Ep. 763: Landscape and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with author Wright Thompson https://www.instagram.com/wrightthompsonbooks/?hl=en. Topics discussed: Grab a copy of Wright's book, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi https://www.wrightthompson.com; the history of a patch of ground; the Mississippi Delta as manmade land; the murder of Emmett Till; cotton; the sharecropper system; always referring to "The War"; what it means to be Southern; the connection between Chicago and Mississippi; learning history to know it; the existential trauma of having so much wilderness erased; and more. Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Steven Rinella?

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• 2:46Steven Rinella?

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• 2:55Steven Rinella?

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• 2:57Steven Rinella?

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• 3:20Steven Rinella?

  All right, everybody. Joined today by Wright Thompson, four time New York Times bestselling author. Grew up in the Mississippi Delta.

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 3:30Steven Rinella?

  If you recognize that name, you might know him because Wright is a senior writer for ESPN.com, ESPN, the magazine, worked at all kinds of newspapers over the years, covering all aspects of sports. He wrote the book Pappy Land, the story of family, fine bourbon, and the things that last. And he wrote The Cost of These Dreams, sports stories and other serious business. He was the editor for a time in the best American sports writing.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:59Steven Rinella?

  Man, I had, over the years, made it into a handful of the best American essays and travel writing and all that kind of stuff. Not essays, travel writing.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:10Steven Rinella?

  Never, never got a nod from the old sports writing.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Well, that is.

• 4:14Steven Rinella?

  Now I know who to blame.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  You should definitely blame me. That's a tremendous oversight.

• 4:18Steven Rinella?

  I know.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  Only because like, my favorite sports writing is outdoors writing.

• 4:24Steven Rinella?

  You know, I thought they were being prejudiced against us.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Well, they, they probably were. I edited one version of it. Let's just like, like, I only screwed you once.

• 4:32Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  So someone else was responsible.

• 4:33Steven Rinella?

  I'm over it now, man. I'm over it. We're here today to talk about, well, we're here today to talk about a. A book, but particularly like a, uh,

• 4:44Steven Rinella?

  let me start over explaining this. First off, here's the book we're here to talk about. It's called The Barn. Now, take note of the title. It's called The Barn. The subtitle is, the subtitle is The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi. When I was a little kid growing up, I was aware of, I was aware of the outlines of the murder of Emmett Till. In what year? In 1955. Okay. As a kid. Yeah. When I, at the point when I hit college, I could have told you that Emmett Till was a boy who was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at, catcalling, something, some affront to a white woman. Yep. And he was killed.

• 5:30Steven Rinella?

  The killers weren't punished. And he, his body turned up in the, in what river? Tallahatchie River. His body, I knew his body turned up in a river and I knew it was tied to some piece of heavy equipment. Yeah, to the, a cotton gin fan. Yep. I knew that.

• 5:49Steven Rinella?

  And this tells that story, but the reason I wanted to have you on

• 5:54Steven Rinella?

  and talk to you is I, I want people to understand that story, but I think that it's fascinating to me. And even when I knew you were working on the book and coming out, that you were calling the book The Barn. Where

• 6:08Steven Rinella?

  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

• 6:18Steven Rinella?

  is applicable to people's lives who, who love nature, who love the outdoors, who like to hunt and who like to fish, whatever. People who have a close relationship to the land, which is something I encourage, I try to encourage. And go and pick a piece of ground, right? And ask yourself, not only like, not only what is the history of this piece of ground, but what are the things that happened that made it be that this piece of ground is now where you find inspiration or whatever, right? Meaning if you have some hunting cabin up north. That you would, or a hunting cabin down south, whatever the hell.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:01Steven Rinella?

  Where I'm from in Michigan, like everyone's hunting cabin is, for whatever reason, is always to the north.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:07Steven Rinella?

  Um, just part, probably parts of the country where everybody's hunting cabin is.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:11Steven Rinella?

  East, south, whatever the hell. But for us in the upper Midwest, every, the action is always perceived to be up north.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:19Steven Rinella?

  So you have a hunting cabin up north and by looking at how you handle this piece of ground and, and, and the barn is on a patch of ground and Emmett Till was murdered in a barn.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 7:31Steven Rinella?

  Bizarrely, I would never have guessed this is true. Bizarrely, that barn still sits there today.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  I mean, it is, uh, it's, it's a guy's barn. I mean, there are Christmas decorations in it. All of his duck hunting gear is in it. Uh, the owner of the barn, who I love and gotten to know really well, uh, you know, he duck hunts every day of duck season.

• 7:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  And it's a barn sitting on a piece of land. And I mean, you know this well, but it was a uniquely American idea for the Land Ordinance Act of seventeen eighty-five, which is Thomas Jefferson, which essentially dropped a grid over America and divided it into townships and ranges.

• 8:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  And so the barn is in section two of township twenty-two north, range four west, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. And like the thing that I thought was important is it's a thirteen hundred year history of this square of land.

• 8:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  And.

• 8:27Steven Rinella?

  And that, that, yeah, that is, when we get going on this, like, that is one of the things I want to focus on is this idea that, that anyone in America who has an attachment to a place, or maybe it's a place where something horrible happened, like in the case of your book, can learn to understand their spot, can like learn to understand their spot in a deep history sense.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 8:54Steven Rinella?

  Like, but culturally, transactionally, like, what are the things that needed to happen? Well, who are the people that needed to live? What are the actions that needed to occur that has it be that your favorite spot? You know.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:10Steven Rinella?

  Like, why is it there?

• 9:11Speaker 03

  And.

• 9:12Steven Rinella?

  Why are you there?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  And how did we, how did we get here? I mean, like, I have this fantasy that, that we could do the entire country this way. Like, I did one thirty-six square mile block.

