Ep. 763: Landscape and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
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Speaker 2 (00:15):
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T E dot com. All right, everybody join today? By

(00:44):
Right Thompson, four time New York Times best selling author,
grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Yes, sir, if you
recognize that name, you might know him because uh right.
As a senior writer for ESPN dot Com ESPN the
magazine worked at all kind of newspapers over the years,
covering all aspects of sports. He wrote the book Pappy Land,

(01:08):
The Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last.
And he wrote The Cost of These Dreams, sports stories
and other serious business. He was the editor for a
time and the best American sports writing, Oh yeah, man,
I had over the years made it into a handful
of the best American essays and travel writing and all

(01:29):
that kind of stuff. Not essays travel writing. But yeah,
never never got a nod from the old sports writing.
Well that now I know who to blame.

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:56):
I'm over it now, man, I'm over it.

Speaker 3 (01:58):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
We're here today to talk about well, we're here today
to talk about a book, but particularly like a Let
me start over explaining this. First off, here's the book
we're here to talk about. It's called The Barn. Now
take note of the title. It's called The Barn. The
subtitle is the subtitle is the secret history of a

(02:20):
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.

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

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

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Yep.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (03:08):
Yep, I knew that. And this tells that story. But
the reason I wanted to have you on and talk
to you is I want people to understand that story.
But I think that it's fascinating to me. And even
when I knew you were working on the book and
coming out that you were calling the book the Barn,

(03:28):
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

(03:52):
is something I encourage. I try to encourage and go
and pick a piece of ground right and ask yourself elf,
not only like, not only what is the history of
this piece of ground. But what are the things that
happened that made it be that this piece of ground
is now where you find inspiration or whatever? Right, Meaning,

(04:17):
if you have some hunting cabin up north that you
would or a honey cabin down south whatever the hell
where I'm from in Michigan, like everyone's hunting cabin is
for whatever reason, is always to the north. Just probably
parts of the country where everybody's hunting cabin is east, south,
whatever the hell. But for us in the Upper Midwest,

(04:37):
every the action is always perceived to be up north. Yeah,
so you have a hunting cabin up north, and by
looking at how you handle this piece of ground, and
the barn is on a patch of ground, and m
Attill was murdered in a barn. Yep, Bizarrely, I would
never have guessed this is true. Bizarrely that barn still

(04:58):
sits there today.

Speaker 3 (04:59):
I mean, and it is. It's a guy's barn. I mean,
there are Christmas decorations in it, All of his duck
hunting gear is in it. The owner of the barn,
who I love and gotten to know really well. You know,
he duck hunts every day of duck season. And it's
a barn sitting on a piece of land. And I
mean you know this well, but it was a uniquely

(05:22):
American idea for the Land Ordnance Act of seventeen eighty five,
which is Thomas Jefferson, which essentially dropped a grid over
America and divided it into townships and ranges. And so
the barn is in section two of Township twenty two north,
range four west, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. And like,
the thing that I thought was important is it's a

(05:45):
thirteen hundred year history of this square of land.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
And that yeah, that is when we get going on this,
Like that is one of the things I want to
focus on, is this idea that anyone in an America
who has an attachment to a place or maybe it's
a place where something horrible happened, like in the case
of your book, can learn to understand their spot, can

(06:12):
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?

Speaker 3 (06:31):
You know?

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

Speaker 3 (06:35):
And how did how did we get here? I mean,
like I have this fantasy that we could do the
entire country this way like I did one thirty six
square mile block. I would love it if people would
take their own version of that, whether it's it's like
you said, whether something terrible happened here, or whether is
this the thirty six square miles where the last cattle

(06:57):
drove was in this part of Montana exactly? And now
tell me every single human being whoever went in and
out of this square of land, and every dollar that
went in and out. I mean, one of my favorite
parts of this was I felt like, you know, there
are long stretches of nature writing in here, because I
felt like you had to evoke the world pre civilization,

(07:17):
like what was this like before people got here? You know?
And the Mississippi Delta was, as you know you've been
down there. I mean, it was a vast, almost uninhabitable
hardwood swamp until around nineteen hundred and then they started
clearing it and building sort of the last generation of
cotton plantations there, and so trying to understand how what

(07:39):
should have been a swamp became, you know, a man
made cotton factory. I mean, I you know nothing about
the Mississippi Delta unless you cross the levee where all
those hunting camps are. Nothing about the Mississippi Delta has
any of its roots in nature. I mean, this is
man made land, and I think that's an important thing

(08:00):
to talk about.

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

Speaker 3 (08:04):
Yeah, let's.

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

Speaker 3 (08:15):
So it's funny. I wanted to write about music and
I was randomly assigned to the sports section at the
college newspaper. But I fell in love with it because
you know, there's nothing you can't write about through the
prism of sports. And there's something incredible about a locker room,
because like, these people have nothing in common except they've

(08:36):
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

(09:01):
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,

(09:28):
in sports like that. You know, I've always been fascinated
by the role the games we love play and shaping
of our identity. And so I've liked that from the
I've liked that forever, you know, and I've liked you know,
I started working for ESPN twenty years ago, and it's
you know, it's the you know, it's the greatest job

(09:48):
in the world because you just get to sort of
follow your obsessions. Yeah, you know, so you're still active.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (10:25):
Uh yeah, man, let me tell you the Uh that
was when you can still have non reimbursable work expenses
written off on your taxes before they close that loophole.
Uh uh that was great. I mean, like, you know,
I had to write I finally had to turn the
book in because I'd already spent all the advance on whiskey.
I was like, well, I can't, you know, there is

(10:46):
no money to give back. But that was fun man.

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

(11:09):
more important than writers?

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Well, and also in screwing over writers, they really screwed
over small business owners because the h you spend money
on your small business to like it's an it's an
investment in the idea of it in the future. And
so when you you know, if I'm doing if I'm

(11:30):
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

(11:52):
a little bit of money to go aboard it. And
so you know, that whole ecosystem was just eliminated almost overnight.

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

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

Speaker 1 (12:11):
They're like that's true. Yeah, uh, next thing I want
to do. Yeah, just because we're we're gonna, of course
step back and go forward. Of course, layout layout I
kind of gave a quick outline of the murder of
Mmett Till. Yeah, but like it's is as quickly as comfortable. Yeah,

(12:31):
tell the story of the murder of Emmett Till so
we can so we can start talking about this barn
that's right, like this piece of ground.

Speaker 3 (12:36):
So, uh, Emmett Till had just turned fourteen years old
and he lived in Chicago. Very much a boy I mean,
he still liked comic books. Uh, he had just gotten
interested in girls. At his fourteenth birthday party, his mother
and her friends overheard him and his friends playing spin
the bottle, okay, and so like, you know, that's in
an age where you still like, you know, I want

(12:59):
to kiss a girl, you have a rush own, but
also still like comic books. Like that's such a specific
moment of boyhood. And he went south to visit his family.
He's from Chicago, but they were all sort of Mississippi
expats and they were going to take the train down
just before the end of summer before schools started, and
he was going with his cousin, next door neighbor and
best friend. There was a guy named Wheeler Parker and

(13:21):
so this was nineteen fifty five. This was the year
after Brown v. Board of Education, which is only important
because the whole South, that's the Supreme Court case that
integrated schools. The whole South just ignored it. So the
next year they had to do Brown two. So the
Supreme Court had to come in and be like, no, really,
we minute, you have to do this. So that whole summer,

(13:44):
everybody was waiting on that Supreme Court decision to come out. Meanwhile,
there was a governor's election in Mississippi where they were
all sort of it was a race to the bottom
for these votes, and so their whole campaign was about
school segregation. So they these you should get on newspaper
com and read these speeches these politicians were giving because

(14:05):
they just were saying outlandish stuff, and so it comes South.
He doesn't really know any of this is going on.
He gets down. You have to understand, he's overweight, he
has a stutter. The first day he gets there, he
goes out to work because it's they're picking cotton now,
and he goes out to work with his cousins and

(14:27):
his family, and he makes it about a half day.
It's really hot out there, and he gets sent back
to the house to help the women and so you know,
so this is this thirteen year old just turned fourteen
year old boy who is down with his cousins, who
is not having a great week. And on that Wednesday,

(14:48):
they go to a little store in town to go
get like ice cream and sodas and things, and so
all the boys drive in and he's in the store
for a minute alone. But it's a sq door later,
Carolyn Bryant, who was the woman that he whistled at,
and her husband and his step brother, his half brother

(15:09):
are the ones who killed him. She is in there.
She said she made up this outlandish story of all
the things he said to her. You know, I've ft
white women before. One, everyone on the porch could hear
every word being said in the store, and that never happened.
And two he had a stutter, he couldn't have said it.
And so she comes outside and he you know, I

(15:32):
so relate to this, remembering being a fourteen year old boy.
I think he's trying to show off for the older kids,
and he whistled at her cat call whistle, and he
looked around and saw in his cousin's eyes real quick.

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

Speaker 3 (15:52):
Was, so what actually happened. And a lot of this
is well intentioned accidental misinformation because made me tell sort
of had a certain version of how she thought her
son's last days went. The last living eyewitnesses a guy
named Reverend Wheeler Parker, who I just saw down in
Mississippi last weekend, and he was standing next to him

(16:12):
when he whistled, and Emmett saw the fear in his
cousin's eyes and was like, something's wrong, and so they ran.
That was on a Wednesday. The thing you have to
understand is it was less than twenty four hours after
the election of that governor's race. I was telling you

(16:33):
about where these governors had been. These candidates had been
saying outlandish stuff. A lot of talk about bayonets, a
lot of talk about violence, a lot of talk about
defending your way of life. And you know, most of
the voters understood they were just politicians chasing votes, but
some people heard them and took them serious. And so

(16:54):
you know, in Mississippi especially, there's such a direct link
between political rhetoric and violence. I mean, it's not an
accident that the day after John F. Kennedy gave his
famous civil rights speech, Medgar Evers was shot. I mean,
those things are, those things are, especially in Mississippi, always
really closely related. So he steps down into this cauldron

(17:15):
where the population has been whipped up into a frenzy
by months of five people trying to prove they are
more segregated than anyone else. And so then there's just
a kid in the middle of that. You know, being
fourteen is about testing boundaries, and the dominant culture of
Mississippi was about protecting boundaries.

