The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 763: Landscape and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Steven Rinella talks with author Wright Thompson. Topics discussed: Grab a copy of Wright's book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi; the history of a patch of ground; the Mississippi Delta as manmade land; the murder of Emmett Till; cotton; the sharecropper system; always referring to "The War"; what it means to be Southern; the connection between Chicago and Mississippi; learning history to know it; the existential trauma of having so much wilderness erased; and more.  Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's F-I-R-S-T-L-L-I-T. all right everybody joined a day by Wright Thompson four-time New York Times best-selling author grew up in the Mississippi Delta yes sir

if you recognize that name he might know him because Wright is a senior writer for ESPN.com ESPN the magazine worked at all kind of newspapers over the years covering all aspects of sports he wrote the book Papyland

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 in 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 a bunch of never never got a nod from the old sports writing well that now I know who to believe You should definitely blame me. That's a tremendous oversight only because, like, my favorite sports writing is outdoors writing. See, I thought they were being prejudiced against this.

Well, they probably were. I edited one version of it. It's like, like, I only screwed you once. Got it. That's cool. Someone else was responsible. I'm over it now, man. I'm over it. 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 to 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 Till in what year? In 1955.

Okay. As a kid. Yeah. 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, some thing, some affront to a white woman. Yep. And he was killed. The killers weren't punished. No. And his body turned up in what river? The Tallahatchie River.

His body, I knew his body turned up in a river, and I knew it was tied to some piece of heavy equipment. Yeah, to the, a cotton gin fan. Yeah, I knew that. And this tells that story. But the reason I wanted to have you on and talk to you is I want to 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 try to encourage.

And go and pick a piece of ground, right? And ask yourself, not only like, not only what is the history of this piece of ground, but what are the, 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, like where I'm from in Michigan, like everyone's hunting cabin is, for whatever reason, is always to the north. Yep.

And just probably parts of the country where everybody's hunting cabin is east, south, whatever to hell. But for us in the upper Midwest, 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 Emmett Till was murdered in a barn. Bizarrely, I would never have guessed this is true. Bizarrely, that barn still sits there today. I mean, 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. Yeah. 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 ordinance act of 1785, which is Thomas Jefferson, which essentially dropped a grid over America and divided it into townships and ranges. Yeah. And so the barn is in section two of township 22 north, range four west, measured from

the Choctaw meridian. And like the thing that I thought was important is it's a 1,300 year history of this square of land. Yeah. 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, that anyone in a. 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, you know, like, why is it there? And why are you there? And how did we get here? I mean, like, I have this fantasy that, that we could do the entire country this way. Like, I did one 36 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 36 square miles where the last cattle drop was in this part of my time? And now tell me every single human being who ever 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, you know, you've been down there. I mean, it was a vast, almost uninhabitable hardwood swamp until around 19.

And then they started clearing it and building sort of the last generation of cotton plantations there. And so, like, trying to understand how what should have been a swamp became, you know, a man-made cotton factory. I mean, 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, like, I think that's an important thing to talk about. Yeah, I'm struggling, like, a little bit. The story you tell is so complicated. Yeah. Let's do this, man.

If you don't mind. First off, give a little, give a little, like, how'd you get into sports writing? So, it's funny. I wanted to write about music, and I was randomly assigned to the sports section at the college newspaper. Okay. And, but I fell in love with it because, you know, there's nothing you can't. right 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, uh, in sports like that you know i've always been fascinated by the role the games we love play and shaping of our identity yeah so i've liked that from the i've liked that forever you know and i've liked uh you know i started working for esbian 20 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 yeah so you still actively write about sports now and you write about everything for like Kentucky Derby, basketball, football.

It's just 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, uh, tennis star who became a spy, you know, and that's in like, it's, so it's a World War II thriller. God. And so like, it's just whatever you're, I've been very lucky in, in that sense to get to follow obsessions. Yeah.

Uh, and I imagine you like to pull a cork to you and that's why you wrote about bourbon. Yeah, man, let me tell you. That was when you could still have non-reimbursable work expenses written off on your taxes before they close that loophole. That was great. I mean, bottom, 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.

And, yeah, with the tax code stuff, they really screwed writers. They screwed writers. And then now they're handing all that out to people that operate on tip functions. They screwed writers and now they're turning around and basically given the whole world to tip people. Why are they so much more important than writers? Well, and also, in screwing over writers, they've really screwed over small business owners. Tell me more. Because you spend money on your small business to, like, it's an investment in the idea.

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 report it. And so, you know, that whole ecosystem was just eliminated almost overnight. Yeah, yeah.

No one wants to hear about that except me, we'll take that offline. That's right. But only writer, by the way, like, there are 11 people right now who are like, yeah, like, leaning in. That's right. They're like, that's true. Yeah. Next thing I want to do. Yeah.

Just because we're going to step back and go forward a little bit. Layout, layout. I kind of gave a quick outline of the murder of Emmett Till. Yeah. But, like, as quickly as is as comfortable. Yeah. Tell the story of the murder of Emmett Till. So we can start talking about this barn.

That's right. Like this piece of ground. So Emmett Till had just turned 14 years old and he lived in Chicago, very much a boy. I mean, he still liked comic books. He had just gotten interested in girls. At his 14th birthday party, his mother and her friends overheard him and his friends playing spin the bottle. Okay.

And so, like, you know, at an age where you still, like, you know, want to kiss a girl, you have a crush on, but also still like comic books. Like, that's such a specific moment of boyhood. Yeah. And he went south to visit his family. He's from Chicago.

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 19, 55. 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 2. So the Supreme Court had to come in and be like, no, really, we meant it. 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 newspapers.com and read these speeches. These politicians were, were giving because they just were saying outlandish stuff. Yeah. And so Emmett 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 and 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 13 year old just turned 14 year old boy who was 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 screen door. Later, Carolyn Bryant, who was the woman that he whistled at and her husband and his stepbrother, 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 effed white women before.

one, everyone on the porch could hear everywhere being set it 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 14-year-old boy. I think he's trying to show off for the older kids. And he whistled at her with a cat-call whistle.

