Ep. 763: Landscape and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Listening past, you can’t predict.

00:00:19
Speaker 1: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com. All right, everybody join today? By Right Thompson, four time New York Times best selling author, grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Yes, sir, if you recognize that name, you might know him because uh right. As a senior writer for ESPN dot Com ESPN the magazine worked at all kind of newspapers over the years, covering all aspects of sports. He wrote the book Pappy Land, The Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last. And he wrote The Cost of These Dreams, sports stories and other serious business. He was the editor for a time and the best American sports writing, Oh yeah, man, I had over the years made it into a handful of the best American essays and travel writing and all that kind of stuff. Not essays travel writing. But yeah, never never got a nod from the old sports writing. Well that now I know who to blame.

00:01:38
Speaker 3: You should definitely blame me. That’s a tremendous oversight, only because like my favorite sports writing is outdoors writing.

00:01:47
Speaker 1: You know, I thought they were being prejudiced against this.

00:01:49
Speaker 3: Well they they probably were, I added in one version of it. It’s just like like I only screwed you once got its school someone else.

00:01:56
Speaker 1: I’m over it now, man, I’m over it.

00:01:58
Speaker 3: Uh.

00:01:58
Speaker 1: We’re here today to talk about well, we’re here today to talk about a book, but particularly like a Let me start over explaining this. First off, here’s the book we’re here to talk about. It’s called The Barn. Now take note of the title. It’s called The Barn. The subtitle is the subtitle is the secret history of a murder in Mississippi. When I was a little kid growing up, I was aware of I was aware of the outlines of the murder of Emmett.

00:02:30
Speaker 3: Till in what year, in nineteen fifty five as a kid.

00:02:35
Speaker 1: When I at the point when I hit college, I could have told you that Emmett Till was a boy who was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at cat calling something some affront to a white woman.

00:02:50
Speaker 3: Yep.

00:02:51
Speaker 1: And he was killed. The killers weren’t punished, and his body turned up in in uh what river?

00:03:00
Speaker 3: A hatchy river?

00:03:00
Speaker 1: His body I knew his body turned up into river, and I knew it was tied to some piece of heavy equipment.

00:03:05
Speaker 3: Yeah, to the a cotton gin fan.

00:03:08
Speaker 1: Yep, I knew that. And this tells that story. But the reason I wanted to have you on and talk to you is I want people to understand that story. But I think that it’s fascinating to me. And even when I knew you were working on the book and coming out that you were calling the book the Barn, where in the book you take a very unique way of looking at a patch of ground. And I think that this way of looking at a patch of ground is applicable to people’s lives who love nature, who love the outdoors, who like the hunt, and who like the fish, whatever, people who have a close relationship to the land, which is something I encourage. I try to encourage and go and pick a piece of ground right and ask yourself elf, not only like, not only what is the history of this piece of ground. But what are the things that happened that made it be that this piece of ground is now where you find inspiration or whatever? Right, Meaning, if you have some hunting cabin up north that you would or a honey cabin down south whatever the hell where I’m from in Michigan, like everyone’s hunting cabin is for whatever reason, is always to the north. Just probably parts of the country where everybody’s hunting cabin is east, south, whatever the hell. But for us in the Upper Midwest, every the action is always perceived to be up north. Yeah, so you have a hunting cabin up north, and by looking at how you handle this piece of ground, and the barn is on a patch of ground, and m Attill was murdered in a barn. Yep, Bizarrely, I would never have guessed this is true. Bizarrely that barn still sits there today.

00:04:59
Speaker 3: I mean, and it is. It’s a guy’s barn. I mean, there are Christmas decorations in it, All of his duck hunting gear is in it. The owner of the barn, who I love and gotten to know really well. You know, he duck hunts every day of duck season. And it’s a barn sitting on a piece of land. And I mean you know this well, but it was a uniquely American idea for the Land Ordnance Act of seventeen eighty five, which is Thomas Jefferson, which essentially dropped a grid over America and divided it into townships and ranges. And so the barn is in section two of Township twenty two north, range four west, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. And like, the thing that I thought was important is it’s a thirteen hundred year history of this square of land.

00:05:49
Speaker 1: And that yeah, that is when we get going on this, Like that is one of the things I want to focus on, is this idea that anyone in an America who has an attachment to a place or maybe it’s a place where something horrible happened, like in the case of your book, can learn to understand their spot, can like learn to understand their spot in a deep history sense. That’s right, Like the culturally transactionally, like what are the things that needed to happen? Who are the people that needed to live? What are the actions that needed to occur? That has it be that your favorite spot?

00:06:31
Speaker 3: You know?

00:06:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, like why is it there? And why are you there?

00:06:35
Speaker 3: And how did how did we get here? I mean, like I have this fantasy that we could do the entire country this way like I did one thirty six square mile block. I would love it if people would take their own version of that, whether it’s it’s like you said, whether something terrible happened here, or whether is this the thirty six square miles where the last cattle drove was in this part of Montana exactly? And now tell me every single human being whoever went in and out of this square of land, and every dollar that went in and out. I mean, one of my favorite parts of this was I felt like, you know, there are long stretches of nature writing in here, because I felt like you had to evoke the world pre civilization, like what was this like before people got here? You know? And the Mississippi Delta was, as you know you’ve been down there. I mean, it was a vast, almost uninhabitable hardwood swamp until around nineteen hundred and then they started clearing it and building sort of the last generation of cotton plantations there, and so trying to understand how what should have been a swamp became, you know, a man made cotton factory. I mean, I you know nothing about the Mississippi Delta unless you cross the levee where all those hunting camps are. Nothing about the Mississippi Delta has any of its roots in nature. I mean, this is man made land, and I think that’s an important thing to talk about.

00:08:00
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’m struggling like a little bit. The story you tell is so complicated.

00:08:04
Speaker 3: Yeah, let’s.

00:08:07
Speaker 1: Let’s do this, man, if you don’t mind it, first off, give a little, give a little. How did you get into sports writing?

00:08:15
Speaker 3: So it’s funny. I wanted to write about music and I was randomly assigned to the sports section at the college newspaper. But I fell in love with it because you know, there’s nothing you can’t write about through the prism of sports. And there’s something incredible about a locker room, because like, these people have nothing in common except they’ve won some genetic lottery. And so I’ve always found that to be fascinating. And I’m most interested in tribes and tribalism and how we organize ourselves and how belief systems are handed down from generation to generation, sort of that as the ultimate inheritance. And so much of sports is rooted in sort of how we code our sort of tribal inheritance to hand from generation to generation. And I mean, I think that’s also true for hunting and fishing. I mean, the ways in which we pass on the things that are important to us about ourselves that we inherited from our parents or our grandparents, and how do we transfer those to another generation of people. And I feel like hunting and fishing is a huge part of that, you know, in sports like that. You know, I’ve always been fascinated by the role the games we love play and shaping of our identity. And so I’ve liked that from the I’ve liked that forever, you know, and I’ve liked you know, I started working for ESPN twenty years ago, and it’s you know, it’s the you know, it’s the greatest job in the world because you just get to sort of follow your obsessions. Yeah, you know, so you’re still active.

00:09:54
Speaker 1: You write about sports now, and you’re right about everything for like Kentucky derby basketball, football.

00:09:59
Speaker 3: It’s just it’s like whatever, Uh, It’s it’s really lucky because it’s just the thing that I’m into at that moment. I mean, I’m doing a thing right now on a tennis star who became a spy, you know, and that’s and like it so it’s a World War two thriller and so like it’s just whatever you’re I’ve been very lucky in that sense to get to follow obsessions. Yeah uh.

00:10:22
Speaker 1: And I imagine you like to pull a cork too, And that’s why you wrote about bourbon.

00:10:25
Speaker 3: Uh yeah, man, let me tell you the Uh that was when you can still have non reimbursable work expenses written off on your taxes before they close that loophole. Uh uh that was great. I mean, like, you know, I had to write I finally had to turn the book in because I’d already spent all the advance on whiskey. I was like, well, I can’t, you know, there is no money to give back. But that was fun man.

00:10:49
Speaker 1: And and yeah, they were with the tax code stuff. They really screwed writers because they and then now they’re handing all that out to people that operate on tip functions. Well, and they screwed writers in the and now they’re turnaround and basically given the whole it’s in the whole world to tip people. Well, and also are they so much more important than writers?

00:11:10
Speaker 3: Well, and also in screwing over writers, they really screwed over small business owners because the h you spend money on your small business to like it’s an it’s an investment in the idea of it in the future. And so when you you know, if I’m doing if I’m trying to build my my business, there are legitimate tax write offs that are really important that you just can’t do anymore. And so like there was you know, there are things you there are things you can’t go do on a flyer being like you know, I think this is for instance, I think this is a great story. I can’t get anybody to bite unless I go spend a little bit of money to go aboard it. And so you know, that whole ecosystem was just eliminated almost overnight.

00:12:00
Speaker 1: No one wants to hear about that. We’ll have to take that offline.

00:12:02
Speaker 3: No, that’s right. But the only writer, by the way, like that. There are eleven people right now who are like, yeah, like leaning in, that’s right.

00:12:11
Speaker 1: They’re like that’s true. Yeah, uh, next thing I want to do. Yeah, just because we’re we’re gonna, of course step back and go forward. Of course, layout layout I kind of gave a quick outline of the murder of Mmett Till. Yeah, but like it’s is as quickly as comfortable. Yeah, tell the story of the murder of Emmett Till so we can so we can start talking about this barn that’s right, like this piece of ground.

00:12:36
Speaker 3: So, uh, Emmett Till had just turned fourteen years old and he lived in Chicago. Very much a boy I mean, he still liked comic books. Uh, he had just gotten interested in girls. At his fourteenth birthday party, his mother and her friends overheard him and his friends playing spin the bottle, okay, and so like, you know, that’s in an age where you still like, you know, I want to kiss a girl, you have a rush own, but also still like comic books. Like that’s such a specific moment of boyhood. And he went south to visit his family. He’s from Chicago, but they were all sort of Mississippi expats and they were going to take the train down just before the end of summer before schools started, and he was going with his cousin, next door neighbor and best friend. There was a guy named Wheeler Parker and so this was nineteen fifty five. This was the year after Brown v. Board of Education, which is only important because the whole South, that’s the Supreme Court case that integrated schools. The whole South just ignored it. So the next year they had to do Brown two. So the Supreme Court had to come in and be like, no, really, we minute, you have to do this. So that whole summer, everybody was waiting on that Supreme Court decision to come out. Meanwhile, there was a governor’s election in Mississippi where they were all sort of it was a race to the bottom for these votes, and so their whole campaign was about school segregation. So they these you should get on newspaper com and read these speeches these politicians were giving because they just were saying outlandish stuff, and so it comes South. He doesn’t really know any of this is going on. He gets down. You have to understand, he’s overweight, he has a stutter. The first day he gets there, he goes out to work because it’s they’re picking cotton now, and he goes out to work with his cousins and his family, and he makes it about a half day. It’s really hot out there, and he gets sent back to the house to help the women and so you know, so this is this thirteen year old just turned fourteen year old boy who is down with his cousins, who is not having a great week. And on that Wednesday, they go to a little store in town to go get like ice cream and sodas and things, and so all the boys drive in and he’s in the store for a minute alone. But it’s a sq door later, Carolyn Bryant, who was the woman that he whistled at, and her husband and his step brother, his half brother are the ones who killed him. She is in there. She said she made up this outlandish story of all the things he said to her. You know, I’ve ft white women before. One, everyone on the porch could hear every word being said in the store, and that never happened. And two he had a stutter, he couldn’t have said it. And so she comes outside and he you know, I so relate to this, remembering being a fourteen year old boy. I think he’s trying to show off for the older kids, and he whistled at her cat call whistle, and he looked around and saw in his cousin’s eyes real quick.

00:15:44
Speaker 1: Over the years, there’s been a lot of debate, Yeah, about who said what and how long the exchange.

