The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

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.