And he looked around and saw in his cousin's eyes. Real quick, over the years, there's been a lot of debate yeah about who said what and and how long the exchange was so what actually happened and a lot of this is well-intentioned accidental misinformation because maybe till sort of had a certain version of how she thought her son's last days went the last living eyewitness is a guy named reverend wheeler parker who i just saw down in mississippi last weekend uh and he was standing next to him when he whistled yeah and uh and emitt 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 24 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 understand. 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, 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 14 is about testing boundaries. And the dominant culture in Mississippi was about protecting boundaries. And this is, I mean, this is right where you grew up. I mean, my family farm is 23 miles from the barn. And so they go to town, Emmett 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 like they're that age. Both of them had their first drink that night, 14 and 16. 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 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, J.W. Milam 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 Wheeler Parker's face first. He still remembers staring down the barrel of a 1911-45. 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 Emmett up. He was sleeping with his cousin, Simeon Wright. Simeon remembered, he died probably 10 years ago, but Simeon remembered his whole life, how long it took him 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. the barn. They, uh, you know, they tortured him. They pistol whipped him with the 45. And, uh, there was a witness named Willie Reed who heard him, uh, 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 with Sharon Wright, who's Moses Wright, uh, Moses Wright's niece. Moses Wright is Emmett's uncle. That's whose house he was staying in the night he was kidnapped. And I'm standing on the banks of the Tallahatchie River with her. And I just sort of 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 Tallahatchie River in Mississippi is known by black families as the singing river because there 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, the state of Mississippi saw the body and tried to bury it immediately. There was a whole dug, the East East Money Church of God in Christ. They had a preacher. They had Paul Bears.

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 hole dug. And then in Chicago, the Steelworkers Union went to war for him until. And so they were so because one of the most powerful guys in the steelworkers 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 LaFleur 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. I mean, it's really, you know, they're, when I started doing this book, there were probably 12 people left alive who knew him.

And now they're probably eight. I mean, they've been dying in front of me. Oh, man, yeah. Yeah, you hit it, you hit it right to get talking to people. 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 as 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 70 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 them up sweet corn. You know, they want hickory wood from the Mississippi Delta for their smokers. that 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 Wright 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 given his dogs away weeping.

And so, like, everybody had to leave in the middle of the night. Willie Reed, the witness, he had to, he got so many death threats that a couple of days after he testified, Moses Wright and Willie Reed were the first black people to go into a court in Mississippi and accuse a white man of murder. And that was 1955. That had never happened before. And so Willie Reed had to walk six miles down a gravel road, down the Drudal Ruleville Road, which is the road the barn is on.

The Druder Rule of a Road, if you want to sort of play with the idea that, like, in like that sort of 100 years of solitude way, the time isn't real, that road was built by Nathan Bedford-Farrest brother. And Nathan Bedford-Farrest, in the winter of 1863 and 64, 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 and J.W. Milam's green and white Chevrolet, two-tone pickup truck, pass each other night after night after night after night. And so Willie Reed walked down that road past Fannie 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 Drudeauville Road and Highway 8. And the man driving that car was Medgar Evers. And it was the sort of first civil rights thing he had ever done. And Willie Reed moved to Chicago, changed his name. And he was married to Juliet, who I know. I just saw her in Mississippi, was married to her 10 years maybe before she knew that he had some other history. It's 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, Wheeler 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.

And so, you know, these were people who, for general, like, had real rhythms in a country way of life. Moses Wright liked 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 wheelbarrow 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. Hmm. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Onex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada.

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In order for you to start tracking the history of this piece of ground and this 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, like, people, like, you think like, how would you lose sight of that? But there was all these different versions of where it happened. And one of the first things in the book is exploring where was it? 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 jeopardy, 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 it's very tribal yeah and so uh 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 the fictitious account that ran in look magazine so you know uh leslie Milam, whose barn it is, Leslie Milam in 1973 called his preacher, Macklin Hubble in Cleveland, Mississippi, who I interviewed before he died and said, you know, his wife actually called a 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-in 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 died, and before he died, he wants to confess to his preacher that he was one of the people who killed him at Till. And his preacher listens and they pray together and the preacher leaves. The preacher is so shook that he left there and drove out to the store and money just to sort of commune with it. And then Leslie Milam died before the sun came up.

And so, like, there were people, you know, Mamie 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. That's the thing I want to touch on later is they got acquitted, but they were cursed, man. They were definitely cursed. It was kind of like what we talked about before we started recording.

Yeah. It was like O.J. Simpson. Well, just he got acquitted, but he was cursed. Well, and, 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 archaeologically interesting, and this is, you know, right in Township 22 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 of 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 their 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

Hernando de Soto rolled along, they were all gone. And so, and this is, so on this piece of land, there was a monocrop 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, the ecosystem that would rise and fall. I mean, in some ways, 1995, in some ways the murder of Emmett Till was the death of sharecropping. Because the first mechanized crop ever planted had been, 1943.

You wouldn't 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 it's become mechanized, on a parallel track, the technology is being invented for the music of those people, you can 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 Dockery Farms, which is 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 1929.

He sang first person songs, name checking local cops. I mean, this was, I mean, this was protest. This is 10 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 EZ's grandparents. owned a grocery store, 16 blocks up Broadway, from the house where one of Emmett Till's killers lived. I mean, these are like, you know, Sam Cook, a change is going to come is from the same little town in the Mississippi Delta's muddy waters.

I'm a man. You know, Nate Dog 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 22 North Range 4 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 P.O.W camp in between Drew, Mississippi and the barn in the 40s where they were bringing Nazi prisoners to work in the cotton fields. And it's interesting that the local people realized that they were helping the Nazis soldiers, like, cheat and teach them how to like, is how you weigh. 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, you know, they were, the Nazi soldiers were treated a lot better than they're sort of the black sharecroppers who were working alongside of them. But, 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 we could do this. Like, I would love to know the history of the square of land, like where we are sitting right now. Someone needs to do a project where you track every, like every section, not every section, but every township. Every town.

Someone should do a whole, the United States township by township, because I would love to know. Some townships wouldn't have many readers. Well, no, but I mean, like, dude, let me tell you. I mean, like the, uh, there's that Frank and Deborah Popper who were academics. Oh, yeah. The Buffalo Commons. The Buffalo Commons.

All right. So I'm way into the Buffalo Commons because. if, and the, this is actually interesting that 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 there are 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 1900 and it's the railroads coming up from the north, south, west, and east, and you see them just stop because they haven't connected yet. So this is 20 years after Frederick Turner's essay. This is 20 years after the census bar. What Wright's referring to is there was a, the U.S. government used to define frontier. is a certain number of people per square mile.