00:15:52
Speaker 3: Was, so what actually happened. And a lot of this is well intentioned accidental misinformation because made me tell sort of had a certain version of how she thought her son’s last days went. The last living eyewitnesses a guy named Reverend Wheeler Parker, who I just saw down in Mississippi last weekend, and he was standing next to him when he whistled, and Emmett saw the fear in his cousin’s eyes and was like, something’s wrong, and so they ran. That was on a Wednesday. The thing you have to understand is it was less than twenty four hours after the election of that governor’s race. I was telling you about where these governors had been. These candidates had been saying outlandish stuff. A lot of talk about bayonets, a lot of talk about violence, a lot of talk about defending your way of life. And you know, most of the voters understood they were just politicians chasing votes, but some people heard them and took them serious. And so you know, in Mississippi especially, there’s such a direct link between political rhetoric and violence. I mean, it’s not an accident that the day after John F. Kennedy gave his famous civil rights speech, Medgar Evers was shot. I mean, those things are, those things are, especially in Mississippi, always really closely related. So he steps down into this cauldron where the population has been whipped up into a frenzy by months of five people trying to prove they are more segregated than anyone else. And so then there’s just a kid in the middle of that. You know, being fourteen is about testing boundaries, and the dominant culture of Mississippi was about protecting boundaries.

00:17:35
Speaker 1: And I mean this is right where you grew up.

00:17:38
Speaker 3: I mean, my family farm is twenty three miles from the barn, and so and so they go to town. Emtt and his cousins go to Greenwood for Saturday night to go to the movie. They stopped at a plantation on the way home. At a party, both Wheeler and Emmett had their first ever SIPs of alcohol, a little sip of moonshine. They didn’t like it, but there that age. Both of them had their first drink. That night, fourteen and sixteen, they rode home. They accidentally hit a dog on the way home, and Emmett was begging them to stop the car and go check on the check on the dog, and it was too dark, and his cousins wouldn’t And so they drove home in silence while Emmett quietly cried in the back seat of the car over the dog. They went to bed. Two and a half hours later, Roy Bryant and his brother JW. Milem show up at the house beating on the door, asking to see that boy in Chicago that did the talking. They pointed the gun in Whigler Parker’s face. First. He still remembers the staring down the barrel of a nineteen eleven forty five. He was just like, the barrel’s a lot wider than you think it’s going to be, and like he remembered that. He remembered the smell of the whiskey on their breaths, on their breath They went and got emmet up. He was sleeping with his cousin, Simeon Wright. He sime And remembered he died probably ten years ago, but Simeon remembered his whole life. How long it took him and to get his shoes on. Because he was scared, They took him out. They drove him around all night. They took him to Roy and j W’s brother Leslie’s barn. The barn they you know, they tortured him the pistol, whiped him with the forty five, and there was a witness named Willie Reid who heard him crying out for his mom. And then they killed him and threw his body in the Talahatchie River where he would have stayed. You know, I went to the banks one time with a member of his family, was Sharon Wright, who’s Moses right, Moses Wright’s niece. Moses Right is Emmatt’s uncle. That’s whose house he was staying in the night he was kidnapped. And I’m standing on the banks of the Talahatchie River with her, and I just sort was like, what do you think about when you’re here? And she’s like, I’m just so grateful, and I’m like what, and she’s like The Talahatchie River in Mississippi is known by black families as the Singing River because there were been so many dead bodies thrown in it. And she looked at there, she looked at me, and he goes he got out of the river, and you know, they tried to State of Mississippi saw the body and tried to bury it immediately. There was a whole doug the East Money Church of God in Christ. They had a preacher, they had pallbearers, they had the body out there. By the way. The embalmer did an incredible job at the Black funeral home. His name was Champ Jackson. Champ Jackson’s daughter works at the Delta Crown Room in the Memphis Airport. She’s in there. She’s in there right now. See her all the time. And so they had him out there. They were going to bury him. They had a whole doug. And then in Chicago, the steel Workers Union went to war for him until and so they were so because one of the most powerful guys in the steel workers union lived in their neighborhood and knew him. And so they got the mayor of Chicago to get the governor of Illinois to get the governor of Mississippi to call the sheriff of Lafour County and stop the burial. And so they put him on a train and took him to Chicago, where his mother insisted on an open casket. And that’s how we know the story, hm, I mean, it’s really you know, there when I started doing this book, there were probably twelve people left alive who knew him, and now they’re probably eight. I mean they’ve been dying in front of me. Oh man.

00:21:21
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you hit it, You hit it right, you get to talking to people.

00:21:25
Speaker 3: Yeah. And so what’s so interesting is and it sort of goes back into the land. And you know, one of the reasons I wanted to do the book is set as a history of the land, because in Mississippi, people lie, but the land does not. The land tells the story. The land. The history of Mississippi is embedded in those courthouse records and who owned what land and how it moved. And Emmett Till’s family, even though they’ve lived in Chicago for seventy years, feel like Mississippians, Like they are definitely people in exile. You know, we grow sweet corn on our farm, and they would always want me to bring him up sweet corn. You know, they want hickory wood from the Mississippi Delta for their smokers. They kept trying to plant magnolia trees in their yard in Chicago, but they just wouldn’t. And so there’s a real sense of people who were disconnected from the you know, Moses Right had to leave his farm. There were so many death threats. He couldn’t harvest his last crop. The trial was in September. They were already picking cotton. He tried to hang on to get his crop out of the field and couldn’t. He had to give away his dogs. There was a newspaper reporter there the day he left, while he was giving his dogs away, weeping, and so like everybody had to leave in the middle of the night. Willy Reid, the witness, he had to. He got so many death threats that a couple of days after he testified, Moses Right and Willy Read were the first black people to go into a court in Mississippi and accuse a white man of murder. And that was nineteen fifty five. That had never happened before. And so Willie Reid had to walk six miles down a gravel road, down the Druda Uval Road, which is the road. The barn is on the Druda Ruval Road. If you want to sort of play with the idea that like in like that sort of one hundred years of solitude way the time isn’t real. That road was built by Nathan Bedford Forest brother, so and Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Winner of eighteen sixty three and sixty four, marched his cavalry down that road past the Doherty Bio. So I think in some world where time doesn’t exist like we think it does, those horses in JW. Milem’s green and white Chevrolet two tone pickup truck past each other night after night after night after night. And so Willy Reid walked down that road past Fanniel lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm and it didn’t exist yet, past where it would be, and there was a car waiting for him at the intersection of the drud Uval Road and Highway eight. And the man driving that car was Mud Grevers, and it was the sort of first civil rights thing he had ever done. And Willie Reid moved Chicago, changed his name, and he was married to Juliet who I know. I just saw her in Mississippi. Was married to her ten years, maybe before she knew that he had some other history. So like, these are people who were forced to leave a place. You know, I’m sure it’s a coincidence. But Moses Wright took a job where he cleaned a local theater in Chicago, and he went to work every night at the exact same time that the kidnappers had knocked on his door. And he kept a garden because he’s a country boy. He hunted and he fished, you know. Wheler Parker told me about his dad. One time a tornado hit their house when they still lived in Mississippi, and it ripped the roof off the smokehouse and it was in the middle of the night in the rain, and his dad had them out there finding bacon and hams and sausages because it had all been thrown all over the field. And he’s like, holy shit, you know, we got to go like yeah. And so, you know, these were people who, for general like had real rhythms in a country way of life. Moses right, like to hunt and liked to fish. He liked to make his own sausage with that sage in it. He liked brains and eggs every morning for breakfast. And he lived in concert with the land. And then was just sent to a city to move into a housing project and they let him. The Illinois Central Railroad gave him a patch of land and he did this incredible garden. They made fake mules out of like wheelburrow wheels, wheelbarrow wheels, and they went out, and that was the closest he ever felt to home again is in his garden. And another old man who’d sort of been forced to leave Louisiana did it with him, and that was Fred Hampton’s father, the founder of the Black Panthers. So Emmett Till’s uncle and Fred Hampton’s father worked a garden together in suburban Chicago.

00:25:53
Speaker 1: HM. In order for you to start tracking the history of this piece of ground barn, you had to kind of settle, or at least in the book, you go through the process of settling where the murder occurred, because there was like a lot of oh like people like you think, like how would you lose sight of that? But there was all these different versions of where it happened, so that one of the first things in the book is exploring where was it.

00:26:21
Speaker 3: So what’s crazy about it is so the killers sold their story a confession to a national magazine because they needed money. And so in the process of doing that, there were a lot more people at the barn that night than just two guys. I mean, they were eight to ten probably, and so most of those people got away with it. So they had to tell a phony version of the confession couldn’t be real because they were protected by double but they couldn’t. And it was a family who did it. I mean, it’s you know, in that barn that night. There were three brothers and a brother in law, you know, and so this is like, this is one family killing, like it’s very tribal, and so they had to write everybody else out of the story, and so they moved everything. And you know, there are a lot of history books that quote from the fictitious account that ran and Look magazine. So you know, Leslie Milam, who’s barnet is Leslie Milam in nineteen seventy three called his preacher, Macklin Hubble in Cleveland, Mississippi, who I interviewed before he died, and said, you know, his wife actually called the preacher and said, Leslie needs to see you. Can you come over? And he goes out to this sort of ranch house on a sun baked dead end street that dead ends into a cotton field on the very outskirts of Cleveland, Mississippi, and there’s this guy dying on the front couch of the room and it’s Leslie Milam. And before he dies, he wants to confess to his preacher that he was one of the people who killed him, until and his preacher listens and they pray together, and the preacher leaves. The preachers so shook that he left there and drove out to the store and money just to sort of commune with it. And then Leslie Miham died before the sun came up. And so like there were people you know, made till got asked late in life, how does it feel that these killers got away with this murder? And she sort of smiled, What do you mean they got the death penalty? You know, they all died young, riddled up with cancer.

00:28:21
Speaker 1: That’s the thing I want to touch on later is they got acquitted, but they were cursed.

00:28:27
Speaker 3: Man, they were definitely they were definitely cursed.

00:28:29
Speaker 1: And like it was kind of like what we talked about before we started recording. Yeah, it’s like oj Simpson, well just he got acquitted, but he was cursed.

00:28:36
Speaker 3: Well, you know, there’s a sense of like one of the things that you want to do is excavate the blood and the dirt. You know, Like I’ve made a real point to follow, you know, if this is a story about memory and erasure. Within eyesight of the barn there is the Harvard’s Peabody Museum started digging, and it’s a Native American city. And the reason it’s archeologically interesting, and this is, you know, right in township twenty two north, right where the barn is. The reason it’s so interesting is that a whole civilization rose and fell there, and in many ways it mirrors the sharecropping civilization that would rise up centuries later in the same place, almost a thousand years later. But what’s interesting to the Harvard and all the other archaeologists who’ve been digging on this site for years is there’s something there that shouldn’t be there. So there’s palisade walls, there’s a there battlement architecture, and there were like loopholes, arrow loopholes within the walls with like interlocking fields of fire like this, like somebody was defending themselves here and all of that that’s all been erased. We don’t know who was the aggressor, we don’t know who was the defender. We don’t know anything about these tribes that live there, other than by the time Ernando de Soto rolled along, they were all gone. And this is so on this piece of land, there was a mono crop culture that where the elites lived on the hills, on the mound structures inside the gates, and then other people lived in little cabins sort of out as they worked the land, and it mirrored so completely the ecosystem that would rise and fall. I mean, in some ways nineteen fifty five, in some ways the murder of Emmettil was the death of sharecropping, because the first mechanized crop ever planted had been nineteen forty three. You want to do something fun, you can lay down these timelines of histories of the research and development, production and then mass production of cotton pickers and the electric guitar. Because it’s almost month to month. So as the technology is invented, that is pulling the last people out of the Mississippi Delta because you don’t need because it’s become mechanized. On a parallel track, the technology is being invented for the music of those people. You could hear an acoustic guitar ring out across a field or in the country, but in a dark loud bar, you need electricity, and so you can watch those things develop in tandem. But anyway, I mean, it’s fascinating to me to understand that there was on the spot where Emmett Till was killed, there was an entire civilization that rose and fell, and we say history is going to remember, but that just isn’t true. I mean, history almost exclusively forgets. And then in that same square of land you have Docre Farms, which is, you know, the home and birthplace of both the Delta Blues and therefore all American music, I mean, all protest music is rooted there. You know. Charlie Patton, who grew up I mean almost with an eyesight of the barn, was the first real blue Star Paramount Records. In nineteen twenty nine. He sang first person songs, name checking local cops. I mean this was I mean, this was protests. This is ten soldiers and Nixon’s coming. This is fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me. This is f the police, this is you know, it’s not an accident that Easy’s grandparents owned a grocery store sixteen blocks up Broadway from the house where one of them, at Tills Killers lived. I mean, these are, like you know, Sam Cook, a change is gonna comes from the same little town in the Missisippi, Delta’s Muddy Waters. I’m a man. You know, Nate Dogg is from that same little town. So every time you’re listening to any g funk, there is a like direct line back to township twenty to north range four west. And so you know, you’ve got Nathan Bedford Forest family. There, You’ve got Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm. There. There was a Nazi pow camp in between Drew, Mississippi and the barn in the forties where they were bringing Nazi prisoners to work in the cotton fields. And interesting that the uh, the local people realized that uh, the they were helping the Nazis uh soldiers like cheat and teach them how to like how you way down, like you know, how to get how to get up on the people running it. But some of the Nazi soldiers stayed and married local women and are still there. And uh, you know they were the Nazi soldiers were treated a lot better than their sort of the black sharecroppers who were working alongside of them. But uh, but you know this was real. I mean, there was a whole universe in this square of land, and you know it’s it would be interesting if you could we could do this, Like I would love to know the history of the square of land where men where we’re like where we are sitting right now.