• 9:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  I would love it if people would take their own version of that. Whether it's, well, it's like you said, whether something terrible happened here or whether is this the thirty-six square miles where the last cattle drop was in this part of Montana?

• 9:37Steven Rinella?

  Exactly.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  Like, and now tell me every single human being who ever went in and out of this square of land and every dollar that went in and out. I mean, one of my favorite parts of this was, I felt like, you know, there are long stretches of nature writing in here because I felt like you had to evoke the world pre-civilization.

• 9:55Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  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, a- 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 like trying to understand how what should have been a swamp became, you know, a man-made cotton factory. I mean, I, 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.

• 10:35Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  And like, I think that's an important thing to talk about.

• 10:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm struggling like a little bit. The, the story you tell is so complicated.

• 10:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:43Steven Rinella?

  Let's, let's do this, man, if you don't mind.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:47Steven Rinella?

  Um, first off, give a little, give a little, like, how'd you get into sports writing?

• 10:52Speaker 03

  So, uh, it's funny, I wanted to write about music and I was randomly assigned to the sports section at the college newspaper.

• 10:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  And, but I, I fell in love with it, uh, 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.

• 11:10Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Because like, these people have nothing in common except they've won some genetic lottery.

• 11:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 03

  And so I've always found that to be fascinating. And I, I, I'm most interested in, 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, in sort of.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  How we code our sort of tribal inheritance to hand from generation to generation. And I mean, I think that's also true for hunting and fishing. I mean, in 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? I feel like, uh, hunting and fishing is a huge part of that, uh, you know, uh,

• 12:05Speaker 03

  in, in sports like the, you know, I, I've always been fascinated by the role the games we love play in shaping of our identity. And so I've liked that from the, I've liked that forever, you know, and I've liked, uh, you know, I started working for ESPN 20 years ago and it's, you know, it's the,

• 12:25Speaker 03

  you know, it's the greatest job in the world because you just get to sort of follow your obsessions.

• 12:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  You know?

• 12:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So you still actively write about sports now and you write about everything for like Kentucky Derby, basketball.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  Football. It's just like whatever, uh, it's, it's really lucky because it's just the thing that I'm into. At that moment, I mean, I'm doing a thing right now on a, uh, tennis star who became a spy. You know, and that's in like, it's, it's a world war two thriller. And so like, it's just whatever you're, I've been very lucky in, in that sense to get to follow obsessions.

• 12:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Uh, and I imagine you like to pull a cork too. And that's why you wrote about bourbon?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, man, let me tell you the, uh, that was when you could still have non reimbursable work expenses written off on your taxes. Before they close that loophole, uh, uh, that, that was great. I mean, but like, you know, I had to write, I, I finally had to turn the book in because I'd already spent all the advance on whiskey. I was like, well, I can't, you know, there is no money to give back, but that was fun, man. And, and.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. They, with the tax code stuff, they really screwed writers. They screwed writers and then now they're handing all that out to people that operate on tip functions. Well, they, they screwed writers and, and now they're turning around and, and basically giving the whole, you know, giving the whole world to tip people.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  Well, and also.

• 13:46Steven Rinella?

  Why are they so much more important than writers?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  Well, and also in screwing over writers, they've really screwed over small business owners.

• 13:52Steven Rinella?

  Uh, tell me more.

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Because the, uh, you spend money on your small business.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  To like it's an it's an investment in the idea of in the future.

• 14:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  And so when you, you know, if I'm doing, if I'm trying to build my my business, there are legitimate tax write offs that are really important that you just can't do anymore.

• 14:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  And so like there was, you know, there are things you there are things you can't go do on a flyer being like, you know, I think this is, for instance, I think this is a great story. I can't get anybody to bite unless I go spend a little bit of money to go record it.

• 14:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  And so, you know, that whole ecosystem was just eliminated almost overnight.

• 14:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, no one wants to hear about that except me. We'll have to take that offline.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  That's right, but only writer, by the way, like there are 11 people right now who are like,

• 14:46Speaker 03

  yeah, like leaning in, that's right.

• 14:48Steven Rinella?

  They're like, that's true.

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:52Steven Rinella?

  Next thing I want to do.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:53Steven Rinella?

  Um, just because we're we're gonna

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 14:56Steven Rinella?

  step back and go forward a little bit. Layout layout.

• 15:01Steven Rinella?

  I kind of gave a quick outline of the murder of Emmett Till.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:04Steven Rinella?

  But like it's it's it's um, as quickly as is comfortable.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:08Steven Rinella?

  Tell the story of the murder of Emmett Till. So we can, so we can start talking about this barn.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 15:13Steven Rinella?

  Like this piece of ground.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  So, uh, Emmett Till had just turned 14 years old and he lived in Chicago. Uh, very much a boy. I mean, he still liked comic books.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  He had just gotten interested in girls. At his 14th birthday party, his mother and her friends overheard him and his friends playing spin the bottle.

• 15:32Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  And so like, you know, that's in an age where you still like, you know, want to kiss a girl you have a crush on, but also still like comic books. Like that's such a specific moment of boyhood.

• 15:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  And, uh, he went south to visit his family.

• 15:46Steven Rinella?