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. That's right. And then there was the observation later that all of a sudden 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 40-acre chunks on arid land, but it wouldn't work. Yeah. And so they leave. And so technically it went back to frontier. I mean, by the way, almost immediately. And so, you know, in 1900, the Mississippi Delta, like I said, was largely uninhabited hardwood swamps.

Yeah, I want to, look, I want you to jump into that a little bit, like, you were talking about Native American history, but kind of explain the Delta as one of the last great wildernesses. So the, from 1750, somebody listening who knows more, from whenever the spinning jenny was invented until the DuPont Laboratory in Wilmington, Delaware in 1933, invented nylon and made petroleum the world's most important commodity. From the spinning jenny to nylon, cotton was the world's most important commodity. What's the spinning? You mean the, the thing that seeds out? No, but the, no, the 1764, it's the thing that starts to allow mass production. So you

can turn one worker into 10. And what is it? And so it's a what is the tool? It's a weaving situation. Like a Manchester, you know, it's not an accident that, uh, 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 functioned for a very long time as a colony of Manchester and Liverpool and London. But anyway, okay. So, because they were sending cotton. They were sending cotton. Sending cotton. Yeah. As a Side note, it's hilarious in the way that, like, you know, the entire Civil War was based on the idea that 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 1859 and 1860, which means that no textile mill in the world needed an ounce of American cotton until at least November of 63, at which point, so the entire war was based on a completely faulty economic idea that, that I think they're like the politicians who caught the car, like they were just out

they're saying stuff. Yeah. And so, like, one economist could have stopped the whole thing, but guys, you're, you're totally flawed. But so, but, oh, you mean you like that, that, yeah, like, this is the cotton market, like, it was the wrong time to start the war. Yeah. Because they didn't, it was the weakest the South had ever been.

Yeah. Which was, it's not unrelated. You only really start wars when you're weak, you know, start 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 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. They quit the railroad companies were buying huge swaths of long. 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.

Oh, okay. And so, like, these timber companies were coming down. That's why Teddy Roosevelt, that's Teddy Bear. He'd been. Sure. So Teddy Roosevelt spent the night in Township 22 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. It's out there on the road. What? You go see it. Yeah. There's a tire swing in it.

Yeah. People who had the house don't know. It's just behind like a, it's not a trailer. It's like a corrugated tin house. And they have Teddy Roosevelt's ginko tree in the backyard. And so, no. Is that in the book? I don't remember that.

Yeah, that's in there. And so, and so like the railroad. companies in concert with the timber companies, they bought all this land, they cleared it. To sell lumber. To sell lumber. And to ship it where? North? All over, like crates.

And by the way, when Mississippi ran out of hardwood, most of these companies went to Oregon. And there's a reason that they're 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, anyway. But out of hardwood. Out of hardwoods, all hardwoods. And so they were cleared in this land. The cotton plantations were almost an afterthought. Yeah.

Like, what are we going to do with this? Like they cleared it for lumber. 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. And I remember you had some statistics about that land that, like the depth of the top soil. Oh, it's some ways it went. It was like, we call that ice cream soil, man.

In some ways, it went like 200 feet deep. Yeah. I mean, incredible soil. I mean, one of the things... Just all that deposition from the river. Just for a... I remember it became blown away that you could dig down like that and hit like alluvial soil. And it goes all the way down.

And I mean, it's millions of years of floods. I mean, one of the things that, you know, millions of years of floods, 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 1919, the price of cotton was a dollar a pound. I think today it's 66 cents. And so maybe 68.

And so it was a dollar a pound. It was the last. It's lower today. By 40 cents. Even adjusted for inflation. No. Not adjusted. I'm saying like just pure money.

No, it's 32 cents lower than it was in 1990. Wow. And by the way, if you talk to it like this is going to be the, this year's going to be so catastrophic for farmers. I mean, our neighbors that are going out of business. Because the cotton price is being low. Cotton prices and soybeans. So 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 1923. And then for 10 years, they tried to fix it. And then in 1933, the Roosevelt administration took over the American cotton economy.

And in some ways, it's Franklin Roosevelt. 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 related, how cotton, how cotton, how, how, the cotton economy put Emmett Till at the exact place at the exact wrong time. And so here we go. I'm going to find this right now. No, go ahead. Oh, I got it. Here we go. The Great Mississippi Delta Cotton Boom lasted 20 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 in the Delta. The land clearing finished around 1900. The price of cotton collapsed for good in 1923. And what happened in between? Port Gibson and Aberdeen raised statues in 1900. Macon in 2001. Fayette in 1904. Carrollton and Bula and Oklahoma in 1905, Tupelo and Ole Miss in 1906, Brandon and Oxford in West Point in 1907. Cleveland and Lexington and Raymond and Duck Hill in 1908. Greenville and Winona in 1909. Hattiesburg twice in Grenada in 1910, Gulfport and Cazesco and Quitman in Ripley in Brooksville and Heidelberg in 1911, Columbus and Laurel and Meridian in Philadelphia in Vaden in 1912, Greenwood and Summner in 1913, Greenwood again in 1915, Hazelhurst in 1917, Louisville, and 1921. 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 1923.

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 seed. 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 in 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 1933 where the government is stepping in and taking over the cotton industry. And if it's, you know, they wrote the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and And they had to, it was declared unconstitutional.

They had to do it again in either 36 or 38, I forget. But one of the things about that that was so interesting is they were 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 1919. 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, the, the, the, a thing that happened between, say, 33 and 55 is you have King Cotton is dying. The, 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 can 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. 1954, 1955 were terrible crops. And so what you have is, and then you have, 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 Emmett Till decides to go visit his family on vacation. Right before I read your book, I read John Barry. What's the Great Rising Tide?

Rising Tide. You know, and by the way, the 1927, the levee 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 22 North Range 4 West, which the whole book is about. And 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 has a different name, but they make lingerie for Victoria's Secret and Marks and Spencer. I mean, companies all still exist.

That plantation was later owned by Monsanto, and it's now owned by Bayer, the aspirin people. And so, but like 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. Yeah.

