by Leslie Lytle, Messenger Staff Writer

“Everybody knows what the caste system does to the people under the boot, but we don’t often talk about the inherited psycho trauma of what it does to the people who are wearing the boot,” said author Wright Thompson taking questions on March 24 in Convocation Hall about his new book “The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.” A New York Times bestseller, frequently touted by reviewers as the “best book of the year,” “The Barn” is an eyes-wide-open journey into a storm of social, agricultural, political, and economic forces all manifestly blamable for the 1955 torture and murder of the 14-year-old black youth, Emmett Till. Thompson claims the Mississippi delta where the torture and murder occurred as his home. Unpacking Thompson’s comment about the psycho trauma experienced by the boot wearer underlies his prayer for the book. “This is a very precarious time for the South and to be Southern and to be proud of being Southern. Is there still such a thing as the South? What is our culture? What are our values? This book exists to me as a prayer that we might find a way to have a unified tribe of us.” The “us” Thompson speaks of are those who inherited the legacy of the former boot wearers, the slave holders, lynchers, and Jim Crow macrocosm that once dominated the culture.

Thompson’s long litany of locations erecting post-civil-war confederate monuments seemed as though it would never end. He juxtaposed the list to the decision confronting Till’s friend, 18-year-old Willie Reed who hid in the brush outside the eponymous “barn” of the book’s title and listened to Till’s screams turn to whimpers turn to silence. Reed chose truth. Reed and Till’s Uncle Mose who witnessed Till’s murderers yank him from the bed in the middle of the night were the first two black men to ever testify against white men. “We have no statues of Willie Reed,” Thompson pointed out.

Plagued by death threats, Reed fled to Chicago, found work and married. Twelve years passed before Reed could bring himself to tell his wife he even knew Emmitt Till.

Jeff Andrews who in 1984 bought the farm where the eponymous barn still stands knew nothing about the barn’s history even though his family was from a neighboring farmstead. Ultimately, Andrews’ father told him about the barn’s significance. “He [Andrew’s] was very kind to all the Till family members who were always coming out there,” Thompson said, “but he doesn’t understand what any of it has to do with him. And the reason is every single person of authority in his life, every coach, every scout master, every preacher, every parent told him it didn’t have anything to do with him.”

“Is there still such a thing as the South?” Thompson asked. “Who are we?”

Till’s best friend growing up in Chicago was his cousin Wheeler Parker. Sixteen-year-old Parker travelled to Mississippi with Till in the summer of 1955. Asleep in the adjacent room, Parker woke up when the men who abducted Till stormed into his room, but they passed him over. They wanted Till to avenge his whistling at a white woman minding the counter at a country store.

Asked what does justice look like to you, Reverend Parker, now 86, answered, “Memory.”

“Justice is never forgetting,” Thompson said. “Justice is you telling that story. Justice is every person here walking away with that story now part of their understanding of their home.”

“In the bookstore, there is almost nothing that says The University of the South,” Thompson stressed. “There’s one T-shirt, it says Sewanee. There is only one place called the University of the South. It feels incumbent in a place like this to model what it means to be Southern, in the way you go about your lives and your traditions and your values and how you relate to your neighbor. If there’s going to be a South, let it start here.”

Veteran investigative journalist and Sewanee resident Lee Hancock brought Thompson to the attention of the program’s sponsors, the University’s Roberson Project on Slavery, Race, and Reconciliation, the Sewanee School of Letters, and The Sewanee Review. Following his talk, Thompson signed free copies of “The Barn” available to everyone attending.