Join acclaimed journalist and author Wright Thompson as he sits down with Southern Living’s Sid Evan’s to discuss his latest book, 'The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.' A Mississippi native, Wright unpacks the long-hidden truths surrounding the Emmett Till case, the deep ties between the Mississippi Delta and Chicago, and the powerful journey of Till’s cousin, Wheeler Parker.
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00:00Wright Thompson, welcome to Biscuits and Jam.
00:02Thank you very, very much.
00:04Where am I reaching you?
00:06I'm in my office outside of Oxford, Mississippi, out by the Little John's gas station.
00:14They have a really good meat and three lunch.
00:18Which comes in handy?
00:19Yeah, it really does.
00:20I eat it way more than I should.
00:23I know you're not actually home all that much.
00:25You're on the road so much with True South and lately with the book.
00:31So it must be nice to have a few days in Oxford.
00:34It's really nice.
00:35And, you know, we're about to get back out with season eight of True South.
00:39We have got a trip coming up and looking at my calendar soon.
00:44And so we're ready to get back out season eight, which is sort of hard to believe.
00:49But that's going really, really well.
00:50Well, I had John T. on this podcast and we talked about True South a bit.
00:55And I don't know if we're going to have time to talk about it today, but it's a great show.
01:00And I love what y'all are doing, getting out and telling so many cool stories about the South that really nobody else is telling.
01:09Yeah, he's fabulous.
01:11So I'm happy to ride on his coattails.
01:13Well, right.
01:13I really I've got to start out by just saying congrats on the new book.
01:19It is just incredible.
01:21It's called The Barn, The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.
01:25I've got it right here.
01:28And it's really one of the most powerful things that I've read in a long time.
01:34And I don't interview authors very often.
01:38There are a lot of musicians and chefs on this podcast.
01:44But I genuinely think that this is a book that every Southerner should read, really every American should read.
01:52So I wanted to talk to you about it.
01:54And I appreciate you being here.
01:56I really appreciate it.
01:57I mean, I think, you know, there the book is the same, but it's really sort of four different books.
02:02One, if you're from the Mississippi Delta, two, if you're from the South, and then three, if you're American.
02:09So I guess three different books, depending.
02:12And so, like, yeah, I was very happy to that it moved you and that, like, that connected with you.
02:19Because that's the sort of, you know, I love the Rick Rubin thing that all the first thing all art must do is divide the audience.
02:25And so you never know, you know, like the idea that you make something that speaks to you and hope it speaks to someone else and put it out in the world.
02:34So anyway, I'm just tickled to death that it resonated with you.
02:40Well, you know, I grew up in Memphis and I spent a lot of time in the Delta.
02:46And I've got family down there.
02:48So it was, you know, it's very, very close to home.
02:52You know, Memphis is the capital city of the Delta.
02:54So in some ways you grew up in the Delta.
02:57You know, there's Andrea Robinson, the Georgetown professor and writer, says you can't see Memphis without seeing the rural, urban interplay of Memphis and Mississippi.
03:08And I thought that was really smart.
03:10Yeah. Yeah. Very true.
03:12Well, speaking of Mississippi, right, I want to just hear a little bit about where you grew up.
03:19You grew up in Clarksdale.
03:21Tell me a little bit about the house that you grew up in.
03:26Oh, man, I grew up.
03:28It was a great house.
03:30Old house upstairs.
03:32There were bullet holes in two of the doors.
03:34And we always heard a bunch of different stories about what had gone down.
03:38It's the old Carr and Fitzgerald house.
03:42So we were the third owners.
03:43And it's, you know, it's just this really old house sitting on what used to be the Sunflower River.
03:51You know, it's this massive primordial backyard that I mean, backyard's not the right thing.
03:57I mean, it was, you know, a lot of woods.
04:00Just woods.
04:01Yeah.
04:01Out behind the house.
04:03My dad got Mike Sanders, who was one of the big contractors in Clarksdale, to build me the world's greatest tree house.
04:11It was just magic.
04:13You know, I had great friends in the neighborhood, rode our bikes everywhere.
04:18I don't know.
04:19It was really interesting.
04:20I grew up in the next to the Clark family.
04:24And so the guy who built that house was John Clark, who founded Clarksdale.
04:28And his daughter was Blanche Clark.
04:31And Tennessee Williams grew up in my neighborhood.
04:33And she's Blanche.
04:36And like, so that was like, you know, it was interesting that all those people in his books were real people in that neighborhood that growing up, everyone I knew still remembered.
04:46I mean, one of the crazy things about this book for me was just, you know, reading about all the people that came out of the Delta, all the, you know, just this little, really, it's not that big of an area.
05:06Just produced, you know, all kinds of people that were so significant in the history of the country.
05:16One of the things is that the book has a lot of moving parts because it was important to me to tell the story in such a way that it got to a couple of the central ideas that I felt just explained where I'm from to me.
