The Daily Stoic - Wright Thompson on Untangling Myth from History in America

Episode Date: September 28, 2024

Wright Thompson grew up in the Mississippi Delta, unaware that his family farm was just 23 miles away from the barn where 14 year old Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. When writing The Barn, Wright had to take a look at the place he had always known as home with fresh eyes and courageously uncover the details of Emmett's tragic story that had been buried for decades. In today’s episode, Wright and Ryan continue their conversation about Emmett Till’s legacy, the complexity of American history, why it’s important to know where you come from, and the responsibility of preserving Emmett’s story. You can get signed copies of The Barn and Wright’s other books,The Cost of These Dreams, Pappyland, at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/You can follow him on Instagram @wrightthompsonbooks or head to his website, https://wrightthompson.com/🎙️ Listen to Pt. 1 of Wright and Ryan’s conversation on the Daily Stoic | Apple Podcasts &  SpotifyCheck out Wright Thompson’s very first interview on the Daily Stoic Podcast | Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or watch it on YouTube!🎥 Subscribe to the Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube | https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And as an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their entire catalog. By the way, you can grab Right Thing right Right Now on audible. You can sign up right now for a free 30-day audible trial and try your first audiobook for free. You'll get Right Thing Right Now totally for free. Visit audible.ca to sign up. Hello, Matt and Alice here, the hosts of Wondrous podcast British Scandal. Our latest series, Peru 2, begins on the sandy shores of Ibiza. Michaela McCollum should have been having the summer of her dreams, but it all went wrong when she met

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To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad free on Wondry Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time.

Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So a lot of the guests on this podcast come out from Austin and it's about a 45 minute drive, but it gets rural real quick.

You take 71, usually I take 812 when I'm going to my house. And then, so I come here via backwards, but you start to pass a number of farms and you see on those farms, these kinds of old barns. I have one on my ranch. I don't know exactly when it was built. That's the weird thing. These buildings just come with the place

and you don't know who built it. And you don't know what happened in that building. When I walk into my barn, it's dark but you know light sort of pours through because there's cracks in it and the windows are old and it's coming apart at various seams, but there's a darkness and a lightness to it. And I can only imagine what it must have been like for today's guest, Wright Thompson, to walk into a barn smack there in the middle of Mississippi where one of the most horrendous moments

of American history occurred, the murder of Emmett Till. It was a barn that people didn't know existed because so much of the story about Emmett Till. It was a barn that people didn't know existed because so much of the story about Emmett Till has been obscured, misreported, misremembered. And that's something I think about. Actually, when I moved to my ranch, I was being shown around by a neighbor who I would buy hay from.

And he's like, hey, look, these are the slave quarters on my ranch. Texas wasn't where I was. It wasn't super productive land. So there weren't a lot of slaves, but certainly existed in this part of the country. And just the casualness with which he pointed out that that's where this sort of monstrous crime happened.

And what other monstrous, more recent crimes have happened that we don't talk about? I've talked about the Confederate statue here in the little town that I'm in. And I know about the town my ranch is in, is a little town and for a very brief period after the Civil War, the county judge, sort of like the county mayor was black

until he was sort of railroaded on flimsy charges, shot at in court and sort of driven from public life. Sort of vigilante violence is an ever present part of the Southern story. And it's a part of today's podcast where I'm talking with one of my absolute favorite people and one of my absolute favorite writers. And usually when people do the podcast,

I give them a tour of my office. And when I brought Wright Thompson up, the first thing he noticed is Walker Percy. I have this little painting done by a previous Daily Stoke podcast guest, Garland Robinette. It's this little New Orleans themed painting of one of my favorite novelists and my guest today, Wright Thompson's favorite novelist,

the one and only Walker Percy. He told me that on his flight to Texas to do this interview, he was surrounded by a number of Percy's on the flight. They're an old Mississippi family from Greenville, Mississippi, steeped in stoic philosophy, and then also kind of tragic tertiary characters in Wright's incredible new book,

The Barn, which is about the murder of Emmett Till and its relation to American history, the way we lie to ourselves about the past, how we make the past seem very distant when in fact it is not distant at all, the horrible ways that human beings can be stirred up to do terrible things, the way we, other people, the way our humanity can be lost

and the timelessness of those human tendencies. It's a beautiful book. You absolutely have to read it. One of my favorite books this year. You have to read The Barn, the secret history of a murder in Mississippi. For every American, it's a history book you have to read The Barn, the secret history of a murder in Mississippi. For every American, it's a history book you have to read. For everyone else in the world, it is a history book you have to read. It's also in a way a fascinating true crime book. I don't want to

reduce it to that. I'm not just saying it's like eat your vegetables kind of reading. It's a riveting, beautiful book. As everything that Wright Thompson writes, he signed copies of The Barn while he was here. He signed The Cost of These Dreams and Pappyland, two other wonderful books from him. The Cost of These Dreams is a book I recommend to so many people. It's one of my all-time favorite sports books.

He's an amazing writer. You can follow him at Wright Thompson Books and Wright Thompson.com. Listen to my other episodes with him on the podcast and thanks to right for coming out. Here's your fun fact because I watched the I watched the maybe everybody knows this I didn't but I watched the Ken Burns Civil War thing. Of course it's incredible. So I went to find where so Nathan Bedford Forrest was originally buried cemetery in Memphis.