We were going to have mom, but he canceled that last minute or something happened. No, his flight got canceled. I'm sorry. Fice got canceled. It's a fascinating book It's really good It introduces a thing about Between that book and your book

And I want you to explain share cropping in a minute Yeah But it introduces like a Introduced me anyways To a weird bit in American history Where From like the history of agriculture Yeah

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 agricultural general particularly cotton production and he lays out this thing that 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 i think that you have to entice

well you have to be able to entice willful laborers and and and the thing that's wild is after the war all anyone wanted was can i just have 40 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 1860. 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, they tried a couple of different things that didn't work. And so, uh, 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 fought a 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. Yeah. Because it like, it gets it something so existentially true. And people just wanted to go home and live on their land. And there was this brief moment in Township 22 North Range 4 West all over the south where you had white and black people. You had veterans of the Confederacy and veterans from the Union Army. You had people setting up 40 acre little homesteads and trying to sort of make a go of being what Thomas Jefferson would have called a yeoman farmer. And you watch those people get just chewed up and spit out by the global capital markets who had to have these lands.

in large blocks. Yeah. 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. It 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. Yeah. And so, anyway, they just wanted these huge gardens and wanted to live with their families.

And, you know, especially if you're a formally enslaved person, try to, you know, roots in your own land were like the most precious thing. Yeah. And you just watch the global capital markets make that impossible. hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart you got steep ground long distances and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate that's why onex hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in canada now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available

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to the public. We can't wait to see y'all down south. I want to finish his point about that he makes and rising tide this thing he explains is it's very surprising

to me that once you had the you had 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 that he explains is that as the Ku Klux Klan emerges

there are agricultural people there are farmers who are fighting against the clan saying this argument stop scaring away all the labor like that's their take their take on it is if you are making it 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 cover so much that

same stuff it was this weird that I happen 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 and farm when you can't just make them do it. Well, 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 lands.

They don't want their labor force to be terrorized. No. 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 tamale is like the stereotypical food of the Delta is that it's tamales made with Mississippi Delta ingredients. So instead of masa, it's just staple cornmeal and it's pork.

And like, anyway, all over the Mississippi Delta, you can buy hot tamales, and that's why, because the black sharecroppers were looking at the hot tamale cans at the end of the road that the folks brought up to help pick and were like, that looks better than whatever lunch we got. So they started doing that. But the, but to your point about like, and about John's book, I mean, that they really nail is that, you know, the planners were trying to fight off the clan. But 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 going to have best practices. We're going to find the best farmers to put on this field, these fields.

And the 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 on 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 conference. 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, there's just, I don't know if you ever read the Robert Palmer book, Delta, Deep Blues. No. But when he's talking about as the price of cotton collapses, this is like 1929, 1930, 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 numerically 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, I mean, like, it's a really, it's the rock and the heart whites. Caught between a battle between rich whites and poor whites. Yes, very much so and very much sort of weaponized in that fight with very, very little regard to what would actually be best for these working families.

Can you explain, I've always, my whole life I've known the term sharecropper, but it wasn't until I read your book and Barry's book kind of as a pair, you know, a little bit. I don't understand what the hell that, like the economics. Can you explain like how it came to be in like when you hear the word sharecropper, like, what exactly are 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 and my family 25 acres of that. Okay. You sort of needed a family every 25 to 40 acres. You would rent me that. like a large landowner would break parcels off 2540 acres and that's I'm and the family gets to move there and you know you gets to I mean has to okay 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 and 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. So me as a land on it, like I own thousands of acres. I run a store where I sell supplies to me. To the people that I'm renting that I have to buy from you. Okay. That's part of the deal. And you're charged me 20% interest. Yeah. And so, uh, and so you get to the end of the year. And, uh, 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. Homer, who sells the crop? So the landowner sells it. So I'm the landowner. You're the share crop. So I plan it. I give you the ground. I give you the seed. I give you a meal. I give you a plow. Yes. You do the daily labor. Yes. And then on your path. And then on your path. You're

grows your cotton. And then, and then I go, I will now sell your cotton. 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 20% interest. And if any money is left, you give that to me. Yeah, but because I sell it. But since I own half of it, I'm incentivized to get the best price for it. You are. But But I don't, I can't check your books. Yeah. So you might sell it for.

Yeah, there's no way you're checking my books. No, no. And so like, you know, and so like there's a gun fight here in this book where a guy came home from World War I and was like, you know, a war, like a war hero and the, his boss tried to mess him up at settlement time and he just shot him. And, you know, because you had no access to the courts. Yeah. But that's the way it works.

So then at that, you harvest. You harvest, I sell. I sell. I sell for $100. Yep. 50 is yours. Yep. And I say to you, okay, you bought 30 bucks worth of stuff at my store. Yep.

Interest on the 30 bucks. You bought at my store. It puts it at $50 or $49. Here's a dollar. Here's a dollar. Yes. And that's sharecropper economy. That's exactly that works.

But it wasn't just like, but there was white sharecroppers. Well, no, 100%. White sharecroppers all over. Okay. 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 sharecropping question. Yeah, I do. I love. So like, like Emmett Till's people had been sharecroppers. Yes. What would be, what would be 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? Yes. Yeah. No. Working that same chunk. A lot of of people didn't leave. And another thing that's interesting is there are a lot of people who are 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 were still living in the house. I see. So the sharecropper could outlast the owner. Many, yes. And so like, and if you found one, so like Will Dockery, who

owned Dockery Farms, which is near the barn, had a reputation of being fair with people. And so, like, you know howland wolf worked on dockery as a sharecroft yeah pop staples like mavis staples dad was a sharecropper on dockery uh you had charlie patten playing there uh the robert so the crossroads the actual crossroads i've been there man yeah so like that's right that's dockery yeah and so like we went there i was with my friend yeah she took me there yeah we did all kinds of junk down there when the short time we were there you know it's funny about do you mind i just No, I love this. Yeah.

I was with my friend Anna Baker. Yeah. I still hang out with. And we were in Memphis. She was going to school in Oxford, Mississippi. Yeah. So, like, we were in Memphis. Then we were down in Oxford, Mississippi.

Then we went to, like, Clarksdale. So I'm from Clarksdale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we go there. We went to that bar. Like Morgan Freeman had a bar. Oh, yeah, ground zero. Yeah.

Went all around there. Went out to that crossroad. Yep. And I was like, man, I'm going to get out of the car, you know, and sell my soul to the devil. You know, she's like, you don't get out of the car. It took off. It's just like a funny moment. But, uh, 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 come and we should bail. Katrina. I'm not kidding you, dude. We were like going from Clarksdale to New Orleans and backed out because of the weather report. Which was 20 years ago last week. Yeah, because of the weather report.