00:33:49
Speaker 1: Someone needs to do a project where you track every like every section all not every section, but every township.

00:33:54
Speaker 3: Every town Someone should do a whole the United States township by township, because I would love.

00:33:58
Speaker 1: To know some townships wouldn’t have many readers.

00:34:01
Speaker 3: Well no, but I mean like going too. Let me tell you, I mean like the there’s that Frank and Deborah Popper who are in academics. Oh yeah, the Buffalo Commons, the Buffalo Commons, right, So I’m way into the Buffalo Commons. Because if in the this is actually interesting, it speaks to this. But like if the wellspring of the American identity is the fact that manifest destiny was achieved. And if you look at Frank and Deborah Popper’s research, that many of the places settled in the Mad Rush West almost immediately started depopulating. So they’re vast stretches of the country now that are technically frontier. And if we didn’t actually settle it, what does that suggest? And one of the things is a lot of this book is a mapping and so I’ve got this great railroad map that shows around nineteen hundred, and it’s the railroads coming up from the north, south, west, and east, and and you see them just stop because they haven’t connected yet. So this is twenty years after Frederick Turner’s essay. This is twenty years after this was.

00:35:06
Speaker 1: What Right’s referring to is there was a the US government used to define frontier.

00:35:12
Speaker 3: Is a certain number of people per square.

00:35:14
Speaker 1: Mind by population density. Yeah, and there was a point at which the Frontier officially closed in America, Yeah, because the population density had been met.

00:35:25
Speaker 3: That’s right there.

00:35:26
Speaker 1: And then there was the observation later that all of a sudden it went, it went unremarked upon, but all of a sudden places kind of went back to frontier. That’s right, because people would come out in homestead, these forty acre chunks on arid land, but it wouldn’t work, Yeah, and so they leave then, and so technically went back to frontier.

00:35:44
Speaker 3: I mean, and by the way, almost immediately. And so you know, in nineteen hundred, the Missy Delta, like I said, was largely uninhabited hardwood Swell.

00:35:51
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to I want you to jump into that a little bit like, so you were talking about Native American history, but kind of explain the Delta as one of the last great wildernesses.

00:36:01
Speaker 3: So the from seventeen fifty somebody listening, who knows more? Whenever, from whenever, the spinning jenny was invented until the DuPont Laboratory in Wimington, Delaware, in nineteen thirty three invented nylon and made petroleum the world’s most important commodity. From the spinning genny to nylon, cotton was the world’s most important commodity. I mean the thing that seeds out. No, but no, the seventeen sixty four it’s the thing that starts to allow mass production, so you can turn one worker into ten. And what is it? And so it’s a wee tool. It’s a weaving situation like a Manchester. You know, it’s not an accident that that during the Civil War in Manchester, the Irish factory workers were raising money for the newly freed enslaved people, and the factory owners were flying Confederate flags above the factories. I mean, it’s not an accident. Like Manchester, Mississippi function for a very long time as a colony of Manchester and Liverpool in London. But anyway, okay, so because they were sending cotton, they were sending cotton. As a side note, it’s hilarious in the way that, like, you know, the entire Civil War was based on the idea that Europe would force a quick end to the war because no one would want to make war on King Cotton was the quote, And it’s so funny, like my family still farms cotton. And the most important thing to know when you’re trying to sort of loosely predict what the price of cotton will be is what’s the carryover? Like how many bales of cotton live in the global sort of textile supply chain, sitting in warehouses that haven’t been brought into the facilities to be turned into stuff. And so the largest carryovers in history to date were eighteen fifty nine and eighteen sixty, which means that no textile mill in the world needed an ounce of American cotton until at least November of sixty three, at which point, so the entire war was based on a completely fall economic idea that that the I think they’re like the politicians who caught the car, like they were just out there saying stuff and so uh, like one economist could have stopped the whole thing. Just but guys, you’re you’re totally flawed, but so meaning.

00:38:17
Speaker 1: Like that that, yeah, like this is the cotton market.

00:38:20
Speaker 3: Like it was a wrong time to start the war because they didn’t need it was the weakest the South had ever been, which was it’s not an unrelated You only really start wars when you’re weak. You know, it started when you’re strong. But uh, anyway, like the Mississippi Delta was the center of the cotton economy for a little while, and then it, you know, it moved around the world. Like oil, does you know they’re finding oil all over the world. Cotton was like that, and so it moved from Mississippi Egypt, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Texas. You know, it’s all over the world. And then the last place it came back to before King Cotton died forever was back to the Mississippi Delta. Mississippi Delta was mostly hardwood swamps. The railroad companies were buying huge swaths of land, and the great the Northern Woods were running out of wood, and so those timber companies came down to Mississippi the big plantation adjacent to the barn was owned by a timber company from New York. And so like these timber companies were coming down. That’s why Teddy Roosevelt, that’s Teddy Bear. He had been sure. So Teddy Roosevelt spent the night in township twenty to north range four west, and he gave as his gift to the plantation homeowners it’s Taylor and Crate, I think it’s right from New York. He gave them two ginko trees to plant as his housewarming gift for having him there. And one of those ginko trees is still alive, and there’s a tire swing in it, and it’s out there on the road. You go see it, Yeah, the tire swing. Yeah. The people who had the house don’t know. It’s just behind like a it’s not a trailer, it’s like a corrugated ten house. And they have Teddy Roosevelt’s Ginko tree in the backyard.

00:39:59
Speaker 1: And man, the book, yeah.

00:40:01
Speaker 3: That’s in there. And so uh and so like the uh the land that railroad companies, in concert with the timber companies, they bought all this land, they cleared it and then.

00:40:11
Speaker 1: To sell lumber, to sell lumber and to ship.

00:40:13
Speaker 3: It where and all over like crates and and by the way, when Mississippi ran out of hardwood, most of these companies went to Oregon. And there’s a reason that their Mississippi town names in Oregon because it’s sort of you know, like Schlitz Brewing Company bought a timber yard so they could make their kegs and so uh anyway out of hardwood, out of hardwoods, all hardwoods. And so they were, uh, they were cleared in this land that the cotton plantations were almost an afterthought, like what are we going to do with this? They cleared it for they cleared it for lumber. They’re like, what are we going to do with it? And so you know, they were selling all of this land and this was cotton’s last gasp.

00:40:52
Speaker 1: And uh, I remember you had some statistics about that land that uh, like the depth of the top soil.

00:40:59
Speaker 3: Oh, it in some ways it went it was like we call that ice cream soil man. In some ways it went like two hundred feet deep. Yeah, I mean incredible soil. I mean one of the all that deposition from the river.

00:41:10
Speaker 1: I remember I remember it being blown away that you could dig down like that and hit like alluvial soil.

00:41:15
Speaker 3: And it goes all the way down, and I mean it’s it’s millions of years of floods. I mean one of the things that you know, millions of years of floods, all of that, all of those natural processes were just stopped, and so the land has sort of been decaying. I mean, the yields are not great in a lot of these places, and so the price of cotton collapsed. In nineteen nineteen, the price of cotton was a dollar a pound. I think today it’s sixty six cents, and so maybe sixty eight, and so it was a dollar a pound.

00:41:48
Speaker 1: It was the last It’s lower today by forty cents, even adjusted for ina. No, yeah, not not adjusted, I’m saying no, No.

00:41:56
Speaker 3: It’s thirty two cents lower than it was in nineteen nineteen.

00:41:59
Speaker 1: Wow.

00:42:00
Speaker 3: And by the way, if you talk to it like this is going to be the this year is going to be so catastrophic for farmers. I mean our neighbors that are going out of business, like people.

00:42:09
Speaker 1: The cotton prices being low.

00:42:10
Speaker 3: Cotton prices and soybeans, so we grew our farm is cotton, soybeans, rice, and corn, and China buys all of our soybeans, and this year they haven’t bought a single pod of American soybeans because of all the terrifying Yeah, all the terrifying it’s just killing American farmers. But anyway, they cleared the price of cotton collapsed in nineteen twenty three, and then for ten years they tried to fix it. And then in nineteen thirty three the Roosevelt administration took over the American cotton economy, and in some ways the it’s yeah, Franklin Roosevelt. And so like, here’s the thing I’m going to try to find because like, I think this explains it’s the only thing I ever really read, because I think there’s something interesting here about how cotton releon, how the cotton economy put Mmett till at the exact place at the exact wrong time. And so here we go. I find this right now, No, golhead, I got it. Here we go. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted twenty years. The suffering and killing and decay that would follow for the next century were the price of three great years and a dozen good ones. Those two decades also marked the peak of the Lost Cause mythology. Consider when all these Confederate statues went up around the state, and consider the history of cotton and the Delta. The land clearing finished around nineteen hundred, the price of cotton collapsed for good in nineteen twenty three, and what happened in between Port Gibson and Aberdeen race statues in nineteen hundred, Macon in nineteen oh one, Fayette in nineteen oh four, Carrollton and Beulah and Okolona in nineteen oh five, Tuplo and ole Miss in nineteen oh six, Brandon and Oxford and West Point in nineteen oh seven, Cleveland and Lexington and Raymond and duck Hill in nineteen oh eight, Greenville and Winona and nineteen oh nine, Hattiesburg twice in Grenada in nineteen ten, Gulf Port and Kasiesco Equipment and Ripley in Brooksville and Heidelberg in nineteen eleven, Columbus and Laurel and Meridian and Philadelphia and Vaiden in nineteen twelve, Greenwood and Sumner in nineteen thirteen, Greenwood again in nineteen fifteen, Hazelhurston nineteen seventeen, Louisville and nineteen twenty one. Many of these were placed quite intentionally on the lawns of local courthouses. Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after nineteen twenty three. Wow, it’s all like, the history is all in. It’s in the price of cotton, it’s in the land. I mean, when you look at the equation of agriculture even now, you don’t control the price of siege. You don’t control the price of equipment. You don’t control the price of chemicals. You don’t control the weather, you don’t control the price of water. You don’t control how much water you need. On the other side of the equation, you can’t control how much you’re selling it for. Because you can’t control the markets. The only X and the long variable of an American farm that you have any control over is labor. And so now you have a system in Mississippi from nineteen thirty three where the government, the government is stepping in and taking over the cotton industry. And if it’s you know, they wrote the Agricultural Adjustment Act of nineteen thirty three, and then they had to it was declared unconstitutional. They had to do it again in either thirty six or thirty eight, I forget. But one of the things about that that was so interesting is they’re trying to figure out, well, what is a subsidy supposed to do for an American farmer. And the thing that they settled upon was it used to be called something called parity payments, and now there’s a different structure, but the fundamental ideas are the same. They wanted people to be able to live like they were living in nineteen nineteen. And so if it ever feels like Mississippi is stuck in the past, it’s because like statutorily, it literally is. You know, a lot of the American farm bills are designed to sort of to sort of recreate that purchasing power. And you know, the a thing that happened between say thirty three and fifty five is you have king Cotton is dying. The as mechanization comes in, you have to have a significant amount of capital to be able to buy all this equipment, So it’s sort of changing who could even farm. So you have a like you have an entire world that is collapsing in on itself, separate from the Supreme Court decisions and you know, integrating the schools. I mean, you just have an entire way of life collapsing in on itself. Prices are spiraling. Nineteen fifty four nineteen fifty five were arable crops, and so what you have is and then you have you know, black people in Mississippi had no access to the courts, so there was no way for them to do anything if their landlord was cheating them. And so you just created this situation where people were desperate and almost had unchecked power over other human beings. And then m. Mantil decides to go visit his family on vacation.