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

Speaker 3 (17:38):
I mean, my family farm is twenty three miles from
the barn, and so and so they go to town.
Emtt and his cousins go to Greenwood for Saturday night
to go to the movie. They stopped at a plantation
on the way home. At a party, both Wheeler and
Emmett had their first ever SIPs of alcohol, a little
sip of moonshine. They didn't like it, but there that age.

(18:00):
Both of them had their first drink. That night, fourteen
and sixteen, they rode home. They accidentally hit a dog
on the way home, and Emmett was begging them to
stop the car and go check on the check on
the dog, and it was too dark, and his cousins
wouldn't And so they drove home in silence while Emmett
quietly cried in the back seat of the car over

(18:21):
the dog. They went to bed. Two and a half
hours later, Roy Bryant and his brother JW. Milem show
up at the house beating on the door, asking to
see that boy in Chicago that did the talking. They
pointed the gun in Whigler Parker's face. First. He still
remembers the staring down the barrel of a nineteen eleven

(18:43):
forty five. He was just like, the barrel's a lot
wider than you think it's going to be, and like
he remembered that. He remembered the smell of the whiskey
on their breaths, on their breath They went and got
emmet up. He was sleeping with his cousin, Simeon Wright.
He sime And remembered he died probably ten years ago,
but Simeon remembered his whole life. How long it took

(19:04):
him and to get his shoes on. Because he was scared,
They took him out. They drove him around all night.
They took him to Roy and j W's brother Leslie's barn.
The barn they you know, they tortured him the pistol,
whiped him with the forty five, and there was a
witness named Willie Reid who heard him crying out for

(19:28):
his mom. And then they killed him and threw his
body in the Talahatchie River where he would have stayed.
You know, I went to the banks one time with
a member of his family, was Sharon Wright, who's Moses right,
Moses Wright's niece. Moses Right is Emmatt's uncle. That's whose
house he was staying in the night he was kidnapped.
And I'm standing on the banks of the Talahatchie River
with her, and I just sort was like, what do

(19:50):
you think about when you're here? And she's like, I'm
just so grateful, and I'm like what, and she's like
The Talahatchie River in Mississippi is known by black families
as the Singing River because there were been so many
dead bodies thrown in it. And she looked at there,
she looked at me, and he goes he got out
of the river, and you know, they tried to State
of Mississippi saw the body and tried to bury it immediately.

(20:11):
There was a whole doug the East Money Church of
God in Christ. They had a preacher, they had pallbearers,
they had the body out there. By the way. The
embalmer did an incredible job at the Black funeral home.
His name was Champ Jackson. Champ Jackson's daughter works at
the Delta Crown Room in the Memphis Airport. She's in there.
She's in there right now. See her all the time.

(20:34):
And so they had him out there. They were going
to bury him. They had a whole doug. And then
in Chicago, the steel Workers Union went to war for
him until and so they were so because one of
the most powerful guys in the steel workers union lived
in their neighborhood and knew him. And so they got
the mayor of Chicago to get the governor of Illinois
to get the governor of Mississippi to call the sheriff

(20:56):
of Lafour County and stop the burial. And so they
put him on a train and took him to Chicago,
where his mother insisted on an open casket. And that's
how we know the story, hm, I mean, it's really
you know, there when I started doing this book, there
were probably twelve people left alive who knew him, and

(21:17):
now they're probably eight. I mean they've been dying in
front of me. Oh man.

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

Speaker 3 (21:25):
Yeah. And so what's so interesting is and it sort
of goes back into the land. And you know, one
of the reasons I wanted to do the book is
set as a history of the land, because in Mississippi,
people lie, but the land does not. The land tells
the story. The land. The history of Mississippi is embedded
in those courthouse records and who owned what land and

(21:46):
how it moved. And Emmett Till's family, even though they've
lived in Chicago for seventy years, feel like Mississippians, Like
they are definitely people in exile. You know, we grow
sweet corn on our farm, and they would always want
me to bring him up sweet corn. You know, they
want hickory wood from the Mississippi Delta for their smokers.

(22:07):
They kept trying to plant magnolia trees in their yard
in Chicago, but they just wouldn't. And so there's a
real sense of people who were disconnected from the you know,
Moses Right had to leave his farm. There were so
many death threats. He couldn't harvest his last crop. The
trial was in September. They were already picking cotton. He

(22:29):
tried to hang on to get his crop out of
the field and couldn't. He had to give away his dogs.
There was a newspaper reporter there the day he left,
while he was giving his dogs away, weeping, and so
like everybody had to leave in the middle of the night.
Willy Reid, the witness, he had to. He got so
many death threats that a couple of days after he testified,

(22:51):
Moses Right and Willy Read were the first black people
to go into a court in Mississippi and accuse a
white man of murder. And that was nineteen fifty five.
That had never happened before. And so Willie Reid had
to walk six miles down a gravel road, down the
Druda Uval Road, which is the road. The barn is
on the Druda Ruval Road. If you want to sort
of play with the idea that like in like that

(23:12):
sort of one hundred years of solitude way the time
isn't real. That road was built by Nathan Bedford Forest brother,
so and Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Winner of eighteen
sixty three and sixty four, marched his cavalry down that
road past the Doherty Bio. So I think in some
world where time doesn't exist like we think it does,

(23:33):
those horses in JW. Milem's green and white Chevrolet two
tone pickup truck past each other night after night after
night after night. And so Willy Reid walked down that
road past Fanniel lou Hamer's Freedom Farm and it didn't
exist yet, past where it would be, and there was
a car waiting for him at the intersection of the
drud Uval Road and Highway eight. And the man driving

(23:55):
that car was Mud Grevers, and it was the sort
of first civil rights thing he had ever done. And
Willie Reid moved Chicago, changed his name, and he was
married to Juliet who I know. I just saw her
in Mississippi. Was married to her ten years, maybe before
she knew that he had some other history. So like,

(24:15):
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.

(24:36):
He hunted and he fished, you know. Wheler Parker told
me about his dad. One time a tornado hit their
house when they still lived in Mississippi, and it ripped
the roof off the smokehouse and it was in the
middle of the night in the rain, and his dad
had them out there finding bacon and hams and sausages
because it had all been thrown all over the field.
And he's like, holy shit, you know, we got to
go like yeah. And so, you know, these were people who,

(24:58):
for general like had real rhythms in a country way
of life. Moses right, like to hunt and liked to fish.
He liked to make his own sausage with that sage
in it. He liked brains and eggs every morning for breakfast.
And he lived in concert with the land. And then
was just sent to a city to move into a

(25:18):
housing project and they let him. The Illinois Central Railroad
gave him a patch of land and he did this
incredible garden. They made fake mules out of like wheelburrow wheels,
wheelbarrow wheels, and they went out, and that was the
closest he ever felt to home again is in his garden.
And another old man who'd sort of been forced to

(25:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
HM. In order for you to start tracking the history
of this piece of ground barn, you had to kind
of settle, or at least in the book, you go
through the process of settling where the murder occurred, because
there was like a lot of oh like people like
you think, like how would you lose sight of that?

(26:13):
But there was all these different versions of where it happened,
so that one of the first things in the book
is exploring where was it.

Speaker 3 (26:21):
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

(26:44):
version of the confession couldn't be real because they were
protected by double but they couldn't. And it was a
family who did it. I mean, it's you know, in
that barn that night. There were three brothers and a
brother in law, you know, and so this is like,
this is one family killing, like it's very tribal, and

(27:06):
so they had to write everybody else out of the story,
and so they moved everything. And you know, there are
a lot of history books that quote from the fictitious
account that ran and Look magazine. So you know, Leslie Milam,
who's barnet is Leslie Milam in nineteen seventy three called
his preacher, Macklin Hubble in Cleveland, Mississippi, who I interviewed

(27:30):
before he died, and said, you know, his wife actually
called the preacher and said, Leslie needs to see you.
Can you come over? And he goes out to this
sort of ranch house on a sun baked dead end
street that dead ends into a cotton field on the
very outskirts of Cleveland, Mississippi, and there's this guy dying
on the front couch of the room and it's Leslie Milam.

(27:51):
And before he dies, he wants to confess to his
preacher that he was one of the people who killed him,
until and his preacher listens and they pray together, and
the preacher leaves. The preachers so shook that he left
there and drove out to the store and money just
to sort of commune with it. And then Leslie Miham
died before the sun came up. And so like there
were people you know, made till got asked late in life,

(28:12):
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.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (28:36):
Well, you know, there's a sense of like one of
the things that you want to do is excavate the
blood and the dirt. You know, Like I've made a
real point to follow, you know, if this is a
story about memory and erasure. Within eyesight of the barn
there is the Harvard's Peabody Museum started digging, and it's

(28:57):
a Native American city. And the reason it's archeologically interesting,
and this is, you know, right in township twenty two north,
right where the barn is. The reason it's so interesting
is that a whole civilization rose and fell there, and
in many ways it mirrors the sharecropping civilization that would

(29:17):
rise up centuries later in the same place, almost a
thousand years later. But what's interesting to the Harvard and
all the other archaeologists who've been digging on this site
for years is there's something there that shouldn't be there.
So there's palisade walls, there's a there battlement architecture, and
there were like loopholes, arrow loopholes within the walls with

(29:40):
like interlocking fields of fire like this, like somebody was
defending themselves here and all of that that's all been erased.
We don't know who was the aggressor, we don't know
who was the defender. We don't know anything about these
tribes that live there, other than by the time Ernando
de Soto rolled along, they were all gone. And this