The, one of the things, I didn't make it, didn't make it there. I love the landscape of the Mississippi Delta. Like, I love, uh, like, I love, uh, like, I love riding the levee. I love being on the other side of the levee, like my uncle and I liked, like, rod 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, uh, 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 on 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 levy and like it's interesting because in some ways this is almost like a user's manual for like if you're going to be there but like I uh I I love that land and so oh it shows man yeah I really it's it's really like I want to be buried in it that's one of the things that drew me to want to talk to you

and like that liked about your book is um I don't I don't try to end the conversation just wedge us in there is that 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 and I got it's funny because I don't mean to like this is not just a Mississippi thing dude but a couple years ago I went turkey hunting with a new friend of mine down at his place in Mississippi

and walking around with him is this Taylor? Yeah. Taylor's my dear friend. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, he talks very fondly. He's a good dude.

Walking around him, like, when I was a kid, if I said the war, because my dad fought World War II. Yeah. So if I was a kid and I said, the war, we all meant like, like, the war was World War II. Oh, that's not what we mean. No. But, I mean, I was telling Corinne and Sierra Day, this is not a day that goes by. He doesn't point to something and be like, before the war, after the war.

And after everybody, like, he's talking about the Civil War. Right, look. It's like a defining landscape feature. It'd be like, that damn, something or another the war. That bridge, something another to the war. Let me take. 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.

Well, you know, my eighth grade American history teacher, shout out, Ms. Hawcomb, called it the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression. Yeah, sure. Yeah, but like, I guess the thing about, you know, I, I, I love the band that drive-by truckers, and I think, like, Patterson Hood, who writes a lot of their songs, writes in a really 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, 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. Being Southern means being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time and 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 Marigold Hunting Club, if you ever get an invitation there, it's, but they have a, they have a communal, like, dining hall. And so people eat, 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 1968 when he took it over, loves, you know, it's funny. He, he's present of two different big deer clubs. He hasn't shot a deer since 1963. And he, he likes the, he likes the herd management.

They got a Ph.D. from Mississippi State, like working with what they're planning and when, and he loves that. And then, you know, we've got three or four duck holes 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. Yeah. And like, that's such a important part to me of what it means to be from Mississippi and to be from the South. That's very funny. I have a dear friend of mine, Clay Newcomb, who I work with too. we always laugh because he has a lot of Arkansas exceptionalism and southern exceptionalism.

He's over at Stuttgart, busting some ducks. 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. Yeah, wait, sorry, I didn't realize music wasn't important in Harlem. Music wasn't important in San Francisco. Yeah, Detroit. This is Motown thing But there is, dude

It's like legitimate And it's thing I'm going back to sharecrout I giggled I haven't done that in a really long time Shows you're having a good time What I hand it to him It's like

He does a lot of interviews with I mean his show Was largely about Southern culture Yeah There's a lot of interviews And like there's a thing that I got to give him If you just went And randomly pulled 100

Okay, you randomly pulled 100 Northerners in a room. And you randomly pulled 100 Southerners in a room, okay? And you said, like, what way, I want to know what cardinal direction, the front door your house faces. The Southerners are going to kick the shit out of the northern. West. If you said, I want to know what is the... How could you not know that? Because it's the sun.

Well, I'm just, okay, it's just a thing. If you took 100 Southerners and 100 Northerners, and you said, if you take a piss in your yard, tell me the route that piss would take as runoff. Oh, I could definitely do that. And what river, what major river would land in, the Southerners are going to kick the shit out of the Northerners. I don't know why they have this. It's because all. And they can all. 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. is to drive around our farm with my Uncle Reeves because he knows, his understanding of the drainage, he's like, well, see, that culvert goes into the bog filial, which is going to flow into Deer Creek. Like, it's unbelievable.

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 Durran's, like, dying right now. He's in Wisconsin. He can tell you where every piece of water. Oh, it's the guy where you guys go deer hunting on the show? He could tell you where every piece of water and the whole state flows to you. So there's exceptions. But I'm saying like, it like the knowledge got scrubbed.

It's getting scrubbed everywhere. Yeah. The knowledge got scrubbed more in the north. It used to be like, it just got scrubbed more in the north. Yeah. Industrialization came quicker, whatever. Suburbia came quicker. It got scrubbed in the north, fashion it got scrubbed the south.

So when I look down there, I'm like, like, like, living with deep history, living with landscape, understanding the limitations of land, it just feels more alive.

Yeah. 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, what goes on, and connecting it to how much topsoil you got, how much rain you got,

what kind of, kind of trees grew where you got, you know? And it's 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 going to do this at a place that changed America.

Well, and, and this idea that, like, that the, that the rainfall and the cottoner soybean yields have a direct impact on violence. Yeah. and that like bad crops ain't good no and like you go back and read narrative like enslaved people's narratives and uh they're talking about in 1850 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 people it's been tied to that forever and i mean you know the ways and 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 and 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, 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 it's their shit was that tied into 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 you know 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, there are probably five or six different times. The reason I like the ivory bill woodpecker in here is because it represents the mystery to me. And it represents the sort of Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, it's raining flowers and macondo, 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. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available.

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We can't wait to see y'all down south. When we finish, I want to talk about two things. I want to hear about the ivory-billed woodpecker. I want to hear about the curse of the killers. But I want to step right now back to something we left off. Why, like Emmett Till's people, his people had been sharecroppers from Mississippi. Why were they up, why were they going to Chicago? Like what was going on 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.

Like what was happening? 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. Got it. Who are being recruiters. Recruers who are being run out of town by the police.

Oh, you shit me really? There's like a tension. No, no, dude. They were like arresting and running them out of town and like, no, it was a huge tension. Because they're taking the labor. 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, coil tighter and tighter, people were looking to leave. There was so much violence. You know, the modern clan was founded like, what, 1922, I think. In response to black soldiers coming home from World War I, 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 1920s. 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 Mamie Till's father moved in like 1923, I think. okay 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 so it was like like moving for safety 22 years before his boy had be killed yes he was moving for safety whatever the hell number of years yeah and it was moving for safety his grandson be killed yeah it was also like you you know the first mechanized cotton crop in america was 1943 in clarkstale at hopsin plantation I mean that was coming and so you know our farm we probably needed In 1950, 400 families living on it to farm it.

We farm it now with, I think, 18 people. And that's because the tractors can't turn themselves around. I bet we're 10 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 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 1955. 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 1965, there were no sharecroppers left in America. Got it. So the whole opportunity was evaporated. Yeah. And so he, you also have to, he arrived at the last gasp of a way of being in the world and didn't know it. Yeah. You know what kind of broke my heart in a weird way is, uh, I always have and, and do hold up World War II guys on a pedestal.