05:33I wanted it to be a book that got at the idea that in this place, this 18-county teardrop of land, time didn't function the same way that it functioned in other places.
05:48And so, you know, the, I mean, that was just very important that like, you know, the first draft of this book was 287,000 words.
05:58And it ran at 107.
06:00And the trick of the cut was I had to be able to, anybody can open it up anywhere and point at it.
06:09And I had to be able to see the barn from there.
06:12I mean, it wasn't always important that the reader could, but I had to know.
06:17And so like everything that didn't do that had to go.
06:20And everything that stayed to me felt load bearing.
06:22You know, I felt like writing about nature and writing about music is where the spiritual heart and the emotional nut graphs of the book live.
06:32And so like, I felt like those were the spaces where all of these disparate things ended up speaking to each other.
06:41And those were the languages in which they spoke.
06:44And so I felt those threads were like really important to the central goal of the project.
06:51So, yeah, I mean, it was really important.
06:54I've read a lot about the Mississippi Delta and I don't want to speak ill of these books, but like some of these really famous books I would read and just feel nothing.
07:03I was like, you know, my first thought was like, have you ever been here?
07:07And so like I wanted to get that right, the feeling of it right.
07:12Well, geography is a really important part of this book and there are layers and layers that you kind of peel back about how the Delta came to be.
07:29And really, it sort of zeroes in on this piece of land that you call Township 22 North Range 4 West.
07:42Is that right?
07:43That's right.
07:43And, you know, I think, you know, one of the central animating ideas of the book is that, you know, by the way, there are lots of places you could make this case for.
07:52I mean, Greg Grandin makes it very well in his book, The End of the Myth, about the, you know, about the border between Texas and Mexico.
08:01But if if if the wellspring of sort of all that is good and bad about the American identity and the American myth flows from this idea of manifest destiny, this idea that like, you know, we must always seek a new frontier.
08:20The Mississippi Delta, most people don't realize, almost all of it was uninhabited hardwood swamps until around 1900.
08:29And so, I mean, it was one of one of, if not the last place, wild place settled in the lower 48.
08:36I mean, this is 20 years after the Census Bureau declares the frontier close.
08:40This is 17 years after.
08:44Oh, my God, I'm blanking on his name.
08:46The guy's famous essay about that.
08:48You know, this is after the OK Corral.
08:49This is well after Geronimo.
08:52And so, you know, there's this, you know, I have this great map that shows all four of the main railroads because the railroads were starting to come in 1890s.
09:02And it shows all of these railroads and coming from and and it's incredible because it's about to complete the grid of the Mississippi Delta.
09:13And so it's all the Illinois Central, the Yellow Dog, the Southern.
09:16I mean, it's all of these railroads and they're all they stop.
09:20So it stops about Drew and it stops about Ruleville and it stops about where, say, Highway 49 is running from Ruleville to Drew and stops about, say, Marigold.
09:36And everything in between is Township 22 North, Range 4 West.
09:40And so there I feel like I could sit with any historian and make a reasoned and potentially successful argument that the last place settled in the lower 48 was the land underneath the barn where Emmett Till was killed,
09:56which I think has tremendous implications for the truth about our national identity and things.
10:04You know, one of the ways I came to see the barn is the answers to all the questions we don't want to ask live inside that barn.
10:11Mm hmm. Yeah. And that sounds like a really kind of a fundamental question of the book.
10:18Right. You grew up you grew up in Clarksdale, but you went off to boarding school unsuccessfully, as you as you said, it didn't really take.
10:32Um, but, you know, you grew up not far from where this murder happened, um, I think 20 some miles, um, but you didn't know this story.
10:43Um, and I, I, I'm wondering when was the first time that you actually heard the story of, of Emmett Till?
10:50I think it was in a, uh, Southern history class at the University of Missouri, I think, uh, which is insane.
10:58What do you attribute that to?
10:59Just the deep omerta in the Delta and also the sense that like, there was a moment when it felt like it was working, you know, Mississippi elected Ray Mabus in 1988.
11:15You know, there was a, there was a moment.
11:17I mean, you think about 1970 when the schools actually integrated to 1988 when they elected Ray Mabus, uh, who's incredibly progressive governor.
11:27There was a sense that there was this really fragile thing that was sort of working or trying to work, I think.
11:36And so, I mean, I think some of the omerta is like, let's just don't mention anything.
11:41And I think some of it is shame.
11:44I think some of it is, you know, the, the SEG Academy system taught a very specific version of Mississippi history.
11:51I think, which was designed to allow future generations to still live in this place.
11:56Like, I think that was the central mission of the SEG Academies is like, we have to teach somebody a version of what happened here that allows people to stay and get out of bed in the morning and have hopes and dreams.
12:09And so, uh, I don't know.
12:12I mean, I think there are a lot of things at work, but I think, uh, some of them, some of
12:18the silence was with incredibly bad intentions.