They exhumed him, he and his wife and moved him to the statue downtown, which is like a block and a half from Sun Studios, which I love that. Yeah, sure. And they left the rest of his family in the cemetery, which I thought was very cruel because they had a child die young

and they left her in the ground alone there. Right, because he's just a symbol. They don't give a shit about him. It just really offended me. Yeah, yeah. Like as a, you didn't move, like fuck you. Right, right, right. But I'm walking around and I look down

and do you know who, if this is where Nathan Bedford Forrest had originally been buried, Yeah. you know who's buried where those monitors are? No. Shelby Foote. Really? Fucking blew my mind.

He got himself buried. That's not an accident. No, next to the Forrest family plot in Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis. Okay, so I have a stoicism thing that pertains to Shelby Foote, and then we'll dig into the books. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so there's this interesting thing I sort of described. So George Long is this British writer who becomes a professor at the University of Virginia in the mid 1840s, I think. And he's the main translator of Marcus Aurelius. He's the one that he's the first sort of popular English translation of Marcus Aurelius. Like you could still read it today. It's very readable. So he comes to America from Britain, but he just gets caught up in kind of lost cause mythology.

I think he's later like buried with a slave or a servant back in England, but he dedicates his translation of Marx's Realist to the example of Robert E. Lee. Like he becomes just caught up in the lost cause mythology. And then so that's one end of the sort of Southern stoic spectrum. Then in the other end,

there's this guy Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who's like a contemporary of Emerson. He translates Epictetus, but he leads one of the only black regiments in the US Civil War. So he goes south, he leads these black troops. He also discovers and publishes Emily Dickinson. Just like a crazy good guy.

By the way, a unit of black Union soldiers in Yazoo City, Mississippi kicked the shit out of Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry. Yeah, it may have been him. I forget where he actually... I'd have to check, but his vaunted cavalry went head-head with a black unit in Yezu City and just got smoked So so you have this sort of spectrum and then right in the middle I feel like you have the Percy family who's obsessed with the stoics that it's multi generations of it I was it so what's today today's Friday Friday on Saturday night it was me and a group of people and we were at my favorite restaurant,

Doze Eat Place in Greenville, Mississippi, and the entire Percy family came in and had dinner sitting down next to us. Oh, that's amazing. They're still there, no, so they're all still there. And like Roy Percy's a federal judge and like. There's a big passage from Marcus Aurelius in the movie goer that the ant recites,

that's which, and the ant is modeled on William Alexander Percy, who introduces Walker to stoic philosophy. That's right. And so, yeah, I was just like, there's this weird kind of southern breed of stoicism that's more lowercase stoicism than uppercase stoicism. But I find the Percy family so fascinating

because you have these intellectual, decent, good people. And then at the same time, like you talk about in the book, also pretty complicit with the status quo and the system. Well, like, uh, Senator Percy, his son who wrote lanterns on the levy was, I love that book, was trying to get people out after. So the 1927 flood, uh, the levy broke at the Delta pond and land plantation. So the Senator's son had found boats and they were going to get everybody out.

Yeah. But his father was like, we can't have, we're going to need labor to like try to salvage a crop. Yeah. Can't get rid of our arc valuable asset. And so they wouldn't. So the Senator Percy canceled the boats. Yeah. And like wouldn't that's why they had like labor camps on high ground, holding people in place because they thought if they leave, they'll never come back, which by the way, they were right. Yeah. It would have started the great migration earlier. Wait, it already started.

Like so that was 2723 is when Mamie Till's family left Mississippi. Like it had already started. But the, you know, the Percy family, they were the central, they were the enemies of the Klan. Yeah. Like, you know, they were the foils for Vardaman and Bilbo and those crazy Mississippi.

So like, it is interesting. If you're in the South, you know there are two very different kinds of racism. And both are terrible and both affect people's lives in really dramatic ways. And it's just class based. And there's the super virulent. And then there's the paternalism of we know better.

Yeah. And so the purses are that. Yes. Yes. And, uh, you know, it's interesting. I went out to see the dead and company at the sphere and got on the airplane and there was, uh, and I know him really well. There were two purses flying out to go see the dead. Yeah. Like it, uh, I love them. We could do a whole one of these on the movie goer. Oh, it's my favorite. I love the movie goer.

Go read Richard Ford right after reading the movie goer. Yeah. It's so clear. Was it the sports writer? Yeah, yeah. Like it's so clear the influence. Yeah. I just saw a copy.

There's the corrections somewhere. Yeah. There is no corrections without the movie goer. Yeah. No, it's such a brilliant novel. And then yeah, the sort of stoicism kind of he's almost presenting the stoicism as the antiquated thing that he's kind of getting away from. But it is a fascinating book with a lot of stoicism in it. And my favorite Walker Percy novel is Lancelot. I've never read that. Oh, dude. It's so good. I used an epigraph from Lancelot in the opening for my book, Conspiracy.

My mom knew him. Really? Yeah. My mom and his daughter both had their debutante debut the same day. Really? Walker Percy's daughter? Yeah.

The one who was deaf? I don't know. Oh, interesting. But yeah, he's so fascinating to me. She owned a bookstore that he would write in. And I only found that out later. The theater is still in New Orleans, the Britannia. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've seen a bunch of movies.

Yeah, I love that too. The certification thing. Yeah. Which is like ironically a certification when you're like, I've been there. What we just did is certification. No, I love that novel so much. Lancelot's my favorite because there's not very many good novels in the second person and Lancelot's my favorite, because there's not very many good novels in the second person, and Lancelot's in the second person. Yeah, I mean, they're like, that whole era, I mean, it's like, you know, there's a lot of sort of agrarians, because when I'm sort of talking about how,

one of the threads is how Nathan Bedford Forrest exists in the southern imagination, and how it's always changing and being, dude, the lawyer for the Forrest family, he and I were driving in Nashville and he was taking me out to the house. And he said, they'd reburied Nathan Bedford Forrest in a private ceremony and we're driving.