(30:04):
is so on this piece of land, there was a
mono crop culture that where the elites lived on the hills,
on the mound structures inside the gates, and then other
people lived in little cabins sort of out as they
worked the land, and it mirrored so completely the ecosystem

(30:26):
that would rise and fall. I mean, in some ways
nineteen fifty five, in some ways the murder of Emmettil
was the death of sharecropping, because the first mechanized crop
ever planted had been nineteen forty three. You want to
do something fun, you can lay down these timelines of
histories of the research and development, production and then mass

(30:46):
production of cotton pickers and the electric guitar. Because it's
almost month to month. So as the technology is invented,
that is pulling the last people out of the Mississippi
Delta because you don't need because it's become mechanized. On
a parallel track, the technology is being invented for the
music of those people. You could hear an acoustic guitar

(31:09):
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

(31:33):
say history is going to remember, but that just isn't true.
I mean, history almost exclusively forgets. And then in that
same square of land you have Docre Farms, which is,
you know, the home and birthplace of both the Delta
Blues and therefore all American music, I mean, all protest
music is rooted there. You know. Charlie Patton, who grew
up I mean almost with an eyesight of the barn,

(31:55):
was the first real blue Star Paramount Records. In nineteen
twenty nine. He sang first person songs, name checking local cops.
I mean this was I mean, this was protests. This
is ten soldiers and Nixon's coming. This is fuck you,
I won't do what you tell me. This is f
the police, this is you know, it's not an accident
that Easy's grandparents owned a grocery store sixteen blocks up

(32:19):
Broadway from the house where one of them, at Tills
Killers lived. I mean, these are, like you know, Sam Cook,
a change is gonna comes from the same little town
in the Missisippi, Delta's Muddy Waters. I'm a man. You know,
Nate Dogg is from that same little town. So every
time you're listening to any g funk, there is a
like direct line back to township twenty to north range

(32:44):
four west. And so you know, you've got Nathan Bedford
Forest family. There, You've got Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm. There.
There was a Nazi pow camp in between Drew, Mississippi
and the barn in the forties where they were bringing
Nazi prisoners to work in the cotton fields. And interesting
that the uh, the local people realized that uh, the

(33:07):
they were helping the Nazis uh soldiers like cheat and
teach them how to like how you way down, like
you know, how to get how to get up on
the people running it. But some of the Nazi soldiers
stayed and married local women and are still there. And uh,
you know they were the Nazi soldiers were treated a
lot better than their sort of the black sharecroppers who

(33:29):
were working alongside of them. But uh, but you know
this was real. I mean, there was a whole universe
in this square of land, and you know it's it
would be interesting if you could we could do this,
Like I would love to know the history of the
square of land where men where we're like where we
are sitting right now.

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

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

Speaker 1 (33:58):
To know some townships wouldn't have many readers.

Speaker 3 (34:01):
Well no, but I mean like going too. Let me
tell you, I mean like the there's that Frank and
Deborah Popper who are in academics. Oh yeah, the Buffalo Commons,
the Buffalo Commons, right, So I'm way into the Buffalo Commons.
Because if in the this is actually interesting, it speaks
to this. But like if the wellspring of the American

(34:21):
identity is the fact that manifest destiny was achieved. And
if you look at Frank and Deborah Popper's research, that
many of the places settled in the Mad Rush West
almost immediately started depopulating. So they're vast stretches of the
country now that are technically frontier. And if we didn't
actually settle it, what does that suggest? And one of
the things is a lot of this book is a

(34:44):
mapping and so I've got this great railroad map that
shows around nineteen hundred, and it's the railroads coming up
from the north, south, west, and east, and and you
see them just stop because they haven't connected yet. So
this is twenty years after Frederick Turner's essay. This is

(35:04):
twenty years after this was.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (35:25):
That's right there.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (36:01):
So the from seventeen fifty somebody listening, who knows more? Whenever,
from whenever, the spinning jenny was invented until the DuPont
Laboratory in Wimington, Delaware, in nineteen thirty three invented nylon
and made petroleum the world's most important commodity. From the
spinning genny to nylon, cotton was the world's most important commodity.

(36:25):
I mean the thing that seeds out. No, but no,
the seventeen sixty four it's the thing that starts to
allow mass production, so you can turn one worker into ten.
And what is it? And so it's a wee tool.
It's a weaving situation like a Manchester. You know, it's
not an accident that that during the Civil War in Manchester,

(36:47):
the Irish factory workers were raising money for the newly
freed enslaved people, and the factory owners were flying Confederate
flags above the factories. I mean, it's not an accident.
Like Manchester, Mississippi function for a very long time as
a colony of Manchester and Liverpool in London. But anyway, okay,
so because they were sending cotton, they were sending cotton.

(37:08):
As a side note, it's hilarious in the way that, like,
you know, the entire Civil War was based on the
idea that Europe would force a quick end to the
war because no one would want to make war on
King Cotton was the quote, And it's so funny, like
my family still farms cotton. And the most important thing
to know when you're trying to sort of loosely predict

(37:28):
what the price of cotton will be is what's the carryover?
Like how many bales of cotton live in the global
sort of textile supply chain, sitting in warehouses that haven't
been brought into the facilities to be turned into stuff.
And so the largest carryovers in history to date were
eighteen fifty nine and eighteen sixty, which means that no

(37:48):
textile mill in the world needed an ounce of American
cotton until at least November of sixty three, at which point,
so the entire war was based on a completely fall
economic idea that that the I think they're like the
politicians who caught the car, like they were just out
there saying stuff and so uh, like one economist could

(38:12):
have stopped the whole thing. Just but guys, you're you're
totally flawed, but so meaning.

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

Speaker 3 (38:20):
Like it was a wrong time to start the war
because they didn't need it was the weakest the South
had ever been, which was it's not an unrelated You
only really start wars when you're weak. You know, it
started when you're strong. But uh, anyway, like the Mississippi
Delta was the center of the cotton economy for a
little while, and then it, you know, it moved around
the world. Like oil, does you know they're finding oil

(38:42):
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.

(39:03):
The railroad companies were buying huge swaths of land, and
the great the Northern Woods were running out of wood,
and so those timber companies came down to Mississippi the
big plantation adjacent to the barn was owned by a
timber company from New York. And so like these timber
companies were coming down. That's why Teddy Roosevelt, that's Teddy Bear.

(39:25):
He had been sure. So Teddy Roosevelt spent the night
in township twenty to north range four west, and he
gave as his gift to the plantation homeowners it's Taylor
and Crate, I think it's right from New York. He
gave them two ginko trees to plant as his housewarming
gift for having him there. And one of those ginko

(39:45):
trees is still alive, and there's a tire swing in it,
and it's out there on the road. You go see it, Yeah,
the tire swing. Yeah. The people who had the house
don't know. It's just behind like a it's not a trailer,
it's like a corrugated ten house. And they have Teddy
Roosevelt's Ginko tree in the backyard.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (40:13):
It where and all over like crates and and by
the way, when Mississippi ran out of hardwood, most of
these companies went to Oregon. And there's a reason that
their Mississippi town names in Oregon because it's sort of
you know, like Schlitz Brewing Company bought a timber yard
so they could make their kegs and so uh anyway
out of hardwood, out of hardwoods, all hardwoods. And so

(40:36):
they were, uh, they were cleared in this land that
the cotton plantations were almost an afterthought, like what are
we going to do with this? They cleared it for
they cleared it for lumber. They're like, what are we
going to do with it? And so you know, they
were selling all of this land and this was cotton's
last gasp.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (41:15):
And it goes all the way down, and I mean
it's it's millions of years of floods. I mean one
of the things that you know, millions of years of floods,
all of that, all of those natural processes were just stopped,
and so the land has sort of been decaying. I mean,
the yields are not great in a lot of these places,
and so the price of cotton collapsed. In nineteen nineteen,

(41:38):
the price of cotton was a dollar a pound. I
think today it's sixty six cents, and so maybe sixty eight,
and so it was a dollar a pound.

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

Speaker 3 (41:56):
It's thirty two cents lower than it was in nineteen nineteen.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
Wow.

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

Speaker 1 (42:09):
The cotton prices being low.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
Cotton prices and soybeans, so we grew our farm is cotton, soybeans, rice,
and corn, and China buys all of our soybeans, and
this year they haven't bought a single pod of American
soybeans because of all the terrifying Yeah, all the terrifying
it's just killing American farmers. But anyway, they cleared the
price of cotton collapsed in nineteen twenty three, and then

(42:32):
for ten years they tried to fix it. And then
in nineteen thirty three the Roosevelt administration took over the
American cotton economy, and in some ways the it's yeah,
Franklin Roosevelt. And so like, here's the thing I'm going
to try to find because like, I think this explains
it's the only thing I ever really read, because I

(42:55):
think there's something interesting here about how cotton releon, how
the cotton economy put Mmett till at the exact place
at the exact wrong time. And so here we go.
I find this right now, No, golhead, I got it.
Here we go. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted
twenty years. The suffering and killing and decay that would

(43:18):
follow for the next century were the price of three
great years and a dozen good ones. Those two decades
also marked the peak of the Lost Cause mythology. Consider
when all these Confederate statues went up around the state,
and consider the history of cotton and the Delta. The
land clearing finished around nineteen hundred, the price of cotton
collapsed for good in nineteen twenty three, and what happened

(43:39):
in between Port Gibson and Aberdeen race statues in nineteen hundred,
Macon in nineteen oh one, Fayette in nineteen oh four,
Carrollton and Beulah and Okolona in nineteen oh five, Tuplo
and ole Miss in nineteen oh six, Brandon and Oxford
and West Point in nineteen oh seven, Cleveland and Lexington
and Raymond and duck Hill in nineteen oh eight, Greenville
and Winona and nineteen oh nine, Hattiesburg twice in Grenada

(44:03):
in nineteen ten, Gulf Port and Kasiesco Equipment and Ripley
in Brooksville and Heidelberg in nineteen eleven, Columbus and Laurel
and Meridian and Philadelphia and Vaiden in nineteen twelve, Greenwood
and Sumner in nineteen thirteen, Greenwood again in nineteen fifteen,
Hazelhurston nineteen seventeen, Louisville and nineteen twenty one. Many of
these were placed quite intentionally on the lawns of local courthouses.

