Writing about the dead encounters both difficulties and advantages. On the one hand, certain questions will never be answered. On the other lies the freedom from fear of being sued for defamation, because the ability to sue for defamation ends at death.
It is with that freedom that Wright Thompson, a Clarksdale native, has written The Barn/ A Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. The book tells the story of the 1955 Emmett Till murder in a farm barn near Drew.
The book, a meditation that puts the Till story in its broadest context, meanders around that story. The book’s mystical incantations of the magic of Delta soil, though they have no scientific basis, are accurate representations of the minds of those who farm it.
Using a technique similar to that found in certain chapters of W.E.B. Dubois’ Souls of Black Folk, Thompson combines the history of a place, the story of an atrocity, and its sequels up to the present day, including the author’s personal experiences. The place is the six-square mile township in which the barn is located.
The book begins with the testimony of Willie Reed, an 18-year-old African American boy who, as he walked to town, heard the 14-year-old Till’s screams inside the barn where Till was being tortured and killed. We now know Till, a mischievous Chicago teenager visiting Delta relatives, had said something to the white woman at a store in Money that caused her to run outside to get a gun from her car. Then Till whistled at her as she went by. For that offense, white men, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, came to the house where Till was staying and took him away. After killing him in a barn rented by Milam’s brother Leslie, they dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River.
Acquitted after a trial in Sumner, the two sold their story to William Bradford Huie, who published it in Look magazine. The rule against double jeopardy prevented a second prosecution, but it did not prevent the social ostracism the two men received from their embarrassed white neighbors.
Thompson fills in the story with details that evidence his considerable research. During the Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest, later founder of the Ku Klux Klan, rode his cavalry through the township. Later, the Dockery Plantation there provided a birthplace for Delta blues music. Turning to the Till story, Thompson reports that a white farmer, Clint Shurden, drove Willie Reed to the trial and stayed with him to ensure his safety. The Sturdivant family, who owned the barn, stopped leasing to Leslie Milam. Today Walker Sturdivant plays a role in preserving the memory of Till’s sacrifice.
But there is more. Thompson identifies men he believes also participated in the murder, including Leslie Milam, Melvin Campbell, Too Tight Collins, Henry Lee Loggins and others. Thompson reports that William Bradford Huie knew about some of them, but kept them out of the story “for his protection” and so wrote a “phony history” that “let them get away with murder.” That is the “secret” in the book’s title.
But the “protection” Huie needed was obvious. Huie could name the men who sold their story. They had consented and could not sue for what he wrote. But if he had named anyone else in 1955, he would have left himself and his publisher open to a libel suit in a place where, as a practical matter, truth was not likely to be an available defense. It was name only the two, or not publish at all.
After all, in that era, any jury who accepted those blatant falsehoods would have had no trouble finding false an accusation against another person the district attorney had not even charged. The defense said the body pulled from the river with a family ring on the finger was not Till’s body at all. They said his mother was lying about that so she could collect life insurance and the NAACP had him hidden somewhere in Chicago. In that era, jury that accepted those falsehoods would have no trouble finding false an accusation against another person the district attorney had not even charged. Just a few years later, the New York Times published a civil rights advertisement and an Alabama jury gave $500,000 to a person who was not even named in the advertisement.
Thompson also asserts that this was not J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant’s first unpunished murder of an African American. The first one was never prosecuted. Their mistake this time was to choose as a victim someone from Chicago with a determined mother. That mother had connections to both the Chicago Defender newspaper and a powerful trade union. She refused to accept her son’s “disappearance” and, when his mutilated body was found, displayed it to thousands of mourners.
In the 1960s, some white college fraternity boys made up a song that mocked the civil rights movement: “We don’t smoke and we don’t cuss. We gonna ride at the front of the bus. We gonna ride at the front of the train, gonna prove Emmett Till didn’t die in vain.”
He didn’t.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
