Book excerpt: “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi” by Wright Thompson
Random House
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Author Wright Thompson’s New York Times bestseller, “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi” (Random House), explores the culture of silence that enveloped the Mississippi Delta over the 1955 murder of Emmett Till.
Read an excerpt below, and don’t miss Jim Axelrod’s interview with Wright Thompson on “CBS Sunday Morning” December 1!
“The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi” by Wright Thompson
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One afternoon Stafford Shurden took me through his family’s land. A Taurus semiautomatic pistol rested casually on his console. His family footprint once stretched to the gates of Parchman, the infamous Gothic prison farm that serves as the Mississippi State Penitentiary, one of the worst and most feared prisons in the country. The front gate is twelve miles north of the barn.
At the end of the drive we stopped at his family’s old farm office, which would have been buzzing with people back when the Shurdens ran this little corner of the world. Now it’s empty. He found a key on a big ring and opened the door.
We stepped into the dark, silent room. The first thing Stafford did was go sit in his father’s old desk chair made out of a green bucket seat from an old classic Thunderbird. He hoped the old man would be proud of him. A painting showed Black cotton pickers moving through a field with their long bags, with the Shurden Farms logo on the trailers parked around them. Stafford sighed.
“Tell me this ain’t the most racist s**t you’ve ever seen,” he said.
There was a walk‑in safe and a poster on the wall: Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle—when the sun comes up, you’ d better be running.
There was an oil painting of a stern old woman.
“That’s Grandma Shurden,” Stafford told me. “She had eighteen kids.”
A family crest, commissioned by Otha Shurden in 1969, has soybeans, cotton, and catfish on it. Grandma Shurden was Clint’s mom, too. In a little side office was a huge map of their part of Sunflower County. It documented who owned every piece of land, divided into squares and rectangles and trapezoids, into little homesteads and big plantations. I looked down at the corner and saw the date: “Jan 1, 1956.”
This was the first county land map made after the murder. I ran my finger along the sides of the map and found the barn: Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. Familiar names claimed plots all around the old Milam farm. Smaller pieces of land were marked only by initials. I found the Dougherty Bayou and all the nearby farms and then the barn. It was the only piece of dirt on the map without a name.
Thomas Jefferson wrote a law that would pass Congress as the Land Ordinance of 1785. His goal was simple. He wanted the empty open space of his new country to be broken into small blocks and sold to yeoman farmers—small, entirely independent (white) landowners—and so he took a system invented by a military engineer named Thomas Hutchins and codified it into law. Many ancient cultures were built around the idea of shared land. America was built around the idea of owning parceled land. That foundational urge was born in the moment when Jefferson put pen to page. Yeomen weren’t plantation lords like Jefferson and they weren’t poor white trash. To Jefferson their protection and elevation in American life was the hill upon which this new nation would live or die. The first draft of the bill broke the country into ten‑mile‑by‑ten‑mile squares called hundreds, while a second reduced them to seven‑mile‑by‑seven‑mile squares called townships. On May 3, 1785, William Grayson of Virginia made a motion to change the seven to a six and James Monroe seconded the motion. They would send surveyors out into every bit of new territory America amassed—starting with the land won from the English in the Revolutionary War—and divide it into thirty‑six‑square‑mile blocks, which would be divided into thirty‑six smaller squares named sections. Each section was 640 acres, or one square mile, and the sale of all this public land would pay down the war debt of the new nation, which hadn’t yet been able to agree on a way to raise money through taxes. A permanent grid appeared overnight.
A central American conflict was baked into this first drawing of the new nation. Jefferson wanted the land to be settled by yeomen. But the price for the newly available land was simply too high for most farmers to pay. In the decades that followed, Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party and Jefferson’s Republican Party fought over this issue. From John Adams through Jefferson and into Madison and Monroe, the minimum purchase amount (and the price) rose and fell depending on whether those in power wanted to help capitalist landowners or small, independent farmers. The Land Law of 1800 reduced the minimum purchase to 320 acres, which was cut to 160, then again to 80, and finally, in 1832, to 40 acres. The base price was about a dollar an acre. This fight between capitalized investors and small farmers dominated the politics of the new nation and would play out brutally on the land surrounding Drew, Mississippi.