  He's from Chicago.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  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 school started. And he was going with his cousin, next door neighbor and best friend. It was a guy named Wheeler Parker. And so this was nineteen fifty five. This was the year after Brown v. Board of Education, which is only important because the whole South, that's the, the, 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 meant it. You have to do this. Yeah. So that whole summer, everybody was waiting on that Supreme Court decision to come out. Meanwhile, there was a governor's election in Mississippi where they were all sort of, it was a race to the bottom for these votes.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  And so their whole campaign was about school segregation. So they, these, you, you should get on newspapers dot com and read these speeches. These politicians were, were giving because they just were saying outlandish stuff. Yeah. And so Emmett comes south. He doesn't really know any of this is going on. He gets down. You have to understand he's overweight. He has a stutter. Uh, the first day he gets there, he goes out to work because it's, they're picking cotton now and he goes out to work with his cousins and his family. And he makes it about a half day and it's really hot out there and he gets sent back to the house, uh, to help the women.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  And so, you know, so this is this thirteen year old, just turned fourteen year old boy who was down with his cousins, who is not having a great week. And on that Wednesday, they go to a little store in town to go get like ice cream and sodas and things. And so all the boys drive in and he's in the store for a minute alone, but it's a screen door. Later Carolyn Bryant, who was the woman that he whistled at and, uh, and her husband and his stepbrother, his half brother are the ones who, uh, killed him. She is in there. She said, she made up this outlandish story of all the things he said to her. You know, I've effed white women before.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  One, everyone on the porch could hear every word being said in the store and that never happened. And two, he had a stutter. He couldn't have said it. And so she comes outside and he, you know, I so relate to this, remembering being a 14 year old boy, like he's trying to show off for the older kids. And he whistled at her, a cat call whistle. And he looked around and saw in his cousin's eyes.

• 18:21Steven Rinella?

  Real quick, over the years, there's been a lot of debate.

• 18:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:26Steven Rinella?

  About who said what and how long the exchange was.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  So what actually happened, and a lot of this is well intentioned accidental misinformation, because Mamie Till sort of had a certain version of how she thought her son's last days went. The last living eyewitness is a guy named Reverend Wheeler Parker, who I just saw down in Mississippi last weekend. And he was standing next to him when he whistled.

• 18:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  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 24 hours after the election of that governor's race I was telling you about, where these governors had been, these candidates had been saying outlandish stuff. A lot of talk about bayonets, a lot of talk about violence, a lot of talk about defending your way of life. And, you know, most of the voters understood they were just politicians chasing votes.

• 19:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  But some people heard them and took them serious. And so, you know, in Mississippi especially, there's such a direct link between political rhetoric and violence. I mean, it's not an accident that the day after John F. Kennedy gave his famous civil rights speech, Medgar Evers was shot. I mean, those things are, those things are, especially in Mississippi, always really closely related. So he steps down into this cauldron where the population has been whipped up into a frenzy by months of five people trying to prove they are more segregated than anyone else. And so then there's just a kid in the middle of that. You know, being 14 is about testing boundaries. And the dominant culture in Mississippi was about protecting boundaries.

• 20:12Steven Rinella?

  And this is, I mean, this is where, right where you grew up.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  I mean, my family farm is 23 miles from the barn. And so, and so they go to town, Emmett and his cousins go to Greenwood for Saturday night to go to the movie. Uh, they stopped at a plantation on the way home at a party. Both Wheeler and Emmett had their first ever sips of alcohol. A little sip of moonshine. They didn't like it. But like they're that age. Both of them had their first drink that night, 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 bo- 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 backseat of the car over the dog. They went to bed.

• 21:00Speaker 03

  Two and a half hours later, Roy Bryant and his brother JW Milam show up at the house, beating on the door, asking to see that boy in Chicago that did the talking. Uh, they pointed the gun in Wheeler Parker's face first. He still remembers. Uh, uh, the ba- staring down the barrel of a, of a nine nineteen eleven forty-five. He was just like, the barrel's a lot wider than you think it's gonna be. And like he remembered that. He remembered the smell of the whiskey on their breaths, uh, on their breath. They went and got Emmett up, Emmett up. He was sleeping with his cousin, uh, Simeon Wright. He, uh, Simeon remembered, he died probably ten years ago, but Simeon remembered his whole life, how long it took Emmett to get his shoes on, cause he was scared.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  They took him out. They drove him around all night. They took him to, uh, Roy and JW's brother Leslie's barn. Uh, the barn. The barn. They, uh, you know, they tortured him. They pistol whipped him with a forty-five. And, uh, there was a witness named Willie Reed who heard him, uh, crying out for his mom. And then they killed him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie 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 Wright. Uh, Moses Wright's niece. Moses Wright is Emmett's uncle. That's whose house he was staying in the night he was kidnapped. And I'm standing on the banks of the Tallahatchie River with her and I just sort of was like, what do you think about when you're here?

• 22:28Speaker 03

  And she's like, I'm just so grateful. And I'm like, what? And she's like. The Tallahatchie River in Mississippi is known by black families as the singing river because there've been so many dead bodies thrown in it. And she looked at there, she looked at me and he goes, he got out of the river. And you know, the, they tried to, state of Mississippi saw the body and tried to bury it immediately. There was a hole dug, 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, the black funeral home. His name was Champ Jackson. Champ Jackson's daughter works at the Delta Crown Room in the Memphis Airport. She's in there, she's in there right now. See her all the time. And so they, they had him out there.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  They were going to bury him, they had a hole dug. And then in Chicago, the steelworkers union went to war for Emmett Till. And so they were so, because the, one of the most powerful guys in the steelworkers union lived in their neighborhood and knew him. And so they got the mayor of Chicago to get the governor of Illinois, to get the governor of Mississippi to call the sheriff of LaFlore 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.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  I mean, it's really, you know, there, when I started doing this book, there were probably 12 people left alive who knew him. And now there are probably eight. I mean, they've been dying in front of me. Oh, man, yeah. Yeah, you hit it, you hit it right to get to talking to people. Yeah, and so what's so interesting is, and this sort of goes back into the land. And, you know, one of the reasons I wanted to do the book as set as a history of the land, because in Mississippi, people lie, but the land does not. The land tells the story. The land, the history of Mississippi is embedded in those courthouse records and who owned what land and how it moved. And Emmett Till's family, even though they've lived in Chicago for 70 years.