Oh, yeah. And Matt Till's murders, man. World War II guys, and it was like a service pistol. Yeah, they beat him to death with his, with his Ithaca, 45. And, yeah, these got like a number of those guys were veterans. Well, and they were all veterans. And, I mean, one of the guy was a veteran from Pelaloo. And then J.W. Milam 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 Emmett Till has a sort of huge line of mistakes through it because there was like a typo in J.W. Milam's obituary and it got the net 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, one of the... You know, there's a thing like that. It's so crazy, man. 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. Dude, see, this makes...

Because of a mistake. It makes, and so, so, this may, 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 in-noted is 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 single obituary that mentioned that. And then I call 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 copy of every single piece of paper.

They're in my filing cabinet. You want to come see them. So I went and spent a couple of days at this guy's house. And I went through every piece of paper from this unit. And J.W. Milam's 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 St. Louis. So in the 1973, there was a terrible fire in St. Louis at the American Archives. And it burned up almost every single World War II veteran's 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 walked through the forest where the foxholes were, wrote all of this, and then cut it all out of the book. So, but I, but I spent a lot of time with J.W. Milam's, you know, J.W. Milam, legitimate, you know, people claimed he would want a silver star. I don't think that's true. But definitely wounded in the Colmar pocket, like right there on the. the border. Where was that?

It's, uh, like, I nodded like I knew, but I don't know. No, it's right on the border between Germany and France. Okay. Uh, so like, uh, Straussberg, like, when I, when I went there, I flew into Stuttgart in Germany and drove across the border. I see. As opposed, that was the closest airport. Yeah.

So you really tracked these guys down. I did. You know, and I had a whole Pelaloo thing on, uh, Melvin Campbell, uh, and like, it's, it's, 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, 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's sort of moving roughly the same

places, generation by generation that the Milams are. Like, you know, the Milam family was married at one point into the DuPont family, you know, and so you watch them generation by generation, poor lifespans 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 in 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 Milam men either killed someone violently or were killed violently, and you're just watching a family disintegrate. And Emmett Till, with his hope and with his young teenage sense of adventure and of boundary stretching and of looking for the line, uh, 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 unit in Chicago right now that the Till family has that has Emmett Till's toy train in it. No kidding. I mean, he's, you know, I mean, like, it's a, you know, like, it's a as 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 crin and i were having a conversation yesterday in in preparation for you coming and somehow like many conversations i'm in came around at oj look i got a weird i don't know man i met oj once And it's a great story. You should talk about your quick OJ story.

Then I'm going to 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. But go ahead. That's perfect. And then I'm going to rip off of the acquittal and turn it back to OJ. All right. No, the, uh, uh, you don't know what point I'm going to make. Did you put LSD in this coffee? Nope.

The, uh, and so, uh, uh, I was at a Kentucky Derby. and I asked, I ran into OJ at a, like, 6 a.m. cocktail party and, uh, because the horses were training. And, uh, I asked him who was going to win. And he said lawyer, lawyer, Ron, because he had, he said he had lots of positive experiences with lawyers. Yeah. And then I obviously went and took a shower. Like, yeah, Jesus Christ. Wow. I was just like, you decapitated somebody. I got to get away from you, man. So allegedly, yeah. If the gloves don't fit. No, you must have quit. Corinne and I were conversing about, I was telling her, she was sweating that she hadn't finished your book.

Oh, come on. 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. Yeah. And I was saying that one of the surprising aspects, and I'm going to bring this around to OJ and cut you loose. One of the surprising aspects when these people's community, these murders, you know, they're judged by their peers. They're tried in their home area. the attitude of the jurors is

we're going to acquit you but I don't want nothing to do with you from here on out very much so and 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 LAPD yeah and it was kind of like we're going to let you go, right? Because these guys are totally, even though you did it, they're also the worst.

We know you did it. Like, we know you did it. We're going to let you go. You're not a good person, but this isn't even about you. Yeah. This is about at the LAPD.

Yeah. So like your guilt or not guilt, like, you know, that's not what's on trial here. You're a piece of shit, but this is not what I'm talking about. Yeah. Piece of garbage.

Yeah. But this is not what I'm talking about. That kind of, that was so surprising that like, the jury, the jurors that acquit them have a like tacit acknowledgement you did it and that's bad but we're not going to participate in this system somehow or like maybe you can explain it better but like they weren't deciding if they did it or not it was something different so one of the things it's so

interesting is in the the sort of white establishment uh you know hit the the the defense attorneys who are all very, very well-educated. You know, a couple of Princeton guys. Chris is not a Princeton person. What did you do at Princeton? Politics. Your whole four-year degree? Uh-huh.

You told me that. She likes to say I went to school in Boston. Politics of the Middle East. That was my... Hold me, you went to college at Princeton? Maybe I knew that and forgot it. I don't really talk about it too much. Rich guy over here.

What are we going to do? That's not. the case of come on. Jesus Christ. Big rich guy. Their financial aid package. What's your name like Van Cockle Horse, the fourth? What are you like?

Schneider. Oh, the night? My dad's from Brooklyn and my mom is from Beijing. Oh, so you don't, there's not some big, like. She didn't like inherit the position at Prince. Oh, so I just apply for it. Oh, okay. I didn't know if there was like a, you know, a Schneider industrial challenger sitting out here at the jet center.

Oh, yeah, not that Schneider. Oh, yeah. We're a family of tailors. Cren Schneider von Thurston, the 18th. 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. I think it's coming back to me now. I think I knew that. But like the lawyers. I just think of her as a lady that makes earrings out of claws and pecker bones and whatnot.

Where did you guys meet? Right here. Right here. But at a different building. Oh. Same space, different building. The, uh, so, 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 of their record, you can go read now, all of 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, J.W. Milman. But they wanted to tie it into desegregation. Yeah, very much.

Desegregation. So they shaped the, dude, when you read, go read the look magazine story that's all phony. They make J.W. Milam 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 time he 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 myelum and the way you realize it is when you uh at ohio state they have a huge trunch of of some of these notes and the lawyer but i can't move on who's the writer i can't tell you is you live yes i'll tell you later there's a funny quote that someone was saying that stand up comedians stand-up comedy is mostly acting outraged by something you said that you made up that a fake friend said.