12:20Some of the silence might be with misguided good intentions.
12:24Some of the silence was just trauma.
12:26Some of the silence was just shame.
12:28Some of the silence, uh, was fear and worry.
12:32And so I think there were a lot of things going on.
12:34Um, I think the result of all of that silence means that, you know, we, we integrated the schools in 1970, uh, the first graduating class of Mississippians, uh, to have been in integrated classrooms their entire lives, graduated 1982.
12:52We elected Ray Mavis, 1988 and 1992, they elected that lunatic Kurt Fordyce in Mississippi sort of began its long, uh, return back to the sort of its political roots of fifties and sixties.
13:08And so like, it's, that's a really short amount of time.
13:11And I think that it's 2025.
13:14Uh, one of the, my profound takeaways from writing this book is that whatever we need to do here, like whatever, whatever is required to make this place whole, not only is it not done, I don't really think it started.
13:30And I think the problem is that you now have two histories like this that just year after year after year.
13:37And like, I don't entirely know how to make them come back together again.
13:41Well, the book feels like a, a, a start, um,
13:44That's why, I mean, that was the reason to do it.
13:49There are a lot of people that don't really know the story.
13:52Um, I mean, cause it hasn't, it hasn't been told as much and it has been written out of the history books and, and even, you know, attempts to, uh, recognize what happened there have been met with fierce resistance, uh, in some cases.
14:06And, you know, shooting up, uh, you know, markers, historical markers and things like that.
14:12But, um, tell me just, you know, briefly the story of, of what happened, what happened to Emmett Till.
14:20Um, and we'll get into it, uh, you know, in more depth, but just, you know, what happened to him?
14:27Emmett Till, uh, was a, he'd just turned 14, uh, at his 14th birthday party.
14:33His, uh, mother heard, uh, uh, him and his friends, uh, he and his friends, my English teacher mother is going to call me after this.
14:42Uh, we're playing like spin the bottle, you know, just sort of gotten into girls, but he still liked comic books.
14:48You know, that's the sort of age he was, wanted to go down with his, uh, best friend, cousin, and neighbor Wheeler Parker, uh, to Mississippi just before summer vacation ended.
15:01And they went down to Mississippi and they were at a rural store one day.
15:06You got to understand Emmett Till was, uh, had tried to work in the fields with his older cousins, but couldn't really hack it.
15:13And sort of got sent to work in the kitchen with the women, which is not what you want as a 13, 14 year old boy.
15:19He was overweight, had a stutter and, uh, they were at this country store and, uh, he did whistle at Carolyn Bryant, but you can just sort of see him trying to show off and, you know, have something that he was brave at after the couple of days of, you know, not, it not going great.
15:38Uh, word got around her husband and his half brother who were really like full brothers.
15:46I mean, it was this real clannish family, uh, pun intended.
15:51And, uh, they went and got him out of his uncle Moses Wright's house in the middle of the night, shined a flashlight and a gun in Wheeler Parker's face first.
16:00Wheeler Parker's still alive.
16:01He's a Kojic minister in Chicago, suburban Chicago, and he's the last one who was in the house that night.
16:08He's still alive and he's in his eighties.
16:09He's great and a central character in the book.
16:13And, uh, they took him and they tortured him and killed him.
16:18And they threw his body in the Tallahatchie river where it would have stayed.
16:22But, uh, uh, black people in the Mississippi Delta have long called the Tallahatchie river, the singing river.
16:28Cause there's so many dead bodies in it.
16:30You know, I stood on the banks of that river with, uh, Sharon Wright, who's a family member.
16:35And she was staring out in the water and she was just like, I'm so grateful or something like that.
16:39And I was like, what do you mean?
16:40And she was like, he got out of the river and nobody gets out of the river.
16:45And so they, his body, they saw it.
16:48And, uh, his mother, the state of Mississippi tried to bury it immediately.
16:52And his mother had the body brought to Chicago, demanded that it be an open casket.
16:58I mean, you should look at these pictures.
16:59It's brutal.
17:00Uh, and, uh, said, let the world see.
17:03And many people sort of America seeing that horror was one of the first big bright sparks of the civil rights movement,
17:11civil rights movement, where it sort of went from being an NAACP thing to a national moral thing.
17:18Right.
17:18You know, when everybody was like, oh, this is, this is messed up.
17:21We can't, this is what, oh my God, this is, this is what it looks like.
17:26Uh, and the only other thing I would say is that everybody knows the year before was Brown v. Board.
17:31Most people don't remember that the South just sort of ignored that.
17:34And so the Supreme Court had to come in and do Brown v. Board too, which is, uh, basically reaffirm that, yes, this is going to happen.
17:42And so everybody was waiting on that verdict all summer.
17:44And there was a Mississippi gubernatorial race that summer.
17:51And, I mean, you should hear their speeches.
17:53It's unbelievable.
17:54It's a race to the bottom.
17:55The entire speech was about who could be the most radical segregationist.