(44:26):
Most of the monuments around the state were built during
the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single
courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after
nineteen twenty three. Wow, it's all like, the history is
all in. It's in the price of cotton, it's in
the land. I mean, when you look at the equation

(44:47):
of agriculture even now, you don't control the price of siege.
You don't control the price of equipment. You don't control
the price of chemicals. You don't control the weather, you
don't control the price of water. You don't control how
much water you need. On the other side of the equation,
you can't control how much you're selling it for. Because
you can't control the markets. The only X and the

(45:08):
long variable of an American farm that you have any
control over is labor. And so now you have a
system in Mississippi from nineteen thirty three where the government,
the government is stepping in and taking over the cotton industry.
And if it's you know, they wrote the Agricultural Adjustment

(45:29):
Act of nineteen thirty three, and then they had to
it was declared unconstitutional. They had to do it again
in either thirty six or thirty eight, I forget. But
one of the things about that that was so interesting
is they're trying to figure out, well, what is a
subsidy supposed to do for an American farmer. And the
thing that they settled upon was it used to be
called something called parity payments, and now there's a different structure,

(45:50):
but the fundamental ideas are the same. They wanted people
to be able to live like they were living in
nineteen nineteen. And so if it ever feels like Mississippi
is stuck in the past, it's because like statutorily, it
literally is. You know, a lot of the American farm
bills are designed to sort of to sort of recreate

(46:14):
that purchasing power. And you know, the a thing that
happened between say thirty three and fifty five is you
have king Cotton is dying. The as mechanization comes in,
you have to have a significant amount of capital to

(46:34):
be able to buy all this equipment, So it's sort
of changing who could even farm. So you have a
like you have an entire world that is collapsing in
on itself, separate from the Supreme Court decisions and you know,
integrating the schools. I mean, you just have an entire
way of life collapsing in on itself. Prices are spiraling.

(46:57):
Nineteen fifty four nineteen fifty five were arable crops, and
so what you have is and then you have you know,
black people in Mississippi had no access to the courts,
so there was no way for them to do anything
if their landlord was cheating them. And so you just
created this situation where people were desperate and almost had

(47:24):
unchecked power over other human beings. And then m. Mantil
decides to go visit his family on vacation.

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

Speaker 3 (47:39):
And by the way, the nineteen twenty seven the Levy
broke in Scott Mississippi. It broke exactly at where Delta
Pine and Land Plantation is. It was dpl was one
of the first landowners in township twenty two north range
four West, which the whole book is about. And uh

(48:01):
it was owned then by the Manchester Fine Doublers and
Spinners Association, which was the world's largest manufacturing conglomerate that
was buying up Mississippi Delta Plantations to vertically integrate its
supply chain. You know, that company still exists. It's a
different name, but they make lingerie for Victoria's Secret and
Marster Spencer. I mean, companies all still exist. That plantation

(48:21):
was later owned by Monsanto and it's now owned by
Bear the aspirin people. Uh huh uh and so but
like where that where the levee broke was at a
plantation that was owned by a Manchester manufacturing conglomerate. Yeah, anyway,
sorry I interrupted you. Oh no, it's a phenomenal book,
Rising Tide. I love that book.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
Yeah, we're gonna have mom but he canceled last minute
or something happened. Flights, I'm sorry, flights got cancer. It's
fascinating books. It's really good. It introduces a thing about
between that book and your book, and I want you
to explain sharecropping in a minute. Yeah, but uh, it
introduces like introduced me anyways to a weird bit in

(49:03):
American history where from agri from like the history of agriculture.
He explains how there's always been like you just mentioned
there's always been a labor problem, yeah, when it comes
to cotton production. Yeah, agriculture in general, particularly cotton production.
And he lays out this thing that the labor problem

(49:27):
kind of emerged upon emancipation of the slaves, where for
a while the labor problems you just owned the labor. Yeah,
and then all of a sudden they're faced with this
thing that you have to entice, well, you have to
be able to entice willful laborers.

Speaker 3 (49:42):
And the thing that's wild is after the war, all
anyone wanted was can I just have forty acres where
I can protect my family? And so the global capital
markets are freaking out about this. You know, you can
read the minutes of like you know, because like the
way we have business conferences now in Las Vegas, they
had those in Brussels in eighteen sixty. I mean they've

(50:02):
been you know, those aren't new. So you can read
the minutes of these like think tank meetings where they're
essentially trying to invent sharecropping in real time. Sharecropping was
the compromise between labor and capital because they tried a
couple of different things that didn't work. And so you
can watch the global capital markets. And we go into

(50:22):
this in the book because it's sort of you watch
the markets coerce people into living in a way that
they didn't want to live, like people wanted. People just
thought of war. People wanted to go You know, I
love that line from that Dire Strait song, Someday You'll
return to your valleys and your farms. It makes the
hair stand up on my arm. You know, I love
that because it like it gets it's something so existentially true.

(50:45):
And people just wanted to go home and live on
their land. And there was this brief moment in township
twenty two north range four west, all over the South
where you had white and black people, You had veterans
of the Confederacy and veterans from the Union an army.
You had people setting up forty acre little homesteads and

(51:06):
trying to sort of make a go of being what
Thomas Jefferson would have called a yeoman farmer. And you
watched those people get just chewed up and spit out
by the global capital markets who had to have these
lands in large blocks. And so, you know, the people
who just wanted to go hunt and fish and you know,

(51:26):
grow a little cotton to have a little cash, but
have big vegetables, with big vegetable gardens, with homegrown tomatoes.
And you know, my dad was a small town lawyer
and he had a client who was a drug dealer
who would pay him in tomatoes, and like it was
the best thing ever man. All summer we'd eat these
homegrown tomatoes. And you know, our big meal in the

(51:46):
summer was was dinner in the middle of the day,
and then like supper was always just like leftovers, but
it's usually like bacon and tomato sandwiches in the summer.
And so anyway, they just wanted these huge gardens and
to live with their families and and you know, especially
if you're a formally enslaved person, try to start. You know,

(52:08):
roots in your own land were like the most precious thing,
and you just watch the global capital markets make that impossible.

Speaker 1 (52:18):
I want to finish this point about that. He makes
some rising tide or sing. He explains, is it was
very surprising to me that once you had to you
have the responsibility of like enticing and holding labor, like
willful people to get to work. One of the conflicts
that comes up in this area along the Mississippi. He explains,

(52:40):
is it As the ku kox Klan emerges, there are
agricultural people. There are farmers who are fighting against the clan,
oh saying this argument, stop scaring away all the labor.
Like that's their tape. Their take on it is, if

(53:01):
you are making a hostile for people that want to
be here and work, you're working against our interests. And
that was their argument against the clan. No, you covered
so much that same something. It was this weird that
I happened to read these two books at the same time,
because I was like, something that never even occurred to me,
is like this huge problem of like how do you
get people to work the land well and farm when

(53:22):
you can't just make them do it well?

Speaker 3 (53:24):
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

(53:48):
letting that on their land.

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

Speaker 2 (53:52):
No.

Speaker 3 (53:52):
And one of the things that's interesting is the and
even so we'll come back to this, but they used
to send trains down at the Mexican border to bring
up for picking because they didn't have enough people. One
of the reason the hot tomali is like the stereotypical
food of the Delta is that it's tomali's made with
Mississippi Delta ingredients. So instead of masa, it's just staple

(54:15):
corn meal and it's pork and like anyway, all over
the Mississippi Delta by hot tomali's. And that's why because
the black sharecroppers were looking at the hot tomali cans
at the end of the road that the folks brought
up to help pick, and we're like, that looks better
than whatever lunch we got, So they started doing that.
But the but to your point about like about John's book,

(54:39):
I mean that they really nail is that, you know,
the the planners were trying to fight off the clan.
The only spot in the Mississippi Delta, this is wild.
The only spot in the Mississippi Delta where there were
a big concentration of small, poor white farmers aka like
prime clan material was right where the barn is. And

(55:02):
it's because the sunflower plantation that was owned by the
New York Timber people where Teddy Roosevelt spent the night
was sold as part of the New Deal. It was
broken up into blocks. And so the Roosevelt administration very
into sort of progressive era America, very into we're gonna
have best practices, We're going to find the best farmers

(55:24):
to put on this field these fields, and they're application
processes about understanding science and all this stuff. And so
what you had was the Roosevelt administration kicking off all
of the black sharecroppers who had worked the sunflower plantation
who wanted to stay there. So they were fighting to
kick these people off and replace them with all white

(55:45):
farmers from Georgia and Alabama, and the local plantation owners
were fighting the Roosevelt administration own behalf of the sharecroppers,
basically saying these people have been here for generations, like
these are great neighbors, Like their churches are here, their
cemeteries are here, Like how could you possibly kick these

(56:05):
people off? So like the other thing that's constantly shaping
the Mississippi Delta is like the unintended consequences. And so
it's not an accident that Emmett Till is killed in
the one square of land where there were lots of poor,
angry white people. I mean, I don't know if you
ever read the Robert Palmer book De Deep Blues, but
what he's talking about as the price of cotton collapses,

(56:27):
this is like nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty, he says,
he's talking about the towns growing up in the Delta
and taking power away from the plantation owners. They attracted
more and more poor whites from the Hills who brought
to the Delta's paternalistic social structure an atmosphere of barely
repressed violence, a burning need to acquire money and power,

(56:48):
and an outspoken racism that neatly suited their purposes. They
control most of the newer Delta towns economically and politically.
The balance of power was shifting, and the planter class
never knew mare Strong could only watch it shift. The
Delta already tense, coiled tighter and tighter. And so that's
a lot of what John's talking about, is that sort
of sense of that. You know, Mississippi so often gets

(57:11):
looked at and people just look at it through the
prism of race, But that's two dimensional. You always have
to do race and class because Mississippi there's always been
in a lot of ways. The black population was caught
in the middle of a culture war between two halves
of the white population, which made it worse for it.
I mean, like it's a really it's the rock in the.