• 24:30Speaker 03

  Feel like Mississippians, like they are definitely people in exile. You know, we grow sweet corn on our farm and they would always want me to bring them up sweet corn. You know, they want hickory wood from the Mississippi Delta for their smokers. 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, of people who were disconnected from the, you know, Moses Wright had to leave his farm. There were so many death threats, he couldn't harvest his last crop. The trial was in September, they were already picking cotton. He tried to hang on to get his crop out of the field and couldn't. He had to give away his dogs.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  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. Willie Reed, the witness, he had to, he got so many death threats that a couple of days after he testified, Moses Wright and Willie Reed were the first black people to go into a court in Mississippi and accuse a white man of murder. And that was 1955, that had never happened before. And so Willie Reed had to walk six miles down a gravel road, down the Drew DeRueville Road, which is the road the barn is on. The Drew DeRueville Road, if you want to sort of play with the idea that like, in like that sort of 100 years of solitude way, the time isn't real. That road was built by Nathan Bedford Forrest's brother.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  So, and Nathan Bedford Forrest in the winter of 1863 and 64 marched his cavalry down that road past the Doherty Bio. Uh, so I think in some world where time doesn't exist like we think it does, those horses and JW Milam's green and white Chevrolet two-tone pickup truck pass each other night after night after night after night. And so Willie Reed walked down that road, past Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm. And, uh, it didn't exist yet past where it would be. And there was a car waiting for him at the intersection of the Drew DeRueville Road and Highway 8, and the man driving that car was Med Grevers. And it was the sort of first civil rights thing he had ever done. And, uh, Willie Reed moved to Chicago, changed his name.

• 26:42Speaker 03

  And he was married to Juliette, who I know, I just saw her in Mississippi, was married to her 10 years, maybe, before she knew that he had some other history. It's like, these are people who were forced to leave a place. You know, I'm sure it's a coincidence, but Moses Wright took a job where he cleaned a local theater in Chicago, and he went to work every night at the exact same time that the kidnappers had knocked on his door.

• 27:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, wow.

• 27:11Speaker 03

  And he kept a garden, because he's a country boy. He hunt, he hunted, and he fished. You know, Wheeler Parker told me about his dad one time, a tornado hit their house when they still lived in Mississippi, and it ripped the roof off the smokehouse. And it was in the middle of the night in the rain, and his dad had them out there finding bacon and hams and sausages, because it had all been thrown all over the field. And he's like, holy shit, you know, we gotta go, like.

• 27:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  And so, you know, these were people who, for general, like, had real rhythms in a country way of life. Moses Wright liked to hunt and liked to fish. He liked to make his own sausage with that sage in it. He liked, uh, brain and eggs, brains and eggs every morning for breakfast. And he, he lived in concert with the land.

• 27:52Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  And then was just sent to a city to move into a housing project. And they let him, the Illinois Central Railroad gave him a patch of land, and he did this incredible garden. They made fake mules out of like wheelbarrow wheels, wheelbarrow wheels. And they went out, and that was the closest he ever felt to home again, is in his garden. And another old man who'd sort of been forced to leave Louisiana did it with him, and that was Fred Hampton's father, the founder of the Black Panthers. So Emmett Till's uncle and Fred Hampton's father worked a garden together in suburban Chicago.

• 28:30Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 28:33Steven Rinella?

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• 29:17Steven Rinella?

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• 30:02Steven Rinella?

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• 30:47Steven Rinella?

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• 31:32Steven Rinella?

  the most of the whitetail rut this fall. In order for you to start tracking the history of this piece of ground in this barn, you had to kind of settle, or at least in the book, you go through the process of settling where the murder occurred. Because there was like a lot of, like people, like you think like, how would you lose sight of that? But there was all these different versions of where it happened. And one of the first things in the book is exploring, um, where was it?

• 32:00Speaker 03

  So what's crazy about it is, so the killers, uh, 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, there were eight to 10 probably. And so, most of those people got away with it. So they had to tell a phony version of the, the confession couldn't be real, because they were protected by double jeopardy, but they couldn't. And it was, 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.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  You know, and so this is like, this is one family.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Killing like it's it's very tribal.

• 32:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  And so, uh, so they had to write everybody else out of the story. And so they moved everything and, you know, there are a lot of history books that quote from the fictitious account that ran in Look Magazine. So, you know, uh, Leslie Mylum, who's Barn it is, Leslie Mylum in 1973 called his preacher, Macklin Hubble in Cleveland, Mississippi, who I interviewed before he died and said, uh, 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.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  And it's Leslie Mylum. 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 preacher is so shook that he left there and drove out to the store and money just to sort of commune with it. And then Leslie Mylum died before the sun came up. And so like there were people, you know, Mamie Till got asked late in life, how does it feel that these killers got away with this murder? And she sort of smiled, what do you mean? They got the death penalty. You know, they all died young, riddled up with cancer.

• 34:00Steven Rinella?

  That's the thing I want to touch on later is, is, um, they got acquitted, but they were cursed, man.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  They were definitely, they were definitely cursed.

• 34:08Steven Rinella?

  It was kind of like what we talked about before we started recording.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:11Steven Rinella?

  It's like OJ Simpson.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Well, just.

• 34:14Steven Rinella?

