IThe BarnWillie 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 they were a week into cotton-picking season. In a few hours, after church ended, hundreds of men, women, and children would be pulling nine-foot sacks through the rows of cotton on the other side of the road. The past few growing seasons had been hard on everyone but for the first time in two or three years the price looked good enough for farmers to clear a little profit, depending on the whim of the landlord. Reed and his family worked for Clint Shurden, one of eighteen siblings who'd all left sharecropping behind to form a little empire around the Delta town of Drew. The Reeds usually made money for a year of work, and Clint also paid Willie three dollars a day to help him out around the place.
The people across the narrow dirt road never made a dime working for their landlord, Leslie Milam, who'd moved into the old Kimbriel place a few years back. Milam was the first member of his hardscrabble family to gain a toehold in the fading, cloistered world of Delta landowners. Bald like his brother J.W., with sagging jowls and a double chin, Leslie was renting to own from the kind of family his had aspired for generations to become, the Ivy League-educated Sturdivants, whose empire included at least twelve thousand acres and a sizable investment in a three-year-old business named Holiday Inn. Leslie's thick brows rose in a perpetual look of surprise above his eyes, which were just a little too close together.
The Black folks who lived in the country between Ruleville and Drew had quickly come to hate Leslie. They had a word for men like him, a whispered sarcastic curse: striver. Leslie Milam was a
striver. Just last year he'd told Alonzo and Amanda Bradley that they owed him eleven dollars, which he'd forgive if they stayed another season. They'd also learned to recognize the mean, cigar-chewing J. W. Milam, who came around from time to time.
When old Dr. Kimbriel had farmed the place, the local sharecropper kids like Willie's uncle James would play in the long, narrow cypress barn just off from the white gabled house. Willie had been inside it once, too. The neighborhood children liked to chase the pigeons, which would fly to safety in the cobwebbed eaves. Nobody chased pigeons once Leslie moved in.
That morning Willie turned left on the dirt road mirroring Dougherty Bayou, lined by knobby bald cypress trees. Five million years ago the range of these trees had stretched far to the north of Mississippi, but the Ice Age had reduced them to a narrow band around the Gulf of Mexico. Cypresses, sequoias, and redwoods are some of the oldest trees on the planet, their presence marking a connection to primordial history. Reed walked past the trees, down to the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, which sat between the road and the bayou.
Dougherty Bayou was the name of the water that drained this part of the Delta into the Sunflower River. Mostly the bayou was known locally for its connection to the Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose postwar extracurriculars included a turn as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, which had originally been led by his former staff officers. The old white folks loved to talk about the Wizard of the Saddle, about how he led his cavalry along the Dougherty Bayou as he moved quietly toward Yazoo City. Forrest Trail, they called the old Indian hunting path that would become the Drew-Cleveland Road, which would later be renamed the Drew-Ruleville Road, which had originally been built in the first place by Forrest's brother. A cavalry once moved down this road to the beat of horse hooves and animal breath. Reed walked the same ground with the quiet shuffle of shoe soles on dirt. The sun had been up for an hour already, enough early light to bring definition to the rows.
Abandoned shacks dotted the countryside around Reed's home. There weren't as many people around as there had been just a few years before. Many of his neighbors had already left the Mississippi Delta. These were the last days of a way of life. With each passing year more and more sharecropper houses sat empty as machines replaced people. Modern civilization spun just a few hours north, connected by family ties and railroads and telephones but separated by what Black expats in Chicago called the Cotton Curtain. Local high schools would soon start scheduling reunions in Chicago, since that's where all the graduates were living.
Reed took a left to cut through Leslie Milam's farm, aiming to cross over the dark, slow-moving Dougherty Bayou, full of crappie and bream the perfect size for a cast-iron skillet. That's when he heard the pickup truck. He turned and looked down the road and saw a two-tone Chevrolet kicking up dirt. A white cab with a green body. The truck turned directly in front of him. The driver pulled up to the long cypress barn. Four white men sat shoulder to shoulder in the cab. In the back, three Black men sat with a terrified Black child.
The child was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. He had two terrible hours left to live.
I first heard about the barn four years ago. An activist named Patrick Weems said we needed to take a drive through the Mississippi Delta during one of those endless days of the early pandemic. I’d been driving a lot during lockdown. My response to the world ending was to go home. I am from Clarksdale, Mississippi, one of those faded Delta farm towns built to support the sharecropper South that emerged in the decades after the Civil War. My family farms the same land we farmed in 1913, just twenty-three miles northwest of the barn Weems insisted I travel to see. I’d been almost completely separated from the agricultural part of my history as a child. My family’s farm had seemed like a past I wanted to leave behind. Then being back home in the stillness of the pandemic forced me to consider where and how I’d grown up. What I found as I drove was that all that running hadn’t really taken me anywhere at all. I remained a child of the Delta. I’d stop on the levee, a bandanna tight around my mouth and nose to keep out the trailing wake of dust, looking out at the land of my birth. I’d let the red dirt settle and I’d stare out at the endless, flat farms. This was some of the most fertile ground in the world-an alluvial plain and not an actual river delta-made rich by the nutrients deposited by a million years of flooding rivers. If you could fly into the air like one of the extinct songbirds that once called this land home, you could see fingers of water stretching out like a hand from the wide, violent Mississippi into the flatland, rivers like the Yazoo, Sunflower, and Tallahatchie, bayous like Dougherty and Hushpuckena and the Bogue Phalia. Black citizens called the Tallahatchie the Singing River because of all the lynching victims who’d been thrown into its dark water. Their souls sang out from the water, the wellspring of Black death and white wealth.
