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New York, NY: Penguin Random House (September 24, 2024)
First Edition. Signed.
As new in dust jacket.
A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till, laying bare the global forces that converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was hidden for so long.
Wright Thompson’s family farm in Mississippi is twenty-three miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he learned of it only when he left the state for college. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are hidden and 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 fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, lying 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 thirty-six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, also home to 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. The decision by Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Thompson has a deep understanding of the world of the families of Emmett Till and of his killers, as well as the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map. This is a story about property, money, power, and white supremacy that 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, 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.
Wright Thompson is a senior writer for ESPN and the bestselling author of Pappyland and The Cost of These Dreams. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi with his family.
“Geography, wrote Ralph Ellison, is fate—an axiom painstakingly proven in the compelling architecture of Wright Thompson’s The Barn. Though grounded in a small radius within the landscape of Mississippi, this capacious examination of a terrible history is both expansive and granular, national and personal. Thompson writes with a tone of relentless urgency at once tempered by a deep reflection on what becomes, ultimately, a seemingly unavoidable trajectory, a cataclysmic inevitability—the consequences of material greed and cruel disregard—into which our nation and the people in it were thrust. He writes, too, with a true storyteller’s gift for language and image, and the ability to make grand connections across time and space, to see all the forces culminating in one terrible moment, all the lives destroyed or forever marked by what happened that night. Follow them though time, Thompson writes—and we do—into a world not only harrowing but also, we come to see, redeemable when the act of remembering, of looking unflinchingly at the troubled fabric of our nation is itself a kind of accountability, and redemption.” —Natasha Trethewey
“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.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and Heavy: An American Memoir
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