17:59And the rhetoric matched that.
18:01There was, you know, lots of talk about bayonets and Civil War imagery.
18:05And this, I mean, these politicians, just awful people.
18:08I mean, all of them just like saying whatever they could say to try to get votes.
18:12And this is happening, echo chamber, echo chamber, defend our way of life, defend our way of life, defend our way of life.
18:18And that election was on a Tuesday and less than 24 hours after the polls closed is when Emmett and his cousins went to that store.
18:30And so you can never, ever separate the story of the torture and murder of Emmett Till from Mississippi and political rhetoric,
18:41just as Medgar Evers was shot the day after John F. Kennedy's speech on civil rights.
18:47You can never, ever separate those two things.
18:51This is 1955.
18:53Yeah.
18:53Summer 1955.
18:56It's harvest season for picking cotton.
19:01First day.
19:02He got there on a Saturday or a Sunday, Monday morning, first day picking season.
19:08So I'm just wondering if you could kind of paint a picture for me of what happened in that store.
19:15You did a lot of work on this part of the story, trying to understand exactly what happened, getting different accounts.
19:23But, you know, 1955, for Emmett Till and his friends to be going into this town, walking into this store, just set that scene and what would have been expected?
19:41What was the kind of atmosphere you have a you have a store that's that's owned by Carolyn Bryant and her husband, Roy, correct?
19:51Yes.
19:52And so it was it was a country store where mostly black folks shopped like that was their main clientele, which is also important to understand their own insecurity.
20:03I mean, one of the things I say in the book is J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were barely white to their white neighbors.
20:10And so there was just a deep reservoir of insecure insecurity and perceived disrespect that fueled almost everything they did.
20:18My understanding of it and I've been around and around and around this.
20:22And I think this is I think this is what happened.
20:25And lots of, you know, I can walk you through all of the footnotes of how I know this, but they got there.
20:31They were playing checkers out on the porch with like soda cap, like Coca-Cola and Sprite tops for the pieces.
20:40And people were sort of going in and out of the store, getting an ice cream, getting some candy.
20:45You know, they had like freeze. It was just like a country store now, frankly.
20:48You know, my dad used to take me to those beer joints and he'd get a beer and I'd get a country time lemonade.
20:53We'd both get a bologna and hook cheese sandwich and just stand up and eat it.
20:57You know, nothing's really changed.
21:00Be a good Southern living story because that those things are almost extinct.
21:05Yeah, there are. I mean, another one closes.
21:07One of those I love closes every eight months.
21:11I'll see another one that's gone. I mean, that's a thing that's almost gone.
21:14He went in the store, bought some things, bought an ice cream and came back out.
21:20There was a screen door so that anything anybody had said in there, they would have heard on the porch.
21:26Nobody heard anything.
21:28Carolyn came out of the store and he whistled at her.
21:34Like, you know, and I asked Wheeler Parker because, you know, he gets really upset when people say allegedly whistled because he feels like they're calling him a liar.
21:42And I was like, well, how did you know he whistled?
21:43And he was like, I was standing next to him when he whistled and we were terrified.
21:48And we're in.
21:49He saw the fear in our eyes and was immediately like, oh, shit.
21:52Like, you know, this, you know, and they ran to their car and went back to the house.
21:57And that was Wednesday.
21:58And, you know, it's interesting.
22:02One of the she told a very different story in court that had him saying, you know, excuse my French, but like, you know, white women, which, of course, he didn't say at a stutter.
22:13And he was 14.
22:14But one of the things that's interesting is her sister-in-law always believed that Carolyn was pissed because Roy and JW had gone down to the coast to get seafood, which I think really they were gambling and drinking and chasing women.
22:30And they came back up and her sister-in-law always believed that she made up a story to try to guilt her husband into never leaving her at home again and then lost control of her lie.
22:46And the defense attorneys, there are all these contemporaneous notes they were taking, which is just unbelievable.
22:51I'm doing this story right now about France in the 1940s and the degree to which the Vichy government and the Gestapo took incredible notes is staggering.
23:01I mean, they just wrote everything down.
23:03These defense attorneys did, too.
23:04And you can watch them tuning up her story and turning up the volume, like, account by account.
23:10It's really crazy to sort of see it evolve into the lie she told under oath.
23:15I mean, it's like this isn't, like, subjective.
23:18I mean, you literally can read it and it's all out there.
23:20It was really staggering to me.
23:22One remarkable aspect of this story that you talk about in the book is that there was a bogus version of it.
23:31There was a false confession that was told in Look magazine that really became the unofficial record of what happened for more than 50 years.
23:43I mean, that was the story, even though that story had been pretty much written and crafted by the lawyers for the murderers.
23:58So, I mean, William Bradford Huey, who wrote the story, I mean, who has a lot of family in Memphis.
24:02I mean, the only awkward moment of book tour was a woman comes up to me after an event in Memphis and was like, I'm Bill Huey's stepdaughter.
