It is one of the best non-fiction works I ever have read.
Thursday at 6p.m Sinclair Community College is presenting “An Evening with Wright Thompson.”
The event, held in Building 12, is free and open to the public.
I caught up to Thompson Sunday morning at the home in Oxford, Mississippi he shares with his wife and two young children. He said he was doing the dishes and told me not to tell anyone.
Credit: Evan France
Credit: Evan France
My surprise was not that he may have been up to his elbows in soapsuds, but that he was back home.
He’s a fellow sportswriter by trade, one of the best in the nation, and he travels the world as ESPN’s senior writer and as a contributing writer to The Atlantic.
He’s the Emmy-winning reporter and producer with John T. Edge of the TV series called “TrueSouth” and he’s a best-selling New York Times author of “Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last” and “The Cost of Dreams.”
This latest book, though, did begin at a dead end.
“This book actually started with Akron’s own LeBron James — it started as a sports story,” he said as he noted in an aside that James’ family tree is deeply rooted in Mississippi.
“I was going to do the family trees of every member of the Los Angeles Lakers, sort of a look at who the team is, in terms of the eight generations they’re all bringing into the room.
“One of the players was Avery Bradley, he’s from Mound Bayou, Mississippi. And one of the witnesses in Emmett Till’s murder was Amanda Bradley, who had connections to Mound Bayou. I thought they might be related, but it turned out they were not.”
While Thompson was researching that point, Patrick Weems, co-founder of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, asked him if he knew about the barn.
“I said, ‘Barn? What barn?’” Thompson recalled.
It turned out to be a nondescript structure outside of Drew, Mississippi where Till — a chubby youngster from Chicago with a stutter that came from a childhood bout of polio; and a love of comic books and the Mississippi-born rocker, Bo Diddley — was beaten and tortured in August 1955 by two white men who eventually shot him to death, tied the cord of large metal fan around his neck and threw him in the Tallahatchie River.
His bloated, mutilated body was found three days later.
Thompson grew up just 23 miles away, but said he’d never heard of Till until he was in a history class at the University of Missouri. Up until about five years ago he had never heard of the barn. Then again almost no one else had either.
He said the story wasn’t taught in school, and was not shared by those in the know because of shame or deceit or simply due to a misguided attempt not reopen some of the region’s deepest scars.
Once Thompson was taken to the barn by Weems, he was overcome by the unsettled, but sacred feeling he experienced there.
A man who knows how to listen to the silence better than most, he could still hear the whimpered cries of a young boy calling for his Mama after being pulled at gunpoint from his bed in the middle of the night, trussed and thrown into the back of a pickup truck and then unmercifully beaten.
And for what?
He was a kid visiting from Chicago who made an impulsive wolf whistle at a white woman, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, who worked the counter of the country store he visited with his cousins.
She later admitted she lied about her account, possibly to get a rise out of her inattentive husband, Roy, who owned the place.
Others who were there that day — at least the ones who did not concoct a false narrative to condone the murder — said there was nothing salacious about the act. Till was simply a kid, unknowing of the deep racial tensions of the region, nervous and trying too hard to impress his Mississippi cousins.
“Emmett Till was still into comic books, but he and his friends had been playing spin the bottle,” Thompson said. “So this idea that he’s maybe, sort of interested in kissing a girl, but still into Spiderman, that’s such a specific age of boyhood.
“That’s the end of idolizing baseball players. You may look like a man, but you are very much still just a boy.
“The deeper I got into this, that really came alive for me in a way it never had before.”
Thompson’s story gets added depth from the way he explains the global forces — the rise and fall of King Cotton; the quest for land, money and power; white supremacy and the disregard for the backbreaking labor of locals who helped outsiders reap the rewards of the Mississippi Delta — that put the likes of Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam in conflict with an unaware teenager from up north.
But more than a critique or some scathing rebuke, Thompson’s book is an act of love for the place where he grew up and now lives again.
As we spoke, he referenced Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers rock band out of Georgia – who mentioned in a 2013 essay and in one of the songs on the Southern Rock Opera album – the “duality of the Southern thing.”
Thompson explained it to me:
“To me, it’s absolutely essential for Southern identity to hold two opposing thoughts in your head – and call them both true.
“If you only love it, you’re not truly Southern. And if you only hate it, you’re not truly Southern.
“Living at the intersection of those two things is the absolute bedrock essential of Southern identity.”