00:47:32
Speaker 1: Right before I read your book, I read John Barry, Oh the Great Rising Tide, Rising Tide, you know.

00:47:39
Speaker 3: And by the way, the nineteen twenty seven the Levy broke in Scott Mississippi. It broke exactly at where Delta Pine and Land Plantation is. It was dpl was one of the first landowners in township twenty two north range four West, which the whole book is about. And uh it was owned then by the Manchester Fine Doublers and Spinners Association, which was the world’s largest manufacturing conglomerate that was buying up Mississippi Delta Plantations to vertically integrate its supply chain. You know, that company still exists. It’s a different name, but they make lingerie for Victoria’s Secret and Marster Spencer. I mean, companies all still exist. That plantation was later owned by Monsanto and it’s now owned by Bear the aspirin people. Uh huh uh and so but like where that where the levee broke was at a plantation that was owned by a Manchester manufacturing conglomerate. Yeah, anyway, sorry I interrupted you. Oh no, it’s a phenomenal book, Rising Tide. I love that book.

00:48:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, we’re gonna have mom but he canceled last minute or something happened. Flights, I’m sorry, flights got cancer. It’s fascinating books. It’s really good. It introduces a thing about between that book and your book, and I want you to explain sharecropping in a minute. Yeah, but uh, it introduces like introduced me anyways to a weird bit in American history where from agri from like the history of agriculture. He explains how there’s always been like you just mentioned there’s always been a labor problem, yeah, when it comes to cotton production. Yeah, agriculture in general, particularly cotton production. And he lays out this thing that the labor problem kind of emerged upon emancipation of the slaves, where for a while the labor problems you just owned the labor. Yeah, and then all of a sudden they’re faced with this thing that you have to entice, well, you have to be able to entice willful laborers.

00:49:42
Speaker 3: And the thing that’s wild is after the war, all anyone wanted was can I just have forty acres where I can protect my family? And so the global capital markets are freaking out about this. You know, you can read the minutes of like you know, because like the way we have business conferences now in Las Vegas, they had those in Brussels in eighteen sixty. I mean they’ve been you know, those aren’t new. So you can read the minutes of these like think tank meetings where they’re essentially trying to invent sharecropping in real time. Sharecropping was the compromise between labor and capital because they tried a couple of different things that didn’t work. And so you can watch the global capital markets. And we go into this in the book because it’s sort of you watch the markets coerce people into living in a way that they didn’t want to live, like people wanted. People just thought of war. People wanted to go You know, I love that line from that Dire Strait song, Someday You’ll return to your valleys and your farms. It makes the hair stand up on my arm. You know, I love that because it like it gets it’s something so existentially true. And people just wanted to go home and live on their land. And there was this brief moment in township twenty two north range four west, all over the South where you had white and black people, You had veterans of the Confederacy and veterans from the Union an army. You had people setting up forty acre little homesteads and trying to sort of make a go of being what Thomas Jefferson would have called a yeoman farmer. And you watched those people get just chewed up and spit out by the global capital markets who had to have these lands in large blocks. And so, you know, the people who just wanted to go hunt and fish and you know, grow a little cotton to have a little cash, but have big vegetables, with big vegetable gardens, with homegrown tomatoes. And you know, my dad was a small town lawyer and he had a client who was a drug dealer who would pay him in tomatoes, and like it was the best thing ever man. All summer we’d eat these homegrown tomatoes. And you know, our big meal in the summer was was dinner in the middle of the day, and then like supper was always just like leftovers, but it’s usually like bacon and tomato sandwiches in the summer. And so anyway, they just wanted these huge gardens and to live with their families and and you know, especially if you’re a formally enslaved person, try to start. You know, roots in your own land were like the most precious thing, and you just watch the global capital markets make that impossible.

00:52:18
Speaker 1: I want to finish this point about that. He makes some rising tide or sing. He explains, is it was very surprising to me that once you had to you have the responsibility of like enticing and holding labor, like willful people to get to work. One of the conflicts that comes up in this area along the Mississippi. He explains, is it As the ku kox Klan emerges, there are agricultural people. There are farmers who are fighting against the clan, oh saying this argument, stop scaring away all the labor. Like that’s their tape. Their take on it is, if you are making a hostile for people that want to be here and work, you’re working against our interests. And that was their argument against the clan. No, you covered so much that same something. It was this weird that I happened to read these two books at the same time, because I was like, something that never even occurred to me, is like this huge problem of like how do you get people to work the land well and farm when you can’t just make them do it well?

00:53:24
Speaker 3: And you know, the thing that’s there was a huge fight between poor, working class white people and white planners and landowners. And so the Delta was seen in large part as a safe space from the clan because like the very paternalistically racist, but like the landowners just weren’t letting that on their land.

00:53:49
Speaker 1: I mean, they don’t want their labor for us to be terrorized.

00:53:52
Speaker 2: No.

00:53:52
Speaker 3: And one of the things that’s interesting is the and even so we’ll come back to this, but they used to send trains down at the Mexican border to bring up for picking because they didn’t have enough people. One of the reason the hot tomali is like the stereotypical food of the Delta is that it’s tomali’s made with Mississippi Delta ingredients. So instead of masa, it’s just staple corn meal and it’s pork and like anyway, all over the Mississippi Delta by hot tomali’s. And that’s why because the black sharecroppers were looking at the hot tomali cans at the end of the road that the folks brought up to help pick, and we’re like, that looks better than whatever lunch we got, So they started doing that. But the but to your point about like about John’s book, I mean that they really nail is that, you know, the the planners were trying to fight off the clan. The only spot in the Mississippi Delta, this is wild. The only spot in the Mississippi Delta where there were a big concentration of small, poor white farmers aka like prime clan material was right where the barn is. And it’s because the sunflower plantation that was owned by the New York Timber people where Teddy Roosevelt spent the night was sold as part of the New Deal. It was broken up into blocks. And so the Roosevelt administration very into sort of progressive era America, very into we’re gonna have best practices, We’re going to find the best farmers to put on this field these fields, and they’re application processes about understanding science and all this stuff. And so what you had was the Roosevelt administration kicking off all of the black sharecroppers who had worked the sunflower plantation who wanted to stay there. So they were fighting to kick these people off and replace them with all white farmers from Georgia and Alabama, and the local plantation owners were fighting the Roosevelt administration own behalf of the sharecroppers, basically saying these people have been here for generations, like these are great neighbors, Like their churches are here, their cemeteries are here, Like how could you possibly kick these people off? So like the other thing that’s constantly shaping the Mississippi Delta is like the unintended consequences. And so it’s not an accident that Emmett Till is killed in the one square of land where there were lots of poor, angry white people. I mean, I don’t know if you ever read the Robert Palmer book De Deep Blues, but what he’s talking about as the price of cotton collapses, this is like nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty, he says, he’s talking about the towns growing up in the Delta and taking power away from the plantation owners. They attracted more and more poor whites from the Hills who brought to the Delta’s paternalistic social structure an atmosphere of barely repressed violence, a burning need to acquire money and power, and an outspoken racism that neatly suited their purposes. They control most of the newer Delta towns economically and politically. The balance of power was shifting, and the planter class never knew mare Strong could only watch it shift. The Delta already tense, coiled tighter and tighter. And so that’s a lot of what John’s talking about, is that sort of sense of that. You know, Mississippi so often gets looked at and people just look at it through the prism of race, But that’s two dimensional. You always have to do race and class because Mississippi there’s always been in a lot of ways. The black population was caught in the middle of a culture war between two halves of the white population, which made it worse for it. I mean, like it’s a really it’s the rock in the.

00:57:32
Speaker 1: Heart’s in a battle between rich whites and poor whites.

00:57:35
Speaker 3: Yes, very much so, and very much sort of weaponized in that fight, with very little regard to what would actually be best for these working families. Can you explain.

00:57:46
Speaker 1: I’ve always my whole life, I’ve known the term sharecroppers, but it wasn’t ntil I read your book and in Barry’s book kind of as a pair, you know, a little bit I don’t unsaid, like what the hell that? Like the economics, like like how it came to be in like and when you hear the word share crop or like what exactly are.

00:58:05
Speaker 3: You talking about? So black people had no virtually no access to credit markets, so the only way you could get out of poverty was with a crop loan. So the way this would work, say you owned a thousand acres, Now I can’t afford land. So what you will do is you will rent me in my family twenty five acres of that. Okay, you sort of needed a family every twenty five to forty acres. You would rent me that like a large landowner would break parcels off twenty five forty acres and that’s I’m and the family gets to move there, and you know, it gets to I mean has tokay and so your own houses. And so basically what happened is you would give me what’s called the furnish, which would be the money I would need to sort of get going for the year. You would provide the seeds, you would provide the equipment mules, I would farm the land. I would have a charge account at the local store. What people don’t realize is most of these farmers really made their money charging exorbitant interest rates on the stores they all owned. So the plantation owners were also primarily merchants.

00:59:25
Speaker 1: So me, as a landowner, like I own thousands of acres, I have, yeah, I run a store, yeah, where I sell supplies to me that people that them rented.

00:59:35
Speaker 3: I have to buy from you, and your charge me twenty percent interest and so and so you get to the end of the year and now you have the right to sell my crop. I can’t go sell my crop, So I don’t know what price you’re getting home. Who sells the crop? So the land owner sells it.

00:59:55
Speaker 1: So I’m the landowner.

00:59:56
Speaker 3: You’re the share crop. So I plan.

00:59:57
Speaker 1: I give you the ground, I give you the seed, I give you a mule, give you a plow. Yes, you do the daily labor. Yes, And then on your patch grows your cotton. And then and then and then an I go, I will now sell your cotton.

01:00:08
Speaker 3: And so you own immediately half of my cotton. That’s the deal. You get half, I get half. You sell it, You keep the money from your half, You take the money from my half. You subtract all of the expenses over the years, with over the year, with twenty percent interest, and if any money has left, you give that to me. Yeah.

01:00:27
Speaker 1: But because I sell it, but since I own half of it, I’m incentivized to get the best price for it.

01:00:32
Speaker 3: You are, but I don’t. I can’t check your books, so you might sell it for there’s no way you’re checking my book. No, no, And so like you know, and so like there’s a gun there’s a gun fight here in this book where a guy came home from World War One. It was like, you know, a war like a war hero and his boss tried to mess him up at settlement time and he just shot him. And you know, because there you had no access to the courts. But that’s the way it works.

01:01:01
Speaker 1: So then so then at that you harvest, you harvest. I sell, I sell for one hundred dollars. Fifty is yours. And I say to you, okay, you bought thirty bucks worth of stuff at my store. Interest on the thirty bucks you bought it, my store puts that fifty or forty nine dollars. Here’s a dollar, here’s a dollar, and that’s sharecropper cut.

01:01:22
Speaker 3: That’s exactly what it was.

01:01:23
Speaker 1: Just like but there was white sharecroppers.

01:01:25
Speaker 3: Was one white sharecroppers all over Okay, and and especially sort of going Alabama, Georgia. No, I mean, sharecropping wasn’t a thing that only happened. Sharecropping happened to lots of poor people. The only way out of sharecropping was credit markets. But let me I got another sharecroper.

01:01:44
Speaker 1: I love, yeah, I love so like like em at Till’s people had been sharecroppers.

01:01:48
Speaker 3: Yes, what would be what would be.

01:01:52
Speaker 1: A long time that a that a family would be on a chunk of ground, like could you raise your kids all through them being kids.

01:02:01
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, no, working that same chunk, A lot of people didn’t leave. And another thing that’s interesting is there a lot of people who were old who still live on land in the delta that you know, his two owners away from whoever the last owner they worked for, and people are still living in the house. I see.

01:02:18
Speaker 1: So the sharecropper could outlast.

01:02:20
Speaker 3: The owner many yes, and and so like uh and if you found one, so it will Dockery, who owned Dockery Farms, which is near the barn, had a reputation of being fair with people and so like uh, you know Howl and Wolf worked on Dockery. Uh as a sharecraft Yeah. Pop Staples like Mayvis Staples dad was a sharecropper owned Dockery. Uh. You had Charlie Patton playing there. Uh the Robert So the crossroads the actual crossroads there man. Yeah, so like that’s right, that’s Dockery and so.