The barn sits on the southwest quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. That’s its exact legal location on Jefferson’s grid: a square mile per section, thirty‑six sections per township, over and over again across the new nation. The thirty‑six square miles of Township 22 North, Range 4 West, have borne witness to the birth of the blues at the nearby Dockery Plantation, to the struggle of Fannie Lou Hamer, to the machinations of a founding family of the Klan, and to the death of Emmett Till.
To get to Dockery, take a right out of Jeff Andrews’s driveway, take another right on Ralph Ray Road toward the Bolivar County line, and then turn left on Dockery Road. Dockery Farms has been called the birthplace of the Delta blues by B. B. King and many others. It’s not an accident then that this land fueled the first protest music. The blues came from the land around the barn. From Charley Patton, the Black grandson of a white man. Patton’s music flowed from a place of rage about how he lived a small, threatened life because his grandmother was Black — “skin the color of rape,” the poet Caroline Randall Williams wrote. He became the first blues star, the man who taught Son House, who taught Robert Johnson, who taught Muddy Waters, who hailed from the same Delta town as Sam Cooke and Nate Dogg, all these genres making the same protest music against the same forces as Patton—Delta blues or G‑funk, Muddy and “I’m a full‑grown man” or Sam’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” or Ice Cube and “F**k tha Police.” Eazy‑E’s grandparents ran a grocery store sixteen blocks up Broadway in Greenville from the house where J.W. Milam lived when he died.
The Dockery family still owns their plantation. Now the granddaughters of the founder control the business. One of them, a distinguished elderly woman named Douglas Dockery Thomas, agreed to meet me in her New York apartment. Her building is on the Upper East Side, overlooking the Metropolitan Museum and Central Park. She’s on the board at the Metropolitan Opera and is one of the central patrons of the Met. The doorman was expecting me. The elevator opened directly into her apartment, which covered an entire floor, easily more than four thousand square feet.
She led me into a formal parlor with a piano under tall ceilings and crown molding. I looked down at the museum and the yellow cabs on Fifth Avenue. Hers is some of the most expensive residential real estate in the world. The final vapors of the Gilded Age moved through the empty rooms in a world where history stopped in 1929, or maybe 1955. Nothing we talk about can be on the record, she says. The family remains very private. Her son, I’ve read, is an incredibly successful venture capitalist, the money behind Venmo and BuzzFeed, among others. We talked about Mississippi. Our families knew each other. On a side table was a picture of her with King Charles III when he was Prince of Wales. I noticed her sharp cheekbones and delicate wrists. She loves the opera but also loves the blues and has set up Dockery as a living museum to honor her parents, Joe Rice and Keith, and the music that came to life on the family farm. Her mother especially seemed to understand that the line all white southerners need to see or be shown wasn’t between good and bad, but between cowardly and brave.
“If I had not been married to Joe,” Keith said, “I might have been out on the streets marching with the protestors. But I was, and I didn’t.”
Willie Reed stepped out of his family home for the last time on a Friday night. He moved alone into the darkness. He had been told the plan and followed it carefully. Lots of people wanted him dead. He’d dared to accuse a white man of murder. In his arms he carried a coat and an extra pair of pants. Everything else he left behind. No account survives of the feelings in that dark house, the sorrow and fear, the words spoken and unspoken. It must have felt like a scene from a different time, a man forced into exile, facing a kind of ancient judgment surely not possible in 1955. The history books say he walked six miles in the dark. Nobody knows for sure which direction but when you look at the map, and understand who lived in the houses lining the roads, there’s only one route he could have taken: down the Drew‑Cleveland Road, now the Drew‑Ruleville Road, skirting the edge of Dockery Farms.