24:11After I had just trashed him, I felt so bad because, like, you know, I'm an author, but I'm also Southern with, like, man.
24:19And I just was like, if I had known you were in here, I wouldn't have trashed him.
24:22It was a bogus story.
24:23It was a bogus story.
24:24And there are things you can read, things that the lawyer said that show up in the story as J.W. Milam.
24:36I mean, like, there's a thing.
24:38When sports writers only, quote, really articulate cab drivers, I just assume they're making it up.
24:45I'm like, I've had a lot of Uber drivers.
24:47I've never had Socrates.
24:49Do you know what I mean?
24:50Like, so, like, I just assume if it's an unnamed cab driver who's saying the most philosophical thing ever, I just assume you're making it up.
24:57I'm going to need a name.
24:59And so they had J.W. Milam talking like he was Immanuel Kant.
25:03It was unbelievable.
25:04And everybody was just like, yeah, sure.
25:07And so that story perpetuated a lot of lies to the point that when the Secretary of the Interior was brought to Mississippi,
25:17they took her to places and said this is where this happened, and it didn't.
25:24It was out of the Huey account.
25:25That was, like, two years ago.
25:26It's still resonating.
25:28I mean, she got brought here and was taken on a partially fictional tour and told it was history.
25:36And so, like, the resonance of that account, it did tremendous damage.
25:41And, look, I don't want to pick on Bill Huey.
25:44But, you know, he went to the NAACP first to try to get them to back it.
25:49So that would have been a very different story.
25:52You know, and so, I mean, you know, he was hustling and I think never imagined.
26:01The impact of it.
26:02Well, that and also, like, the degree to which there'd be a paper trail of all this shit.
26:06You know, like, my dad used to always say, like, don't lie because it's wrong.
26:11But if that doesn't move you, it's just a lot easier because you don't have to remember it.
26:17And, like, people are, like, there's just a paper trail.
26:20It's a lot easier to tell the truth.
26:21Yes.
26:21It is.
26:22And he just, he did a lot of damage to people.
26:25There's a real, like, Emmett Till Industrial Complex that is interesting to sort of be adjacent to for a brief period of time.
26:33You know, I sort of stepped into the world.
26:35And there's some people who are really generous who don't try to take ownership even though they've done tremendous amounts of work.
26:43And then there are other people who are just out there operating.
26:47And it's just interesting to see.
26:48It was just really fascinating.
26:50Well, I think people should know that because that story that's been handed down and has been, you know, republished and reprinted in so many places is not true.
27:06One of the great circular things is, you know, John Witten was the defense attorney, one of the defense attorneys, I think the lead defense attorney.
27:15Uh, his granddaughter, uh, Ellen Witten's master's thesis at Rhodes, uh, proved like, uh, in a qualitative way that the story laid out in Huey's, uh, magazine piece was impossible.
27:31Which is pretty incredible.
27:32I mean, what a, it's really cool.
27:34It's really cool.
27:35Like, you know, what a, what a thing to do as a student.
27:38Um, I keep thinking about that line in the sea shall give up.
27:41It's dead, you know, like, like, yeah, nothing stays buried.
27:44So, right.
27:45Uh, I want to talk about the structure that the book is named after.
27:50Um, you, you called the book, the barn very intentionally.
27:55Um, you really centered everything around that location, which is where it happened.
28:03Tell me a little bit about what it was like for you the, the first time that you actually saw it and, and what it, what it meant to you at the time.
28:13I mean, I remember it exactly.
28:14I mean, I just remember thinking, uh, I mean, not to be overdramatic about it, but like really thinking like, Ooh, I don't know if I want to look in there.
28:25Uh, I mean, it, it has a power that's real and, uh, you know, it's funny.
28:31I would take people, I've been out there hundreds of times now.
28:35Uh, I haven't been out there in a really long time, which is also not an accident and, uh, sacred space.
28:42You know, I've seen people have unbelievable emotional reactions to it.
28:46I've had really unbelievable emotional reactions to it.
28:49I mean, sometimes I'd be out there and just feel numb.
28:52Sometimes you'd be out there and you'd almost feel like you were scuba diving in a shipwreck.
28:59Like you shouldn't be there, you know, uh, it's really powerful.
29:04I mean, it's in, in, you know, I believe their energy space, I mean, that their American energy spaces and memory spaces that function, you know, like as people say that stuff does out in Sedona, but like where the, the, the ground carries the trauma.
29:21Like, like, like, I just think that's real.
29:23And I think that, uh, in many ways, the book is a profile of sort of 36 square miles of American dirt as a proxy for all American dirt.
29:32But like, let's take this one square of land that surrounds this one building and completely excavated to see what happens.
29:40And like, I, you know, I think that was fueled by the sort of energy I felt out there that was like, oh, there's blood in the ground here.
29:46Right. There, there are also some really inspiring characters that come out of this.