01:02:52
Speaker 1: Like right there, I was with my friend, Yeah, she took me there. Yeah, we did all kinds of junk down there the time we were there. You know what’s funny about do you mind?

01:03:02
Speaker 3: I know that she said?

01:03:03
Speaker 1: The funny little story is I was with my friend ann A Baker. Yeah, I still hang out with And we were in Memphis. She was going to school in Oxford, Mississippi. So like we were in Memphis. Then we were down in Oxford, Mississippi. Then we went to like Clarksdale, so I’m from Clarkstone, yeah, yeah, yeah, So we go there. We went to that bar like Morgan Freeman had a bar. Yeah, went all around there, went out to that crossroad yep. And I was like, man, I’m gonna get out of the car, you know, and sell sell my soul to the devil, you know. She said, you know, I get out of the car and took off.

01:03:38
Speaker 3: It’s just like a funny moment. But uh.

01:03:41
Speaker 1: And then we had in our head that we were going to go to New Orleans, okay, and we were going there and they’re like, ah, there’s a hurricane coming, we should bail Katrina.

01:03:53
Speaker 3: I’m not kidding, dude.

01:03:54
Speaker 1: We were like going from Clarksdale to New Orleans and backed out because of.

01:03:58
Speaker 3: The weather report, which was years ago last week.

01:04:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, because of the weather report. The one of the things I didn’t make it didn’t make it there.

01:04:06
Speaker 3: I love the landscape of the Mississippi Delta, like I love like I love riding the levee. I love being on the other side of the levee like my uncle and I liked like ride horses back through the old sort of second growth but cottonwood trees that you could stick your hand into. You know, there’s like, uh, there’s an abandoned I think Bungie the Grain Company. They have an abandoned sort of elevator complex out there where they used to load up barges and you could ride horses through there. And it’s like post apocalyptic because it’s real industrial, but it’s just in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere, and you know, I love over there. I love being on the Mississippi River. I love the idea of you know, I love taking my girls out of the Mississippi River. I love, you know, them running up a boat on a sandbar, like the idea that, like Mike, that they’re growing up in concert with that river and uh, you know, our farm runs up to the levee and like it’s interesting because uh, in some ways this is almost like a user’s manual for like if you’re going to be there, But like I I love that land and so oh it shows man I really it’s it’s really like I want to be buried in it.

01:05:20
Speaker 1: That’s one of the things that drew me to want to talk to you. And like that I liked about your book. Is I don’t I don’t not try to end the conversation, just wedge just in there, is it? Uh, you do a thing that’s hard to do, which is like, you love where you’re brought up, You love the landscape. You know it’s history and you have but and you’re also willing to point out a lot of stuff you guys got wrong. Well and I got it. It’s funny because I don’t mean, like this is not just a Mississippi thing, dude. But a couple years ago, I went turkey hunting with a with a new friend of mine Don at his place in Mississippi and walking around with him.

01:06:00
Speaker 3: Is this Taylor? Taylor’s my dear friend.

01:06:02
Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, he talks very fondly. He’s a good dude, walking around him. Like like when I was a kid, if I said the war, my dad fought World War two, So I was a kid, I said the war, we all meant like, like the war was World War two?

01:06:17
Speaker 3: That’s not what we mean. No, But I mean, I.

01:06:20
Speaker 1: Was telling Crine ther day, it’s not a day goes by. He doesn’t point to something and be like before the war, after the war, and everybody like he’s talking about the Civil War, look like it’s like a defining landscape feature. It’d be like that damn something in another the war, well that bridge something war, who owns that land something or other? The war, And it’s just not like in the North, it is not a thing that comes up.

01:06:47
Speaker 3: Well, you know, my my eighth grade American history teacher, shout out, Miss Halcomb called it the Civil War the War of Northern aggression. Yeah, sure, yeah, But like I guess the thing about you know, I love the I love the band the Drive By Truckers. Uh. And I think like Patterson Hood, who writes a lot of their songs, Rights is in Us, writes in a really sophistical, sophisticated way about the South and the thing he calls it is like the duality of the Southern thing. And so like, I’ve really come to believe that the most intrinsic part of having a Southern identity is living at the intersection of the conflict of these things. So if you’re somebody who only says we’re the worst. This sucks, this all his you know, we’re just you know, everybody is descendants of oppressors like like, but like that’s boring as shit, and it’s also you’re missing it. And if you only defend it and only say you know, if you try to diminish the other stuff, you don’t actually live there. Living there means living at the intersection of these two. It Being Southern means being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time in some parts of both of them be true. And so like when I see people who aren’t willing to do that, I just find it odd and you know, I think it, you know, like it’s not an accident that so many Southerners were in favor of tariffs, which everyone’s grandparent would have known what a tariff does to a commodity market. It’s where being Southern used to be about being on the land and living in concert with the seasons and understanding that. And so few people are still connected to the dirt in that way that you have, you know, like you have people out there living in like you know, angry travel ball suburbs who don’t remember anything about what it means to farm Who don’t remember what it means to live in concert with the seasons? Who don’t you know, who don’t move out to the deer camp between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve? You know, you think about you know, my cousin, second generation president of the Mayor Gold Hunting Club. If you ever get an invitation there, it’s but they have a day of a communal like dining hall, and so people eat meat like between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve, like farmers move their families out there, and so like I love the parts of Mississippi that are still deeply connected to the rhythms of the land. You know, my uncle Reeves, who has been on our farm every single day since nineteen sixty eight when he took it over, loves you know, it’s funny. He managed, he’s president of two different big deer clubs. Uh, he hasn’t shot a deer since nineteen sixty three and and he he but he likes the he likes the herd management. They got a PhD Fromsissippi State, like working with what they’re planning and when, and he loves that. And then you know, we’ve got three or four duckoles on our farm, and he’s out there every single day and a lot of times doesn’t take a gun, like it’s just calling him in. Just likes to be there and wants to be on not land, wants to be on his land, you know, wants to be buried in his land. And like, that’s such an important part to me of what it means to be from Mississippi and to be from the South.

01:10:12
Speaker 1: That’s very funny. I have a dear friend of mine, Clay Nukem, who I work with too. We always laugh because he has a lot of Arkansas exceptionalism and Southern exceptional So he’ll.

01:10:25
Speaker 3: He’s over at Stuttgart busted some ducks.

01:10:27
Speaker 1: He’ll he’ll say, quite freely. He’s like, well, in the South, music is very important to us, and I’m like, okay, I didn’t realize that it’s not. I didn’t realize it’s not important.

01:10:39
Speaker 3: Yeah. Wait, sorry, I didn’t realize music wasn’t I didn’t realise music wasn’t important in Harlem, music wasn’t important San Francisco, Troy, Detroit, this is motown thing.

01:10:49
Speaker 1: But there is, dude, It’s like legitimate, and I want to get back to sharecrowd.

01:10:53
Speaker 3: Sorry I giggled. I haven’t done that in a really long time.

01:10:56
Speaker 1: Shows you’re having a good time. But I have it to him is like he does a lot of interviews with with I mean, his his show was largely about Southern culture. There’s a lot of interviews, and like, there’s a thing that I got to give them. If you just went and randomly pulled a hundred okay, you randomly pulled a hundred Northerners in a room, and you randomly pulled a hundred Southerners in a room, okay, and you said, like, what way, I want to know what cardinal direction the front door of your house faces. The Southerners are going to kick the ship out of the Northern If you said, I want to know what is the.

01:11:40
Speaker 3: How could you not know that? Because it’s the sun. I’m just okay, it’s just a thing.

01:11:44
Speaker 1: If you took one hundred Southerners and one hundred northerns and you said, if you take a piss in your yard, tell me the route that piss would take as runoff could definitely do that, and what river, what madjeor river would land in the Southerners are going to kick the shit out of.

01:11:58
Speaker 3: The northerns all fine.

01:11:59
Speaker 1: I don’t know why they have.

01:12:01
Speaker 3: It’s because all they can They just can’t. All farming is really is getting water on to land and getting water off of it. Yeah, you know, Like one of my favorite things to do is to drive around our farm with my uncle Raeves because he knows his understanding of the drainage. He’s like, well, see that culvert goes into the Bogue Falia which is going to flow into Deer Creek, Like it’s unbelievable.

01:12:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so like Southerners are better at it. There’s just something about there’s something about the Southern experience that or it’s everyone had it, but it got And this is just very general. Like my friend Doug Duran’s like dying right now. He’s in Wisconsin. He can tell you where every piece He’s.

01:12:42
Speaker 3: The guy where you guys go Deer Honey on the show.

01:12:44
Speaker 1: He can tell you where every piece of water, and the whole state flows too. So there’s exceptions, but I’m saying like, like the knowledge got scrubbed. It’s getting scrubbed everywhere. Yeah, the knowledge got scrubbed more in the North Earth. It used to be like it just got scrubbed more in the north. Industrialization came quicker. Whatever suburbia came quicker, it got scrubbed in the north. Fashion out scrubbed the South. So when I look down there, I’m like, like living with living with deep history, living with with landscape, understanding the limitations of land. It just feels more alive in the South. And reading your book, I’m like, this is you know, and looking at your book, I’m like, this is the kind of thing that I wish there was more of. Is people being like the history where you live, at what goes on and connecting it to how much top soil you got, how much rain you got, what kind of trees grew, were you got, you know, and it is just this story just gives like this story gives this like super dramatic, nationally known travesty a way to go, like, Okay, let’s let’s do this at a place, but we’re gonna do this at a place that changed America.

01:14:00
Speaker 3: Well, and this idea that like that the that the rainfall and the cotton or soybean yields have a direct impact on violence.

01:14:13
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that crops ain’t good.

01:14:16
Speaker 3: No, And like you go back and read narrative like enslaved people’s narratives. And they’re talking about in eighteen fifty knowing needing to know what the Liverpool price of cotton was because that was going to determine how violent their day was. Like this is the moods of the It’s been tied to that forever. And I mean, you know the ways in I mean we said this earlier, but the ways in which Mississippi you know, functioned as an extension of man My mother grew up in Shelby, Mississippi, and they got the Manchester Guardian delivered to their house to track cotton, to track to textile industries in cotton because there was no internet, and even though the paper came once a week, it gave her father just a little more info. And so there’s always been you know, uh, Yazoo City, Mississippi used to be named Manchester, Mississippi. My uncle Will was the team doctor for Manchester Academy football team forever, and it’s named after Manchester, you know, and I mean that tight. Yeah, it was so tied into you know, in New Orleans, all those banks, those are all London banks, New Orleans and New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah were sort of outpost of European capital markets. Yeah uh, And it’s just like all of that stuff is fascinating, you know, one of the there are a lot of these histories of America that I feel like are fatally flawed because they stop at the water’s edge, as if you know, as if like this, like you can watch capital markets move all of this and one of the heartbreaking things in the book. They’re probably five or six different times. The reason I like the Ivory Bill Woodpecker in here is because it represent it’s the mystery to me, and it represents the sort of Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, It’s raining flowers in Macondo’s sort of active imagination of what could have happened. Nine different times this whole thing could have been avoided, and so like rolling through the history of the land, you see over and over times where a decision, like one decision, and none of this would have even ever been there.

01:16:27
Speaker 1: When we finished it, I talked about two things I want to hear about the Ivory Bill Woodpecker. Yeah, I want to hear about the Curse of the Killers. But I want to step right now back to summer we left off. Why like Emmett Tills people. Yeah, his people had been sharecroppers from Mississippi.

01:16:44
Speaker 3: Yep.

01:16:45
Speaker 1: Why were they up? Why were they going to Chicago? Like what was going on in the in the economy and on the land that made it that these long time people that had been slaves then they had been sharecroppers they gave up on the South? What was happening?

01:17:00
Speaker 3: So a couple of things are going on. One, factories are desperate for workers. They’re sending northern factories they’re sending like labor agents down to the South. God, who are being recruiters, recruiters who are being run out of town by the police.

01:17:16
Speaker 1: Oh you shit me? Really, there’s like a tension.

01:17:17
Speaker 3: No, no, dude, they were like arresting and running them out of town and like no, it was a huge tension.

01:17:23
Speaker 1: And they’re taking the labor.