By the way, that's, by the way, that's really good. Like, there is no stand-up without the straw man. Like, I got to say, you make up a friend, you make up a thing he said, and then that thing pisses you off and you talk about that. That's right. Or it's like, yeah, or like, you know, the great Louis C. K fit about everyone else on the airplane being pissed. about the Wi-Fi.

Give it 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, but maybe. No, anyway, I love. So you're not going to tell me the writer.

No. And so I filibustered that. And so the, but you see things that are coming out of JW's mouth that are verbatim from notes that the writer took from interviews with the lawyers. And so you're watching the lawyers shape it. And so one of them, one of the lawyers said, we need people like J.W. Milam to fight our wars and to keep people in line. And so there was very much a sense of like, we're going to, it's exactly what you said.

Like, we're going to circle the wagons, but like these people were totally ostracized. I mean, at the end of his life... Which people? The murderers. Oh, yeah. At the end of Roy Bryant's life. Like the people that the families that, the people that acquit them, like, they didn't want them around. No.

And they couldn't get crop loans and they couldn't, you know, Leslie Milam became a drug dealer. And J.W. Milam was arrested for food stamp fraud. And like that, like, that was one of the biggest ironies, I think, is that if you had asked, if you went and asked people, it'd be like, Um, 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, food stamp fraud, drug dealing. So, 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. I 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. 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.

J.W. Milam is one of the main bootleg runners for the sheriff who's 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 LaFloor 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. Yeah. You know, and like, you know, and, and like the, the grand conspiracy of what, so when, when the FBI wanted to reopen the case in 2004, 0304, they had to exhume the body. And so the reason they had to exhume Emmett 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, 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 Tallahatchie River, weighted it down just enough, you know, obviously understanding the deep science of your body releasing decomp gases, so they would know exactly

how much weight to have so that it would sink but then float again. You know, somebody had 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 Emmett Till 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 exhume him and do a DNA test to make sure that the body in Burrough Cemetery in Chicago was Emmett Till. And, I mean, of course it was. And, you know, so the, and then like, I'm going to find this thing real quick. Because, like, you talk, this is what is being taught about, this is from a textbook that's being taught right now in the Mrs. V. Delta about the Emmett Till 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 and rewriting text. Like, my Mississippi 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 Emmett Till. And this is, this is being taught right now.

In 1955, J.P. Coleman, the attorney general from Choctaw County was elected governor of Mississippi 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 a pass at a white woman in a rural store. Two men kidnapped him, beat him, killed him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie 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. And so like... Well, what about that? Like, help me understand. So the thing for me is that the entire murder

is still taught in the context of the death of a... The worst part about a death of a child... Oh, is it a poor image. Or is that it sure made the... No, I understand. 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 used, you shouldn't learn the history of the Mississippi Delta to determine who was 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, like, I don't have some weird, like, Southern guilt thing, but I do think it's incumbent 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 have it. 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. Yeah. Hunting big country isn't for the faint of heart. You got steep ground, long distances, and miles of crown land that aren't always easy to navigate. That's why Anex Hunt just got a serious upgrade for hunters in Canada. Now you can get nationwide coverage for less than the cost of a box of shells with major updates to crown land layers and new parcel boundaries where available. Scout access boundaries and terrain with confidence before you even lace up your boots.

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Not really because, you know, there's a lot. that, one, 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'Kine does the sort of version, I know. He's like, I may not wear a Stetson, 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 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 have been very little pushback. And, you know, it's interesting because, I mean, I love the Mississippi. Mississippi Delta. I didn't know hardly any of this. I certainly didn't understand. You know, is it 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 read, go down Moses, you go down read absalom, absalom. 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 25 years. And we 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 Absalom, like I feel, I mean, I feel like Faulkner's read now only through the prism of race.

And I actually think that's not, you have to read Faulkner 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 Emmett 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, like, so wholly overridden. Yeah, it just has nothing to do with that.

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 history man like i get what you're saying and history's history's so tough and the telling of it's so tough the other day i took my kids we were in new mexico for a wedding yeah and i took my kids to bandelier oh yeah okay the site of old uh ancestral Puebloan settlements and there's a big sign you get up in this high overlook and you can see Los Alamos 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 1943 or whatever the hell it was okay and the freedom to go there still hasn't been restored. I said to my kids, like, I called more, I said, man, like, I want you to understand what this sign is. And I want you to understand what's not here. Well, and I'm like, that's crazy.

Well, I pointed out. Would you want to not be on a site where we test nuclear weapons? I said, if I was going to write this sign, you could 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 250,000 American lives because we would have had to have invaded the mainland of Japan. And so I'm like, there's just, I was like kind of lecturing them. I'm like, there's just always more to the story.

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, and it's like, once you become, but like, like, the point being, once you become aware, like, you did, like, you got obsessed. Yeah. And you, you, you attempted your book, you attempt your book to do, to unravel every little bit. We're trying to turn, like, oh, who's this guy that happened to walk by one day? I'm going to track his family back a hundred years. Well, because, you know, there's a sense that, like, uh, we're trying to turn our descriptions of American history into tweets and, like,

It's too complicated for a sign over, you can't, 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, uh, the last free bank. band of Natchez Indians in Mississippi was sold into slavery by the Choctaw and the French and were 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 Haitian 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 going to tell the history of. of, you know, if you're going to 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 these. the U.S., and so they sort of, you know, like, you understand, like, they're 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, uh, elites built their houses on top of them as a way to sort of like symbolically stand on the shoulders of the ancestors. Yeah. 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. Yeah. Like, I don't, like, go back to the, the, the, the, 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, we, 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 people. 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. Yeah. And so, like, I found that to be, like, I think with history, I don't, I don't think we need

some, like, sort of weird, judgy sign. I just think we need to know everything we can possibly know about a square of land because the truth of it is 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. You know, a little thing that hit me reading it. Does that make sense at all? Yeah. Yeah. Earlier I mentioned my friend, my friend Doug Duren, who lives, like, on his family's farm.

yeah 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 oh i love that do you follow me like like every like little tree like trees and whatever it's all like it's all it's all compressed well i love the idea that like the places i like best or with a membrane between the president in 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. Yeah.

And it's all happening right now. And, you know, Nathan Bedford-Farst Cavalry is walking the same road as J.W. Milam's driving as Willie Reed is walking as, uh, you know, if you ever listen to Crossroads, uh, go see my friend Willie Brown. Willie 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. There's this thing, Doug, when you get in the local tour, there's this thing Doug does it that, like, has reminiscent of Emmett Till.