And I don't know why this, I just looked at him and I'm like, did you bury him in uniform? Yeah. And it was a long pause. And he looked and he goes, yes. And I was like. So somebody was touching the body and dressing bones. And I said, what, I'm like, where did you get it? Yeah. He smiled and there is a, there's a civil war reenactment uniform,

Taylor and Corinth, Mississippi, that makes super high end bespoke uniforms. And I was just like, that wasn't a replica. That was a real Confederate uniform. Or a real Confederate. Yes. And like, that just blows my mind. That it's still there. That like, they make these tailors. I mean, it's the art imitating life. It's like, you know, the thing we talked about,

like the political cycle of cynics to true believers. Yeah. Like there is a tailor in Corinth, Mississippi, who has made a real Confederate uniform. Yeah. Like none, it's just like. Yeah, the weird thing, I remember watching the Ken Burns Civil War documentary and Shelby

Foote comes off as awesome and he's fascinating. That's why I was so bummed out. Yeah, but you realize, oh, there's something a little darker about your fascination with Nathan Bedford Forrest. And then I went and read about Forrest and you go, first of all, he wasn't that good of a general. He was a psycho, like a literal psychopath. Not just like, even the people during the war on both sides were like, this dude's fucking nuts.

And so there's something, there's something it's sullies the Shelby foot legend a little bit. Well, the other thing and like, you know, Robert E. Lee, I mean, Gettysburg was a terrible idea, but like he understood the danger of the lost cause mythology and of his own potential symbolism. Like he didn't want any of these stats. Like he was like, we lost, we need to move on. And like, it's, it's just interesting how sophisticated he was and understanding everything that was going to happen in his name. Yeah. You know, I remember when I was growing up, I don't know if these still do,

but like there were gas stations in rural Tennessee and they would sell shot glasses and t-shirts and bumper stickers that said, Lisa rendered. I didn't. Yeah. Like that were everywhere. Yeah. And they were like Hank Williams, Jr. flags that had like all sorts of Confederate shit on it. And like Confederate flags that had the big Bocifist logo. Anyway, I just remember that so clearly and like when Lee wrote about that and seemed really aware of what was coming and the danger of it. Yeah, I think one of the things that struck me early in your book was that as they're murdering Emmett Till, there's just that conversation,

someone walks by goes, I think they're murdering someone up the. There's just that conversation, someone walks by and goes, I think they're murdering someone up the hall or up the road. And the casualness with which violence was just a part of daily life and accepted as part of this. Like, I think people think of segregation as they're like, you have to drink at this water fountain, you have to drink at this water fountain,

you go to this school and I go to this school, which it was, but how do you get people to accept something so unnatural and weird? It is with the constant and perpetual threat and follow through of terrifying violence. I mean, one of the defense lawyers said on the record that wealthy white people need to convince poor white people to be angry and violent,

because that's the only way that this can continue. I mean, the degree to which everybody was incredibly explicit about what they were doing and why. And like, you start reading this thing and it's like, I mean, I would just drop stuff. I'd be writing like, oh my God. No, no, just widespread perpetual violence had to, that's how you would perpetuate a system like that.

This sort of, there is this part of Southern culture that even now, like I think you see it, and I don't think I'm not being extreme here, you see it now in the kind of Trump parades where it's like, it is a culture of menacing. It was like, we're going to put these big flags on the truck. We're going to drive around in circles and send a message.

Well, it's also just like, it's like ISIS. What kind of like small person has to put a flag on the back of their truck to feel seen? I mean, seriously, like change the flag out. Yeah, no, no, it is important that you, like how does Afghanistan, how do the warlords in Afghanistan, how do they perpetuate a system where women don't have these various rights? It is with a constant and ritualized form of violence,

like, hey, we're gonna execute this girl today. You have to make, you create these cultures of this code and then you have to constantly make very public examples of people who violate that code to keep the system in place. And what's so tragic about the Emmett Till story is he walks into it and doesn't realize. He doesn't understand what he's walking into. He doesn't understand how the moment he's walking into it is maybe as dangerous and violent as it has ever been. He also, he just turned 14.

All that is, is about exploring boundaries. Yeah. And- Trying to get in trouble, mess around, do what you're not supposed to do. And also like, he was overweight and he had a stutter. Yeah. And you can just see see the only thing he had

to make him cool was Chicago. And you can just see it. Like, you know, cause like he definitely whistled. People say allegedly and the witnesses at the store get really angry about that. Cause they're like, why are white people calling me a liar? Because people want to say allegedly whistled. And so his family who was there actually get really upset

about the word allegedly because they were like, we were there, he definitely whistled. And then when he did it, it breaks my heart because their reaction to him immediately let him know that he really messed up because he immediately saw the look on their face and they were like, but you could just see just turned 14, has a stutter, overweight, couldn't work in the fields, ended up having to help Elizabeth right around the house.

Cause it was too hot and too hard. So probably felt emasculated. Yeah. Like you could do. He was a teenage boy. And they killed him for being a teenage boy. And like, it's one of the most terrible things you can imagine. And that's it. Yeah. I mean, they all died really young. I mean, Mamie Till famously said, somebody asked her like, you know,

how do you feel about your son's killers getting away with it? And she's like, they didn't get away with anything. They were shunned in life and died young, horribly painful deaths. I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankenbaum. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season we're exploring the life of Marilyn Monroe.

