Kyle Kellams: Let's begin the show with author Wright Thompson. He's a senior writer for ESPN, and he's the author of the books The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business; Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last; and his latest book about the murder of Emmett Till, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
He is one of the authors who will be speaking at the Six Bridges Book Festival, hosted by the Central Arkansas Library System. He'll be at Ron Robinson Theater in Little Rock Thursday night beginning at 7:30 p.m.
Thompson is a native Mississippian, and he says while he knew about the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, he didn't know many of the details surrounding the murder, including the structure in the title of his book.
Wright Thompson: You know, this is the barn where Emmett Till was murdered. That, for a variety of reasons, was written out of the story for 70 years. And, I mean, we all live in the South. We see lots of barns. I don't ever drive by a barn now where I don't wonder what happened in there that I don't know about.
Kellams: How did you begin to develop a knowledge about the barn?
Thompson: It was early pandemic and I was working on a story for ESPN, which is my day job, about the Los Angeles Lakers. And I ended up really digging into Avery Bradley, who was on that team. And he is from Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and one of the witnesses in the Till murder was a woman named Amanda Bradley. So in trying to find out if they were related—and they're not—I ended up talking to a bunch of Emmett Till scholars, and one of them said, have you ever been to the barn? And I said, what barn?
Kellams: It should be noted that when you open up The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, one of the first few pages we see family trees. Why was it important to put those in?
Thompson: To understand that how everyone arrived in that barn that night was not an accident and wasn't random. It's that through social and socioeconomic and political forces, these two tribes of people—and, in fact, these two families—had been set on a collision course with each other. And that's one of the things The Barn tries to unpack: the deep history of the land where the murder happened and all of the people involved on both sides of it. Because where those three through lines intersect, you start to get into really interesting places and ideas about American history.
Kellams: Obviously, we know that the murder of Emmett Till was a series of incidents, from the whistle to the murder itself. And I think, as can happen with history, we tend to think of it in this little condensed period of time. But as you so eloquently write in The Barn, this is something that stretches across a long amount of time. Was that important for you to convey?
Thompson: The only useful history is deep history to me. When I say learn from the past, they don't mean learning about specific incidents. I think they mean learn how things accrue and stack on each other and look for the patterns. And so it was very important to me for this to all sit on a pedestal of deep, deep history. Because when you start to see the long arc of history, you understand that things that we see on our television or in our newspaper as breaking news are often dozens, even hundreds of years in the making.
Kellams: What kind of pressure does that put on you when you're writing The Barn to want to get as much of that context from 1955 and before into the book?
Thompson: I don't think there was a lot of pressure. It required a lot of cutting. It's hard to know at the beginning what is and isn't load-bearing. The first draft of the book was 280, 290,000 words, and it ran at 107,000. I cut a book and a half. A lot of it was trying to figure out what is necessary and what is a tangent. That's the million-dollar question with something like this.
Kellams: The details in this book from incidents that happened 70 years ago are immense. What was your discipline to get the details from the morning of the murder to the trial?
Thompson: Asking questions and reading. There's no magic to it. It's just somebody said one time that Zen is a butt in a seat. So you just sort of do it.
Kellams: We begin the book meeting Willie Reed, which was a name that I was not familiar with. How did you decide that's how The Barn would start?
Thompson: I think he's one of the real unknown heroes of this. The book tells not just the story of the murder, but the story of the place where the murder happened, which is Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw meridian in the Mississippi Delta. Willie Reed is the only reason we know that's where the murder happened. He lived in that square of land. This crime is connected with that square of land. It felt like a logical place to start.
Kellams: You are a native Mississippian.
Thompson: Yes, sir.
Kellams: I wonder how important it is that a native Mississippian wrote this book?
Thompson: It's certainly a different book if somebody not from Mississippi writes it. For a variety of reasons. One, you have to be plugged into that world to get people talking about it. That certainly helped. The book is clearly written at the intersection of love and hate. That's part of why that's important.