In that, you go by this farm, and Doug's like, sold in the past, because in his father's time, some kids stole some gas, 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 right at the back of the head.

High school kids. He gets acquitted. He thought it was birdshot. Is their argument. What? Yeah, he thought it was birdshot, not buckshot or slug or whatever the hell he killed the kid with.

The idea that a sophisticated hunter doesn't know what's, Well, that's just like, do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, that's ridiculous. 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 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? I love that kind of, like I like that kind of experience and that's so much of what I got from your book is this way of just like taking chunks of ground. and, like, really getting them. 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. And it's interesting because the map doesn't show sort of gradations 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. 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. 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 Mississippi 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 400 to come back. And so, like, you know, Mississippi functioned as a, you know, Argo Summit, Illinois, where Emmett Till's family settled. They all worked at the Argo starch plant. They make Argo cornstarch. Oh, I know that brand.

They still make it. Yeah. And they make Cai syrup and make your pecan pie with. And they all live there. 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 to Mississippi Delta, it's super decay. And you know, Mississippi Delta is like, it's like Dorian Gray, you know, it wears its sins on the outside. And they're just abandoned buildings and collapsed cotton gins and it feels like a failed experiment, which is it what it was. I mean, the global capital markets came here, stripped out there 10% and then moved

on and left the rest of us there to clean up the mess. And you get this sense that like, uh, that, that, you know, 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. Yeah. I, I, you know, I don't ever, my accent gets pegged all the time on the south side of Chicago was from Mississippi. Like, people, people just hear it. They'll know.

And no. 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 know, if you go to a baseball game, almost inevitably the person working will look at it and see that it's Mississippi driver's license and say something. That happens to me more in Chicago than it doesn't. I mean, like, you know, there's... The connection is that strong. 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 hot Italian beef places in the Mississippi Delta because people are coming back home and they're bringing the food of their own. old home with them. As the last thing, before we wrap up, can you hit me with the, what you take on the ivory-billed woodpeckers? We've covered that bird good.

All right. So. Remember we saw that one. We did. We got the handle one. It's dead. Oh, yeah. So the law, well, one of the things that's crazy is like they had a little foot tag on

them all dried out in that drawer. Remember that? Cornell University. That's right. So there's a huge fight, as you know, between the, the scientist at Cornell and. And then those folks down in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, who claim to have seen one. Yeah. There's the guy.

Because what they're always, yeah. What they're looking at is, is, is, uh, pilliated woodpecker. And there's a, that's the argument. And then there's a double, like there's a, there's the double knock is that the, there's something about the call that's specific to the ivory build versus the pilliated woodpecker. Anyway, I went out for a couple of days in, uh, in the swamps. It's all around the Stennis space station. Okay. And what's interesting is that...

You know what we didn't do? Just to re-cave people. There's a bird that ivory-billed woodpecker went extinct in the 50s. Yeah. Now that, they knew where the last one was. And it was in a nest and they cut its tree down. Here we go. In April 1944, 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 80,000 acres in Louisiana. called the Singer Tract, named after the sewing machine company that owned it. They were four nest 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 I mean, signed a contract with the military to deliver wood. It began cutting immediately. The National Audubon Society went to work to save the woodpecker habitat.

hat, 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 are you 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 Godbird itself, the ivory-billed woodpecker. The wood got turned into military packing crates and plywood gasoline tanks for fighter planes. The Audubon 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 Echleberry, just 23, went south to the swamps. He searched and followed and looked for specific nest and trees. Walking through a swamp while looking up is a learned skill. One evening around dusk, his bard owl sang in anticipation of a nighttime kill, Echleberry 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. Echleberry noted 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 no shit yeah and like uh oh man really yeah and so like it's infuriated me like you come down you're going to cut down my wilderness and then go somewhere else and preserve wilderness and act on your vacation spot that's right

I mean, that's hearty fuck you to them. Sorry, Phil. All good. I don't do the TV edits as somebody else's problem. He's trying to look out for them. It'll go, beep. Yeah, it's fine. I call Clay even beeps out when someone says like, gosh, durn, Clay will be beeping out.

He's so opposed. You know, it would be really funny. If you beeped out stuff that wasn't cursing and make it look like somebody is just. Yeah, that'd be a great trick to do on somebody. Yeah, just. Yeah. His mom be like, you should be ashamed to 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. So do you think there's still I if you build woodpeckers around if you had to guess? And I'm talking the kind of guess

where there's a gun to your head. Gun to my hat. And here's what I highlight 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 that if there are or are not, I'm going to ask you the question. If you get it right, you live. If you get it wrong, 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. 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 you live or die. Here's what I think. And I say, are there I have you built woodpeckers alive right now? My answer is no. All right. With the gun to 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 Mr. 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, and here's why.

And here's why. No, I hope you're right. No, no. See, now the omniscientious being is like, geez, maybe I'm wrong. No, so here are the two reasons that I, that here's why I think that. I think one, uh, 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 doth protest too much. There's something about how aggressive they're being that makes me think that they're operating.

from a place of weakness, not confidence. Okay. And then the other thing, I think, is that, uh, 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 wilderness that like I tend to think that like whatever we think we know I feel like we'll 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're secrets and their mysteries that like the deep ocean remain unknown and almost.

unimaginable and their sort of wonder and surprise. That would be my argument. Great. I'm going to holster my pistol. Well, I'm not the omniscient being. Oh, yeah, I was about to say, by the way, the moment you fake shot me was the moment you actually, your 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, he just shot. Oh, shit. Stephen is the omniscient being. I know. I somehow got into the role. I didn't want the role. but I did there I was

Ladies and gentlemen If nominated I will No that's right 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 20 miles down the road from that murder It's a landscape history It's American culture um it's politics it's agriculture um it's everything man it's everything it's the whole everything squeezed uh beautifully and elegantly into a single book uh right thompson thank you very

much for coming on man man uh thanks so much for having me appreciate it thanks First Lights Navigator hoodie was built and tested where plans fall apart and weather doesn't ask permission. It's built to perform, built to last, breathable insulation that dumps heat fast on the hike-in, stretch fabric that stays silent for close encounters moisture control that wicks away sweat on the packout because in the field the plan shifts the wind changes the moment comes sooner or later than you thought when it does you adapt without hesitation first lights navigator delivers on versatility no matter the situation it happens to be my favorite piece of gear they make right now i live in it check it out at first light dot com that's f i r s t l i t e

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