  He got acquitted, but he was cursed.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Well, and you know, there's a sense of like, one of the things that you want to do is excavate the blood in the dirt. You know, like I, 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, uh, the Harvard's Peabody Museum started digging and it's a Native American city. And the reason it's archaeologically interesting, and this is, you know, right in Township 22 North, uh, right where the barn is, the reason it's so interesting is that. That a whole civilization rose and fell there. And in many ways, it mirrors the sharecropping civilization that would rise up

• 34:58Speaker 03

  centuries later in the same place, almost a thousand years later. But what's interesting to the Harvard and all of the other archaeologists who've been digging on this site for years is there's something there that shouldn't be there. So there, there's palisade walls, there's a, their battlement architecture. And there were like loopholes, arrow loopholes within the walls with like interlocking fields of fire. Like this, like somebody was defending themselves here. And all of, that, that's all been erased. We don't know who was the aggressor. We don't know who was the defender. We don't know anything about these tribes that live there other than by the time Hernando de Soto rolled along, they were all gone.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  And so, and this is, i- i- so on this piece of land, there was a monocrop culture that, uh, where the elites lived on the hills, on the mound structures inside the gates. And then other people lived in little cabins, sort of out as they worked the land. And it mirrored so completely the, the ecosystem that would rise and fall. I mean, in some ways, 1955, in some ways, the murder of Emmett Till was the death of sharecropping. Cause the first mechanized crop ever planted had been, uh, 1943. You want to do something fun, you can lay down these timelines of histories

• 36:21Speaker 03

  of the research and development, uh, production and then mass production of cotton pickers and the electric guitar. Cause it's almost month to month. So as this, 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. Uh, on a parallel track, the technology is being invented for the music of those people. You can hear an acoustic guitar ring out across a field or in the country. But in a dark, loud bar, you need electricity. And so you can watch those things develop in tandem. But anyway, I mean, it, it's, it's fascinating to me to understand that there was on the spot where Emmett Till was killed.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Uh, there was an entire civilization that rose and fell. And we say history's going to remember, but that just isn't true.

• 37:15Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  I mean, history almost exclusively forgets. And then in that same square of land, you have Dockery Farms, which is the, 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, uh, Charlie Patton, who grew up, I mean, almost with an eyesight of the barn, was the first real blue star Paramount Records in 1929. He sang first person songs, name checking local cops. I mean, this was, I mean, this was protest. This is 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, uh, you know, it's not an accident that Eazy-E's grandparents owned a grocery

• 37:57Speaker 03

  store 16 blocks up Broadway from the house where one of Emmett Till's killers lived. I mean, these are like, you know, Sam Cooke, A Change Is Going to Come is from the same little town in the Mississippi Delta's Muddy Waters, I'm a Man.

• 38:11Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  You know, uh, 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 22 North Range 4 West. And so, you know, you've got Nathan Bedford Forrest family there. You've got Fanny Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm there. There was a Nazi POW camp in between Drew, Mississippi and the barn in the 40s where they were bringing Nazi prisoners to work in the cotton fields. And it's interesting that the, uh, the local people realized that, uh, the, they were helping the Nazis, uh, soldiers like cheat and teach them how to like, here's how you

• 38:53Speaker 03

  weigh down, like, you know, how to get, how to get up on the people running it. But, uh, some of the Nazi soldiers stayed and married local women and, and are still there. And, uh, you know, they were, the Nazi soldiers were treated a lot better than their sort of the black sharecroppers who were working alongside of them. But, uh, but you know, this was real. I mean, there, there was a whole universe in this square of land. And, you know, it's.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  It would be interesting if you could, we could do this. Like, I would love to know the history of the square of land, like where, where, like where we are sitting right now.

• 39:28Steven Rinella?

  Someone needs to do a project where you track every, like, every section, not every section, but every township.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Every town, someone should do a whole, the United States township by township, because I would love to know.

• 39:38Steven Rinella?

  Some townships wouldn't have many readers.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  Well, no, but I mean, like.

• 39:41Steven Rinella?

  There's no one on them.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Let's do, let me tell you, I mean, like, the, uh, there's that Frank and Deborah Popper who are academics.

• 39:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, the Buffalo Commons.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  Buffalo Commons, alright, so I'm way into the Buffalo Commons, because if, and the, the, this is actually interesting, it speaks to this, but like, if the wellspring of the American identity is the fact that manifest destiny was achieved, and if you look at Frank and Deborah Popper's research, that many of the places settled in the mad rush west almost immediately started depopulating, so there are vast stretches of the country now that are technically frontier, and if we didn't actually settle it, what does that suggest? And one of the things is, I, a lot of this book is a mapping, and so I've got this great railroad map

• 40:27Speaker 03

  that shows around 1900, and it's the railroads coming up from the north, south, west and east, and, uh, and you see them just stop because they haven't connected yet. So this is 20 years after Frederick Turner's essay, this is 20 years after the census.

• 40:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what, what Ray's referring to is, there was a, the, the US government used to define frontier.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Is a, is a certain number of people per square mile.

• 40:54Steven Rinella?

  By population density.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:55Steven Rinella?

  And there was a point at which, um, the frontier officially closed in America.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:02Steven Rinella?

  Because the population density had been met.

• 41:04Speaker 03

  That's right, and so there, there.

• 41:05Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 41:15Steven Rinella?

  Because people would come out and homestead these forty acre chunks on arid land, but it wouldn't work.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:20Steven Rinella?

  And so they leave.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  And then it.

• 41:21Steven Rinella?

  And then so technically it went back to frontier.

• 41:23Speaker 03

  I mean, and by the way, almost immediately. And so, you know, in nineteen hundred, the Mississippi Delta, like I said, was largely uninhabited hardwood swamps.

• 41:31Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  So the, uh, from seventeen fifty, somebody listening who, who knows more, whenever, from whenever the spinning Jenny was invented until the DuPont laboratory in Wilmington, Delaware in nineteen thirty-three invented nylon and made petroleum the world's most important commodity. From the spinning Jenny to nylon, cotton was the world's most important commodity.

• 42:04Steven Rinella?

  What's spinning? You mean the, the seeds out?

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, but the, yeah, no, the seventeen sixty-four, it's the thing that starts to allow mass production. So you can turn one worker into ten.

• 42:15Steven Rinella?

  And what is it?

• 42:15Speaker 03

  And so it's.