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They all bear the weight of those crimes and the stigma of those crimes. And also the despair and disillusionment of realizing that they were had or that they were the useful idiots. And then the people who were involved who actually were responsible on the higher level. Or like, it's like Ashley Babbitt dies,

but Tom Cotton, no consequences. And so that process, that's how it goes. Demagogues whip up people, they get them to do horrible things. And then those people- It's like that great Bruce Springsteen song, the wall, what he's like, uh, and the men who put you here eat in their fancy dining halls. And apology was apologies. Got no place here at all.

And there's another line that's like, like I heard Robert McNamara said, he's sorry. Yeah. And it's just like the whole thing that like the defense lawyer, I mean, it's in there, but the defense lawyers, their descriptions of what Mylam and Brian did and why, I mean, everybody was so explicit. Yeah. Like they're just openly talking about what's going on. I mean, I just was stunned. These letters, the letters, I just sat in these libraries

over the course of three or four years and just read these letters with my jaw hanging open. Well, that's what's interesting about allegedly whistled, right? The debate over allegedly whistled, what everyone is agreeing on then is that if he had whistled, that's a capital crime, which is insane. That makes no sense to anyone but a group of people whose brains have been broken for

generations and it's the culmination of that toxic ideology, just being exposed to the wider public in a way that it never had been before. Well, I mean, the law enforcement who saw the body tried to get it in the ground before anyone else could, because they understood, you know? And I mean, Mamie Till might be one of the bravest people who ever lived. Cause like, you know, there's a famous picture of, of Emmett on his bicycle and she kept that bike. I got to be really close to Wheeler Parker, who's Emmett's cousin and best friend,

was the, rode the train with him South to Mississippi. He was in the house when he was kidnapped. It's the last living witness. And it was really stunning to me. This is a murder that happened to a country and sparked a movement, inspired Rosa Parks. But it's also a murder that happened and is still happening to a family. Yeah. And also it happened to a person. Yes. Like the victim.

He was a human being. But like they're probably, when I started this, there were probably 12 people left alive who actually knew him. Yeah. I bet that number is eight now. I mean, I'm making that up seven. I mean, that people, in like, you get the sense that like, when the last of those people is gone, then only the symbol is left. I mean, what struck me that I think the line that hit me the most about it, and I'd read a lot about it before, was that they went in to get him in the house, and they told him to put on his shoes.

And it takes a minute to put on his shoes. And I was like, my son who's eight, he can't do anything quickly. He can't get out of the car quickly. He can't put his shoes on quickly. He can't put his plate in the dishwasher quickly. It's just all, and it was like, this is a kid who can't do a thing.

And in this case, he's pissing himself with fear because he must know that something terrible is about to happen. And can't yet imagine the register of it. Yeah. I mean, just like the... Right, because it's incomprehensible how insane what's about to happen actually is. And the thing, the Bible is so clear about the importance of spiritual and physical neighbors. And Elizabeth Wright, he's kidnapped from their home. She runs next door and has to use a telephone.

And the white family, out of fear. We don't want to get involved. Wouldn't let her use the telephone. Yeah. And like. That could have stopped him. If the right person had answered the phone, someone could have intercepted that car or found him before.

He still would have been bad off, but he might be alive. He could be alive today. He'd be like 85. Well, in the Chicago Defender, there were all these letters to the editor of people wanting pen pals. So all of the people who were 13 or 14 years old in the summer of 1955,

I wrote all their names down and went and sort of found them. And then there's one of them in there and it was just sort of, I wanted it to be the ghost ship. Yeah. Like the life that he would have lived. Yeah, yeah. So there's like a thousand word thing in there about someone who was writing a letter to the editor

and the something from Vaughan, Mississippi. And its whole point in the narrative is, this is the life that was left unlived and it's brutal. And like, you know, I was talking to Wheeler Parker one time and I was just like, he'd been doing a lot of thought about remembering everything that Emmett ever said about faith and believing in Jesus and everything other people said, because he was trying to sort out for himself whether Emmett would be in heaven to meet him when he died. Like that's real stuff.

And like, I mean, Wheeler Parker should be on American money. I mean, I went with him to the, and I just love him and his wife, Marvelle. They're incredible people. The book is dedicated to them. and his wife Marvelle, they're incredible people. The book is dedicated to them. I went with them to the African American History Museum and they have the original casket.

Cause they had to zoom his body when the FBI opened it and they reburied him. And so the original casket is in the museum. And boy, he got out of that room. Ryan, he was just making noises. Yeah. And like, but it's interesting, we walked out of that museum, we were like halfway up before he really spoke again. And when he did, he was just like, we can't let people

forget. And, you know, I think I said this earlier, but like if the book has an animating conflict, it is memory versus erasure. And you learn about one barn to learn about all the barns. You learn about one act of violence to learn about all the acts of violence. You write about 136 square mile block of land to write about all of them. And it really starts to pile on itself.