29:54Um, and, and one of them you mentioned earlier, and that's Wheeler Parker and, and Wheeler was, um, Emmett's cousin.
30:04Um, and he was in the house, um, when it happened, when he was abducted and taken, uh, at, at gunpoint.
30:14Um, and, but Wheeler really became kind of a, he almost felt like kind of a spiritual guide for you in this story.
30:24Um, tell me a little bit about him and, and your, your connection with him.
30:29Look, I've, I've always had a sort of, uh, problematic relationship with the idea of God.
30:36Being around him is truly the best evidence I've ever seen that there has to be something because I, I've spent a lot of time with this guy and I, I otherwise can't explain his love in the face of hate and, and his, uh, grace in the face of, you know, everything that's happened to them.
31:01Um, and he's really, I mean, he's something, and I mean, I, I was driving one time with him and he started talking about how, you know, he knew he was really old and he knew that like he, he could go anytime.
31:14I mean, he could die tomorrow.
31:15He could die in 10 years, but you know, he is very aware that he is in the last act and talked about how, you know, he's been thinking a lot.
31:25He's been going over and over and over and over in his mind, everything he saw or heard about Emmett's spiritual life to try to make sure that Emmett will be in heaven when he gets there.
31:36And he's, uh, said he looks forward to see him again in hopes that his friend is pleased at the job he's done and preserving and protecting his memory.
31:46And like, I just, you know, you know, I mean, what do you do?
31:49And so, uh, he's a tremendous, they should put him on money.
31:55He's just tremendous.
31:56And, uh, I feel lucky to know him and his wife, Marvell, who is just a force of nature and is really protective of him in a sort of mama bear way that, uh, you know, I'm a little afraid of her.
32:11Like, you know, I mean, you know, you don't, she is, uh, there to make sure that nobody takes advantage of Wheeler Parker's generosity of spirit.
32:21And they're a tremendous team.
32:23And, uh, they're also hilarious.
32:26Like I, I love sitting away.
32:28One of my favorite, it's not in the book.
32:30Uh, one of my favorite things is, uh, I went up to Chicago one time because, uh, Annie Wright, who's Simeon Wright's, uh, widow.
32:38And Simeon was, uh, also Emmett's cousin.
32:41He was in the bed with him the night he was kidnapped and he died every 10 years ago.
32:46And Annie, uh, wanted me to come to lunch at her house.
32:49Cause, uh, she said that, uh, I was talking about some great meal I had and she's like, you hadn't had a meal till you had one of mine.
32:56And so I went up there, I brought a socket to me cake and my little cake caddy on, on the train.
33:00And, and, uh, you know, we, uh, Wheeler Marvell came over and, uh, Annie and her sister were there and we had this huge lunch, fried chicken and pork chops and neck bones, 19 vegetables.
33:14And it was incredible.
33:15And, uh, uh, they told stories about growing up in Mississippi, but all the funny stories about, you know, growing up on the farm.
33:24And I just was like in hysterics at these guys telling these hilarious stories and, uh, you know, just the degree of isolation.
33:32Wheeler said he'd never had a hamburger or a hot dog until they moved to Chicago.
33:38Cause there was no, you know, you killed your own meat or buy meat at a store, you know, and they'd never seen a hot dog.
33:47Uh, I don't know why that stuck with me.
33:50Uh, so anyway, like, uh, they're, they're really, both of them are tremendous.
33:56Well, and he didn't just move to Chicago.
33:59He escaped to Chicago, right?
34:04Yeah, no, I mean, they, they, they fled.
34:06And so, uh, you know, one of the things that it's interesting to me how all of these years later,
34:16some essential part of them is, uh, uh, uh, they're Mississippians in exile.
34:25I mean, he's lived in Chicago six or seven times as long as he lived in Mississippi and they're Southerners in exile.
34:32You know, they love it when I bring sweet corn from Allendale, our farm.
34:36Uh, when they come to Mississippi, they load their, you know, their car up with, uh, hickory wood from Teoc so they can put that in the smoker.
34:45You know, they, they like, you know, they, they have tried multiple times to plant magnolia trees in Argo, Illinois.
34:52Like these are Mississippians in exile.
34:54Every time somebody starts to talk, every time people wonder why the Delta is so busted or why just parts of Mississippi are so busted.
35:04I'm always like fly to Chicago, rent a car, drive over to the South side, and then drive 85 square blocks, mile after mile after mile of beautiful middle-class Norman Rockwell bungalows with manicured yards.
35:25And every single one of those people, almost, if you go back two or three generations are all from Mississippi, most of them from the Delta.
35:35And all of those houses should be in Mississippi and all that money should be in Mississippi.
35:41And, uh, it's just wild.
35:43Yeah, that was a real revelation to me.
35:45I hadn't really thought about the connection between the Delta and Chicago and how strong that was and how much back and forth there was.