01:17:24
Speaker 3: They’re taking the labor there was it had gotten after the price of cotton collapsed. I think an already tense situation like the like the book said, uh coil tighter and tighter. People were looking to leave. There was so much violence, you know, the modern clan was found in like what nineteen twenty two, I think in response to Black soldiers coming home from World War One. You know, there was a whole sort of America first after the horror of going to Europe and fighting this war, and so there just was a real retrenchment in the eighteen twenties, and so you had, you know, there were black veterans being killed all over the South and so like people were trying to get out. And so Maymi Till’s father moved in like nineteen twenty three, I think because he was like he didn’t feel like he had daughters and he didn’t feel like he could protect his daughters, and he was like, we got to get out of here.

01:18:22
Speaker 1: So it was like moving for safety, twenty two years before his.

01:18:26
Speaker 3: Boy would be killed. Yes, it was moving for safety, whatever the hell number years, Yes, and it was moving for safety grandson be killed.

01:18:32
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:18:32
Speaker 3: And it was also like, you know, the first mechanized cotton crop in America was nineteen forty three in Clarksdale at Hobson Plantation. I mean that was coming. And so you know, our farm we probably needed in nineteen fifty four hundred families living on it to farm it. We farm it now with I think eighteen people. And that’s because the tractors can’t turn themselves around. How about we’re ten years away from farming it with four people, and so you can just watch sort of the need for all of this labor run out. One of the sort of ironies of the of Emmett Till’s murder is that it was very much an effort by a sort of class and race of people to protect what they felt was a world running through their hands. So many families left the Mississippi Delta after nineteen fifty five, Every family who lived in Money, Mississippi, every black family who had a teenage son left, And so the people who couldn’t afford the expensive equipment were the only people who were still using sharecroppers. And then the last of the sharecroppers left, and I think by nineteen sixty five there were no sharecroppers left in America, got it.

01:19:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it was the whole opportunity was evaporation.

01:19:46
Speaker 3: Yeah. And so you also have he arrived at the last gasp of a way of being in the world and didn’t know it.

01:19:58
Speaker 1: You know what kind of uh broke my heart in a weird way, is uh? I always have and and do hold up World War two guys, pedestal. Oh yeah, M Mattill’s murders man the World War two guys and it was like a service pistol.

01:20:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, they beat him to death with his uh, with his ithaca uh forty five and uh yeah.

01:20:24
Speaker 1: These got like a number of those guys were veterans.

01:20:26
Speaker 3: Well, and they were all veterans, and I mean one of the guys was a veteran from Pelolu. And then JW. Milem was wounded at the Colmar Pocket. One of the things in the book is so all of the all of his every book ever written about m until has a sort of huge line of mistakes through it. Because there was like a typo in JW. Milem’s obituary and it got the number of his unit wrong. So people in these books would be describing the battles he would have been in, but he wasn’t there. And so on.

01:20:59
Speaker 1: One of the does a thing like that. It’s so crazy it makes me I don’t want to get it. There’s a thing like that in the history of the American Buffalo. Yeah, it was a thing that you can’t read a book about that subject that doesn’t include a thing that never happened.

01:21:10
Speaker 3: Dude, See this because of a mistake, so it makes it and so so, and it’s in every book, so then you’ll love this. So I was like, this doesn’t. I just didn’t believe it. I think, like, if you’re going to write something that is like this, you have to there’s a reason it’s so endnoted. You got to show your work. Yeah, And I was like, so, I’m not taking anything for granted. And so I found I found every obituary that had ever been published that mentioned this unit, because I didn’t know it was a typo yet, and so I just believed it. I just so I found every every single obituary that mentioned that. And then I called the eldest son of every one of those dead veterans and said or emailed or called and said, hey, did your dad bring home anything from the war. And this really nice guy outside of Fort Worth, Texas was like, my dad was like the logistics officer for that unit, and he brought home a every single piece of paper. Theyre in my filing cabinet. You want to come see them. So I went and spent a couple of days this guy’s house and I went through every piece of paper from this unit and JW. MILEMS name wasn’t on any of it, and so then I went to these incredible There’s this guy named Eric who works in the archives in Saint Louis. So in the nineteen seventy three there was a terrible fire in Saint Louis at the American Archives, and it burned up almost every single World War Two veterans personnel file. They’re all gone. They all burned the unit files with like the morning reports. All of that is still there. So you can recreate someone’s service record, but it’s unbelievably tedious. And so I eventually recreated his entire service record. And then I went to France and then I walked the battlefields, you know, I like walked through the forest where the foxholes were. Wrote all of this and then cut it all out of the book. So I but I spent a lot of time with JW. Milems you know JW. Miles legitimate. You know, people claimed he will want a silver star. I don’t think that’s true. But definitely wounded in the coal Maar pocket, like right there on the border between It’s like no, it’s right on the border between Germany and France. Uh so like uh Strausburg, like when I when I went there, I flew into Stuttgart in Germany and drove across the border as that was the closest airport.

01:23:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, so you really track these guys down.

01:23:31
Speaker 3: I did, you know. And I had a whole pelolu thing on Melvin Gamble, uh and like it’s it’s just when a legitimate war hero thinks that it is necessary to torture and kill a child to preserve something that he feels is being lost, Like you know, you know, I say in every book talk like, yeah, forces had a lot to do with him until his death, but forces didn’t kill him. Everybody in that barn that night had free will. But what’s so interesting is you watch these people move across the south. You know, my family sort of moving roughly the same place as generation by generation that the Milems are, like, you know, the Mylem family was married at one point in the DuPont family, you know, And so you watch them generation by generation, poor life spans get shorter, not longer. You were watching a family keep going west to try to try again with the next generation, failing, generation after generation, continuing to move west until there’s nowhere left to move west. And so the generation that sort of washed up and there was nowhere left to go, was like JW. And Roy’s parents generation, and so they were in the hills. They had their noses pressed up against the glass of the last great gold Rush and the cotton industry, and they didn’t get down into the delta until right after it collapsed. And so for generations they’ve been trying to get into this place where this land was, and they get there and then the promise of it is all gone. And you know, four generations of the mile of mile of men either killed someone violently or were killed violently, and you just watch, You’re just watching a family disintegrate. And m Until with his hope and with his young teenage sense of adventure and of boundary stretching and of looking for the line. He uh, you know, he intersected. He was on the way up, and he intersected with a group of people who had been auguring in for generations. And like that has something to do with all of this, you know, I mean it’s like, uh, you just forget. Like you know, there’s a storage you know in Chicago right now that the Till family has that has him it Tills Toy train in it No kidding. I mean you know, I mean like this was a child who ran into a family that was had been so disillusioned by whatever they had been sold about the possibility of where they lived that it had curdled into something terrible.

01:26:23
Speaker 1: Krin and I were having a conversation yesterday in preparation for you coming, and somehow, like many conversations I’m in, came around at OJ.

01:26:34
Speaker 3: Look I got a weird man. I met OJ once and it’s a.

01:26:38
Speaker 1: Great story, quick OJ story. I was not gonna talk about the conversation we were having about you that turned into a conversation about OJ, which I’m going to turn into a conversation about the acquittal ahead.

01:26:48
Speaker 3: That’s perfect. The uh. And then I’m going to riff off of the acquittal and turn it back to OJ. All right, No the uh?

01:26:55
Speaker 1: Uh you don’t know what point I’m gonna make.

01:26:58
Speaker 3: Did you put LSD in this coffee? The uh? And so uh Uh. I was at a Kentucky derby and uh, I asked, I ran into OJ at a like six am cocktail party and uh because the horses were training, and uh, I asked him who was gonna win? And he said, lawyer, lawyer, Ron because he had he said he had lots of positive experiences with lawyers. And then I obviously went and took a shower, like Jesus Christ. Wow, I was just like, you decapitated somebody. I got to get away from you, man, so allegedly, Yeah, gloves don’t fit now, you must have quit.

01:27:38
Speaker 1: Krin and I were converse about I was telling her she was sweating that she hadn’t finished your book, and I’m like, I read the whole damn thing, so we’re covered. Anyways, I was explaining to her a little bit about the curse, and I was saying that one of the surprising aspects and I’m gonna bring us around. Oh yeah, and you caught you loose one of the surprising aspects. When these peoples come unity, these murders, you know, they’re judged by their peers. They’re they’re tried in their home area, and the attitude of the jurors is, we’re gonna acquit you, but I don’t want.

01:28:15
Speaker 3: Nothing to do with you from here on out, very much so.

01:28:18
Speaker 1: And with with OJ’s jury, they weren’t they weren’t considering whether he did it or not. You know, it was like it was about the l A p D. Yeah, And it was kind of like, we’re gonna let you go, right because.

01:28:39
Speaker 3: These guys are totally there even though you did it, we.

01:28:42
Speaker 1: Know you did it, like we know you did it. We’re gonna let you go. You’re not a good person, but this isn’t even about you. This is about at the LAPD. So like you’re guilt or not guilt, like you know, that’s not that’s not what’s trial. Here’s the ship, but this is not what I’m talking about. Piece of garbage, but this is not what I’m talking about. That that kind of that was so surprising that like the jury, the jurors that acquit them have like tacit acknowledgment you did it and and that’s bad, but we’re not going to participate in this system somehow or like yeah, maybe you can explain it better, but like they weren’t deciding if they did it or not. It was something different.

01:29:26
Speaker 3: So one of the things that’s so interesting is in the the sort of white establishment, uh you know, the defense attorneys who are all very very well educated. You know, a couple of Princeton guys and uh.

01:29:41
Speaker 1: Chris, is that a Princeton person? Mm, hmm, what you do at Princeton politics? Well mean your whole four year degree here told me.

01:29:50
Speaker 3: That she likes to say, I would sco Boston.

01:29:55
Speaker 1: You went to college at Princeton. Maybe I knew that and forgot it.

01:29:59
Speaker 2: She I don’t really talk about it too much.

01:30:02
Speaker 3: Rich guy over here, what are we gonna do? That’s not the case, Jesus Christ.

01:30:07
Speaker 2: Rich financial aid package?

01:30:10
Speaker 3: What’s your name? Like Van Cockle Horse the fourth? What are you like? Schneider the ninth.

01:30:17
Speaker 2: My dad’s from Brooklyn and my mom is from.

01:30:21
Speaker 3: So so you don’t there’s not some big like she inherit the position of okay, I didn’t know if there was like a you know, a Schneider Industrial Challenger sitting out here at that at the Jet Center.

01:30:34
Speaker 2: That Schneider the family.

01:30:38
Speaker 3: That’s no, that’s right, that’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. She actually owns all of this. You just don’t know it. She really liked you. She’s the investor. There’s a series of shell companies, so you’ll never find out.

01:30:52
Speaker 1: I think it’s coming back to think so. But like the lawyers, her as a lady that makes ear out of the claws and pecker.

01:31:02
Speaker 3: Bones and whatnot.

01:31:04
Speaker 1: Where did you guys meet right here but at a different building? Same the uh so.

01:31:13
Speaker 3: Uh. You know. One of the things that the defense lawyers clearly understood was that they were going to use this case. I mean they talked about this openly, like all their record you can go read now all the stuff they talk openly amongst each other that like, we’re going to use this murder as our shocking act of violence to try to maintain some control that because of these court rulings we’re losing. So you know, like JW.

01:31:36
Speaker 1: They wanted to tie it into very segregation.

01:31:40
Speaker 3: So they shaped the Dude, when you read go read the Look magazine story that’s off phony. They make J. W. Milems sound like he’s Plato, do you know what I mean, Like like Aristotle, he’s the most sophisticated. Like there’s a newspaper reporter I won’t name, but I’m always convinced this guy makes stories up because every I mean quotes a cab driver. I’m like, dude, I’ve had a lot of cab drivers. I’ve never had a cab driver like who says the exact, perfect, eloquent philosophical thing I need at the Like you’re that just didn’t happen. So, but the lawyers are making up these quotes that are coming out of JW. Milum. And the way you realize it is when you at Ohio State. They have a huge trunch of some of these notes in the law.

01:32:24
Speaker 1: But I can’t move on. Who’s the writer. I can’t tell you is he alive? Yes, I’ll tell you later. There’s a funny quote that someone was saying that stand up comedians, Yeah, stand up comedy is mostly acting outraged by something of you said that you made up that a fake friend said.

01:32:42
Speaker 3: By the way, this, by the way, that’s really good, Like there is no stand up without the straw man, Like I gotta.

01:32:50
Speaker 1: Say that you make up a friend, You make up a thing, he said, and then that thing pisces you off and you talk about that that’s.