I’ve driven that road at night, in a big, modern Chevrolet four‑ wheel‑drive, with my armor of white skin, with a .40‑caliber semi‑ automatic pistol in the glove box, and even then it’s spooky. The darkness of rural Mississippi remains a physical thing, heavy and alive, a sonic experience, too, loud with bugs and birds. There is no safety outside the civilization of headlights. If someone wanted to kill you, there would be nobody to hear you scream. If someone approached, there would be no place to hide. This road was by far Reed’s safest option, lined with poor Black families. He only had two other options to escape. The first, the Drew‑Merigold Road, would have taken him through the only real community of small, poor, white farmers in the Delta. That was suicide. He could have run into the town of Drew. Also suicide. That left Ruleville, which is 6.6 miles from his house and still risky. One of the policemen in the city of Ruleville was J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant’s brother. Reed likely passed his girlfriend Ella Mae Stubbs’s home. He didn’t have time to tell her goodbye.
A car waited in the dark at the end of the road. The driver took Reed north on Highway 61 through Cleveland and Merigold, finally reaching Mound Bayou and safety. Another car awaited him there. The man behind the steering wheel was Medgar Evers. The other passenger was Congressman Diggs. The three men drove north in Evers’s Oldsmobile 88 with a big‑block V‑8, which he had bought specifically to outrun the white terrorists who’d follow and chase him through the backroads of the rural state. His speedometer glowed red whenever he got over sixty miles an hour, which he did as the three men roared toward Memphis Airport. When they arrived, Diggs and Reed went inside the terminal. They probably took the 10:00 a.m. Delta‑C&S 686 from Memphis to Chicago, with a stop in Saint Louis, each leg exactly an hour and nine minutes. That’s three hours with the layover to try to imagine what awaited them when the plane touched down. In Chicago, Diggs took Willie to Congressman William Dawson’s office. Dawson had represented the South Side of Chicago since 1943. An uncle met him up there. Two strangers approached them.
“Willie?” “Willie Reed?”
Both Reed and his uncle felt terror. He’d already been found. The fear eased when the men introduced themselves as Chicago police officers. They’d been assigned to make sure Reed was safe in his new home. Reed struggled to focus as his uncle took him to his mother’s walk‑up apartment at 2103 South Michigan, two blocks from what is now the Marriott Marquis, across the street from the Chess Records studio where the Rolling Stones would one day visit and find their hero Muddy Waters painting the walls of the lobby.
Reporters met Reed there in the first hours of his exile. “Everybody is scared,” he told them. “Why? What did we do?” They asked him about the world he’d left behind.
“I feel kind of lonely for Ella Mae,” he said.
The next morning charitable strangers offered to write blank checks to bring Ella Mae Stubbs to Chicago. Mississippi reporters went out to the Clark Plantation and found her father, Ernest Stubbs, and asked his opinion. He said his daughter barely knew Willie Reed and that his family was perfectly happy in Mississippi.
Willie Reed never saw Ella Mae Stubbs again.
A Jackson Daily News reporter, Bill Spell, flew up to Chicago in a state‑owned airplane to “interview” him. The whole point was to let Willie know that Mississippi could reach him anytime it wanted. Spell would confess later in life that Senator Eastland’s office was actively digging up dirt on the Till family and actually delivering prewritten hatchet jobs to the Jackson paper where he worked. The reporter, a member of the National Guard, got his commanding officer to approve a military flight to Chicago. Spell found Reed in Michael Reese Hospital, located in Bronzeville on the South Side, with what best can be described as a nervous breakdown. His room was in between the train station where Emmett’s body would arrive and the little piece of sidewalk where Sonny Boy Williamson got murdered as he walked home from a gig. A month later, Reed swallowed his fear and returned to Mississippi to testify in Leflore County as a grand jury debated indicting Milam and Bryant for kidnapping. He told his story and flew back to Chicago. The grand jury declined to bring charges, just as the jury in Sumner had acquitted Milam and Bryant, and with that the legal proceedings in the case of Emmett Till ended.
Reed changed his name to Willie Louis soon after. That had been his father’s last name and he wanted to be anonymous again. Every day he went to work as a surgical technician in a South Side hospital, located between Michelle Obama’s childhood home and the house of poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Mamie Till-Mobley, Simeon Wright, and Wheeler Parker all lost touch with him and thought he’d been killed. Willie Louis vanished into working-class Chicago. He would go many years before telling another person about what he’d heard that morning inside Leslie Milam’s barn.
From “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi” by Wright Thompson. Copyright © 2024 by Wright Thompson. Published by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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