Well, first off, history is political. We're always fighting over what we want to remember or what we don't want to talk about. And so it's interesting. Well, that's what people say, well, history will judge, no it won't. Right, right, because we, but the idea that history is supposed to be pleasant

is that like, that like people want this version of American history that shows what's amazing about America. And it's like, I'm not sure that's what we need to be learning about. We, you want to be focusing on the horrendous stuff so you don't fucking do it again. And also like that. What is that? So insecure. Like I'm very, you know, I still tear up a little when the national anthem is played before

sporting. I mean, I just grew up like with a deep inherited love and respect for America. Look at it. It's awesome. You can see it. History is something other than celebration. And like, yes, and that like, I mean, America is still trying to do something that no other country in the world has ever even tried to do. And like, the whole point should be,

our whole history should be focused, it should be two things. It should be what is the ideal of the experiment, and what is every example where we have fallen short of it? And like the fact that people think that is somehow the fact that their love for America isn't strong enough to handle that conversation, their lack of patriotism, their lack of love of America, their lack of understanding of what America is

and what it is trying to do that is different, just because you don't get your country and you don't actually love it, I don't know why you would try to ruin it. Well, here's the thing, when you look at these dark, so you peel back the onion on this, right? There's good people and bad people, right? You said there's brave people and coward.

Well, so when you people and coward. Well, so when you explore something dark and twisted, you are also seeing the courageous people. Like I, have you read a Halberstam's book called the children's incredible, but the character that jumped out to me most in that book was not all the monstrous white people. It was a Floyd man. And who's the sheriff in this book that tries to do a good job. George Smith is like trying to do the right thing.

Clint Sheridan is trying to do the right thing. I mean, over and over, you see, it makes the people who are willing to do anything against the status quo. It makes you realize how brave they were and how strong their moral core was. Because even if you didn't agree with what they were doing, they were like putting it on the line. Yeah, it says, someone pointed this out,

but they're like, it says something about what you think of your children, that when you think that when they hear this story, they're going to identify and feel shame for being the shitty people, as opposed to seeing the good people and going, I want to be one of those people. And also like this is a story of the rise and ride of a tribe of people,

which I'm one and I love my tribe of people and I, you should, you come spend a weekend with me in the Mississippi Delta. I'll show you the best three days you ever had. It is a magical place full of people. It's one like my whole love of sense of place is rooted in this and my love for it and my deep inherited roots in it, as opposed to being threatened by our actual history. If you don't know your actual history, you're just cosplaying your life.

Like we're not like, what are we even doing? Well, you talked about, you, you went back and you've got your, your like high school textbook where you talk and it's like basically some two guys did a bad thing and then that made us look bad. That's like the entirety of the image building. And it's like, the assumption there was that if we tell people it really happens, these young kids are going to see and relate to, and are going to think they're the murderers

as opposed to let's have them tell a story and they're gonna relate to the courage of Emmett Till's mother and the courage of the sheriff who did the right thing. Willie Reed, 18 years old, agrees to testify. I mean, Willie Reed should be on American money. That's what I mean. When you study the dark parts of history,

you realize, okay, it was a lot worse than I thought, but there's also the aspiration to do and be good is still there and that that's, America is those people, the struggle in spite of and often failing in the moment to beat back them. And that it's both, it's people who do both. I mean, it's the, you know, it's George Washington who was, who owned slaves and thought that the Choctaw nation should be sovereign.

It's Thomas Jefferson who knew it was wrong and did it anyway. And like in those lives, you find the roadmap together forward. And like in those lives, you find the roadmap together forward. And like, it's just like all the ratio is bad and all memory is good. I don't know. It's not, that's not that simplistic, but like there's something there about like real memory. I'm going to talk that out. I mean, cause the word memory to me also feels deeply influenced by mythology. Like the word memory feels different than a resuscitation of historical facts. Like it feels like when something is a memory, you're acknowledging just from the definition

of the word that this is my memory. It's not the memory, it's my memory. There's this horrifying, but also incredible, and I mean that in the truest sense of that word, passage where this soldier who was involved in the Trail of Tears, he's dying as like 100, he calls his family in, and he decides to like, tell them what actually happened.

Oh shit. And you read it and you're like, what he did was heroic in the sense that he decided, he didn't take the secret to his grave. That's right, that's the thing. Carolyn Bryant took her secret to her grave, can you imagine? The very first question, if there are pearly gates,

the very first question she's getting asked is, what the actual fuck? Yeah, what's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Yeah. And like, I mean, no one ever tell. Like, so Leslie Milam who owned the barn, 1974, his wife calls up Macklin Hubble, who's their priest, preacher, Baptist preacher, and says, can you come?

Leslie wants to see you. Preacher goes over to the house walks in Leslie is laid out on the couch in the front room a lot of natural light and he says What's going on? Leslie's dying. Yeah, and Leslie says I need to Confess something. Yeah, and he's like what I talked to Reverend Huffle has since died, but he was alive when I went and spent the day with him. And Leslie Milam said, I killed Emmett Till. I was involved in the killing of Emmett Till. And he just wanted to tell someone. And the preacher, I mean, I write this in the book, but the

preacher said he remembered feeling a little disgusted because it felt like Leslie was trying to lawyer his way to heaven. That even then he was just thought he could like pull a fast one on God. And like, if I do this right now, I'm good. And he didn't live to see the sunrise again. I mean, he died that day. I mean, he confessed on his death couch, I guess. But I mean, he didn't live to see morning.

Well, talking about people who are not good or bad, it's complicated. I read Three Lives for Mississippi, which Martin Luther King writes a forward to, and the author comes off as pretty heroic and decent and not like the Southerners of that time. And then in your book, he's a fucking villain. Oh, William Bradford Huey.

