sons and daughters tried to sort out what their beloved parents had done in their lives and what they had done it for.

In the coming fifty-one years, there would be many times when the families of the killers and the families of the jurors who would acquit them went to town together, built bridges together, attended weddings and funerals together, hunted deer and canned vegetables together. These are the people who would feel their culture under threat in 1955 and their response would exist inside, and not outside, their familiar rhythms of life. Nothing about the murder of Emmett Till was random. One tribe, related by blood and history, killed a child of another tribe. —

The Delta blues emerged as evidence of the enduring violence that birthed it, a left-behind record of lives built and broken, buried and erased. Its rise happened at the historical moment this violence became inescapable.

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

Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923. The Lost Cause was always about cotton and money.

The Roosevelt White House had formed an organization called the Farm Security Administration, which among other things purchased plantations from industrialist types who didn’t want them anymore, which allowed the wealthy capitalists to reinvest that money in more modern parts of the struggling economy, especially petroleum and steel, and allowed the government to try to help small-time farmers finally achieve Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman dream, which the free market would never allow. The FSA wanted to remove the Black families who’d been living on Sunflower for generations, removal having long ago become the default solution for any problem, and replace them with mostly white farmers from other states. Each family picked for the helping hand would get forty acres and a newly built house for $5,500 to $6,500. Each homestead came with a smokehouse and a shed. The government financed loans and set payment between $250 and $325 a year at 3 percent interest for forty years. These were sweetheart loans, designed to allow poor white families to build capital and wealth. That kind of helping hand could have changed the lives of the Black families who’d worked on the Sunflower Plantation. The land came with communal barns and mules and equipment and wells. It turns out that during the Roosevelt administration the United States did give folks forty acres and a mule.

As 1954 dawned in the Delta and across the South, the authorities worked, as they long had, to keep The Chicago Defender out of people’s hands. The national powerhouse African American newspaper offered proof of a different kind of life. Railroad porters would throw bundles of it into the darkness from a moving train, trying to get news through an iron curtain.

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

Carolyn Bryant would feel followed, hounded, for the rest of her life. She wrote that she, too, was a victim. And she insisted in her memoir that she had been justified. What kind of person carries a lie to the grave? That’s what I kept wondering with each page of the memoir. Killinger spent time with FBI profilers before interviewing her and they all agreed that his chances of breaking her were slim because when a lie gets told that many times for that many years, the person telling the lie believes it. The story becomes memory, the memory becomes truth. That same emotional process protects modern white Mississippi.

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.

She went into a defensive crouch, determined to offer her son a measure of protection in death that she’d been unable to provide in life. His last words, the witnesses reported, had been crying out for her. She sent a telegram to President Eisenhower and demanded he use the powerful tools of the federal government to bring justice to the men who had lynched her son. “Awaiting a direct reply from you,” her message ended. She got no response. Down in Mississippi, the bigoted Sheriff Strider wanted the body buried immediately. Two men even dug the hole in the little graveyard outside the East Money Church of God in Christ. I’ve walked that cemetery more than once trying to see if there’s a sunken rectangle where a grave was dug and not filled. A hearse brought Emmett and parked along the gravel road. It’s clear the Mississippi officials who’d seen the body understood what the torture represented.

Rayner asked Mamie, gently, if she wanted his team to do some work on the body. Make it more presentable. “No,” Mamie said. “Let the world see what I’ve seen.” Rayner placed Emmett in a shiny casket. Three pictures of him from that Christmas photo shoot were pinned to the soft lining of the lid. More than fifty thousand people would walk past that casket at the funeral at Roberts Temple. Mamie was changing. Soon she’d emerge from this pain as a focused, relentless woman. She went out on the road and told her story to anyone who would listen. She spoke to huge crowds. Former sharecroppers and their descendants, just two generations removed from enslavement, listened in Detroit, and in Harlem, in Omaha, Nebraska—everywhere the diaspora had settled outside the South. The month after the funeral she’d visit thirty-three cities in nineteen states. At every stop she told the crowds her sadness had been replaced by anger.

The jury, once selected, was sequestered at the nearby Delta Inn, where a cross was burned in the yard the morning of opening arguments. It’s well established that this trial was corrupted from the beginning by the familial ties stretching from the Hills down to the courthouse in Sumner. The killers and most of the jurors, the defense attorneys and the sheriff and the local congressman, were all from the same tiny corner of Tallahatchie hill country.

No transcript of the closing arguments still exists. They’ve all been destroyed, lost, or hidden. (The FBI found the witness testimony only after a source tipped them off to a copy in private hands on the Mississippi Gulf coast.) That’s obviously not an accident. That file was the most famous one in the entire courthouse and the biggest case any of the lawyers involved ever tried. Newspaper coverage mentioned a dramatic ratcheting up of racial rhetoric but quoted only a few passages from John Whitten’s final plea to the jury. All the defense lawyers had been building toward this speech. The whole subtext of the trial had been about Brown v. Board and the sudden existential challenge to segregation. A way of life was being defended, not just two disposable rednecks. There’s a reason people refer to Emmett Till’s death as the spark of the modern civil rights movement. Everyone involved in the trial understood the stakes and yet nobody has a clue exactly what the defense lawyers said to an all-white, all-male jury in the steaming courtroom. Their words, necessary in the moment but despicable to decent people even then, have been erased.

The Delta is full of dead and dying grandfatherly and horrible old men.

I asked him to explain to me what it was like to be born Black in the Mississippi Delta, and he paused for a long time. “It’s hard,” he said. “Real fucking hard.” Twenty-two more seconds of silence passed. I felt terrible for asking. His lip quivered and then he started to cry, big tears rolling down his cheeks, until finally he got out a few words. “Your life is in danger every day, all day,” he said. “You’re constantly paranoid. You ride by me too many times, I have to take a picture of your tag or something.”

