28-01-2025
My pick for Mississippi book of the year. Here is why
These general interest columns are essentially reactions to news events, which is standard operating procedure in the industry for this work. I haven't written about many books over time.
It's hard not to have something to say, however, about Mississippi's book of the year — perhaps the book of the year nationally, one that's a projected winner of multi publishing industry honors for 2024.
That's "The Barn: The Secret History Of A Murder In Mississippi," of course.
What other book could it be? There's simply not another.
Clarksdale-native Wright Thompson is the author of this crown jewel that profoundly explores the nightmarish murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till in 1955 in rural Mississippi Delta environs.
The author is a senior writer for the ESPN television network. He's also a producer on the "True South" show on the SEC Network. He's the one with that deeply Southern and gravelly, educated voice working alongside the Georgia-bred, sophisticated host, the James Beard-winning food writer John T. Edge.
'Barn' brings full bore public notice to a structure in Sunflower County in which young Till was murdered after an alleged incident at a country store in the hamlet of Money in Leflore County.
It's well established that Roy Bryant, whose wife, Carolyn, was Till's supposed whistling target in the store, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, led a gang of vigilantes who later snatched Till from a cousin's home and took him for retribution to the barn in question before dumping his savagely torn body into the nearby Tallahatchie River.
'The blood on the floor of the barn was covered in cottonseed, soaking up the proof,' Thompson wrote, chillingly.
Bryant and Milam were acquitted of the murder in a farcical trial held in the Tallahatchie County courthouse in Sumner, transformed in 2012 into the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and now linked to a new federal monument dedicated to Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley.
Till's murder is widely recognized as a major impetus of the campaign for human and voting rights that soon thereafter burst wide open across the South.
Said Thompson: 'Till's murder gave powerful fuel to the Civil Rights Movement in 1955, and his symbolic importance has only grown since. When Americans gather to protest racial violence, someone almost certainly carries his picture, held high like a cross, no name needed. His hopeful, innocent face delivers the message…'
The writer's storytelling of a teenager's murder over basically nothing is phenomenal in scope, Herculean in effort and perpetual in certitude. His weaving together of the rascals involved in this lawlessness with others on its perimeter (there's plenty of them) and his portraiture of the times accurately reflect 1950s Mississippi.
Gloria C. Armstrong returned home to run the We2gether Creating Change nonprofit in Drew and was elected District 5 supervisor of Sunflower County. Her parents, Matthew and Mae Bertha Carter, led the family's integration of the Drew public schools in 1965.
Armstrong asks a question through Thompson that will hit readers in different ways, depending on whether one is commiserative toward Till and his family or whether they remain defiant-to-change and have wearied of hearing of the murder over the almost 70 years since.
'Why bring it up?'
And, indeed, 'Why did it happen to him?' Thompson wrote. 'Which is a way of asking, 'Why did a bright, hopeful child get murdered for whistling in 1955. What about the intersection of Emmett and the Mississippi Delta at that specific time led to his death?' The attitudes and intentions are why we bring it up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.'
— Mac Gordon, a native of McComb, is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon@
This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: My pick for Mississippi book of the year
