Marble Falls       The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi is a powerful and disturbing book about the killing of Emmett Till in Sunflower County in and around Drew, Mississippi on August 28, 1955.  The physical barn is still there, and it is where the killing was done.  The Till story is well-known these days, but the book is perhaps more about the community then and now from someone who was from the area, as it is about this famous, scarring act of violence and racism.

I had read the earlier story in The Atlantic a couple of years ago by Wright Thomspon, so I knew what to expect when I started reading the book.  I didn’t have a choice about it.  Drew was personal to me.  My grandparents lived in Drew on Shaw Street.  My mother and my two uncles were raised there.  When we moved to New Orleans, my family would drive up there about this same time for Thanksgiving for several years.  My brother and I would rake the leaves into giant piles and jump into them before picking them all up.  My grandmother made divinity and jam cake, a family tradition. We would go to my great aunt Sue’s house a couple of blocks past Drew High School, where my mother had been valedictorian, to pick pecans.  I would have been 7 when Till was killed, and still living in Kentucky then before my dad was transferred to New Orleans later that same year.  I never heard of the tragedy until much later, and certainly never from any of my family, or anyone whose path we crossed when we would visit Drew.  I wasn’t of Drew.  Our visits crisscrossed this small delta town for perhaps a half-dozen years from when I was 8 to 14.  The silence around Drew then is at the heart of Thompson’s theme.

I was startled though in reading the early pages when Thompson mentioned one of the principal’s family had moved “down the road toward Ruleville to take more of a manager’s job with the Roy Clark plantation…”  The barn at “Township 22 North, Range 4 West, Section 2, West Half, measured from the Choctaw Meridian” was close by.  I knew Roy Clark, even if just barely as a kid.  His wife was a school friend of my mother’s.  I can remember them coming into my grandparents’ living room.  I can remember overhearing them talking about Roy Clark from year to year and what kind of cotton crop he had, whether it was good enough that he bought a new car, or so bad he was hardly hanging on.  I read the rest of the book in fear that he or someone else whose paths I might have crossed in Drew would come up in the book, and breathed a sigh of relief to get to the end with only one other connection.

If there’s a modern hero in the book who stands out in this willful silence and neglect, it’s Gloria Dickerson.  I had tracked her down five years ago to see if there was something I might be able to do as an organizer to lend a hand in Drew in memory of my mother and the rest of the Ratliff’s.  I visited with her a couple of times on the way to Greenville and Little Rock or the way back.  Her organizations were big on Main street.  She was all about economic development and rebuilding Drew.  She was in a campaign to be re-elected as a county supervisor then.  The pandemic pushed any prospects away when she was stuck more at her home in Jackson, than in Drew, so we never really made anything work then.  I reached out to see if she wanted to apply for a radio station a year ago, but didn’t hear back.

It was great to read that she had been a guide to Thompson and a catalyst behind the developments of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center, which has now purchased the barn and converted it into a memorial.  None of that changes the way the Till story has been silenced and suppressed in Mississippi, Sunflower County or in Ruleville or Drew, but it all makes a difference.  People around there may not want to talk about it or reckon with it fully, but there’s no forgetting what happened and the impact it has had over the last 70 years and will continue to have in the future.