Yeah, what's his deal? Hubris, he had a huge best seller in 1954. Yeah. Was feeling on top of the world. Yeah. You know, he, so for people who don't know William Bradford Huey, uh, wrote the look magazine story that was the sort of famous confession. It was spoon after they got off, they confessed from a jeopardy. They confessed for money. Yeah. And, uh, all of their quotes, when you read the

correspondence between Huey and the defense lawyers, the quotes attributed to Milam and Bryant about upholding segregation are verbatim things that the defense lawyers were saying. These defense lawyers essentially wrote a version of the story to serve their purposes. They wanted it, they literally are saying, we are excited you are writing this story because this will make this into a warning. And like it was on purpose. It's the final act of the crime.

It's the final act of the crime. That's a perfect way of putting it. And so William Bradford Huey just wanted, he went to the NAACP first to see if they would, like he was just a soulless gun for hire. And like you read the letters and it's just, you just, if you've ever been a writer and you've ever had any writerly hubris,

you recognize it. You talk about the importance of learning the history. It was very important for me, because he does a thing that I've sort of done, which is if you have New York editors, they sometimes sort of like it when you tell stories about the South, and the urge to crank them to 11.

He's playing a character. He's playing a character. And the urge to crank them to 11. Yeah. And a character. He's playing a character. And the urge to crank him to 11. Yeah. And like, uh. Yeah, with the suspenders. All that bullshit. And like, uh, he didn't write it,

but it's the Robert O'Kane, I may not wear a Stetson, but I'm willing to bet son that I'm as big a Texan as you are. Yeah. And like, you know, there's this, uh, people want to wear costumes sometimes, like real and metaphysical,

but like Huey, man, he did a lot of damage. Yeah. Cause he, he was also kind of complicit in some of the, some like some of the lies he told still exist. I mean, the many different people have been told that, and that Emmett's body was thrown off of the black bio bridge in Glendore, Mississippi. I mean, the secretary of the interior, I believe, was told that on a tour. It's just not true.

When you pull up aerial photographs from 1955, it didn't connect to where the body was found. Like, this whole story has been told, and like, you know, you have like the secretary of the interior out there crying at this site and it's the William Bradford Huey. There's a museum in the Delta run by really well-intentioned guy, I think, where a lot of the history in the museum

is from the Huey account. I mean, we're still trying to sort of escape the gravitational pull of it. Yeah, it's just like, I think that's an important question you've got to ask yourself as a person, especially now in the world where like, used to be like these are journalists over here This is everyone else journalists have this code journalists have this thing now We're all kind of that so you have to ask yourself when you repeat stuff when you talk about stuff when you have a podcast

Or right, but who am I carrying water for like who am I carrying water for? I mean one of the reason benefits from me saying it this way verse that way and Like one of the reasons that it's so relentlessly end noted is you gotta show your work. And like, you know, I had to read a really rigorous fact check because like one, I'm a perfectionist, but two, like this is serious business. You can't accidentally be Huey. Yeah.

Or intentionally, God forbid. But I mean, most of the time you can't like actively, you know. Right. You gotta show your work. Yeah. And you gotta think about where am I getting this food benefit? I mean, look, the news story this week is that there were a bunch of podcasts or some who I know, before they, you know, went insane, who were basically funded by a Russian propaganda arm.

And by the way, there's one idiot, I can't remember which one, who was like, I'm imagining the accent, sorry, I was just about to do that. Are you thinking of Tim Poole? The guy who said I wrote all of it, how could they tell me, no one told me what to write? I mean, I know, I've met him before, I've talked to him, he was a regular person like eight years ago.

So what I would just say to him is like, you dumbass, they don't have to tell you what to write. They have decided that your worldview is on its own without them doing anything, an enemy of the American. You've spun yourself around. They know they just gotta give you some money and you'll keep doing your thing. Yeah, like you're already doing it.

Yes, yes. Your idea is so wrong that the Russian security services think that funding it is a weapon against the American. Like, let me ask you this, isn't that a treason? Not knowing any better isn't an excuse. Not knowing the law is like you, you're a foreign agent. It's just cause you're too dumb to know you're in the KGB. Yeah.

Which doesn't, like, I don't like. Right, no, no, but that's where we've gotten though, we were talking about this earlier, like we exist now in a world where like, what it really comes down to is going to be ultimately, whether that was strictly legal or illegal. The sense that it's morally repugnant or insane or a bad way to spend your life or not a good thing to do for society.

That's all irrelevant. People are like, we're victims. Oh, you're, oh, okay. But do you know what I mean? Like, whether it's strictly legal or not is the concern. It's the thing we talked about with the ESPN person who was telling me that company policy meant that it was. Like, we live in a world of

situational ethics that is so pervasive that, that you like one of the real, one of the reasons I think that stoics are having such a moment is people are desperate for a non relativist moral code, where they like an absolute right and an absolute wrong and this what about ism. Well, you know, I was at the white house a year ago for this book when a wheeler Parker introduced Joe Biden.

I walked out of that room terrified cause I was like, he's in a lot worse shape than we're being told. And the degree to which Democrat, they were lying to the American public and the degree to which people who I love want to defend him for that out of like a what about ism. Like there's just such a moral relativity now where nothing's wrong if it's your tribe doing it. And like we just, like Willie Reed who agreed to testify and totally blew up his life.

I mean, he's one of the main characters in this book. His grandfather told him not to do it because he knew what was going to happen. He didn't get rewarded. He testified and it ruined his life. And he ran from those ghosts for the changed his name. Like he was not rewarded whatsoever in any shape, form or fashion in this life for doing the right thing.

