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Author: Wright Thompson
ISBN No: 9781804952917
Review date: 22/06/2026
No of pages:
Publisher: Penguin
Publisher URL:
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/467703/the-barn-by-thompson-wright/9781529154702
Year of publication: 01/01/2024
Brief:
price
£12.99, paperback
The Barn by Wright Thompson tells the story of the murder of Emmett Till, a black boy, by white men in Mississippi in 1955.
The feat of the author is as much of editing as of creation, because he has set out how that single crime fits into American history, geography and culture. As for geography, he quotes (page 316) a civil rights era description of northwest Mississippi as โone of the most vicious areas of human intolerance and brutality on the face of the earthโ, suspicious of strangers. The extreme sense of place that Thompson evokes is reminiscent of another great work by an American, Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean. Thompsonโs achievement is as the same time to investigate a covered-up crime, and to make that event stand for so much more (the UK sub-title, different from the US one, includes ‘the Cradle of American Racism’): a former culture, a โdominantโ culture (page 358) that touches on so much and so many โ President Lyndon Johnson, famous musicians.
Like the Hillsborough disaster in Sheffield, the wrong-doing extends beyond the original event to the โerasing over the yearsโ of evidence โ in Hillsboroughโs case the CCTV tape disappeared, in The Barn the only copy of the trial transcript. The erasing was โblunt and brutally effectiveโ (page 321). The standard account of Tillโs killing is wrong, as Thompson patiently shows. In August 1955, after the two men charged with the murder were acquitted by an all-white jury, they gave a false confession to a journalist (remarkable, that they wanted to tell their story, to further intimidate others). Partly for that reason, Thompson points out how โresponsibility for the status quo falls on the heads of every single person living benefiting from the status quo,โ by implication including the author, born in 1976, who grew up in the Mississippi delta, relatively near (in American terms) where Tillโs murder happened, in a barn.
The murder happened during the โformal Jim Crow caste systemโ that legally broke down in the 1960s, although Thompson sets out how schools (like the one he went to) amounted to โa parallel school system in the Delta, a constellation of segregation academiesโ. What put an end to such segregation was economics, whether due to changes in markets and land-owning, or flight from the land.
Thompson takes the story to the present; the era of the George Floyd killing, and of the pulling down (or defence of) statues of Confederate generals. As one of the many interviewed by Thompson says: โAt some point we keep wallowing in the past, or we just get past the past.โ The book closes with an acknowledgement of the site of Tillโs death, โa complicated site for historians to interpret or figure out an appropriate way to visitโ.
In one of the most powerful passages of the book, a preacher outside the barn has those gathered call Emmett Tillโs name. Not quite at the end, Thompson is at the White House, where President Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris take part in a ceremony with Tillโs cousin. Till โdied alone in a barn in the absolute middle of nowhere, a godless place where his cries for his mother went unheeded, in a man-made landscape of profit margins and control, and for decades his name got whispered as a kind of code, pushed aside for those who couldnโt stand the mirror his body held upโ. While going into as much detail as he could about the murder, Thompson showed also the need for honesty and accepting of the truth, rather than silence about โthe story of the barnโ, now designated a national monument. Thompsonโs book (and others that he acknowledges) are therefore both the telling of the story and a civic contribution in the continuing story of America in general and its South in particular.