Speaker 1 (57:32):
Heart's in a battle between rich whites and poor whites.

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

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

Speaker 3 (58:05):
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

(58:26):
is you will rent me in my family twenty five
acres of that. Okay, you sort of needed a family
every twenty five to forty acres. You would rent me
that like a large landowner would break parcels off twenty
five forty acres and that's I'm and the family gets
to move there, and you know, it gets to I
mean has tokay and so your own houses. And so

(58:49):
basically what happened is you would give me what's called
the furnish, which would be the money I would need
to sort of get going for the year. You would
provide the seeds, you would provide the equipment mules, I
would farm the land. I would have a charge account

(59:11):
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.

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

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

Speaker 1 (59:55):
So I'm the landowner.

Speaker 3 (59:56):
You're the share crop. So I plan.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:00:32):
You are, but I don't. I can't check your books,
so you might sell it for there's no way you're
checking my book. No, no, And so like you know, and
so like there's a gun there's a gun fight here
in this book where a guy came home from World
War One. It was like, you know, a war like
a war hero and his boss tried to mess him

(01:00:52):
up at settlement time and he just shot him. And
you know, because there you had no access to the courts.
But that's the way it works.

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

Speaker 3 (01:01:22):
That's exactly what it was.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
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.

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:02:20):
The owner many yes, and and so like uh and
if you found one, so it will Dockery, who owned
Dockery Farms, which is near the barn, had a reputation
of being fair with people and so like uh, you
know Howl and Wolf worked on Dockery. Uh as a
sharecraft Yeah. Pop Staples like Mayvis Staples dad was a

(01:02:40):
sharecropper owned Dockery. Uh. You had Charlie Patton playing there.
Uh the Robert So the crossroads the actual crossroads there man. Yeah,
so like that's right, that's Dockery and so.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
The funny little story is I was with my friend
ann A Baker. Yeah, I still hang out with And
we were in Memphis. She was going to school in Oxford, Mississippi.
So like we were in Memphis. Then we were down
in Oxford, Mississippi. Then we went to like Clarksdale, so
I'm from Clarkstone, yeah, yeah, yeah, So we go there.

(01:03:24):
We went to that bar like Morgan Freeman had a bar. Yeah,
went all around there, went out to that crossroad yep.
And I was like, man, I'm gonna get out of
the car, you know, and sell sell my soul to
the devil, you know. She said, you know, I get
out of the car and took off.

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:03:53):
I'm not kidding, dude.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:04:06):
I love the landscape of the Mississippi Delta, like I
love like I love riding the levee. I love being
on the other side of the levee like my uncle
and I liked like ride horses back through the old
sort of second growth but cottonwood trees that you could
stick your hand into. You know, there's like, uh, there's
an abandoned I think Bungie the Grain Company. They have

(01:04:29):
an abandoned sort of elevator complex out there where they
used to load up barges and you could ride horses
through there. And it's like post apocalyptic because it's real industrial,
but it's just in the middle of the woods, in
the middle of nowhere, and you know, I love over there.
I love being on the Mississippi River. I love the
idea of you know, I love taking my girls out
of the Mississippi River. I love, you know, them running

(01:04:52):
up a boat on a sandbar, like the idea that,
like Mike, that they're growing up in concert with that
river and uh, you know, our farm runs up to
the levee and like it's interesting because uh, in some
ways this is almost like a user's manual for like
if you're going to be there, But like I I

(01:05:14):
love that land and so oh it shows man I
really it's it's really like I want to be buried
in it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:20):
That's one of the things that drew me to want
to talk to you. And like that I liked about
your book. Is I don't I don't not try to
end the conversation, just wedge just in there, is it? Uh,
you do a thing that's hard to do, which is like,
you love where you're brought up, You love the landscape.

(01:05:41):
You know it's history and you have but and you're
also willing to point out a lot of stuff you
guys got wrong. Well and I got it. It's funny
because I don't mean, like this is not just a
Mississippi thing, dude. But a couple years ago, I went
turkey hunting with a with a new friend of mine
Don at his place in Mississippi and walking around with him.

Speaker 3 (01:06:00):
Is this Taylor? Taylor's my dear friend.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:06:20):
Was telling Crine ther day, it's not a day goes by.
He doesn't point to something and be like before the war,
after the war, and everybody like he's talking about the
Civil War, look like it's like a defining landscape feature.
It'd be like that damn something in another the war,
well that bridge something war, who owns that land something

(01:06:41):
or other? The war, And it's just not like in
the North, it is not a thing that comes up.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
Well, you know, my my eighth grade American history teacher,
shout out, Miss Halcomb called it the Civil War the
War of Northern aggression. Yeah, sure, yeah, But like I
guess the thing about you know, I love the I
love the band the Drive By Truckers. Uh. And I
think like Patterson Hood, who writes a lot of their songs,
Rights is in Us, writes in a really sophistical, sophisticated

(01:07:10):
way about the South and the thing he calls it
is like the duality of the Southern thing. And so like,
I've really come to believe that the most intrinsic part
of having a Southern identity is living at the intersection
of the conflict of these things. So if you're somebody
who only says we're the worst. This sucks, this all
his you know, we're just you know, everybody is descendants

(01:07:32):
of oppressors like like, but like that's boring as shit,
and it's also you're missing it. And if you only
defend it and only say you know, if you try
to diminish the other stuff, you don't actually live there.
Living there means living at the intersection of these two.
It Being Southern means being able to hold two opposing

(01:07:55):
ideas in your head at the same time in some
parts of both of them be true. And so like
when I see people who aren't willing to do that,
I just find it odd and you know, I think it,
you know, like it's not an accident that so many
Southerners were in favor of tariffs, which everyone's grandparent would

(01:08:18):
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,

(01:08:39):
angry travel ball suburbs who don't remember anything about what
it means to farm Who don't remember what it means
to live in concert with the seasons? Who don't you know,
who don't move out to the deer camp between Thanksgiving
and New Year's Eve? You know, you think about you know,
my cousin, second generation president of the Mayor Gold Hunting Club.

(01:09:00):
If you ever get an invitation there, it's but they
have a day of a communal like dining hall, and
so people eat meat like between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve,
like farmers move their families out there, and so like
I love the parts of Mississippi that are still deeply
connected to the rhythms of the land. You know, my

(01:09:21):
uncle Reeves, who has been on our farm every single
day since nineteen sixty eight when he took it over,
loves you know, it's funny. He managed, he's president of
two different big deer clubs. Uh, he hasn't shot a
deer since nineteen sixty three and and he he but
he likes the he likes the herd management. They got

(01:09:44):
a PhD Fromsissippi State, like working with what they're planning
and when, and he loves that. And then you know,
we've got three or four duckoles on our farm, and
he's out there every single day and a lot of
times doesn't take a gun, like it's just calling him in.
Just likes to be there and wants to be on
not land, wants to be on his land, you know,
wants to be buried in his land. And like, that's

(01:10:07):
such an important part to me of what it means
to be from Mississippi and to be from the South.

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

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):
He's over at Stuttgart busted some ducks.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:10:56):
Shows you're having a good time. But I have it
to him is like he does a lot of interviews
with with I mean, his his show was largely about
Southern culture. There's a lot of interviews, and like, there's
a thing that I got to give them. If you
just went and randomly pulled a hundred okay, you randomly
pulled a hundred Northerners in a room, and you randomly

(01:11:20):
pulled a hundred Southerners in a room, okay, and you said, like,
what way, I want to know what cardinal direction the
front door of your house faces. The Southerners are going
to kick the ship out of the Northern If you said,
I want to know what is the.

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:11:59):
I don't know why they have.

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

(01:12:21):
into the Bogue Falia which is going to flow into
Deer Creek, Like it's unbelievable.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:12:44):
He can tell you where every piece of water, and
the whole state flows too. So there's exceptions, but I'm
saying like, like the knowledge got scrubbed. It's getting scrubbed everywhere. Yeah,
the knowledge got scrubbed more in the North Earth. It
used to be like it just got scrubbed more in
the north. Industrialization came quicker. Whatever suburbia came quicker, it

(01:13:09):
got scrubbed in the north. Fashion out scrubbed the South.
So when I look down there, I'm like, like living
with living with deep history, living with with landscape, understanding
the limitations of land. It just feels more alive in
the South. And reading your book, I'm like, this is
you know, and looking at your book, I'm like, this

(01:13:30):
is the kind of thing that I wish there was
more of. Is people being like the history where you live,
at what goes on and connecting it to how much
top soil you got, how much rain you got, what
kind of trees grew, were you got, you know, and
it is just this story just gives like this story
gives this like super dramatic, nationally known travesty a way

(01:13:55):
to go, like, Okay, let's let's do this at a place,
but we're gonna do this at a place that changed America.

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

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
Yeah, and that crops ain't good.

Speaker 3 (01:14:16):
No, And like you go back and read narrative like
enslaved people's narratives. And they're talking about in eighteen fifty
knowing needing to know what the Liverpool price of cotton
was because that was going to determine how violent their
day was. Like this is the moods of the It's

(01:14:37):
been tied to that forever. And I mean, you know
the ways in I mean we said this earlier, but
the ways in which Mississippi you know, functioned as an
extension of man My mother grew up in Shelby, Mississippi,
and they got the Manchester Guardian delivered to their house
to track cotton, to track to textile industries in cotton

(01:14:58):
because there was no internet, and even though the paper
came once a week, it gave her father just a
little more info. And so there's always been you know, uh,
Yazoo City, Mississippi used to be named Manchester, Mississippi. My
uncle Will was the team doctor for Manchester Academy football
team forever, and it's named after Manchester, you know, and
I mean that tight. Yeah, it was so tied into

(01:15:23):
you know, in New Orleans, all those banks, those are
all London banks, New Orleans and New Orleans, Charleston and
Savannah were sort of outpost of European capital markets. Yeah uh,
And it's just like all of that stuff is fascinating,
you know, one of the there are a lot of
these histories of America that I feel like are fatally
flawed because they stop at the water's edge, as if

(01:15:45):
you know, as if like this, like you can watch
capital markets move all of this and one of the
heartbreaking things in the book. They're probably five or six
different times. The reason I like the Ivory Bill Woodpecker
in here is because it represent it's the mystery to me,
and it represents the sort of Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, It's

(01:16:05):
raining flowers in Macondo's sort of active imagination of what
could have happened. Nine different times this whole thing could
have been avoided, and so like rolling through the history
of the land, you see over and over times where
a decision, like one decision, and none of this would
have even ever been there.