Doing the right thing often has no material reward and in fact often brings terrible consequences. It certainly did for all these witnesses in this case. When you think about William Bradford Huey, right? What I loved about Three Lives for Mississippi was Mickey, was it Mickey Schwermer? What's his name? He goes down there, he's doing

what's obviously the right thing. And you know, he's just, it's not like they threw him a parade. I mean, he was viciously murdered and dumped in a ditch. And they piled dirt over him. In the bogachit of swamp. My wife worked at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at Ole Miss

and she worked down the hall from Rita Schwerner, who was Mickey's widow. Wow. She stayed? She came back to do a thing. Wow. And it just, every time I saw her there, and do you know the name of the building

that her office was in? Something terrible, right? Vardaman Hall. The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. Yeah. And like there's this incredible, let me see this thing, the conspiracy of southern politicians. Here we go. This is... What do you think of of Schwermer's last words? I can't wrap my head around them. What do you think it's true?

What he said? That he said it? Oh, because Huey might have made them up. Do you think it's true? What he said, that he said it? Yeah. Oh, cause Hughie might've made him up. Do I have an index? Yes, I do. Well, that's fun. For people who don't know, you don't have to make your own index.

It just shows up. They charge you for it, but it shows up. Oh, that's right. Can you imagine making this yourself? Sun House. I checked this up. This is when the civil rights workers have gone missing. Oh, were they gaslight Johnson about it? Because they were totally gaslighting Johnson about it.

And the, oh, here we go. This is it. Senator Eastland told President Johnson, the civil rights workers weren't actually missing and that it was all a publicity stunt designed to make the good white people of Mississippi look bad. Eastland hung up.

Exactly six minutes later, Johnson got a call from the FBI telling him that the burned wreck of a station wagon had been found 30 feet off the highway through the Boca Chita swamp. Six minutes. Yeah. And like over and over, every conspiracy theory, they said that it wasn't Emmett Till's body. When they exhumed, the reason they exhumed Emmett Till when they were going to try to retry this case is because that was, it was proven in court

that the body was not. So they did a DNA test. Of course it was. It is kind of fascinating that that's an underexplored part of the civil rights movement where you have people like Johnson. I mean, Johnson's born racist, raised by racist, partly, Of course it was. It is kind of fascinating that that's an underexplored part of the civil rights movement where you have people like Johnson.

I mean, Johnson's born racist, raised by racist, partly. Like the awakening that they have when they realize like the other politicians aren't just doing it cynically but really believe it and are ready to take it to extremes that even a Johnson wouldn't consider. Do you know what I mean? Like, he's awake, like, those six minutes change Johnson's life.

Cause this guy is just like, every time. He thinks he's dealing with a genteel racist and realizes he's dealing with a. Well, cause, and the thing I would argue is that they're the same thing. And so like, but like it's interesting though, cause not of course, I mean, cause like, you know, the difference between Vardaman and Percy,

who were mortal enemies, you know? I mean, I think like, you only really see the South when you see race and class together, because so many books focus on one or the other and the Venn diagram of that becomes really interesting. I mean, like the only, so the federal government bought the Sunflower Plantation in the 1930s, because all of the farm subsidies

that were written as part of the new deal, I mean, essentially they all still exist. And what they did was they statutorily tried to set the buying power of farmers to equal what it was between like 1916 and 1920. So first of all, if it ever seems like Mississippi is stuck in the past, that's because statutorily it is. But the other thing that's really interesting is the federal government bought the sunflower

plantation, which in some ways you realize like, oh, this is a, this is a, this is a move to improve the economy because we have these big industrialists and cotton has been replaced by oil and synthetics. Let's figure out a way for them to get their capital out of here so they can deploy it somewhere else in the economy. They bought this plantation and then they broke it up

into 40 acre plots. And then they moved all of the black sharecroppers off. So the Roosevelt administration was fighting with local plantation owners. The plantation owners were trying to get the sharecroppers to be able to keep the land. And the Roosevelt administration took it from them. So the guy who owned the barn where Emmett Till was killed was fighting with the Roe Roosevelt administration on behalf of the sharecroppers. You'd think it would be the other way around. And he's writing letters.

It's being like, can you, can somebody explain to me why you're kicking? These people are great farmers. They're great neighbors. They have a church here. They have a cemetery. They've been here for generations. If you're going to give this land to someone, why don't you give it to them? And the Roosevelt administration had all these ideas about best practices. And so they were trying to go find superior farmers from out of state. And so like they didn't know they were being racist, right? But that's the systemic racism, but it's just wild.

And so they moved all of these people in. So the Delta never really, the client never really had a foothold because the Delta was these huge plantation blocks and the plantation owners, the last thing they wanted was a bunch of rednecks scaring their labor. And so the purses of the world were able to keep the Klan out, except in this one block of Drew, Mississippi surrounding the barn where Emmett Till was killed, which was the only real place like this in the central Delta where there were lots of small white farmers. Right.

And so the reason that people talk about there was a Klan in Drew when there wasn't in other places in the Delta was all because of that. And so it was the unintended consequences of sort of US Department of Agriculture best practices. consequences of sort of US Department of Agriculture best practices and I mean, so like over and over the unintended consequences. Yeah, when people talk about reparations, they skip over more recent injustices that were done by the state to groups of people.

