In This Edition of
The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published February 12, 2025
ISSN: 1930-0018
Contents
Highlighting indicates debut books
Discussions are open to all members to read and post. Click to view the books currently being discussed.
Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Short Stories
Essays
Thrillers
Romance
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Biography/Memoir
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Science, Health and the Environment
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Thrillers
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
| BookBrowse: | |
| Critics: | |
| Readers: |
A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long.
Wright Thompson's family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely unknown, including where it took place and how many people were involved. This is no accident: the cover-up began at once, and it is ongoing.
In August 1955, two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were charged with the torture and murder of the 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading about where the long night of hell took place and who was involved. In fact, Wright Thompson reveals, at least eight people can be placed at the scene, which was inside the barn of one of the killers, on a plot of land within the six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as the birthplace of the blues on nearby Dockery Plantation.
Even in the context of the racist caste regime of the time, the four-hour torture and murder of a Black boy barely in his teens for whistling at a young white woman was acutely depraved; Till's mother Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this story—the world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map. As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power, and white supremacy. It implicates all of us. In The Barn, Thompson brings to life the small group of dedicated people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light. Putting the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a way of mapping the road this country must travel if we are to heal our oldest, deepest wound.
1
The Barn
Willie Reed awoke early Sunday morning to the sound of mockingbirds. Mosquitoes hovered and darted on the bayou behind his house. The cypress floorboards creaked beneath his feet. He stepped outside into a visible wall of humidity. Local kids like Willie had a name for the little riffles rising from the dirt: heat monkeys, animated like a living thing. A Mississippi Delta sunrise is feral and predatory; even at 6:00 a.m., the air feels hot on the way in and stagnant on the way out. Daylight had broken an hour before Reed started his short walk to Patterson's country store, one of the many little places out in the country that sold rag bologna and hoop cheese. It was August 28, 1955. His grandfather wanted fresh meat to cook for breakfast. He was eighteen years old, with a boyish face that made him look at least three or four years younger, with almond-shaped eyes and delicate lashes. His girlfriend, Ella Mae, lived a few miles south on Roy Clark's plantation. Late August meant they were a week into cotton-picking season. In a few hours, after church ended, hundreds of men, women, and children would be pulling nine-foot sacks through the rows of cotton on the other side of the road. The past few growing seasons had been hard on everyone but for the first time in two or three years the price looked good enough for farmers to clear a little profit, depending on the whim of the landlord. Reed and his family worked for Clint Shurden, one of eighteen siblings who'd all left sharecropping behind to form a little empire around the Delta town of Drew. The Reeds usually made money for a year of work, and Clint also paid Willie three dollars a day to help him out around the place.
The people across the narrow dirt road never made a dime working for their landlord, Leslie Milam, who'd moved into the old Kimbriel place a few years back. Milam was the first member of his hardscrabble family to gain a toehold in the fading, cloistered world of Delta landowners. Bald like his brother J.W., with sagging jowls and a double chin, Leslie was renting to own from the kind of family his had aspired for generations to become, the Ivy League-educated Sturdivants, whose empire included at least twelve thousand acres and a sizable investment in a three-year-old business named Holiday Inn. Leslie's thick brows rose in a perpetual look of surprise above his eyes, which were just a little too close together.
The Black folks who lived in the country between Ruleville and Drew had quickly come to hate Leslie. They had a word for men like him, a whispered sarcastic curse: striver. Leslie Milam was a striver. Just last year he'd told Alonzo and Amanda Bradley that they owed him eleven dollars, which he'd forgive if they stayed another season. They'd also learned to recognize the mean, cigar-chewing J. W. Milam, who came around from time to time.
When old Dr. Kimbriel had farmed the place, the local sharecropper kids like Willie's uncle James would play in the long, narrow cypress barn just off from the white gabled house. Willie had been inside it once, too. The neighborhood children liked to chase the pigeons, which would fly to safety in the cobwebbed eaves. Nobody chased pigeons once Leslie moved in.