35:54And, and also just, you think about the blues and, and, you know, that, that's a whole other book.
36:00Well, yeah.
36:01And I mean, you know, there's a, you know, they, they used to have Mississippi high school reunions in Chicago because everybody was already there.
36:07And, you know, we said earlier that Memphis is the capital of the Mississippi Delta.
36:13What I think it is really, and like, I'm doing the worst thing you can do on a podcast, which is think out loud in real time.
36:19But Memphis is sort of the capital of the white Delta and the South side of Chicago is the capital of the black Delta.
36:26Last time I had breakfast on the South side, I went into a diner and sat down and the waiter was like, heard my voice and was like, where are you from?
36:35And I'm like, Clarksdale.
36:37And he was like, I'm from Shelby, which is a town of 1200 people where my mother is from.
36:42You know, it's just like the whole South side of Chicago was a little Mississippi.
36:47And so, you know, my joke has always been the only professional sports team in the state of Mississippi, the Chicago White Sox.
36:53You know, Muddy Waters loved the Chicago White Sox.
36:56He'd get up in the afternoon because they was up all night and he'd have a bowl of black walnut ice cream that he would pour knee high grape soda in.
37:05And he would sit there in his pajamas and watch the White Sox game on TV and eat the ice cream for breakfast.
37:11Well, that's a whole other story we have to get into at some point.
37:15Right.
37:15I want to ask you about one more person, another character in the book, and that's Gloria Dickerson, who I believe still lives in Mississippi.
37:24Lives in Drew.
37:25In Drew.
37:25Talk to me about what motivates her and what her hopes are for sharing this story because she seems to really believe that it's a story that needs to be told.
37:41And she wants to respect what happened to Emmett and make sure that people are able to come there and understand that.
37:55Well, you know, I mean, Gloria's parents, May Bertha and Matthew Carter, Gloria Dickerson and her siblings, the Carter girls and boys, integrated the Drew school system in 1964.
38:09And, uh, obviously not a great experience for them.
38:15They got their, you know, their house got the credit.
38:18Somebody killed all their animals and the garden and the credit was cut off and they were thrown out of their homes.
38:24And, uh, they were going to be pushed out of the school district, but Catholic charities came in and bought a house for a priest and then put them in it, which is so they could stay in the school district.
38:37Uh, and, uh, it was back, you know, when the Catholic church wasn't, you know, insane, uh, and political.
38:46And so they, she moved away all this, everybody went to college, you know, she went to grad school with a corporate executive, uh, and, uh, started to wonder why they'd done all that because they had successfully been educated there and had a great life.
39:02But Drew had just looked, Drew looked bombed out.
39:05And so she kept asking when somebody was going to do something to help Drew.
39:09And finally, somebody was like, well, why don't you do it?
39:11And so she moved back and she started the We Together Foundation.
39:14And, you know, they do youth mentoring and they do a lot of teaching about Emmett Till.
39:19And she was the one who really sort of opened my eyes to the ways in which she sees what happened in that barn and what happened subsequently to erase it from people's memory is, uh, a, a story that in proxy explains to young kids and adolescents what happened here.
39:41And so she thinks that understanding this story is the key to understanding how they all ended up marooned in a emptying out, dying, dead Mississippi Delta with so few, uh, avenues of escape.
39:57And she sees those things as really related and that sort of opened up my eyes and, uh, helped me have the most maximalist view of the barn possible.
40:06And she's great, funny and intense.
40:09And, you know, I've been with her all over the country and she came to Oxford for the opening night of the book tour and she and I were in conversation and, uh, you know, she met my kids.
40:20And she's really great.
40:21Right.
40:21You've been traveling all over the country talking about this book and, and I'm wondering if there's a theme to what you've heard from readers.
40:31Um, you know, is there, are there some common threads there?
40:34You know, I think that, you know, some people I was preaching to the choir.
40:38I mean, but the thing that was interesting to me is everywhere I've been, I've heard people wanting to learn and engage on this issue in a way that, uh, you know, I was expecting it to be really contentious.
40:53And so even, you know, very quote unquote conservative people were really like, I found everybody earnestly wanting to read history and learn history.
41:05And some people wanted to push back on certain things, which is awesome.
41:09And, uh, I found it to be a very civil earnest dialogue.
41:16Uh, I mean, I, I was really honestly surprised.
41:19I mean, I sort of was ready, you know, just in case somebody, and I wasn't sure sort of which extreme right or left I was going to get hit on, frankly, but I just was expecting something.
41:30And instead, what I found were, uh, earnest, patriotic Americans who wanted to know their history and learn things they didn't know and expand their knowledge.
41:44And, uh, I really, I don't know.
41:48I mean, I knock on wood.
41:49I mean, I found it really hopeful, frankly, and, uh, and, uh, not really what I had expected.
41:56Well, that's, that's, that's, um, that's encouraging to hear.
41:59And I, and I hope more and more people, um, will read it.
