The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson

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.