THE BARN

A native son dissects one of Mississippi’s most shocking racist crimes.

With deep roots in Clarksdale, “one of those faded Delta farm towns,” Thompson, author of Pappyland, grew up not far from the place where a farmer named J.W. Milam and a storekeeper named Roy Bryant kidnapped Emmett Till, who had allegedly made suggestive remarks to Bryant’s wife. The sadistic killing took place in the barn of Thompson’s title, which for a long time afterward “was just some guy’s barn, full of decorative Christmas angels and duck-hunting gear…hiding in plain sight, haunting the land.” When a sign was erected, years after Till’s murder, white racists tore it down; a second one was shot full of holes. The barn still stands. Ironically, Thompson notes, the town where Till was murdered was named for the daughter of one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan—but for all that, he adds, the KKK never gained much of a foothold among white Delta families, the racist murder notwithstanding. Thompson ranges widely in telling Till’s story, with one character a Black sharecropper who saw the boy’s freshly spilled blood on the floor of the barn and left the state, returning 50 years later when the Department of Justice reopened the murder case. The author’s story, intended for readers “everywhere the poison of the Lost Cause has spread,” offers hope for a more racially equitable Mississippi. Eventually justice did arc the right way, at least after a fashion: Till’s mother noted that her son’s killers were shunned by the white community after the killing, no one would rent land to Milam, and, she concluded, “before long, cancer got both of them. They lost their lives for what they did to my boy.”

A profoundly affecting, brilliantly narrated story of both an infamous murder and its unexpected consequences.