The defense had painted a picture of a vast plot by people all over America, including right at home, involving such communist stooges as Moses Wright whose mission was to damage and discredit the good name of Mississippi and its humane and Christian system of segregation. The jurors bought that story because they’d long ago given up logic and common sense. A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.

Responsibility for the status quo falls on the heads of every single person benefiting from the status quo. But the overriding urge and inherited moral imperative is to protect the land. “What we’ve done and what we’ve left undone comes out pretty strong,” she wrote. “It’s embarrassing. Life just went on. And I recognize to my own sorrow that Molière was right: ‘It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’ ” The thing “not done” was protecting a child, and then compounding that failure by not telling his story. Fewer and fewer people talked about the barn, even the people closest to it—perhaps especially the people closest to it—and slowly it vanished from memory, like so much else surrounding the actual facts of the Till murder. The erasing over the years has been blunt and brutally effective. The only copy of the trial transcript disappeared. Till’s ring disappeared from evidence, too. The gun is in a safe, or at least it was until the crop duster pilot’s sister started deteriorating from dementia and accusing everyone around her, including her brother, of trying to steal everything from her, including that heirloom gun.

It was a somber day on the South Side of Chicago. The family held a small service and then the diggers went to work. They removed the vault and then the casket. As soon as the casket came out, the concrete vault crumbled to dust. The assembled people gasped. Emmett Till had been buried in a glass-top coffin. The glass hadn’t broken. The fingerprint smudges of the mourners still showed. And the Tutwiler embalmer clearly had done his work carefully and with love. Emmett Till looked exactly as he had when they put him in the grave. The FBI photos taken in 2005 mirrored the famous Jet magazine pictures.

All the other sites carry some note of redemption or tell the story of the societal decay that led to the killing, but this is a reminder of the opposite. There is no heroism to remember here. No defiance. Nobody burst through the door in the nick of time, or risked their life for another, nobody stood up to evil, no one stopped the torture. The only other space in twentieth-century American history with a similar absence of redemption is the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. But that’s a site of pilgrimage. The barn remains a working barn. Now seeing all these people here made the barn’s meaning feel different. It felt like a funeral, but this wasn’t a burial so much as another exhumation. “This is horrible ground you have made holy ground,” an Episcopal priest said in welcome.

The Emmett Till Interpretive Center needed money to save the barn. The National Park Service took over only fully restored sites and that meant the River Site and the courthouse were the only serious candidates. That left the preservation of the barn to private donors and activists. The issue all along with acquiring and preserving the sites was finding the money to buy them. Jeff Andrews had been as warm and gracious as the Tribbles had been rude and evasive but the issue still came down to money. It’s hard to find money in the Delta. Then Patrick Weems got a call from a number he didn’t recognize. A Beverly Hills number. The woman on the other end ran the philanthropic efforts of the star Hollywood producer Shonda Rhimes, the Black creative force behind shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Bridgerton. She swore Patrick to secrecy. In all her years working for Rhimes, the woman said, this was the first project her boss had ever called her about supporting. Usually it worked the other way around. But this time the producer said she wanted to donate the money to buy the barn. To save it.

Robert Raben, a lobbyist consulting for the ETIC, talked about the issue with his friend Barack Obama. They went through the public relations issues of a white man profiting from Black trauma. “Nobody in the family is for it,” Marvel told me. Former president Obama said to buy it no matter the price, understanding that owning land is the only way to tell the truth about it. Eventually Marvel agreed to not oppose the purchase. She understood intellectually its value even as she struggled emotionally with the transaction.

I waited outside the entrance to the West Wing, as the skies darkened and thunder boomed above the city. Today Emmett Till would have been eighty-two years old. He died alone in a barn in the absolute middle of nowhere, a godless place where his cries for his mother went unheeded, in a man-made landscape of profit margins and control, and for decades his name got whispered as a kind of code, pushed aside for those who couldn’t stand the mirror his body held up, and now his name would be spoken and preserved forever in the most visible place in the world. A White House staffer led us into the Indian Treaty Room.

Wheeler steadied himself and looked out at the packed room. His nerves faded away. He made a joke. “In fact,” he said, “we were married fifty-six years on Sunday.” He paused and smiled. “My wife says, ‘When we get to heaven, I’m gonna say, “Lord, not up here, too.” ’ ” The room erupted in laughter. Parker looked out and laughed, too. “I see we have a whole lot of amens to that.” His friends in the crowd started to cry as he spoke. “You see, I was born in Mississippi,” he said. “I spent my early years as a sharecropper and was focused upon filling up a nine-foot sack.” The sun and shadow announced work and rest in his old world. He looked up. The crowd leaned in. “From the outhouse to the White House,” he said.

Myrlie Evers-Williams said once that yes, Mississippi was, but Mississippi is. The state deserved a chance to break free from its history. We spend so much time in the past here and yet so little time learning who we are and how we got here. These memorials offered a fresh start. A way to go into the past, to finally confront, to address, to apologize and make amends, and then to walk into the future together. It is not in vogue right now to talk of racial reconciliation, and that kind of hard line might work in some places but not in a place as broken as Mississippi. 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. Either that or generation by generation watch nature take this Delta back and hold it safe until the next group of people come to try to extract its bounty.

Mamie wrote that thousands of people created the dominant culture that killed Emmett, and many thousands more benefited from it, and while there’s no way to unravel the complicated financial web that stretched from Manchester to New Orleans and enriched generations of people in between, there is a way to stand up now and say, I’m sorry. It was wrong. We were wrong.