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

Speaker 3 (01:16:44):
Yep.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
And they're taking the labor.

Speaker 3 (01:17:24):
They're taking the labor there was it had gotten after
the price of cotton collapsed. I think an already tense
situation like the like the book said, uh coil tighter
and tighter. People were looking to leave. There was so
much violence, you know, the modern clan was found in

(01:17:44):
like what nineteen twenty two, I think in response to
Black soldiers coming home from World War One. You know,
there was a whole sort of America first after the
horror of going to Europe and fighting this war, and
so there just was a real retrenchment in the eighteen twenties,
and so you had, you know, there were black veterans
being killed all over the South and so like people

(01:18:07):
were trying to get out. And so Maymi Till's father
moved in like nineteen twenty three, I think because he
was like he didn't feel like he had daughters and
he didn't feel like he could protect his daughters, and
he was like, we got to get out of here.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:18:32):
And it was also like, you know, the first mechanized
cotton crop in America was nineteen forty three in Clarksdale
at Hobson Plantation. I mean that was coming. And so
you know, our farm we probably needed in nineteen fifty
four hundred families living on it to farm it. We
farm it now with I think eighteen people. And that's
because the tractors can't turn themselves around. How about we're

(01:18:54):
ten years away from farming it with four people, and
so you can just watch sort of the need for
all of this labor run out. One of the sort
of ironies of the of Emmett Till's murder is that
it was very much an effort by a sort of
class and race of people to protect what they felt
was a world running through their hands. So many families

(01:19:18):
left the Mississippi Delta after nineteen fifty five, Every family
who lived in Money, Mississippi, every black family who had
a teenage son left, And so the people who couldn't
afford the expensive equipment were the only people who were
still using sharecroppers. And then the last of the sharecroppers left,
and I think by nineteen sixty five there were no

(01:19:41):
sharecroppers left in America, got it.

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:20:26):
Well, and they were all veterans, and I mean one
of the guys was a veteran from Pelolu. And then JW.
Milem was wounded at the Colmar Pocket. One of the
things in the book is so all of the all
of his every book ever written about m until has
a sort of huge line of mistakes through it. Because

(01:20:47):
there was like a typo in JW. Milem's obituary and
it got the number of his unit wrong. So people
in these books would be describing the battles he would
have been in, but he wasn't there. And so on.

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

Speaker 3 (01:21:10):
Dude, See this because of a mistake, so it makes
it and so so, and it's in every book, so
then you'll love this. So I was like, this doesn't.
I just didn't believe it. I think, like, if you're
going to write something that is like this, you have
to there's a reason it's so endnoted. You got to
show your work. Yeah, And I was like, so, I'm
not taking anything for granted. And so I found I

(01:21:33):
found every obituary that had ever been published that mentioned
this unit, because I didn't know it was a typo yet,
and so I just believed it. I just so I
found every every single obituary that mentioned that. And then
I called the eldest son of every one of those
dead veterans and said or emailed or called and said, hey,
did your dad bring home anything from the war. And

(01:21:53):
this really nice guy outside of Fort Worth, Texas was like,
my dad was like the logistics officer for that unit,
and he brought home a every single piece of paper.
Theyre in my filing cabinet. You want to come see them.
So I went and spent a couple of days this
guy's house and I went through every piece of paper
from this unit and JW. MILEMS name wasn't on any
of it, and so then I went to these incredible
There's this guy named Eric who works in the archives

(01:22:15):
in Saint Louis. So in the nineteen seventy three there
was a terrible fire in Saint Louis at the American Archives,
and it burned up almost every single World War Two
veterans personnel file. They're all gone. They all burned the
unit files with like the morning reports. All of that
is still there. So you can recreate someone's service record,

(01:22:37):
but it's unbelievably tedious. And so I eventually recreated his
entire service record. And then I went to France and
then I walked the battlefields, you know, I like walked
through the forest where the foxholes were. Wrote all of
this and then cut it all out of the book.
So I but I spent a lot of time with JW.
Milems you know JW. Miles legitimate. You know, people claimed

(01:23:02):
he will want a silver star. I don't think that's true.
But definitely wounded in the coal Maar pocket, like right
there on the border between It's like no, it's right
on the border between Germany and France. Uh so like
uh Strausburg, like when I when I went there, I

(01:23:23):
flew into Stuttgart in Germany and drove across the border
as that was the closest airport.

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

Speaker 3 (01:23:31):
I did, you know. And I had a whole pelolu
thing on Melvin Gamble, uh and like it's it's just
when a legitimate war hero thinks that it is necessary
to torture and kill a child to preserve something that

(01:23:51):
he feels is being lost, Like you know, you know,
I say in every book talk like, yeah, forces had
a lot to do with him until his death, but
forces didn't kill him. Everybody in that barn that night
had free will. But what's so interesting is you watch
these people move across the south. You know, my family

(01:24:12):
sort of moving roughly the same place as generation by
generation that the Milems are, like, you know, the Mylem
family was married at one point in the DuPont family,
you know, And so you watch them generation by generation,
poor life spans get shorter, not longer. You were watching
a family keep going west to try to try again

(01:24:37):
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

(01:24:58):
last great gold Rush and the cotton industry, and they
didn't get down into the delta until right after it collapsed.
And so for generations they've been trying to get into
this place where this land was, and they get there
and then the promise of it is all gone. And
you know, four generations of the mile of mile of
men either killed someone violently or were killed violently, and

(01:25:20):
you just watch, You're just watching a family disintegrate. And
m Until with his hope and with his young teenage
sense of adventure and of boundary stretching and of looking
for the line. He uh, you know, he intersected. He

(01:25:44):
was on the way up, and he intersected with a
group of people who had been auguring in for generations.
And like that has something to do with all of this,
you know, I mean it's like, uh, you just forget.
Like you know, there's a storage you know in Chicago
right now that the Till family has that has him
it Tills Toy train in it No kidding. I mean

(01:26:06):
you know, I mean like this was a child who
ran into a family that was had been so disillusioned
by whatever they had been sold about the possibility of
where they lived that it had curdled into something terrible.

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:26:58):
Did you put LSD in this coffee? The uh? And
so uh Uh. I was at a Kentucky derby and uh,
I asked, I ran into OJ at a like six
am cocktail party and uh because the horses were training,
and uh, I asked him who was gonna win? And
he said, lawyer, lawyer, Ron because he had he said

(01:27:20):
he had lots of positive experiences with lawyers. And then
I obviously went and took a shower, like Jesus Christ. Wow,
I was just like, you decapitated somebody. I got to
get away from you, man, so allegedly, Yeah, gloves don't
fit now, you must have quit.

Speaker 1 (01:27:38):
Krin and I were converse about I was telling her
she was sweating that she hadn't finished your book, and
I'm like, I read the whole damn thing, so we're covered. Anyways,
I was explaining to her a little bit about the curse,
and I was saying that one of the surprising aspects
and I'm gonna bring us around. Oh yeah, and you
caught you loose one of the surprising aspects. When these

(01:27:59):
peoples come unity, these murders, you know, they're judged by
their peers. They're they're tried in their home area, and
the attitude of the jurors is, we're gonna acquit you,
but I don't want.

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

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

(01:28:38):
right because.

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

Speaker 1 (01:28:42):
Know you did it, like we know you did it.
We're gonna let you go. You're not a good person,
but this isn't even about you. This is about at
the LAPD. So like you're guilt or not guilt, like
you know, that's not that's not what's trial. Here's the ship,
but this is not what I'm talking about. Piece of garbage,
but this is not what I'm talking about. That that
kind of that was so surprising that like the jury,

(01:29:05):
the jurors that acquit them have like tacit acknowledgment you
did it and and that's bad, but we're not going
to participate in this system somehow or like yeah, maybe
you can explain it better, but like they weren't deciding
if they did it or not. It was something different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(01:31:33):
these court rulings we're losing. So you know, like JW.

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

Speaker 3 (01:31:40):
So they shaped the Dude, when you read go read
the Look magazine story that's off phony. They make J. W.
Milems sound like he's Plato, do you know what I mean,
Like like Aristotle, he's the most sophisticated. Like there's a
newspaper reporter I won't name, but I'm always convinced this
guy makes stories up because every I mean quotes a

(01:32:00):
cab driver. I'm like, dude, I've had a lot of
cab drivers. I've never had a cab driver like who
says the exact, perfect, eloquent philosophical thing I need at
the Like you're that just didn't happen. So, but the
lawyers are making up these quotes that are coming out
of JW. Milum. And the way you realize it is
when you at Ohio State. They have a huge trunch

(01:32:22):
of some of these notes in the law.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:32:55):
Right, or it's like yeah, or like you know the
the Great Louis c k fit about uh, every someone
else on the airplane being pissed about the Wi fi.
He's given a minute, it's got to go to space.
And you're like, when I heard that, I'm like, oh,
he's clearly both people in this scenario. He's both the
person having a temper tantrum, and also the other version

(01:33:15):
of him who is self aware enough to know that, like,
so anyway, the uh uh but maybe no anyway, I
love uh.

