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Summary and Reviews of The Barn by Wright Thompson

The Barn by Wright Thompson

The Barn

The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

by Wright Thompson
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  • Sep 24, 2024, 448 pages
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Book Summary

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...

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

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...continued

Full Review Members Only (1352 words)

(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).

Media Reviews

Associated Press
Thompson travels back to his native Mississippi ... and talks to scores of people, building on the reporting of others to tell Till's story, and using The Barn as a jumping off point to explore the racist history of the Mississippi Delta ... It's powerful and unflinching writing ... What's unforgettable by the end of Thompson's book… is just how thoroughly this country was built on a belief that some people were worthless and expendable because of the color of their skin ... It's the work of activists like Dickerson and books like The Barn that offer some hope that America can heal its oldest and deepest wound.

BookPage
Pappyland, showed the author's talent for threading culture, history and industry together with vividly drawn portraits of a family. His new history, The Barn, takes a similar tack as Thompson investigates a crime we may think we understand: the murder of Emmett Till. Thompson grew up just miles away from where the Black child was murdered in the Mississippi Delta, and his inquiry digs up truths long concealed and cover-ups still ongoing.

Boston Globe
Terrifying and humbling, The Barn is a chilling examination of the American strain of a nasty human disorder: the slow immolation that some communities initiate when they choose enabling mythologies, deceit, silence, injustice, and willed ignorance as their moral orders.

Chapter 16
[Thompson's] personal investment, professionalism, and integrity pay out. This is most evident in the trust he earns from eyewitnesses, including Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr., Till's closest friend in Chicago ... Digging deep into the individual-meets-local-meets-global Mississippi Delta history, The Barn helps reckon with traumatic memory writ large.

LitHub
Crucial facts about this historic injustice are still coming to light, many of which are gathered in Wright Thompson's gripping, thoroughly researched account of the night Till was murdered—in a barn just over 20 miles from Thompson's family farm—and the cover up that followed (and continues to this day). An important addition to the historical record.

Los Angeles Times
Thompson ... has written a gut-punch of a book about the murder of Emmett Till and the place where it happened. Foregoing the harrowing photos that emphasize Till's martyrdom, Thompson dives instead into family trees, court transcripts, witness memoirs and more to unearth the enormous human tragedy we forget at our peril: 'Hate grows stronger and resistant,' he reminds us, 'when it's pushed underground.'

She Reads
The Barn is the perfect combination of suspense, history, and truth. Within these pages, readers will journey alongside Thompson as he unearths the chilling details of the murder of Emmett Till. Through meticulous research and a gripping narrative, Thompson reckons with the complexities surrounding this case and the systemic corruption that relentlessly works to bury the truth.

Washington Post
[Thompson's] extraordinary new book The Barn is not only an intimate history of the tragedy, but also a deep meditation on Mississippi and America ... While sifting through the dirt that buried the facts about Till's death, Thompson credits the work of the historians, journalists and filmmakers who have sought to tell the true tale. But he crafts a wider, deeper narrative. The Barn is serious history and skillful journalism, but with the nuance and wallop of a finely wrought novel ... The Barn describes not just the poison of silence and lies, but also the dignity of courage and truth.

Booklist (starred review)
Carefully weighing each word as though it's being set on the scales of justice, Thompson presents a deeply felt and vitally written history of conscience with infinite consequence.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
A profoundly affecting, brilliantly narrated story of both an infamous murder and its unexpected consequences.

Author Blurb 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
In this arresting, insightful book, Wright Thompson takes a deep dive into the historical record to guide us on a compelling, thousand-year international journey of power, greed, corruption and injustice, leading inevitably to the lynching of Emmett Till.

Author Blurb Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy: An American Memoir
The Barn is the most brutal, layered and absolutely beautiful book about Mississippi, and really how the world conspired with the best and worst parts of Mississippi, I will ever read. In Mississippi, we talk about athletes who bust their ass, skills be damned. Well, every generation you get a few writers with the engine of a 747 and the skill of a wizard. We see it in Ward, Wright, Faulkner and Trethewey. And that finely crafted motor is on full display in this work by Wright Thompson. The Barn is the new standard in research and book-making. There is one Wright Thompson. And we are so lucky he loves Mississippi. Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this. Mississippi, goddamn.

Reader Reviews

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 ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



Willie Reed: The Witness Who Returned Home

Color photograph of water tower in Drew, MIssissippi 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 ...

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Read-Alikes

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