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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
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True crime

THE BARN

Wright Thompson

The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

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.

Wright Thompson's family farm in Mississippi is 23 miles from the site of one of the most notorious and consequential killings in American history, yet he had to leave the state for college before he learned the first thing about it. To this day, fundamental truths about the crime are widely 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 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. After their inevitable acquittal in a mockery of justice, they gave a false confession to a journalist, which was misleading 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 six-square-mile grid whose official name is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, fabled in the Delta of myth as 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; Till's mother Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to keep the casket open seared the crime indelibly into American consciousness. Wright Thompson has a deep understanding of this storythe world of the families of both Emmett Till and his killers, and all the forces that aligned to place them together on that spot on the map. As he shows, the full horror of the crime was its inevitability, and how much about it we still need to understand. Ultimately this is a story about property, and money, and power, about white supremacy. It implicates all of us. In The Barn, Thompson meets the few people who have been engaged in the hard, fearful business of bringing the truth to light, people like Wheeler Parker, Emmett Till's friend, who came down from Chicago with him that summer, and is the last person alive to know him well. Wheeler Parker's journey to put the killing floor of the barn on the map of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, and the Delta, and America, is a journey we all need to go on if this country is to heal from its 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.

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Book Published 2024-09-01 by Penguin Press

Comments

In 'The Barn,' Wright Thompson fixes his gaze, and ours, on the place Emmett Till was murdered Read more...

An extraordinary new history of Emmett Till, Mississippi and America Wright Thompson's deep meditation on the notorious murder in his home state revolves around an artifact hiding in plain sight: the barn where Till was killed. Read more...

With integrity, and soul, Thompson unearths the terrible how and why, carrying us back and forth through time, deep in Mississippibaring, sweat, soil, and heart all the way through.

The Barn is the perfect combination of suspense, history, and truth. Within these pages, readers will journey alongside Thompson as he unearths the chilling details of the murder of Emmett Till. Through meticulous research and a gripping narrative, Thompson reckons with the complexities surrounding this case and the systemic corruption that relentlessly works to bury the truth.

Thompson . . . has written a gut-punch of a book about the murder of Emmett Till and the place where it happened. Foregoing the harrowing photos that emphasize Till's martyrdom, Thompson dives instead into family trees, court transcripts, witness memoirs and more to unearth the enormous human tragedy we forget at our peril: 'Hate grows stronger and resistant,' he reminds us, 'when it's pushed underground.

UK: Hutchinson Heinemann/PRH UK ; Italian: Mondadori

Pappyland, showed the author's talent for threading culture, history and industry together with vividly drawn portraits of a family. His new history, The Barn, takes a similar tack as Thompson investigates a crime we may think we understand: the murder of Emmett Till. Thompson grew up just miles away from where the Black child was murdered in the Mississippi Delta, and his inquiry digs up truths long concealed and cover-ups still ongoing.

Crucial facts about this historic injustice are still coming to light, many of which are gathered in Wright Thompson's gripping, thoroughly researched account of the night Till was murderedin a barn just over 20 miles from Thompson's family farmand the cover up that followed (and continues to this day). An important addition to the historical record.

Carefully weighing each word as though it's being set on the scales of justice, Thompson presents a deeply felt and vitally written history of conscience with infinite consequence.

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

Geography, wrote Ralph Ellison, is fatean 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 inevitabilitythe consequences of material greed and cruel disregardinto 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 writesand we dointo 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.

The secrets of what happened in The Barn in 1955 when a boy named Emmett Till was murdered have been buried for decades. The killers were never brought to justice and their allies covered up for them. With a passion for truth and justice, and a fierce determination to dig for the secrets, Wright Thompson has produced an incredible history of a crime that changed America.

Reporting and reckoning can get no better, or more important, than this.