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

Speaker 3 (01:33:25):
No, and so I filibustered that, and so the uh.
But you see things that are coming out of JW.
Malm's mouth that are verbatim from notes that the writer
took from interviews with the lawyers, and so you you're
watching the lawyers shape it. And so one of them,
one of the lawyers, said, we need people like JW.

(01:33:47):
Milem to fight our wars and to keep people in line.
And so there was very much a sense of like
we're gonna it's exactly what you said, like we're gonna
circle the wagons. But like these people were totally ostracized.
I mean at the end of his life. Uh, which
people the murderers, Oh yeah, at the end of Roy Bryance,
like the.

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:34:22):
That was one of the biggest ironies I think is
that if you'd asked, if you went and asked people,
I'd be like, you know, if you said, like, hey,
give me the give me your like prejudice views on
what like minorities are up to. Yeah, like oh, food

(01:34:43):
stamp fraud, drug dealing, and the dudes that killed Emmett
till Well food stamp fraud, so drug dealing.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:35:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (01:35:07):
Yeah, like you only ever despise in other people, which
you actually despise in yourself. I mean that's just sort
of like, I mean, that's almost universally true, and so
like you have Yeah, I mean, you know, these guys
are bootleggers. They're making whiskey. JW. Milem is one of
the main bootleg runners for the sheriff. It was investigating

(01:35:31):
his murder. I mean, there's a whole theory of the
case that Sheriff Strider made sure to claim jurisdiction because
the body was found in Tallahatchie County, the kidnapping happened
in Lafleur County, the murder happened in Sunflower County, and
the but the case was tried in Tallahatchie County because
it was the most conservative and it's also where the

(01:35:52):
killers were from. A bunch of the members of the
jury were like related to them. This is very much
this is not a random act of violence. This is
one tribe, members of one tribe of people killing a
child of another tribe of people to send a message,
you know, and like you know and like the grand

(01:36:14):
conspiracy of what. So when when the FBI wanted to
reopen the case in two thousand and four three four,
they had to exhume the body. And so the reason
they had to exhume Mmitt Till's body was because the
jury had said that that wasn't Emmett Till that they
had pulled out of the river. So what the defenses

(01:36:35):
theory of the case that the jury bought was that
the NAACP in cahoots with the Communist Party, had gotten
a body out of a morgue, thrown it in the
Mississippi in the Tallahatchee River, weighed it down just enough,
you know, obviously understanding the deep science of your body
releasing decom gases, so they would know exactly how much

(01:36:57):
weight to have so that it would sink but then
flow again. You know, somebody really done some work and
that this body that and then Mamie Till had said
it was her son in exchange for getting a payout
of a life insurance policy, and that Emmettil was alive,
and that all of this had been done to make

(01:37:19):
to make Mississippi look bad and to help the Communist
Party take over America. And that was the case that
the jurors made. That was the case the lawyers made,
and that was what the jury bought. So they had
to exzuom him and do a DNA test to make
sure that the body in Burroke Cemetery in Chicago was Mt.
Til and I mean and of course it was, and
you know, so the and then like I'm gonna find
this thing real quick because I like you talk about

(01:37:41):
this is what is being taught about This is from
a textbook that's being taught right now in the Mississippi
Delta about the Mmettil murder. I mean you talk about
the accusation is always a confession only sort of Only
a state that has so actively rewritten history to such
a degree would be worried that someone else was come

(01:38:02):
along and do it the other way. So, like you know,
Mississippi has been banning textbooks forever in rewriting text like
my Missippi history textbook stopped before the Civil Rights movement.
So this is what is. This is from a textbook,
and this is the only thing in the textbook that
is about Mt. TIL And this is this is being
taught right now. In nineteen fifty five, J. P. Coleman,

(01:38:25):
the Attorney general from Choctaw County, was elected governor of
Mississippi and was elected governor in Mississippi's first general election
after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Coleman promised
to keep the schools segregated. He proved to be a
moderating force during a very difficult time. Just after the election,
Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago, allegedly made

(01:38:46):
allegedly made a pass at a white woman in a
rural store. Two men kidnapped him, beat him, killed him,
and threw his body in the Tallahatchee River. The coverage
of the trial, an acquittal of his accused murderers, who
later admitted their guilt in an article in a national magazine,
painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.
That's the textbook, m H. And so like, well, what

(01:39:09):
what about that? Like to help me understand? So the
thing for me is that the entire murder is still
taught in the context of the death of The worst
part about a death of a child image, well is
that it sure made the sure made the white people look bad.
And like, you know, I think like somewhere along the line,

(01:39:34):
learning our history was transformed into sort of relentlessly attacking
people with it. And I think, like, you shouldn't be
using You shouldn't learn the history of the Mississippi Delta
to determine who is currently politically problematic, who should be canceled.
You should learn the history just to know it. And
so like, I don't feel guilty, Like I don't, I

(01:39:58):
don't have some weird like Southern guilt thing, but I
do think it's a combent upon me to know what
happened on this land if I'm going to farm it.
And you know, and I do think that that it
is essential to be able to say this is what
happened here, and you know, it's not like you know,
we're still on the land. You know, it's not like

(01:40:20):
I haven't I failed to understand how learning the history
of this in any way negatively affects me. I mean
I've thought about that a lot, because that's so that
you know, that conversation is in the air so much,
and like, I just failed to understand how teaching this
history in a school could do a single thing to
me or anyone related to me.

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

Speaker 3 (01:40:55):
Are not? Really because you know there is that when
I'm from there, and like there's the you know, there's
that great I think it's Willie Ray Wiley Ray Hubbard
wrote it, But like Robert O'Kane does the sort of
version I know he's like I may not wear a
stet Son, but I'm willing to bet son that I'm
as big a Texan as you are. Like I sort
of feel like we've been I've been there from a

(01:41:17):
long We've been there a long time, We're going to
be there a long time. I can kind of say
whatever the hell I want. There's a sense of also
it's just true, and like the people who are from
there know it, you know, and and and are much
more nuanced about this than our two dimensional politicians would
lead you to believe, like, you know, like Mississippi is Mississippi,

(01:41:40):
and Mississippians are complicated and and so there've been very
little pushback. And you know, it's interesting because I mean,
I love the Mississippi Delta. I didn't know hardly any

(01:42:01):
of this. I certainly didn't understand, you know, Paul the
Paul Simon song. That's just it's not the highway through
the cradle of the Civil War. But I don't think
I knew that until this. I mean, there's there's just
a lot about the actual history of the land and
the way that both you know, I think Faulkner is
so often misunderstood. I think if you go read the Bear,

(01:42:22):
you go read Go Down, Moses, you go down and
read as you go read Absolom Absolom, Like I think
one of if not the most animating things in all
of his work is the bewilderment at the Mississippi Delta,
going from uninhabited swamp to a agricultural factory in twenty
five years. I mean, it would have taken a thousand
years in Bavaria to kill a forest that big. And

(01:42:45):
I think like the idea of civilization as the enemy
of nature and how that flows through Faulkner's work. I mean,
like when I read The Bear, when I go read
like I said, go down Moses or Absolom, like I feel.
I mean, I feel like Faulkner's read now only through
the prism of race, and like, I actually think that's

(01:43:07):
not how you have to read Faukner through the prism
of his deep bewilderment at the sort of existential loss
and trauma of having that much wilderness just erased, and
like what that does to a people, Like I mean,
it's not an accident that like nothing about the land

(01:43:28):
where immit Till was killed has anything to do with God,
Like this is not this is man made land, this
is not none of this bears the fingerprint of the
creator God. And yeah, it just has nothing to do
with that what And so you know, if you ever
go out to that barn and wonder, like God, did
God forsake this place? Maybe the answer is yes.

Speaker 1 (01:43:52):
History man, Like, I get what you're saying. History's history
is so tough and the telling of it's so top.
The other day I took my kids. We were in
New Mexico for a wedding. Yeah, and I took my
kids to Bandolier. Yeah, okay, the sight of old ancestral

(01:44:12):
to Blowing Settlements. There's a big sign. You get up
in this high overlook and you can see Los Animals
laboratories off to the west. Okay, and there's a sign there,
and it's a National Park Service sign, and the sign
is about The sign is exclusively about that Puebloan people

(01:44:34):
weren't allowed to go on the Los Alamos land starting
in nineteen forty three or whatever the hell it was, Okay,
and the freedom to go there slas and been restored.
I said to my kids, like I called more. I said, man,
I want you to understand what this sign is, and
I want you to understand what's not here.

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

Speaker 1 (01:45:01):
I said, if I was going to write this sign,
you call my kids in here and ask. I said,
if I was going to write this sign, I would say,
and it's worth pointing out the thing they invented on
that site over there saved probably two hundred and fifty
thousand American lives because we would have had to have

(01:45:22):
invaded the mainland of Japan, you know. And so I'm like,
there's just I was. I was like kind of lecturing them,
I'm like, there's just always more to the story.

Speaker 3 (01:45:31):
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.