• 42:16Steven Rinella?

  What is the tool?

• 42:17Speaker 03

  It's a weaving situation, like a Manchester, you know, it's not an accident that, uh, uh, that during the Civil War in Manchester, the Irish factory workers were raising money for the newly freed enslaved people. And the factory owners were flying Confederate flags above the factories. I mean, it's not an accident, like Manchester, Mississippi functioned for a very long time as a colony of Manchester and Liverpool and London. But anyway, okay. So.

• 42:44Steven Rinella?

  Cause they were sending cotton.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  They were sending cotton, sending cotton.

• 42:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Uh, as a side note, it's hilarious in the way that like, you know, the entire Civil War was based on the idea that, that Europe would force a quick end to the war. Cause no one would want to make war on King Cotton was the quote.

• 43:00Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  And it's so funny, like my family still farms cotton and the most important thing to know when you're trying to sort of loosely predict what the price of cotton will be is what's the carryover? Like how many bales of cotton live in the global sort of textile supply chain, sitting in warehouses? That haven't been brought into the facilities to be turned into stuff.

• 43:20Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  And so the largest carryovers in history to date were eighteen fifty-nine and eighteen sixty, which means that no textile mill in the world needed an ounce of American cotton until at least November of sixty-three, at which point, so the entire war was based on a completely faulty economic idea that, that.

• 43:42Speaker 03

  The, I think they're like the politicians who caught the car.

• 43:45Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Like they were just out there saying stuff.

• 43:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  And so, uh, like one economist could have stopped the whole thing, just but guys, you're totally flawed. But so.

• 43:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you mean like the, the, the.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, like this is.

• 43:58Steven Rinella?

  The cotton market, like.

• 44:00Speaker 03

  It was the wrong time to start the war.

• 44:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Because they didn't, it was the weakest the South had ever been.

• 44:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Which was, it's not unrelated. You only really start wars when you're weak, you know, start them when you're strong. But, uh, anyway, like the Mississippi Delta was the center of the cotton economy for a little while. And then it, you know, it moved around the world like oil does, you know, they're finding oil all over the world. Cotton was like that. And so it moved from Mississippi, Egypt, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Texas. You know, it's all over the world. And then the last place it came back to before King Cotton died forever was back to the Mississippi Delta. Mississippi Delta was mostly hardwood swamps. They quit, uh, the railroad companies were buying huge swaths of land. And the great, the northern woods were running out of wood.

• 44:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 44:59Steven Rinella?

  Oh, good.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  And so like these timber companies were coming down. That's why Teddy Roosevelt, that's Teddy Bear, he'd been.

• 45:05Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  So Teddy Roosevelt spent the night in Township 22 North Range 4 West. And he gave as his gift to the plantation homeowners, they, it was Taylor and Crate, I think it's right, from New York. He gave them two Ginkgo trees to plant as his hu- housewarming gift for having him there. And, uh, one of those Ginkgo trees is still alive and there's a tire swing in it and it's out there on the road.

• 45:28Steven Rinella?

  What?

• 45:28Speaker 03

  Go see it. Yeah.

• 45:29Steven Rinella?

  There's a tire swing in it?

• 45:30Speaker 03

  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 tin house. And they have Teddy Roosevelt's Ginkgo tree in the backyard. And so.

• 45:39Steven Rinella?

  Kidding?

• 45:39Speaker 03

  No, man.

• 45:39Steven Rinella?

  Is that in the book? I don't remember that.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, 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.

• 45:51Steven Rinella?

  To sell lumber.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  To sell lumber.

• 45:52Steven Rinella?

  And to ship it where?

• 45:53Speaker 03

  North? 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.

• 46:04Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 46:04Speaker 03

  You know, like Schlitz Brewing Company uh bought a timber yard so they could make their kegs. And so, uh, anyway.

• 46:12Steven Rinella?

  But out of hardwood?

• 46:13Speaker 03

  Out of hardwoods, all hardwoods. And so they were uh, so they were cleared in this land. The cotton plantations were almost an afterthought.

• 46:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  Like, what are we gonna do with this?

• 46:22Steven Rinella?

  Like, they cleared it for lumber.

• 46:23Speaker 03

  Cleared it for lumber. They're like, what are we gonna do with it? And so, you know, they were selling all of this land and this was cotton's last gasp.

• 46:31Steven Rinella?

  And uh, can you, I I remember you had some statistics about that land that uh,

• 46:37Steven Rinella?

  like the depth of the topsoil?

• 46:39Speaker 03

  Oh, it it's some ways it went. It was like, we call it ice cream soil, man. In some ways it went like 200 feet deep.

• 46:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 03

  I mean, incredible soil. I mean, one of the things.

• 46:48Steven Rinella?

  All that deposition from the river.

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Just.

• 46:50Steven Rinella?

  Cause I remember, I remember it became blown away that you could dig down like that and hit like alluvial soil.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  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, it it the yields are not great in a lot of these places. And so the price of cotton collapsed in in 1919. The price of cotton was a dollar a pound. I think today it's 66 cents. And so maybe 68. And so, uh, it was a dollar a pound. It was the last.

• 47:29Steven Rinella?

  It's lower today.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  By 40 cents.

• 47:31Steven Rinella?

  Even adjusted for inflation.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  No, yeah.

• 47:33Steven Rinella?

  Not not adjusted. I'm saying like just pure money.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  No, it's 32 cents lower than it was in 1919. Wow. Uh, and by the way, if you talk to it like this is gonna be the, this year's gonna be so catastrophic for farmers. I mean, our neighbors that are going out of business. Like people. Cause of cotton prices being low. Cotton prices and soybeans. So we grew, our farm is cotton, soybeans, rice and corn. And, uh, uh, China buys all of our soybeans and this year they haven't bought a single pod of American soybeans. Cause of all the terrifying. Yeah, all the terrifying. It's just killing American farmers. But anyway, the, they cleared, the, the price of cotton collapsed in 1923. And then for 10 years, they tried to fix it.

