c.2024, Penguin Press
$35
448 pages
You’ve driven past it so many times, that you haven’t actually seen it in ages.
After all these years, it’s just a part of the scenery, something you barely even notice anymore. But what’s its story? Why is it there? As in the new book “The Barn” by Wright Thompson, could that landmark hold a horrible history?
Through the years, Wright Thompson has drawn a map of his Mississippi homeland dozens of times. Drive down this road, turn here, there, and you’re at a spot that was laid out over two centuries ago, Township 22 North, Range 4 West. It’s an area where the Blues were born, the civil rights movement was sparked, and the Klan began.
Inside that 36-mile square is the barn where Emmett Till was murdered.
Ask anyone in that area of Mississippi where this story all started and they’ll point you toward a derelict building that was once a grocery store. Supposedly, 14-year-old Till whistled at a white woman there. He was kidnapped that night, snatched from his bed, and taken away in a green and white pickup truck. Thompson says he’s studied this crime for years, and he thinks eight white men were involved in the subsequent beating death of Till.
So why has the barn — a place that Thompson has visited hundreds of times, a place that holds Christmas decorations, lawn equipment, and ghosts — been largely ignored? People knew what happened there. People heard things, and were intimidated into keeping quiet. Others bravely confronted Till’s murderers in court.
Why, in the years after the trial that freed those killers, did the barn go back to being just a barn?
No doubt, you know this story. You had nightmares about it for years. Be prepared to sleep with the lights on again, then, once you’ve read “The Barn.”
Much like a love letter written in arsenic, author Wright Thompson describes his beloved home area in lush words with horror behind them, which is both good and bad. You’ll almost be able to feel the gumbo mud, but — ever actually been to this square of Mississippi? If not, there’s a lot of geographical information inside this book, and it’s not going to mean much to you.
No, the meaning lies in the rest of the story of a murder that changed American history and that still has the power to make readers shudder. Thompson uses a narrow barn as a pivot point to reach back in history, to Reconstruction and slavery, Jim Crow and differences in racism in the North and South, Delta culture, and the biography of a boy, in a story that’s both personal and local, and that’ll keep you glued to your seat.
It’ll also help you see how a decades-old murder can be solved, but never put to rest.
“The Barn” is a tale that’s hard to read, but also one you can’t look away from. If you need an update, or a book to help you better understand the Till case, you’ll want to see this one.