That morning Willie turned left on the dirt road mirroring Dougherty Bayou, lined by knobby bald cypress trees. Five million years ago the range of these trees had stretched far to the north of Mississippi, but the Ice Age had reduced them to a narrow band around the Gulf of Mexico. Cypresses, sequoias, and redwoods are some of the oldest trees on the planet, their presence marking a connection to primordial history. Reed walked past the trees, down to the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, which sat between the road and the bayou.
Dougherty Bayou was the name of the water that drained this part of the Delta into the Sunflower River. Mostly the bayou was known locally for its connection to the Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose ...
Excerpted from The Barn by Wright Thompson. Copyright © 2024 by Wright Thompson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!
The Barn explores with depth and care the murder of Emmett Till. While Till's murder has been seared into American history, the exact story of what happened has been morphed, adjusted, and at times completely erased until now. The following questions ask you to examine what you knew, what you know now, and how we go forward while recognizing the brutality of the past.
Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Penguin Press. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.
The barn doesn't reek of catastrophe at first glance. It is on the southwest quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, surrounded by cypresses, sequoias, and the bayou. The barn looks like every other barn in Sunflower County, Mississippi with weathered boards and a dull patina. When Jeff Andrews purchased it, he was unaware of its menacing and symbolic past, as the place where fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was tortured, beaten, brutalized, and lynched.
The barn's very presence reopens a tattered wound that Wright Thompson thinks of as a blessing and a curse. Thompson is mostly known for his long-form articles for ESPN.com, where he is a senior writer. He has penned a masterful work in The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, examining the death of a child while also questioning Mississippi culture and the history of the land where the murder took place, which is his home state. Thompson eloquently finds a middle ground to tell the story of Emmett Till and the story of Mississippi — a balancing act to be sure, mapping both gods and monsters.
For those who don't remember or have never heard, Chicago-born Emmett Till was visiting his great uncle Moses Wright in Money, Mississippi. Wright, the son of slaves, had once owned land until the cotton market crashed, which forced him into the oppressive contractual agreement of sharecropping. Had that not happened, he would have probably fled Mississippi too. But he was stuck and, in the summer of 1955, his great nephew Emmett came to visit and meet his southern relatives.
Emmett loved rural life. Milk coming out of a cow. Uncle Moses eating brains and eggs for breakfast, and on a good day, Moses making his own sausages and hanging them in the smokehouse. Mississippi was a simple place for a well-loved Chicago kid unaware of the code of conduct he was supposed to follow. Or, how white women, with the stories they told their fathers, brothers, and husbands, could sign a death certificate for an innocent black boy.
What you think happened to Emmett Till depends on who or what you believe. The white men who were acquitted of his murder (though they later confessed to the crime). Or the copious facts like those Wright Thompson has uncovered in his research. There's a third option as well. Common sense. A black boy leaves Chicago healthy and comes back in a coffin, and comes back at all only because the governor of Illinois demands the sheriff turn over the body. Mamie Till refused to close her son's casket and encouraged photojournalists to snap his picture and publish it in newspapers all over the world to show what racial violence looked like on a teenager whose bloodied, battered, and puffed-out face categorized a generation of dead and beaten innocents. "Let the world see," she demanded.
The question Wright Thompson had to wrestle with before beginning to write about the barn where Till was tortured was simple: Why write a book about the Till murder seventy-plus years after the fact? What do we need to know about the story that we don't already know? Till was kidnapped at two in the morning, held hostage, tortured, lynched by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, then dumped into the Tallahatchie. Emmett Till is dead. His mother Mamie is dead. His killers got off scot-free. Carolyn Bryant recanted her lie about Till whistling and making sexual advances toward her at Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market. (Bryant never suffered any consequences for her fabrication.) She is dead too. So, what's the point?
Thompson believes details matter. "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."
And yet, even with that intention, it's not the story of Emmett Till itself that shapes The Barn into its greatness. Thompson offers a cogent argument that the culture of Mississippi murdered Till just as much as the cohort of men in the barn. He presents as evidence grains of racism like soil in which hate is an organic fertilizer. It reveals itself first in the mud and then in the root, and then grows the tree and bends the leaves and permeates the air and water and men swallow it.