And also like the... Like it wasn't this thing that happened once. It was a perpetual, perpetuated. And like when I grew up in Mississippi, like everything was on a charge account, because it wasn't really a cash economy because nobody had money till the, till the crops were sold in November and then everybody got straight. So the degree to which all large scale agriculture is, I mean, it's not a Ponzi scheme. That's totally unfair. It isn't at all,

but it is, it's a lot Ponzi scheme. That's totally unfair. It isn't at all, but it is. It's a lot of moving stuff around on paper. Yeah. And it's a lot. It's financially engineered in a way that you don't. It seems like honest work and an honest living, but it's. It's all credit. Yeah.

And the banks determine what you plant based on prices. Yeah. And like, you know, we farm, we have to get a huge crop loan every year. Yeah. And so it's all based on credit. And credit, like if I had my family farm with the exact same amount of land

and the exact same financial history, and I went in to get a loan, I wouldn't be able to get as good a loan as my uncle who runs the farm, because he has their faith and he's been doing it a long time and they trust him. So credit is already, it's already interpersonal and it's already like we try to have forms for people to fill

out, but it really is. If you're the banker, do you believe I'm going to pay you back? And so, you know, the ways in which credit markets screw people and you had, you know, black farmers who had no access to credit and a really thin, like a really short leash on getting foreclosed. And like the degree to which their reparations owed for that. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, that's, and you know,

and it's interesting too, because like most of the people who own the land, most of the land, like the old mile implantation is owned by a publicly traded company that's owned by Black Rock and Vanguard. If you have a 401k, you own plantations. So a lot of the old families around where we farm, they didn't make it through the 80s. Bill Gates is the third largest land owner in the state of Mississippi. So like these are huge institutional owners of this land because it's, it's a farmland

is not, is inflation proof. And so it, and it's not tied to other fundamentals in the markets. So like huge, like pension funds, 401k is high net worth people. There's always like a bedrock level of farmland. So one of the animating ideas of the book is following the money. And why is it so often that the more valuable dirt is, the less valuable humans are?

I don't know. All of that is incredibly interesting about how the cognitive dissonance and the unintended of unintended consequences. Yeah. The last thing I was going to ask you about is you talk about it towards the end, but you sort of had this teenage rebellion apathetic, you know, sort of, if I don't try, then when I fail, it doesn't say anything about me.

And then you're sort of embracing kind of some southern mythology. But you had this sort of teacher that sets you straight. And I think that's such an interesting intervention because it's so hard to get people, as we said, it's hard to get people to understand things that are painful to understand. And he managed to do that to you in a way. Well, the story is, I was at an event at the courthouse where the trial was, and it was an anniversary. It was the national park dedication and Gloria Dickerson, one of the people and one of the people like the heroes of this book was speaking and she asked, she did this thing sort of like a moment of silence, but just breathing. And the story about to tell, I hadn't thought of in 20 years, like swear to God. And it came back to me and it was so incredible.

And I just remember, so I remember like had all these Confederate flags and Confederate stuff. And like I went to a boarding school and I hated the boarding school. I just was totally lost and like really struggled and like trying to find an identity and like had all this sort of Confederate iconography. And I had a teacher at the boarding school, a music teacher. I've been trying to find the guy's name separate from this. Oh, you can't remember.

I cannot remember. It's Dan something. But when I Google it, so anyway, uh, he basically pulled me aside and instead of just screaming at me was just like, you're an idiot. You don't understand what this means to people. Yeah. was just like, you're an idiot. You don't understand what this means to people. And walked me through it. And I just remember in that moment feeling so ashamed that like, I didn't know. I write in here that I want everybody to read this book. I want to sell a gwa-jillion copies, all of it., I really want every idiot 18 year old.

But you didn't know because people worked very hard for you not to know. Well, my entire, dude, like my high school, this is not a joke. My high school history teacher called the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression. Like, I'm not kidding. Like, I just grew up in a world in which none of this was taught. And like, if you don't really know the history of your home, then you really don't know anything. And if you don't really know where you're from, like really know, then you're not from anywhere.

And you're just adrift and none of this is real. And I felt like this started during the pandemic. Like I was working on a story and I was doing the, adrift and none of this is real. And I felt like this started during the pandemic. Like I was working on a story and I was doing the, I wanted to do the great migration story of every member of the Los Angeles Lakers. Oh, wow. And so Avery Bradley was on that team and Avery Brad, and so one of the Avery Bradley's from Mount Biome, Mississippi, which is very close to the barn. And one of the witnesses who testified was a woman named Amanda Bradley. So there was this brief moment where I wondered and they're

not related, but in the process of finding that out, one of the till scholars I talked to was like, do you know about the barn? And I'm like, what barn? And here we are. And so it was the fact that I didn't know any of this, you know, never again. Yeah. Yeah. And the only reason like it's a fluke and a random, it's like, despite everyone's best efforts, the barn is still there.

Like it's the one unlucky break these people didn't get. Well, it's like there's architects or sort of have been mapping and studying the barn because they're going to turn it into like a museum. That's all just started. Like Anne Frank's house or something like that. When they came in and did all of the, like they did this incredible imaging.

And it's totally structurally unsound. And they're like, they actually don't understand why a stiff wind hadn't just knocked it over. And like, I love the idea that, you know. Cause if it was gone, basically the every other part of the crime is destroyed. And then erasure wins. I mean, like Sometimes you do wonder if the arc of the moral universe bends toward a racer, you know, I mean like it so like I don't that You know, there's a great grateful deadline that I love we used to play for silver now we play for life and I just felt Like, you know my girls ever say where are we from? I can just hand them this Yeah, well, it's incredible man. want to, I want to show you some books.

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