01:32:55
Speaker 3: Right, or it’s like yeah, or like you know the the Great Louis c k fit about uh, every someone else on the airplane being pissed about the Wi fi. He’s given a minute, it’s got to go to space. And you’re like, when I heard that, I’m like, oh, he’s clearly both people in this scenario. He’s both the person having a temper tantrum, and also the other version of him who is self aware enough to know that, like, so anyway, the uh uh but maybe no anyway, I love uh.

01:33:24
Speaker 1: So you’re not gonna tell me, the writer.

01:33:25
Speaker 3: No, and so I filibustered that, and so the uh. But you see things that are coming out of JW. Malm’s mouth that are verbatim from notes that the writer took from interviews with the lawyers, and so you you’re watching the lawyers shape it. And so one of them, one of the lawyers, said, we need people like JW. Milem to fight our wars and to keep people in line. And so there was very much a sense of like we’re gonna it’s exactly what you said, like we’re gonna circle the wagons. But like these people were totally ostracized. I mean at the end of his life. Uh, which people the murderers, Oh yeah, at the end of Roy Bryance, like the.

01:34:06
Speaker 1: People that the families that the people that had quit them, like they didn’t want them around.

01:34:12
Speaker 3: No, and they couldn’t get crop loans and they couldn’t you know. Leslie Malham became a drug dealer and JW. Malham was arrested for food stamp fraud and like that.

01:34:22
Speaker 1: That was one of the biggest ironies I think is that if you’d asked, if you went and asked people, I’d be like, you know, if you said, like, hey, give me the give me your like prejudice views on what like minorities are up to. Yeah, like oh, food stamp fraud, drug dealing, and the dudes that killed Emmett till Well food stamp fraud, so drug dealing.

01:34:50
Speaker 3: So I mean, I don’t know how it is here, but like, especially in Mississippi, the accusation is always the confession. Like people only get mad at other people.

01:35:00
Speaker 1: Read that quote and I told that quote my wife and then I had to try to explain it to her because you did a better job explaining that the accusation is the confession.

01:35:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, like you only ever despise in other people, which you actually despise in yourself. I mean that’s just sort of like, I mean, that’s almost universally true, and so like you have Yeah, I mean, you know, these guys are bootleggers. They’re making whiskey. JW. Milem is one of the main bootleg runners for the sheriff. It was investigating his murder. I mean, there’s a whole theory of the case that Sheriff Strider made sure to claim jurisdiction because the body was found in Tallahatchie County, the kidnapping happened in Lafleur County, the murder happened in Sunflower County, and the but the case was tried in Tallahatchie County because it was the most conservative and it’s also where the killers were from. A bunch of the members of the jury were like related to them. This is very much this is not a random act of violence. This is one tribe, members of one tribe of people killing a child of another tribe of people to send a message, you know, and like you know and like the grand conspiracy of what. So when when the FBI wanted to reopen the case in two thousand and four three four, they had to exhume the body. And so the reason they had to exhume Mmitt Till’s body was because the jury had said that that wasn’t Emmett Till that they had pulled out of the river. So what the defenses theory of the case that the jury bought was that the NAACP in cahoots with the Communist Party, had gotten a body out of a morgue, thrown it in the Mississippi in the Tallahatchee River, weighed it down just enough, you know, obviously understanding the deep science of your body releasing decom gases, so they would know exactly how much weight to have so that it would sink but then flow again. You know, somebody really done some work and that this body that and then Mamie Till had said it was her son in exchange for getting a payout of a life insurance policy, and that Emmettil was alive, and that all of this had been done to make to make Mississippi look bad and to help the Communist Party take over America. And that was the case that the jurors made. That was the case the lawyers made, and that was what the jury bought. So they had to exzuom him and do a DNA test to make sure that the body in Burroke Cemetery in Chicago was Mt. Til and I mean and of course it was, and you know, so the and then like I’m gonna find this thing real quick because I like you talk about this is what is being taught about This is from a textbook that’s being taught right now in the Mississippi Delta about the Mmettil murder. I mean you talk about the accusation is always a confession only sort of Only a state that has so actively rewritten history to such a degree would be worried that someone else was come along and do it the other way. So, like you know, Mississippi has been banning textbooks forever in rewriting text like my Missippi history textbook stopped before the Civil Rights movement. So this is what is. This is from a textbook, and this is the only thing in the textbook that is about Mt. TIL And this is this is being taught right now. In nineteen fifty five, J. P. Coleman, the Attorney general from Choctaw County, was elected governor of Mississippi and was elected governor in Mississippi’s first general election after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Coleman promised to keep the schools segregated. He proved to be a moderating force during a very difficult time. Just after the election, Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago, allegedly made allegedly made a pass at a white woman in a rural store. Two men kidnapped him, beat him, killed him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchee River. The coverage of the trial, an acquittal of his accused murderers, who later admitted their guilt in an article in a national magazine, painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens. That’s the textbook, m H. And so like, well, what what about that? Like to help me understand? So the thing for me is that the entire murder is still taught in the context of the death of The worst part about a death of a child image, well is that it sure made the sure made the white people look bad. And like, you know, I think like somewhere along the line, learning our history was transformed into sort of relentlessly attacking people with it. And I think, like, you shouldn’t be using You shouldn’t learn the history of the Mississippi Delta to determine who is currently politically problematic, who should be canceled. You should learn the history just to know it. And so like, I don’t feel guilty, Like I don’t, I don’t have some weird like Southern guilt thing, but I do think it’s a combent upon me to know what happened on this land if I’m going to farm it. And you know, and I do think that that it is essential to be able to say this is what happened here, and you know, it’s not like you know, we’re still on the land. You know, it’s not like I haven’t I failed to understand how learning the history of this in any way negatively affects me. I mean I’ve thought about that a lot, because that’s so that you know, that conversation is in the air so much, and like, I just failed to understand how teaching this history in a school could do a single thing to me or anyone related to me.

01:40:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, what kind of opposition to your work have you encountered? Or threats or people trying to undermine it?

01:40:55
Speaker 3: Are not? Really because you know there is that when I’m from there, and like there’s the you know, there’s that great I think it’s Willie Ray Wiley Ray Hubbard wrote it, But like Robert O’Kane does the sort of version I know he’s like I may not wear a stet Son, but I’m willing to bet son that I’m as big a Texan as you are. Like I sort of feel like we’ve been I’ve been there from a long We’ve been there a long time, We’re going to be there a long time. I can kind of say whatever the hell I want. There’s a sense of also it’s just true, and like the people who are from there know it, you know, and and and are much more nuanced about this than our two dimensional politicians would lead you to believe, like, you know, like Mississippi is Mississippi, and Mississippians are complicated and and so there’ve been very little pushback. And you know, it’s interesting because I mean, I love the Mississippi Delta. I didn’t know hardly any of this. I certainly didn’t understand, you know, Paul the Paul Simon song. That’s just it’s not the highway through the cradle of the Civil War. But I don’t think I knew that until this. I mean, there’s there’s just a lot about the actual history of the land and the way that both you know, I think Faulkner is so often misunderstood. I think if you go read the Bear, you go read Go Down, Moses, you go down and read as you go read Absolom Absolom, Like I think one of if not the most animating things in all of his work is the bewilderment at the Mississippi Delta, going from uninhabited swamp to a agricultural factory in twenty five years. I mean, it would have taken a thousand years in Bavaria to kill a forest that big. And I think like the idea of civilization as the enemy of nature and how that flows through Faulkner’s work. I mean, like when I read The Bear, when I go read like I said, go down Moses or Absolom, like I feel. I mean, I feel like Faulkner’s read now only through the prism of race, and like, I actually think that’s not how you have to read Faukner through the prism of his deep bewilderment at the sort of existential loss and trauma of having that much wilderness just erased, and like what that does to a people, Like I mean, it’s not an accident that like nothing about the land where immit Till was killed has anything to do with God, Like this is not this is man made land, this is not none of this bears the fingerprint of the creator God. And yeah, it just has nothing to do with that what And so you know, if you ever go out to that barn and wonder, like God, did God forsake this place? Maybe the answer is yes.

01:43:52
Speaker 1: History man, Like, I get what you’re saying. History’s history is so tough and the telling of it’s so top. The other day I took my kids. We were in New Mexico for a wedding. Yeah, and I took my kids to Bandolier. Yeah, okay, the sight of old ancestral to Blowing Settlements. There’s a big sign. You get up in this high overlook and you can see Los Animals laboratories off to the west. Okay, and there’s a sign there, and it’s a National Park Service sign, and the sign is about The sign is exclusively about that Puebloan people weren’t allowed to go on the Los Alamos land starting in nineteen forty three or whatever the hell it was, Okay, and the freedom to go there slas and been restored. I said to my kids, like I called more. I said, man, I want you to understand what this sign is, and I want you to understand what’s not here.

01:44:55
Speaker 3: Well, and I’m like that’s crazy. Well, well, would you want to not be on this where we test nuclear weapons.

01:45:01
Speaker 1: I said, if I was going to write this sign, you call my kids in here and ask. I said, if I was going to write this sign, I would say, and it’s worth pointing out the thing they invented on that site over there saved probably two hundred and fifty thousand American lives because we would have had to have invaded the mainland of Japan, you know. And so I’m like, there’s just I was. I was like kind of lecturing them, I’m like, there’s just always more to the story.

01:45:31
Speaker 3: And also like if you don’t want someone to drop an atomic bomb on you, maybe don’t attack them, because like there’s a certain degree of don’t start shit, won’t be no shit, I know.

01:45:42
Speaker 1: And it’s like like once you become like like your point being, once you become aware, like you did, like you got obsessed. Yeah, and you you attempted your book. You attempted your book to do to unravel every little bit. We’re trying to like whoa, who’s this guy that happened to walk by one day, I’m going to track his family back one hundred years.

01:46:02
Speaker 3: Well, because you know, there’s a sense that like we’re trying to turn our descriptions of American history into tweets and like it’s too complicated for a sign over you like, you can’t do in a sign the interplay between the Pueblo people and the atomic bomb, or like, you know, I got deep into the history. I didn’t realize that, like the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, that the Chickasaw were sort of deeply intermarried into the British and the Choctaw were deeply intermarried into the French, and so that the last free band of Natchez Indians in Mississippi was sold into slavery by the Choctaw and the French. And we’re sent down to work the plantations in Haiti, and a French military officer there ran into years later, one of those last Natchez chiefs, and he was down in the harbor and whatever the town it’s cap Haiti now, I can’t remember what the name was then, and it was sort of like what are you doing? And he was just staring longingly up at home, and so like, you know, if you’re gonna tell the history of uh, you know, if you’re gonna tell the history of the native settlements in the Mississippi Delta, you have to talk about like, you know, tribes were being erased by other tribes. Tribes were being erased by the French. Tribes were being erased by the British. The Choctaw, and the Choctaw and the Chickasaw sort of picked there were a bunch of powers down there, and nobody picked the Us, and so they sort of you know, like you understand like there are these warring factions, and like when you get into the history, it is so complicated. And you know, all of the Indian mounds in Mississippi. I didn’t realize this. They elites built their houses on top of them as a way to sort of like symbol luckily, stand on the shoulders of the ancestors. So you know, it’s like it’s like if your last name is Whitney or something. You know, it’s the same kind of idea. And it just occurred to me researching all this history. How little history we actually know. Like I don’t like, go back to the native town right there, I don’t know, we don’t know who the good guys and the bad guys were. You know, we preserve these mound structures, but we don’t know what the people who are living in the houses on top of those mounds were doing to those working folks sort of out in the cornfields. And like, so I just I know an incredible amount about the history of this piece of land, but like mostly what I know is like the sheer tonnage of a what I don’t know, And some of it I just probably not a good enough reporter to find. But a lot of it is just unknowable. And so I found that to be like I think with history, I don’t I don’t think we need some like sort of weird jug sign. I just think we need to know everything we can possibly know about a square of land because the truth of it, it’s going to be so much more complex than we realize. The truth of it will never fit into sort of one ideological sides version of this. I mean, you know this, the book sort of goes after tenets of a bunch of the truth is not helpful to ideology.

01:49:26
Speaker 1: You know, A little thing that’s hit me reading it.

01:49:29
Speaker 3: Does that make sense at all? Yeah?

01:49:34
Speaker 1: I mentioned my friend, my friend Doug Darren, Yeah, who lives like on his family’s farm.

01:49:39
Speaker 3: Yeah.