Farming at its essence is just the practice of getting water onto land and then getting it off again, and the eighteen-county teardrop of the Mississippi Delta did this as well as anywhere on earth. On the eastern boundary between the Hills and the flatland a series of reservoirs trapped the runoff water, and on the western edge levees kept the big river from flooding out crops and people. Humans had stopped the natural order of things, halting the patterns that created their fertile home, working with puritanical resolve to strip out the bounty that had taken a million years to create. Nothing about the physical appearance or ecosystem of the Delta carried any of the Creator's fingerprints. This land is man-made. Never once until learning about the barn had I considered the idea that removing God's dominion from his creation might also remove his protection, his grace, and his oversight, leaving this corner of the world undefended from the impulses and desires of man.
When I was growing up, the seasons still dominated life. Little towns came alive with planting and harvest festivals. The romantic smell of my childhood world is that sweet, decaying blanket of defoliant that settles on my hometown in the last days of summer. Little yellow airplanes streak across the sky with billowing clouds of poison spraying from nozzles underneath the wings. My mother walks into our front yard when picking season begins and breathes deeply. She's a child again and her father is coming home for dinner, the big midday meal, hanging his fedora by the front door and talking with pride about his stand of cotton. The house is alive with the shuffle of cards and the pop of grease and the understated Methodist prayers for themselves and their neighbors. Her dad got his ship shot out from beneath him in the Pacific Ocean and every morning when he drank his glass of cold milk he quietly went back to the rattling thirst he felt holding on to a piece of decking and looking into the blinding horizon for help. Every Sunday he'd take his family for a drive around the farm, steering his station wagon through the fields, proud about the lack of weeds around his cotton plants. My grandmother and mother loved to make fun of his meticulousness. He'd been a dentist before the war, and they joked that Doc McKenzie wanted more than anything to floss his rows.
I can draw from memory a detailed road map of the Delta. At Tutwiler, Highway 49 forks, the west route going near where Willie Reed walked in 1955 and the east route cutting down to Greenwood, where Reed was born. Highway 1 follows the river, through Gunnison, and runs parallel to Highway 61. Highway 61, where Bob Dylan sang about God wanting his killing done, connects Clarksdale and Cleveland. Little dying farm communities cling to the roadside between the two old railroad towns. Shelby, home of my family, where my grandparents are buried on the outskirts of town. Winstonville, where Ray Charles and B. B. King played to sharecropper crowds at the Harlem Inn, which fire took down to a grassy spot on the east side of the road. Mound Bayou, the famous all-Black town founded by freed enslaved people. And Merigold, ten miles west of the land Willie Reed and his family farmed. All of these places, and the history buried around them, aren't disparate dots on a map but part of a tapestry, woven together, so that the defining idea of the Delta is one of overlap, of echo, from the graves of bluesmen to the famous highways. Many times I've sketched these four mother roads on a bar napkin. Which is to say that the Delta is my home, my family's home, for generations now. I know it well, and I'd never heard about the barn until Patrick told me I needed to take a ride.
The barn where Emmett Till was murdered, he said, was just
some guy's barn, full of decorative Christmas angels and duck-hunting gear, sitting there in Sunflower County without a marker or any sort of memorial, hiding in plain sight, haunting the land. The current owner was a dentist. He grew up around the barn. When he bought it, he didn't know its history. Till's murder, such a brutal window into the truth of a place and its people, had been pushed almost completely from the local collective memory, not unlike the floodwaters kept at bay by carefully engineered reservoirs and levee walls.
Patrick Weems runs the Emmett Till Interpretative Center, or ETIC, in Sumner, Mississippi. His job is to make sure people never forget about Emmett Till’s murder. We set a time to spend a day following the Till trail that his organization was working to establish and protect; it is his goal to preserve all the places associated with Emmett’s murder, with the hope that these places might teach future generations to be better than their ancestors. Weems is skinny, with hair nearly to his shoulders and a dark sense of humor. A local Black political leader said he decided to trust Weems because only progressive white boys wore their hair like that. Patrick climbed into the passenger seat of my truck holding his breakfast: an ice-cold can of Coca-Cola.
We agreed to start in Money.
Money, Mississippi, was once home to the Money Planting Company, owned by Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch, whose grandsons now donate to Weems's ETIC, perhaps in hopes of settling some cosmic debt. Follow Grand Boulevard in Greenwood past all the cotton mansions, and cross over the Yalobusha River bridge, and the boulevard name changes to Money Road. That's where Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant and three days later got kidnapped and murdered by her husband and his brothers.
"I just can't imagine the dark of night being in the back of that truck," Weems says quietly. "He just turned fourteen."
Till's murder gave powerful fuel to the civil rights movement, and his symbolic importance has only grown in power. When Americans gather to protest racial violence, someone almost certainly will be carrying his picture, held high like a cross, no name needed. His innocent, hopeful face delivers the message. But the way Till exists in the firmament of American history stands in startling opposition to the gaps in what we know about his killing. No one knows how many people were involved. Most historians think at least six were present. There's a small orbit of researchers who have made this murder their life's work, filmmakers like Keith Beauchamp and Fatima Curry, authors like Devery Anderson and Chris Benson, retired law enforcement officers like Dale Killinger, journalists like Jerry Mitchell, academics like Dave Tell at Kansas and Davis Houck at Florida State. These folks mostly agree on all the details but argue over how many people were present at the barn. After four years of reporting, I think the number is probably eight.
Copyright © 2024 by Wright Thompson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