42:02I really, I really do.
42:04Um, there's a line in the book that jumped out at me, right?
42:08Um, and it, it says, we spend so much time in the past here and yet so little time learning who we are and how we got here.
42:18And I'm just wondering if you could comment on that.
42:22We don't really live in the past.
42:23We live in sort of a mythic construction, right?
42:27I mean, you know, nostalgia, which comes from, uh, was it the Greek words for home and pain?
42:36Uh, you know, we spend, uh, we spend an inordinate amount of time communing with the past, but always with the past of our own creation.
42:48And, you know, I think, I mean, if I learned anything from this, it's that if there's, if there's going to be a South, there has to be one history and one tribe.
43:01And, uh, you know, I think reuniting, reuniting and sorting out the contradictions between the myth and the truth of the past feels to me at the very core of any look into our future.
43:24Well, you know, for you, I mean, you who grew up in Clarksdale, this whole book feels like a real journey for you, um, learning about where you came from.
43:36I mean, on the deepest level possible, really learning this story and learning the story of your hometown, learning the story of the Delta.
43:46Um, it's, it, is that fair to say this was just, this was a real process of, of discovery?
43:52Well, that, and, you know, at the end of the day, I mean, the thing it had to do first was get the history and the feeling and the spirit of the Delta, right.
44:04Or warts and all, maybe even more warts than not warts, but like to get it right where people from there were like, yeah, that's it.
44:13And so, uh, I felt like I didn't know a lot of that.
44:17And so that just made me think that lots of other people didn't know it too.
44:22And, you know, I was just incredibly unsatisfied with the history books I'd read about the Delta, you know?
44:29And, uh, so I don't know.
44:32I wanted it to, that was very important to me was for it to feel like a letter from home.
44:38Um, well, it does that.
44:40Um, and, uh, I hope we can come back and do this again sometime.
44:43And, and, uh, there's a whole other conversation I want to have with you about music, uh, but we'll have to, we'll have to put a hold on that.
44:51Um, well, right.
44:53I just have one more question for you.
44:55What does it mean to you to be Southern?
44:58You know, that's a very good question.
45:01Uh, I, sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing anymore as Southern,
45:06other than, you know, like I see people with styrofoam cups that say sweet tea, y'all.
45:13I'm just like my very Southern grandma would have not been called dead with something that said Southern by the grace of God.
45:21You know, I feel like the two main tenants right now of, of mass culture, Southernism are, uh, consumerism and politics.
45:31What do you buy and who do you hate?
45:33To me, I feel like being Southern means still having a foot in some sort of agrarian life.
45:43I think it means still knowing what the price of soybeans is.
45:48I think it's $10 and 30 cents a bushel.
45:50It's still knowing what the price of cotton is, which I think today is 69 cents and some change.
45:55Uh, I think it is, uh, having a deep, deep reverence for and sense of protection of, uh, your ancestors.
46:10Uh, but of course you understand that like, if you ask someone, what does Southie Boston mean to them?
46:17They would have said the exact same things, you know, I think, uh, I think that, I think it's changing dramatically.
46:28You know, I think, you know, what's the most Southern breakfast foods, not a biscuit.
46:33It's a taco, you know, uh, I think the South is changing.
46:38I love those changes.
46:41I, you know, what's a Southern sandwich.
46:43It's a banh mi sandwich on the coast as much as it is a barbecue sandwich in the hills.
46:48And so, uh, I think maintaining a connection to your past, but being open to what the South is becoming.
46:57I mean, that's the whole point of true South is that like we, this is, this is, these are dispatches,
47:03not from some Paula Dean South, but from, this is the actual South in 2024 and 2025.
47:10This is what is going on out there.
47:12Take a look at it.
47:14Uh, it is your culture too, and it's awesome.
47:17And so I think all of that, man, I think the South is a fancy duck.
47:22I think the South is a fancy duck hunt.
47:24I think the South is tacos on Rangelod road in Little Rock.
47:29I think the South is a big ribeye does eats place.
47:32I think the South is, you know, somebody living in a trailer who thinks the government is spying on them.
47:39So they have tinfoil on their windows.
47:42And we all, you know, I can drive you by five of those.
47:45Uh, you know, I think the South is really complex.
47:48And I think that, uh, many of the old things that were used to define it, hospitality, rural,
47:56like a lot of that is vanishing and being replaced by other things.
48:00And I think the future of the South depends on our generation of people's ability to take these new
48:07things, marry them with the old in a cohesive way to maintain this tribe of us if it's going to
48:14continue.
48:14But I mean, everybody's got a different answer.
48:17Well, that was a great one and I appreciate it.
48:21And, uh, I hope you keep doing what you're doing.
48:23And keep writing, keep telling those stories and congrats on an extraordinary book.
48:28Um, and, um, Wright Thompson, thanks for being on Biscuits and Jam.
48:32Thanks.
48:35Bye.
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