Book excerpt: ‘The Barn’ by Wright Thompson

Editor’s note: Wright Thompson’s “The Barn” is the story of the place where Emmett Till was tortured to death in the summer of 1955, and a thousand-year history of the dirt surrounding that barn, an attempt to map the forces that drove a mob of white men to kill a Black child. It follows the curdling of the Mississippi Delta as the global cotton markets rise and then, starting in 1920, collapse. This is one story among many.

On Friday, December 14, 1923, a sharecropper outside Drew named Joe Pullum went to visit his plantation manager, Tom Sanders, to settle his annual accounts. Pullum carried a .38-caliber revolver. He’d learned to shoot fighting with the famous U.S. Army Buffalo Soldiers in the hills of Cuba during the Spanish-American War. When he returned home to farm, he lived with his family in a small tenant house east of town. The crop had been harvested and now came the tense settlement day. The only input a farmer controlled was the price of labor, a fundamental that remains true today, and for some men the temptation to cheat people with no legal recourse remained too great. Settlement day was an annual test of honesty and honor and most men failed. Pullum already suspected his boss would try to cheat him.

It had been another terrible year, the third in a row. Rain fell for nearly the entire cotton season and many farmers picked the worst crop they’d picked in decades, ten acres to make one bale in some places instead of three bales an acre. These plagues of sun and sky felt biblical. Banks wanted money or land from farmers. A third fewer bales got picked statewide and many farmers just abandoned the crop in the fields rather than pick at a loss. The jarring sign of untouched cotton in winter haunted the memories of farmers for a generation. It was the smallest crop in fifty years. That was a problem for management.

Pullum wanted his money.

Sanders said Pullum owed him fifty dollars. 

They began to shout at each other. Nobody knows who drew his weapon first. Sanders and his manager, John Manning, stood on a back porch. Pullum stood on the ground below them and shot both men before fleeing east towards the Brooks plantation headquarters—the same land that in five decades would become Fannie Lou Hamer’s Freedom Farm.

Sanders was dead. John Manning was wounded. Pullum ran to his house and loaded his shotgun with the only ammunition he had: lightweight bird shot. The posse went to Pullum’s house. Pullum aimed at their heads because of the low-caliber bird shot. He shot R. L. Methvin in the face and killed him. He wounded another man, then slid into the Wild Bill Bayou and started trying to move his way north. His mother sharecropped on the next road to the north and, under threat, he tried to make it to her. A witness saw him cross Brooks Road to the west side of the bayou. The posse couldn’t follow him through the thick swamps, still uncleared, and lost his trail at an abandoned tenant house. For two hours they searched, until someone found boot tracks leading down into a drainage ditch that fed back into the Wild Bill Bayou. They spread out along both sides of the swamp. Joe Pullum hid in the thick undergrowth, careful like those ancient deer about where he put his feet, and he listened as they approached. His military training kicked in.

The posse got closer and closer. Pullum waited.

Finally they were within pistol range. Just a few yards away. He shot Kenneth Blackwood in the face, Luther Hughes in the head, and Bob Stringfellow in the side and the arm. He shot Archie Manning, a local cotton gin employee and ancestor of the famous quarterback, in the face and the throat. The posse emptied eight or ten boxes of ammunition into the swamp but hit nothing. Pullum slipped silently away from his pursuers, moving through the bayou toward his mom’s house on what is now Swope Road.

The posse called for help. The sheriff from my hometown of Clarksdale, along with a half dozen prominent citizens, arrived with two Browning machine guns. Other men went into Drew and loaded ten fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline onto a truck, which they drove as far as it could go into the muck. A wagon pulled by a team of four mules took it the rest of the way into the swamp. At 11:30 p.m., more than fourteen hours after the first shot was fired, the mob rolled the first barrel of gasoline into the swamp. They lit it on fire and ran down shooting wildly.

J. L. Doggett, from Clarksdale, saw something move in the darkness.

“There he is!” he shouted.

Pullum shot him immediately. 

Doggett was a prominent lumberman. I knew his daughter when she was an old woman. She played bridge at the Clarksdale Country Club, in one of the rooms just off the snack bar, where kids would go to get chicken tenders and lemonade to charge to their parents’ accounts.

“All my friends are dead and gone,” she’d say.

Back at the Wild Bill Bayou the mob rolled a second barrel of gasoline into the water. The machine guns fired belts of withering fire into the darkness. Pullum remained hidden and picked off his attackers whenever he got a clear shot. He had only a shotgun and a small pistol, so he had to get close to kill. The posse rolled a third barrel of gasoline into the swamp and lit it on fire. This time the fire made Pullum move and the machine guns opened up and cut him down. Pullum had killed at least four people and wounded at least nine, although local oral accounts put that number higher.

The posse threw his dying body on a horse and they took him to a waiting car, which drove him to town. They left him to die on the cotton platform on Main Street. His shotgun got displayed in downtown Drew. Some older Black citizens tell how their parents and grandparents told them that parts of Pullum’s body—multiple people mention his ear or ears—got displayed for decades after that in local shop windows as a warning.

After the lynching Drew and other nearby towns enforced a strict curfew for Blacks. More lines got drawn on the Delta, unmarked on any map but understood by everyone as law. Boundaries governed more and more moments and spaces, and crossing one of those boundaries would be Emmett Till’s fatal crime. When a local dance hall closed and the crowd didn’t clear fast enough, the local sheriff shot and killed seven or eight people, including two of the musicians.

The Franklin family left Sunflower County because of the killing. Their nine-year-old son, who would name his daughter Aretha, heard his parents talking about it. In nearby Webb, twenty-three miles from the barn and less from the spot where Pullum died, Mamie’s father packed up his family and moved to Chicago.

Pullum’s family disappeared. His great-grandson Thomas Pullum, who lives in Oakland, California, spends his free time trying to find out what happened to them, especially to Joe’s two sons, who were never heard from again. Thomas came to Mississippi for the first time in 1967 and sat with his grandmother in the shadow of the Wild Bill Bayou. In a quiet moment he asked her to tell him about Joe. He saw a cloud of “pain and misery” pass over her face as tears welled in her eyes. But then something strange happened. Something in her eyes changed, a defiant sparkle emerging, and she smiled and settled back into the pillows on her bed and started to tell the kids the story.

“I had heard of Mr. Joseph Pullum, your great-grandfather, all my life,” she began and told them the tale of a Black man who had the courage to say no, to stand up for himself, and when it became clear he would not survive, a man who decided to send as many of the enemy to hell as he could before they got him. Those stories are all that’s left, along with some newspaper clippings and a smudged death certificate, signed by the same local doctor who would later buy the barn where Emmett Till was tortured to death.

The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi by Wright Thompson will be released on Sept. 24, 2024.