We learn that black residents have renamed the Tallahatchie River the Singing River because the lynched were also the drowned. Their souls sing about their pain. The land that the barn is on is land the government evicted black people from in order to give it to white men like Jeff Andrews' grandfather to even out the economic plight of the Great Depression.
This, too. In 1871, sixty members of an insurgency led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, former Confederate general and first Grand Wizard of the KKK, invaded the home of black political leader Jack Dupree in Monroe County, Mississippi. They dragged him out the front door, stripped his clothes off and knifed him. They slit his throat, then cut out his heart and intestines before throwing his corpse in the creek. Then they beat local independent farmers who were renting land and working it. The goal was to force blacks to become sharecroppers. When Vicksburg voters elected a black sheriff in 1874, white mobs killed fifty black citizens. When they were found guilty, a judge reversed the indictments. The worst part was how the Supreme Court was complicit, agreeing with the judge and normalizing Klan violence as self-defense.
"The story of Till's death is the story of the rise and rot of a tribe of people of which I am one," Thompson writes, and this feels melancholic juxtaposed against the racial violence romanticized in Mississippi. There are a lot of tragic stories he tells but one stuck with me. A beating of a black man in a store, his skull exposed, and all the white men laughing.
What does this have to do with the barn? Everything. It's the celebratory subtraction of human beings. During his research for the book, Thompson met with Jeff Andrews, a dentist, to get a glimpse of the barn, and Andrews was thrust into the role of tour guide. "That's right there where he was hung at," Andrews informed him as they looked up at a corroded beam. Andrews is patient with members of the Till family, who every now and then want to visit the barn as a requiem to their fallen relative, but he isn't quite sure why it really matters. He's the fourth owner of the barn since the Milam family; he doesn't cosign the past as being prologue. For that reason he is part of the audience Thompson is appealing to, The Barn a reminder of the history he owns.
Thompson exposes blatant lies that land quietly. Emmett Till did not die in Money, Mississippi. He was executed in a barn in Drew, in Sunflower County. The men on trial for his murder weren't rogue racists acting on impulse. It was a coordinated and planned attack with powerful men behind the scenes who made sure their names were kept out of the news. The gun hasn't been melted down and isn't in a museum but in a safety deposit box.
The Barn is a breathtaking book and story and history. Its brilliance is its light. Its brilliance is its darkness. The historic recurrence of anti-black violence is the broad stroke Thompson paints so elegantly, which is the irony. His gentle prose allows us to grasp what happened that horrible day in August. The barn where Till died, in Thompson's words, is like a vessel. One that restores truth back to the earth.
Thompson's insights and quasi-shame of being a child of the Delta build a story that is wholly unforgettable, but then, what creeps upon you as you absorb one page after the next, and exhale and swallow, and read another passage, and notice the lack of mercy, is that this is all true.
This really happened.
Reviewed by Valerie Morales
Christopher Benson, Associate Professor, Medill School of Journalism; co-author with Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till
Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy: An American Memoir
Rated 4 out of 5
by Elizabeth campbell
The Barn provides both a personal and historical exploration, shedding light on the complex legacy of the civil rights era.
Wright Thompson's The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi unravels the history of trauma through the murder of Emmett Till in 1955 by using a metaphorical barn as a symbol for secrets and tragedies buried in Mississippi's Delta. He weaves a complex tapestry: meticulous historical research paired with personal narrative, and he delves into a far larger sphere of impact by Till's murder, focusing on the extreme racial injustices and culture of silence that allowed such crimes to continue perpetually.
Critics are raving about this book, focusing on its powerful, haunting exploration of the complex social and racial landscape in Mississippi, giving voice to the hidden histories there. Thompson details not only the tragedy but also how local and national efforts to confront these histories have evolved, making this book a tough read but simultaneously thought provoking. While readers may get mired in regional details-meaning for those not familiar with the area that is being described the details might be just a bit too minute-they also provide irreplaceable historical and cultural context to the stories of Till and his legacy.
Most readers interested in American history, civil rights, or especially the Emmett Till legacy would find The Barn informative and incredibly moving.