01:49:40
Speaker 1: Uh, he lives a very deep history existence where it seems like the past like when you’re hanging out with them, it seems like the past is all happening right now.

01:49:54
Speaker 3: I love that.

01:49:55
Speaker 1: Do you follow me? Like like every like little true or like trees and what it’s all like, it’s all it’s all compressed.

01:50:02
Speaker 3: Well. I love the idea that, like the places I like best, or the membrane between the president and the past is so thin you can see through it. And so like, I feel like there’s a version of the Mississippi Delta where this is all happening at once. Yep, and it’s all happening right now. And you know, Nathan Bedford Forrest Cavalry is walking the same road as JW. Milms driving, as Willie Reid is walking as you know, if you ever listen to Crossroads, Uh go see my friend Willy Brown. Willy Brown lived right by the barn. And so like, like, I think there’s a way in which all of this is happening all the time, over and over simultaneously.

01:50:45
Speaker 1: He there’s this thing, Doug, you when you’re getting the local tour, there’s this thing Doug does it that Like like I was like, has reminiscent of Emmett Till in that. Uh you go buy this farm, and Doug’s like, so in the past because in his father’s time, some kids stole some gas, Yeah, some egg gas from the farmer. The farmer comes running out, and the kids jump in the car and take off, and the farmer takes a shotgun and shoots one of the kids.

01:51:18
Speaker 3: Right in the back of the head.

01:51:21
Speaker 1: High school kids. He gets acquitted. He thought it was bird shot, is their argument. Yeah, he thought bird shot, not buckshot or slug or whatever the hell he killed the kid.

01:51:35
Speaker 3: The idea that it’s a sophisticated hunter doesn’t know what’s.

01:51:38
Speaker 1: Well, that’s just like that’s just and like it’s just funny a way of looking at you know, history, and it has all these same things like like when it was logged and who cleared it. But it’s like in his when when you’re out with Doug, Yeah, it’s like that kid’s driving down the road right now, do you know what I’m saying? Well, I love that kind of like I love I like that kind of experience. And that’s so much what I got from your book is this way of just like taking chunks of ground and like really getting them.

01:52:10
Speaker 3: So I made a map of everything that had happened. It’s on my phone of everything that had happened in this square of land. It’s interesting because the map doesn’t show sort of gradiations based on chronology. It’s just all there, so you’re sort of drive I can drive around and look at the stuff, and it’s like and I also made a map just like that of the South side of Chicago and so like and uh, that’s where my dad was brought up. Oh yeah, I mean, like it is my firm. But well, first of all, the South side of Chicago is the capital of the Mississippi Delta, like the only professional sports team in the state of Mississippi, or the Chicago White Sox, you know in Chicago until they started dying. Big mississipp high schools would have their reunions in Chicago, like Greenwood High School, Greenville High School. Because so many people had moved Chicago, it was easier for the six people still in Mississippi to go up there than for all four hundred to come back. And so like, you know, Mississippi functioned as a you know Argo Summit, Illinois, where Emmettil’s family settled. They all worked at the Argo starch plant. They make argo cornstarch. Oh yeah, they may still make it. Yeah, and they make Cairo syrup and make your pecan pie with and uh. They all lived there, and they called it Little Mississippi, like there were so many Mississippians and so you know, I feel like, I mean, one of the things I love to do is drive people from the Delta around the south side of Chicago, like Hyde Park, sort of south and like, you know, because it’s mile after mile after mile after mile of perfectly manicured, middle class bungalows and I’m like, you know, if you drive the Mississippi Delta, it’s super decayed. And the Missippi Delta is like it’s like Dori and Gray, you know, whereas its sins on the outside and they’re just abandoned buildings and collapse cotton gins and feels like a failed experiment, which is at what it was. I mean, the global capital markets came here, stripped out their ten percent, and then moved on and left the rest of us there to clean up the mess. And you get this sense that like that you know that that that all of that money that’s on the south side of Chicago should still be in the Mississippi Delta, like all of those like that’s what it should look like anyway, I I you know, I don’t. Ever my accent gets pegged all the time on the south side of Chicago is from Mississippi. Like can people just hear it? They’ll know and like uh. Or if you’re in Chicago and you ever have to give your driver’s license, either at a hotel or like at a will call, like you if you go to a baseball game, almost inevitably the person working will look at it and see that it’s mess to be driver’s license and say something that happens to me more in Chicago than it doesn’t.

01:54:50
Speaker 1: I mean like that, you know, there’s connections that strong.

01:54:52
Speaker 3: And then the other thing that’s interesting is so many people are retiring back to the South. So in the same way that there are lots of Southern foods in Chicago, they’re now like polishes and high Italian beef places in the Mississippi Delta because people are coming back home and they’re bringing the food of their old home with them.

01:55:09
Speaker 1: As a last thing, Yeah, before we wrap up, can you hit me with the what you take on ivory build woodpeckers. We’ve covered that bird good, all right? So you remember we saw that one. We did, we got to handle one. It’s dead.

01:55:22
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so the look well, one of the things that’s crazy is like they.

01:55:26
Speaker 1: Had a little foot tag on them, all dried out in that drawer, remember that.

01:55:31
Speaker 3: That’s right. So the there’s a huge fight, as you know, between the scientist at Cornell and then those folks down in Louisiana, Arkansas, Misissippi who claimed to have seen one. Yeah there’s the guy because.

01:55:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, but they’re always what they’re looking at is is uh pilliated?

01:55:49
Speaker 3: Yeah? Wood? And there’s that’s the argument. And then there’s a double like there’s a there there, there’s the double knock. Is that the there’s something about the call that’s specific to the Ivory build versus the affiliated woodpecker. Anyway, I went out for a couple of days in the swamps. It’s all around the Stennis Space Station. And what’s interesting is that, Pa.

01:56:11
Speaker 1: You know, we didn’t do what just to recap people. There’s a bird. The Ivy built woodpecker went extinct in the fifties.

01:56:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, well and.

01:56:17
Speaker 1: All that they knew where the last one was and it was in a nest and they cut its treet down.

01:56:21
Speaker 3: Here we go. In April nineteen forty four, a human being made the last confirmed sighting of an ivory bill woodpecker. The fight to save them had failed. The last large hardwood patch in the Lower Mississippi Valley was eighty thousand acres in Louisiana called the Singer Tract, named after the sewing machine company that owned it. There were four nests in John’s Bio and a confirmed roost tree in max Bio. The company leased the land to the state as a hunting refuge, but sold the timber rights to a big lumber firm out of Chicago. When the war began, Chicago Mill and Lumber World War one or World War two, I mean signed a contract with the military to deliver wood. It began cutting immediately. The National Autobund Society went to work to save the woodpecker habitat, lining up state and national support, even getting the War Department to agree to accept less wood in exchange for saving the bird. The company cut it all down anyway. The company executive, who answered all of these pleas, responded by saying, we are just money grubbers. We are not concerned as our u folk with ethical considerations. So many animals had vanished from these river hardwood swamps. The red wolf, the cougar, the Carolina parakeet, and now the saws had come for the Lord god bird itself, the ivory built woodpecker. The wood got turned into military packing crates and plywood gasoline tanks for fighter planes. The Autobund Society sent a researcher back into the vanishing forest to see if any birds remained. He found one. The researcher told a colleague, who was also an artist, that if he ever wanted to draw an ivory bill from a living bird, the time was now. Don Eckleberry, just twenty three, went south to the swamps. He searched and followed, and looked for specific nests and trees. Walking through a swamp while looking up his a learned skill, one evening around dusk, his barred owl sang in anticipation of a nighttime kill. Eckleberry and his traveling companions heard the double knock. They silently waited. Thirteen minutes later, the bird swooped through the clearing, flying above the broken tree corpses left by the lumberman. Eckleberry notated the details in his journal. He stared at the last known ivory bill woodpecker, and would never forget its face, hysterical pale eyes, he wrote, And so also the lumber. The family that cut down those forests is the family that founded and nurtured and invented aspen. So like people who love their wilderness don’t give a shit about yours. Huh you know what I mean? Oh shit, yeah, and like uh oh man really yeah, and so like it’s infuriating me, Like you come down, you’re gonna cut down my wilderness and then go somewhere else and preserve wilderness and act like your vacation spot. That’s right, And that’s a hearty fuck you to them. Sorry, Phil oh good. I don’t do the TV. It’s just somebody else’s past, you know, trying to look out for them. That’s fine.

01:59:12
Speaker 1: I called Clayven beeps out when someone says, like, gosh, durn clail beep.

01:59:16
Speaker 3: He’s so opposed. You would be really funny if you beeped out stuff that wasn’t cursing and make it look like somebody.

01:59:21
Speaker 1: Is just yeah, that’d be a great trick to do on somebody. Yeah, just his mom be like.

01:59:26
Speaker 3: You should be shamed yourself, My mom, is always like, uh, because my mom listens to all of these and she’s always you need to leave the locker room. Talk in the locker room.

01:59:34
Speaker 1: So do you think there’s still if you build Woodpecker’s around if you had to guess, And I’m talking the kind of guests where there’s a gun to.

01:59:42
Speaker 3: Your head, gun to my hat. Gun.

01:59:44
Speaker 1: There’s here’s why I like the latest kind of thing out. There’s an omniscient being that knows all truth. This omniscient being has a pistol. Yep, it says, I know the omniscient being. I know if there are are not, I’m going to ask you the question. If you get it right, you live, If you get it wrong.

02:00:06
Speaker 3: You die. Okay, this is a fun game. And then I go, what’s that line from the West Wing? If the oscars were like that, I’d watch.

02:00:12
Speaker 1: And I say to you. Then I say to you then, So there’s no being cute, there’s no being like what you wish was true. There’s no being cute, there’s no Devil’s advocate. It’s just pure.

02:00:22
Speaker 3: You live or die. Here’s what I think.

02:00:24
Speaker 1: And I say, are there I you Bill Woodpecker’s alive right now? My answer is no, right with the gun to.

02:00:29
Speaker 3: My head, all right, So I will say this. My answer is not going to be no, although I am hesitant to offer a wilderness hot take in the corporate headquarters of meat Eater with mister meat Eater, so I don’t want. I feel like you probably know more about this than I do. I say that I think there is because no, man, here’s why, and here’s why. No no, no no, And now.

02:00:58
Speaker 1: The omniscient being is like, geez, maybe I’m no.

02:01:00
Speaker 3: So here the here are the two reasons that I that. Here’s why I think that. I think One, I think that there is a tremendous desire from sort of the ornithology establishment for it to not be true. And so something about the argument against it feels a little bit to me like the Lady Duth protest too much. There’s something about how aggressive there being that makes me think that they’re operating from a place of weakness, not confidence. And then and then the other thing I think is that I think you know, I love to watch your show, and one of the reasons is because I like to watch you guys move through a universe the scale of which is so unimaginable to me. Like we’re sort of glassing over three valleys and just thinking, like we don’t there’s so much we don’t know about what goes on in the wildern that like I tend to think that like whatever we think we know, I feel like will be proven wrong. I just think they’re mysteries that you know, And maybe I’m just romanticizing the idea of wilderness, but like, I just think they are secrets, and they’re mysteries that, like the deep ocean, remain unknown and almost unimaginable, and they’re sort of wondering surprise. That would be my argument.

02:02:31
Speaker 1: Great, I’m gonna holster my pistol. Well I’m not the omniscient being.

02:02:36
Speaker 3: Well yeah, I was about saying, By the way, the moment you fake shot me was the moment you actually you’re inner narcissism revealed that, like in this story, you’re the omniscient being. So I’m glad. I’m like, I’m like wait a minute. I’m like wait a minute. I’m like you he just shot Oh shit, Steven.

02:02:53
Speaker 1: Is I know I somehow got I somehow got into the role. I didn’t want the role, but there I was.

02:02:59
Speaker 3: If thanks gentlemen, if nominated I will know that’s right.

02:03:04
Speaker 1: Get your brain if you want to stretch your brain out, real good, like a real good brain stretching. Pick up the Barn. The Secret history of a murder in Mississippi by a man who was born and raised twenty miles down the road from that murder. It’s a landscape history. It’s American culture, it’s politics, it’s agriculture. It’s everything, man, it’s everything. It’s the whole everything, squeezed beautifully and elegantly into a single book. Right, Thompson, thank you very much for coming on, man, man, thanks so much for having me appreciate it. Thanks