Willie Reed
The fate of Emmett Till may have never come out were it not for the bravery of 18-year-old Willie Reed, who hid in the bushes and watched as the 1954 two-tone white Chevrolet pick-up truck with Bryant and Milam inside pull up to the barn and take Till inside.
Reed initially heard screams and pleading and later, after going to the store and returning, he heard only Till’s whimpers and pleas for his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who was back in Chicago and had reluctantly allowed him to ride the train back to visit cousins in the area where she’d grown up.
Other witnesses refused to come forward, but Reed did what he thought was right.
Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with murder; and Reed was kept hidden until he could testify in court about what he’d seen and heard.
Such an act would surely have gotten deadly retribution for him, so he was spirited out of the state the next night, after walking along a gravel road to Highway 8, where a waiting car that was driven by Medgar Evers — the World War II veteran and NAACP field secretary who was murdered himself in Mississippi eight years later — took him to the Memphis airport and a flight to Chicago.
Reed changed his name to Willie Louis, worked as a hospital orderly and rarely talked about the incident. At night though — right up to when he died in 2013 at age 76 — he was haunted by nightmares, his wife said.
Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white, male jury which took less than an hour to deliberate and that included a break to drink soda pop one juror later joked.
Several jurors embraced an unhinged conspiracy theory, saying they thought the NAACP and the Communist Party got a body out of the morgue and threw it in the river. They believed Till was safely hidden in Chicago or Detroit.
The absurdity of such belief is magnified when you consider what Reed went through to tell the truth.
Thompson knows Reed’s story well.
“On the 70th anniversary of the killing I went to a church service they had at the barn,” he said. “I’d gone to Chicago and met Willie’s wife, Juliet Louis, and we rode the train down south. She had never seen where Willie lived. In a way she felt she was saying goodbye to him.
“Just the other day, she sold their Chicago home and moved to Ashtabula to live with their son.
“At the ceremony I was able to introduce her to Medgar Ever’s daughter Reena. That was an incredible moment.”
Thompson introduces us to several other heroes in the story, especially the Rev. Wheeler Parker and his wife Dr. Marvel Parker. He dedicated the book to them and said it was Rev. Parker who first let him into the heart of the story.
He was Emmett’s cousin, next door neighbor and best friend. They had ridden the train together from Chicago to Mississippi that fateful summer in 1955.
Parker had been at the store that day of the incident and had been sleeping in the house when the men took Emmett at gunpoint.
After the murder, Parker became a minister and embraced love over hate — a position that still amazes Thompson — and made it his life’s goal not to let Emmett’s story be erased as so many have tried to do in past and now in these retrograde times threaten to do again.
My favorite person, though, is Emmett’s mother Mamie, who resisted Mississippi authorities’ attempts to quickly bury her son there. With help, she got the body shipped back to Chicago.
She insisted her son’s casket be left open so people could see his bloated, mutilated face and know the horrors that had been done to him.
The national revulsion that followed created moral outrage that helped fuel the Civil Rights movement.
“Nothing she had ever done indicated that she was remotely capable of doing what she did,” Thompson said. “There’s sort of an old school thought that she’s the patron saint of strong Black motherhood, but I would take that a step farther.
“She is the ideal of the American mom.
“It’s that thought that if you (expletive) with mom it’s at your own peril!
“Mamie Till evoked that very special kind of American motherhood.”
Keeping Till’s story alive
The last section of Thompson’s book came to him as he immersed himself deeper into the story.
He was moved by the people fighting — often while being threatened themselves — to keep the Emmett Till story from being defused by fake narrative — including a bogus story that appeared in Look magazine — or completely erased.
Along with Parker he celebrates Weems and especially Gloria Dickerson, a community activist who integrated the Drew schools in 1965, and today teaches students the Till story at her We2Gether Creating Change foundation.
As he’s gone around the country on his book tour one thing has surprised Thompson.
“Every room I’ve been in, mostly it feels like there’s a hunger to agree with people. It’s an almost radicalized centrism. I think people are tired of the house to house fighting of daily rhetoric.
“I’ve found almost zero contention.”
As for his Sinclair audience, he hopes they take a few things away from the evening:
“I hope they understand the severity of this moment and the danger of ignoring history.
“And I hope they too are inspired to investigate the land they stand on and understand the only way to prevent all of the pain they never suffered is to learn the lessons of the past.”
“The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi” can help anyone do that.
I don’t know if will serve as a portal for you — that depends how far you walk into it — but I can promise you this:
Pick up the book and start reading.
It will not be a dead end for you.
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