Kellams: The second part of the title of the book, The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. In this book, we find out things that I did not know, and I think a lot of other people didn’t. Did you find, as you were interviewing people and researching, that there were a lot of people, even in Mississippi, who didn't know many of the details about the murder and the subsequent events?
Thompson: I think very few of us have been taught our own history. There have been books written about the textbook wars in Mississippi. The state has long engaged in the political editing of history curriculums. One of the reasons people in Mississippi and in the Deep South—sort of the white establishment—push back so hard against what they would call critical race theory or the teaching of a certain kind of Black history is deeply rooted in the fact that they are hyper-aware of the power of that, since they've been doing it to other people for generations. Only someone who understands the real power and danger to an establishment of accurate history would be scared of it.
Kellams: Is Mississippi, is the South held back from progressing by not addressing it?
Thompson: I think there are a wide range of opinions about that across the political spectrum, all of them valid. I don't know. What I might call progressing, other people might disagree with and vice versa. It's important that if you're going to live in the South, you have to be cool with your neighbors’ opinions that are different than yours. I do think the South would be very different if that history were taught. I don't think Mississippi would be nearly as poor. Every time I drive through the South Side of Chicago, which is miles of manicured, middle-class bungalows, many of them owned by Black ex-pats of the Mississippi Delta, I often think how nice it would be to have all of that capital in Clarksdale or Greenville or Shelby.
Kellams: And I think the same can be said of much of Arkansas as well.
Thompson: Go to Lake Village. I love Lake Village, I love Rodes, I love Cowboy Steakhouse in Lake Village, but Lake Village looks like a bomb went off. And it did. The global river of capital flowed through there and then no longer needed that place or those people to make its 10%, and then just left that place and those people behind to figure it out.
Kellams: You write something in the book that resonated. You're talking about the landscape of Mississippi and how it's been manipulated so cotton can grow and the river's been changed. And you write, “Removing God's dominion might also remove his protection.” I really liked that line. Do you remember writing that?
Thompson: I remember thinking it for sure. So much of life in the South feels rooted to me in that line of the Episcopal liturgies: “We do this in remembrance of you.” And so it certainly begs the question, if you remove God from the land, where else do you remove God from?
Kellams: I know deadlines are pivotal in completing a project, but how did you know you had to cut the book in half? We're talking about something 70 years ago. How did you know when it was ready for our readership?
Thompson: At some point, it's just due. I don't think they're ever done. When you read about authors who spend 10 and 12 years working on a book, usually it's people who are following up some enormous success, and that success has bought them the freedom to indulge their own insanity. So at some point, it's good for the adults in the room to come get the book. My agent is David Black, and my editor is Scott Moyers. At some point, they have to come get the book or I'd still be doing this.
Kellams: Finally, I hope this isn't a trick question, but do you think writing this book and seeing it on the shelves has changed you as either a writer or a person?
Thompson: I certainly was glad to have been able to handle the moment. The story arrived and I was able to do it. I'm proud of that. I certainly see Mississippi differently because I really know the history in a way that very few people actually do. The more history you know, the more that changes the fundamental reality of the present. It's that Gabriel García Márquez thing where it's raining flowers in Macondo. I think that's just institutional memory and knowledge of a place that allow you to see through the matrix. That's important in Mississippi, especially. When you know the history, you process what you see in front of you differently, if that makes any sense.
Kellams: It makes perfect sense. The name of the book is The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi, now also in paperback. Wright Thompson will be at the Six Bridges Book Festival in Little Rock on Thursday, Oct. 2, at 7:30 p.m. Wright Thompson, thank you so much for your time.
Thompson: It was really great. I really appreciate the questions.
Kellams: Wright Thompson will be speaking at the Six Bridges Book Festival Thursday night at the Ron Robinson Theater, beginning at 7:30. The Six Bridges Book Festival is hosted by the Central Arkansas Library System. You can learn more about all of the authors scheduled to appear at the festival. Our conversation took place last week.
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