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

Speaker 3 (01:46:02):
Well, because you know, there's a sense that like we're
trying to turn our descriptions of American history into tweets
and like it's too complicated for a sign over you like,
you can't do in a sign the interplay between the
Pueblo people and the atomic bomb, or like, you know,

(01:46:25):
I got deep into the history. I didn't realize that,
like the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, that the Chickasaw were
sort of deeply intermarried into the British and the Choctaw
were deeply intermarried into the French, and so that the
last free band of Natchez Indians in Mississippi was sold
into slavery by the Choctaw and the French. And we're

(01:46:49):
sent down to work the plantations in Haiti, and a
French military officer there ran into years later, one of
those last Natchez chiefs, and he was down in the
harbor and whatever the town it's cap Haiti now, I
can't remember what the name was then, and it was
sort of like what are you doing? And he was
just staring longingly up at home, and so like, you know,

(01:47:09):
if you're gonna tell the history of uh, you know,
if you're gonna tell the history of the native settlements
in the Mississippi Delta, you have to talk about like,
you know, tribes were being erased by other tribes. Tribes
were being erased by the French. Tribes were being erased
by the British. The Choctaw, and the Choctaw and the

(01:47:34):
Chickasaw sort of picked there were a bunch of powers
down there, and nobody picked the Us, and so they
sort of you know, like you understand like there are
these warring factions, and like when you get into the history,
it is so complicated. And you know, all of the
Indian mounds in Mississippi. I didn't realize this. They elites

(01:47:56):
built their houses on top of them as a way
to sort of like symbol luckily, stand on the shoulders
of the ancestors. So you know, it's like it's like
if your last name is Whitney or something. You know,
it's the same kind of idea. And it just occurred
to me researching all this history. How little history we
actually know. Like I don't like, go back to the

(01:48:17):
native town right there, I don't know, we don't know
who the good guys and the bad guys were. You know,
we preserve these mound structures, but we don't know what
the people who are living in the houses on top
of those mounds were doing to those working folks sort
of out in the cornfields. And like, so I just
I know an incredible amount about the history of this

(01:48:38):
piece of land, but like mostly what I know is
like the sheer tonnage of a what I don't know,
And some of it I just probably not a good
enough reporter to find. But a lot of it is
just unknowable. And so I found that to be like
I think with history, I don't I don't think we
need some like sort of weird jug sign. I just

(01:49:00):
think we need to know everything we can possibly know
about a square of land because the truth of it,
it's going to be so much more complex than we realize.
The truth of it will never fit into sort of
one ideological sides version of this. I mean, you know this,
the book sort of goes after tenets of a bunch

(01:49:23):
of the truth is not helpful to ideology.

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:49:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:49:40):
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.

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:50:02):
Well. I love the idea that, like the places I
like best, or the membrane between the president and the
past is so thin you can see through it. And
so like, I feel like there's a version of the
Mississippi Delta where this is all happening at once. Yep,
and it's all happening right now. And you know, Nathan
Bedford Forrest Cavalry is walking the same road as JW.

(01:50:25):
Milms driving, as Willie Reid is walking as you know,
if you ever listen to Crossroads, Uh go see my
friend Willy Brown. Willy Brown lived right by the barn.
And so like, like, I think there's a way in
which all of this is happening all the time, over
and over simultaneously.

Speaker 1 (01:50:45):
He there's this thing, Doug, you when you're getting the
local tour, there's this thing Doug does it that Like
like I was like, has reminiscent of Emmett Till in that.
Uh you go buy this farm, and Doug's like, so
in the past because in his father's time, some kids

(01:51:06):
stole some gas, Yeah, some egg gas from the farmer.
The farmer comes running out, and the kids jump in
the car and take off, and the farmer takes a
shotgun and shoots one of the kids.

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (01:51:38):
Well, that's just like that's just and like it's just
funny a way of looking at you know, history, and
it has all these same things like like when it
was logged and who cleared it. But it's like in
his when when you're out with Doug, Yeah, it's like
that kid's driving down the road right now, do you
know what I'm saying? Well, I love that kind of

(01:51:59):
like I love I like that kind of experience. And
that's so much what I got from your book is
this way of just like taking chunks of ground and
like really getting them.

Speaker 3 (01:52:10):
So I made a map of everything that had happened.
It's on my phone of everything that had happened in
this square of land. It's interesting because the map doesn't
show sort of gradiations based on chronology. It's just all there,
so you're sort of drive I can drive around and
look at the stuff, and it's like and I also
made a map just like that of the South side
of Chicago and so like and uh, that's where my

(01:52:33):
dad was brought up. Oh yeah, I mean, like it
is my firm. But well, first of all, the South
side of Chicago is the capital of the Mississippi Delta,
like the only professional sports team in the state of Mississippi,
or the Chicago White Sox, you know in Chicago until
they started dying. Big mississipp high schools would have their
reunions in Chicago, like Greenwood High School, Greenville High School.

(01:52:53):
Because so many people had moved Chicago, it was easier
for the six people still in Mississippi to go up
there than for all four hundred to come back. And
so like, you know, Mississippi functioned as a you know
Argo Summit, Illinois, where Emmettil's family settled. They all worked
at the Argo starch plant. They make argo cornstarch. Oh yeah,

(01:53:15):
they may still make it. Yeah, and they make Cairo
syrup and make your pecan pie with and uh. They
all lived there, and they called it Little Mississippi, like
there were so many Mississippians and so you know, I
feel like, I mean, one of the things I love
to do is drive people from the Delta around the
south side of Chicago, like Hyde Park, sort of south

(01:53:35):
and like, you know, because it's mile after mile after
mile after mile of perfectly manicured, middle class bungalows and
I'm like, you know, if you drive the Mississippi Delta,
it's super decayed. And the Missippi Delta is like it's
like Dori and Gray, you know, whereas its sins on
the outside and they're just abandoned buildings and collapse cotton
gins and feels like a failed experiment, which is at

(01:53:55):
what it was. I mean, the global capital markets came here,
stripped out their ten percent, and then moved on and
left the rest of us there to clean up the mess.
And you get this sense that like that you know
that that that all of that money that's on the
south side of Chicago should still be in the Mississippi Delta,
like all of those like that's what it should look

(01:54:17):
like anyway, I I you know, I don't. Ever my
accent gets pegged all the time on the south side
of Chicago is from Mississippi. Like can people just hear it?
They'll know and like uh. Or if you're in Chicago
and you ever have to give your driver's license, either
at a hotel or like at a will call, like

(01:54:38):
you if you go to a baseball game, almost inevitably
the person working will look at it and see that
it's mess to be driver's license and say something that
happens to me more in Chicago than it doesn't.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (01:56:21):
Here we go. In April nineteen forty four, a human
being made the last confirmed sighting of an ivory bill woodpecker.
The fight to save them had failed. The last large
hardwood patch in the Lower Mississippi Valley was eighty thousand
acres in Louisiana called the Singer Tract, named after the
sewing machine company that owned it. There were four nests

(01:56:41):
in John's Bio and a confirmed roost tree in max Bio.
The company leased the land to the state as a
hunting refuge, but sold the timber rights to a big
lumber firm out of Chicago. When the war began, Chicago
Mill and Lumber World War one or World War two,
I mean signed a contract with the military to deliver wood.
It began cutting immediately. The National Autobund Society went to

(01:57:04):
work to save the woodpecker habitat, lining up state and
national support, even getting the War Department to agree to
accept less wood in exchange for saving the bird. The
company cut it all down anyway. The company executive, who
answered all of these pleas, responded by saying, we are
just money grubbers. We are not concerned as our u
folk with ethical considerations. So many animals had vanished from

(01:57:27):
these river hardwood swamps. The red wolf, the cougar, the
Carolina parakeet, and now the saws had come for the
Lord god bird itself, the ivory built woodpecker. The wood
got turned into military packing crates and plywood gasoline tanks
for fighter planes. The Autobund Society sent a researcher back
into the vanishing forest to see if any birds remained.

(01:57:48):
He found one. The researcher told a colleague, who was
also an artist, that if he ever wanted to draw
an ivory bill from a living bird, the time was now.
Don Eckleberry, just twenty three, went south to the swamps.
He searched and followed, and looked for specific nests and trees.
Walking through a swamp while looking up his a learned skill,
one evening around dusk, his barred owl sang in anticipation

(01:58:10):
of a nighttime kill. Eckleberry and his traveling companions heard
the double knock. They silently waited. Thirteen minutes later, the
bird swooped through the clearing, flying above the broken tree
corpses left by the lumberman. Eckleberry notated the details in
his journal. He stared at the last known ivory bill woodpecker,
and would never forget its face, hysterical pale eyes, he wrote,

(01:58:34):
And so also the lumber. The family that cut down
those forests is the family that founded and nurtured and
invented aspen. So like people who love their wilderness don't
give a shit about yours. Huh you know what I mean?
Oh shit, yeah, and like uh oh man really yeah,
and so like it's infuriating me, Like you come down,
you're gonna cut down my wilderness and then go somewhere

(01:58:57):
else and preserve wilderness and act like your vacation spot.
That's right, And that's a hearty fuck you to them. Sorry,
Phil oh good. I don't do the TV. It's just
somebody else's past, you know, trying to look out for them.
That's fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaker 3 (02:00:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (02:00:12):
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.

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

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

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

(02:00:51):
is because no, man, here's why, and here's why. No no,
no no, And now.

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

Speaker 3 (02:01:00):
So here the here are the two reasons that I that.
Here's why I think that. I think One, I think
that there is a tremendous desire from sort of the
ornithology establishment for it to not be true. And so
something about the argument against it feels a little bit

(02:01:20):
to me like the Lady Duth protest too much. There's
something about how aggressive there being that makes me think
that they're operating from a place of weakness, not confidence.
And then and then the other thing I think is
that I think you know, I love to watch your show,
and one of the reasons is because I like to

(02:01:41):
watch you guys move through a universe the scale of
which is so unimaginable to me. Like we're sort of
glassing over three valleys and just thinking, like we don't
there's so much we don't know about what goes on
in the wildern that like I tend to think that

(02:02:03):
like whatever we think we know, I feel like will
be proven wrong. I just think they're mysteries that you know,
And maybe I'm just romanticizing the idea of wilderness, but like,
I just think they are secrets, and they're mysteries that,

(02:02:24):
like the deep ocean, remain unknown and almost unimaginable, and
they're sort of wondering surprise. That would be my argument.

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

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

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

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

Speaker 1 (02:03:04):
Get your brain if you want to stretch your brain out,
real good, like a real good brain stretching. Pick up
the Barn. The Secret history of a murder in Mississippi
by a man who was born and raised twenty miles
down the road from that murder. It's a landscape history.

(02:03:26):
It's American culture, it's politics, it's agriculture. It's everything, man,
it's everything. It's the whole everything, squeezed beautifully and elegantly
into a single book. Right, Thompson, thank you very much
for coming on, man, man, thanks so much for having
me appreciate it. Thanks

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 763: Landscape and Murder in the Mississippi Delta