• 48:15Speaker 03

  And then in 1933, the Roosevelt administration took over the American cotton economy. Mm-hmm. And in some ways, the, it's. Franklin Roosevelt. Yeah, Franklin Roosevelt. And so like, here's the thing I'm gonna try to find because like, I think this, this explains, it's the only thing I ever really read because I think there's something interesting here about how cotton related, how cotton, how the cotton economy put Emmett Till at the exact place at the exact wrong time. And so, here we go. I'm trying to find this right now. No, go ahead. Oh, I got it. Here we go. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted 20 years. The suffering and killing and decay

• 48:58Speaker 03

  that would follow for the next century were the price of three great years and a dozen good ones. Those two decades also mark, marked the peak of the lost cause mythology. Consider when all these Confederate statues went up around the state and consider the history of cotton in the Delta. The land clearing finished around 1900. The price of cotton collapsed for good in 1923. And what happened in between? Port Gibson and Aberdeen raised statues in 1900. Macon in 1901. Fayette in 1904. Carrollton and Beulah and Okalona in 1905. Tupelo and Ole Miss in 1906. Brandon and Oxford and West Point in 1907. Cleveland and Lexington and Raymond and Duckhill in 1908, Greenville and Winona in

• 49:39Speaker 03

  1909, Hattiesburg twice and Grenada in 1910, Gulfport and Cosiesco and Quipman and Ripley and Brooksville and Heidelberg in 1911, Columbus and Laurel and Meridian and Philadelphia and Vaden in 1912, Greenwood and Sumner in 1913, Greenwood again in 1915, Hazelhurst in 1917, Louisville in 1921. Many of these were placed quite intentionally on the lawns of local courthouses. Most of the monuments around the state were built during the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after 1923. Wow. It's all like, the history is all in, it's in the price of cotton, it's in the land.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  I mean, when you look at the equation of agriculture even now, you don't control the price of seeds, you don't control the price of equipment, you don't control the price of chemicals, you don't control the weather, you don't control the price of water, you don't control how much water you need. On the other side of the equation, you can't control how much you're selling it for because you can't control the markets. The only X in the long variable of an American farm that you have any control over is labor. And so now, you have a system in Mississippi from 1933 where the government, the government is stepping in and taking over the cotton industry.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  And if it's, if it's, you know, they wrote the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and then they had to, it was declared unconstitutional, they had to do it again in either 36 or 38, I forget. But one of the things about that that was so interesting is, they were trying to figure out, well, what is a subsidy supposed to do for an American farmer? And the thing that they settled upon was, it used to be called something called parity payments, and, and now there's a different structure, but the fundamental ideas are the same. They wanted people to be able to live like they were living in 1919. And so if it ever feels like Mississippi is stuck in the past, it's because like statutorily, it literally is.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  You know, the, a lot of the American farm bills are designed to sort of, to sort of, recreate that purchasing power. And, you know, the, the,

• 51:59Speaker 03

  A thing that happened between, say, thirty-three and fifty-five is you have King Cotton is dying.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  The, the, as mechanization comes in, you have to have a significant amount of capital to be able to buy all this equipment. So it's sort of changing who can even farm. So you have a, like, you have an entire world that is collapsing in on itself, separate from the Supreme Court decisions and, you know, integrating the schools. I mean, you just have an entire way of life collapsing in on itself. Prices are spiraling. Nineteen fifty-four, nineteen fifty-five were terrible 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

• 52:50Speaker 03

  way for them to do anything if their landlord was cheating them. And so you just created this situation where people were desperate and almost had unchecked power over other human beings. And then Emmett Till decides to go visit his family on vacation.

• 53:09Steven Rinella?

  Um, right before I read your book, I read, uh, John Barry, what's the, the great?

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Oh, Rising Tide?

• 53:17Steven Rinella?

  Rising Tide.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, and by the way, the, uh, nineteen twenty-seven, the levee broke in Scott, Mississippi. The, it broke exactly at where Delta Pine and Land Plantation is.

• 53:29Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 53:30Speaker 03

  Uh, it was, uh, DPL was one of the first landowners in Township Twenty-two North Range Four West, uh, which the whole book is about. And, uh, it was owned then by the Manchester Fine Doublers and Spinners Association, which was the world's largest manufacturing conglomerate that was buying up Mississippi Delta plantations to vertically integrate its supply chain.

• 53:52Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 53:52Speaker 03

  You know, that company still exists. It has a different name, but they make lingerie for Victoria's Secret and Marks and Spencer. I mean, the companies all still exist. That plantation was later owned by Monsanto and it's now owned by Bayer, the aspirin people.

• 54:04Steven Rinella?

  Uh-huh.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Uh, and so, but like, where that, where the levee broke was at a plantation that was owned by, uh, a Manchester manufacturing conglomerate.

• 54:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Anyway, sorry, I interrupted you.

• 54:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no. It, it's a phenomenal book, Rising Tide.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  I love that book.

• 54:20Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. We were gonna have mine, but he canceled at the last minute or something happened.

• 54:26Steven Rinella?

  No, his flight got canceled. Flight, I'm sorry, flight's got canceled.

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:30Steven Rinella?

  It's a fascinating book.

• 54:30Speaker 03

  It's really good.

• 54:31Steven Rinella?

  It introduces a thing about, um, between that book and your book, and I want you to explain sharecropping in a minute.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:37Steven Rinella?

  But, uh, it introduces like a, introduced me anyways to a weird bit in American history where

• 54:46Steven Rinella?

  from, from agri, from like the history of agriculture.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 54:50Steven Rinella?

