Two Fundamental Questions: A Guest Post by Wright Thompson
The story of Emmett Till is one of the most tragic in American history, and never before has it been examined like this. Bestselling author Wright Thompson returns to his roots in the Mississippi Delta and uncovers new details and participants in Till’s murder — and the ongoing conspiracy to conceal the truth, nearly seventy years later.
Hear more from Wright Thompson on our Poured Over podcast.
Hardcover $35.00
The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi
In Stock Online
Hardcover $35.00
A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long.
A shocking and revelatory account of the murder of Emmett Till that lays bare how forces from around the world converged on the Mississippi Delta in the long lead-up to the crime, and how the truth was erased for so long.
My name is Wright Thompson and I’m the author of The Barn. During the pandemic, stuck back in the Mississippi Delta where I grew up, I began wrestling with two fundamental questions. One, an obsession with the hidden history of the barn where Emmett Till was murdered, and two, a desire to unpack why I didn’t know about the barn, why nobody seemed to know about it, and why I hadn’t heard the story of Till’s murder until I left the state for college. Those questions drove this quest and the answers, it turned out, lay in a deep history of the dirt itself. The 36 square miles of land around the barn — Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw meridian, part of the American grid system that drove so much violence and profit — served as a microcosm for the whole history of our country, and indeed even of capitalism. I found out about the barn by accident, but once I found out about it, it fundamentally changed the way I saw the place I knew best in the world. Because you have to understand: Mississippi is covered in old and collapsed barns and once you know this history, there is only one question a reasonable person can ask after seeing each one of these barns: I wonder what terrible thing happened inside that place that nobody knows about. That question haunted me — and maybe it will haunt you now, too — and it compelled me to write this story. Most books either go wide or deep and because of my two driving questions, I felt like this book had to do both. The Barn is intended to be an antidote to the erasure that defined my childhood and young adulthood. It is a reckoning, with myself, my home, my country. It is the story of one barn, and therefore all the barns, about one act of violence, and therefore about all the violence, about how I was taught to love the same ground that Emmett Till’s family was taught to fear.