The plan had to be executed perfectly by Willie Reed, an eighteen-year-old native of the Mississippi Delta. He had to walk into the darkness by himself making sure his bearings were correct. He had in his possession a coat and another pair of pants. He had to walk six miles on rural roads absent of all light. That would protect him, the inky night. The Drew-Cleveland Road was close to the edge of the Dockery Farms. Willie Reed kept walking.
"If someone wanted to kill you, there would be nobody to hear you scream. If someone approached, there would be no place to hide. The road was by far Reed's safest option, lined with poor black families," explains Wright Thompson in his stunning book The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
Willie had limited options. The Drew-Merigold Road would have cut through white farmers' land. Catastrophe. The downtown section of the town of Drew would have been deadly. So he walked the 6.6 miles from his house. He passed his girlfriend's house without saying goodbye.
A car was waiting at the end of the road in the dark and Willie opened the door. The driver went north on Highway 61. It reached Mound Bayou and another car, an Oldsmobile 88, waited. Inside that car were two black men. The passenger was Charles Diggs, the first black congressman elected in Michigan. The driver was activist Medgar Evers. Evers had purchased the Oldsmobile with its V-8 engine to outrun white terrorists who liked to chase him through back roads because they hated his voter registration efforts. Now he was pushing sixty to get to the Memphis airport. To get Willie to Chicago. And freedom.
All of this cloak-and-dagger stealth had a point. Willie was a witness to a murder.
A few weeks earlier, on August 28, 1955, Willie woke to mockingbirds. He made his way to Patterson's country store. His grandfather wanted meat to cook for breakfast. He passed abandoned shacks of those who had already fled the violence and poverty of the Delta for Chicago. He cut through Leslie Milam's farm and was about to cross over the bayou when he heard a Chevrolet pickup truck. It passed him and he glanced at the passengers. Four white men and a scared fourteen-year-old child who he later would learn was Emmett Till.
Willie Reed heard Till's screams for his mother. He heard his grunts and cries and saw the truck parked in front of the barn. He stopped at a sharecropper's house, where he asked a woman named Amanda Bradley, "Who they beating to death down there?"
In the days that followed, Willie was too frightened to tell what he saw until he noticed an account in a local newspaper. The boy was named Emmett Till. He was from Chicago. Willie then told his grandparents. Eventually J.W. Milam, one of Till's killers, approached Willie and asked, did he see anything. Willie lied and said no, sir. "Boy, did you hear anything?" He answered the same. No, sir.
When Willie testified it was an anomaly. "At that time, it was virtually unheard of for a black person to testify against a white, particularly if that person was a sharecropper, dependent on whites for his livelihood," says George Curry, editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association's wire service. Willie identified the killers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam but to no avail. The all-white jury acquitted the men in a little over an hour.
In Chicago, Reed changed his name to Willie Louis to forget his Mississippi past. Willie worked as a surgical technician and he never told his story, how he was a witness to Till's brutal murder and that he was outside the barn when Till was beaten. He suffered nightmares and a nervous breakdown.
Then, in 2003, almost fifty years after the murder, an FBI agent named Dale Killinger knocked on the door and told Willie the agency was reopening their investigation into the Emmett Till murder to see if new information was available. They needed Willie to go back to Mississippi.
"You could see how powerful it was for him to go back there," Killinger remembers. Willie still heard the screams of Emmett Till. He told Killinger the screams were from the right side of the barn. Everything about the place he grew up in, after all this time, was forever changed. His grandfather's house was gone. The country store was gone. Everyone he knew, including his girlfriend Ella Mae, was gone. But the barn remained.
If the barn was the ghost of the incident that would never, ever die, Willie Reed was the glue that held it all together. He was the only eyewitness to the crime and it was his words that established the chronology of events. Historians like David T. Beito hold him in high regard: "His act in some sense was the bravest act of them all. He had nothing to gain: he had no family ties to Emmett Till; he didn't know him. He was this 18-year-old kid."
Drew, Mississippi
Photo by Lauren McCauley (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Filed under People, Eras & Events
Winfred Rembert grew up in a family of Georgia field laborers and joined the Civil Rights Movement as a teenager. He was arrested after fleeing a demonstration, survived a near-lynching at the hands of law enforcement, and spent seven years on chain gangs.
A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy.
Books with similar themes
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