  He explains how there's always been, like you just mentioned, there's always been a labor problem.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:57Steven Rinella?

  When it comes to cotton production.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:59Steven Rinella?

  Agricultural in general, particularly cotton production. And he lays out this thing that, that the labor problem kind of emerged upon emancipation of the slaves, where for a while the labor problem was you just owned the labor.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:13Steven Rinella?

  And then all of a sudden they're faced with this, I think that you have to entice.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  Well.

• 55:18Steven Rinella?

  You have to be able to entice willful laborers.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Well, and, and, and the thing that's wild is after the war, all anyone wanted was, can I just have 40 acres where I can protect my family? And so the global capital markets are freaking out about this. Big, you know, you can read the minutes of like, you know, cause like the way we have business conferences now in Las Vegas, they had those in Brussels in 1860. I mean, they've been, you know, those aren't new. So you can read the minutes of these like think tank meetings where they're essentially trying to invent sharecropping in real time. Sharecropping was the compromise between labor and capital because they, they tried a couple of different things that didn't work. And so, uh, you can watch the global capital markets and we go into this in the book because it's sort of,

• 56:04Speaker 03

  you watch the markets coerce people into living in a way that they didn't want to live. Like people wanted, people just fought a war. People wanted to go, you know, I love that line from that Dire Straits 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.

• 56:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:21Speaker 03

  Cause it like, it gets at something so existentially true and people just wanted to go home and live on their land. And there was this brief moment in Township 22 North Range 4 West, all over the South where you had white and black. People, you had veterans of the Confederacy and veterans from the Union Army. You had people setting up 40 acre little homesteads. And trying to sort of make a go of being what Thomas Jefferson would have called a yeoman farmer. And you watch those people get just chewed up and spit out by the global capital markets, who had to have these lands in large blocks. Yeah. And so, you know, the people who just wanted to go hunt and fish and, you know,

• 57:06Speaker 03

  grow a little cotton to have a little cash, but have big vegetables with big vegetable gardens with homegrown tomatoes. And, you know, my dad was a small town lawyer and he had a client. It was a drug dealer who would pay him in tomatoes. And like, it was the best thing ever, man. All summer, we'd eat these homegrown tomatoes. And, uh, you know, our big meal in the summer was, was dinner in the middle of the day. And then like supper was always just like leftovers. But it's usually like bacon and tomato sandwiches in the summer. Yeah. And so, uh, anyway, they just wanted these huge gardens and wanted to live with their families. And, and, you know, especially if you're a formerly enslaved person, try to start, you know, roots in your own land were like the most precious thing.

• 57:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And you just watch the global capital markets make that impossible.

• 57:57Steven Rinella?

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• 58:40Steven Rinella?

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• 1:00:02Steven Rinella?

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• 1:01:00Steven Rinella?

  I want to finish this point about that he makes in Rising Tide or the thing he explains is...

• 1:01:07Steven Rinella?

  It's very surprising to me that, that once

• 1:01:11Steven Rinella?

  you had the, you had the responsibility of like enticing and holding labor.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Steven Rinella?

  Like willful people to get to work. One of the conflicts that comes up in, in this area along the Mississippi that he explains is that, um, there's a, as the Ku Klux Klan emerges.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:26Steven Rinella?

  There are agricultural people. There are farmers who are fighting against the Klan.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:01:35Steven Rinella?

  Saying this argument. Stop scaring away all the labor. Like that's their take, their take on it is if you are making it hostile for people that want to be here and work, you're working against our interests and, and that was their argument against the Klan.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:01:52Steven Rinella?

  And you cover so much of that same stuff. It was just 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? And farm? When you can't just make them do it.

• 1:02:05Speaker 03

  Well, and you know, the thing that's,

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  there was a huge fight between

• 1:02:12Speaker 03

  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 Klan. Cause like the very paternalistically racist, but like the, the landowners just weren't letting that on their land.

• 1:02:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  I mean,

• 1:02:31Steven Rinella?

  They didn't want their labor force to be terrorized.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  No. And, uh, one of the things that's interesting is the, and the 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 reasons the hot tamale is like the stereotypical food of the Delta is that it's tamales made with Mississippi Delta ingredients. So instead of masa, it's just staple cornmeal and, and it's pork and like, but anyway, they, they, all over the Mississippi Delta, you can buy hot tamales. And that's why, uh, because the, the black sharecroppers were looking at the hot tamale cans at the end of the road that the, 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,

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  But to your point about like and about John's book, I mean, that they really nail is that, you know, the the planners were trying to fight off the Klan. Uh, the, 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 Klan material, was right where the barn is. And it's because the sunflower plantation that was owned by the New York Timber people, where Teddy Roosevelt spent the night, was sold as, as part of the New Deal. Uh, it was broken up into blocks. And so the Roosevelt administration, very into sort of progressive era America, very

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  into, we're gonna have best practices, we're gonna find the best farmers to put on this fields, these fields, and they're gonna, the application processes about understanding science and all this stuff. And so what you had was the Roosevelt administration kicking off all of the black sharecroppers who had worked the sunflower plantation, who wanted to stay there. Mm-hmm. So they were fighting to kick these people off and replace them with all white farmers from Georgia and Alabama. And the local plantation owners were fighting the Roosevelt administration on behalf of the sharecroppers, basically saying, these people have been here for generations, like, these are great neighbors, they've like, their churches are here, their cemeteries are here. Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Like, how could you possibly kick these people off? So like, the other thing that's constantly shaping the Mississippi Delta is like, the unintended consequences. And so it's not an accident that Emmett Till is killed in the one square of land where there were lots of poor, angry, white people. I mean, there's this, I don't know if you've ever read the Robert Palmer book, uh, Deep Blues? No. But what he's talking about, as the price of cotton collapses, this is like 1929, 1930, he says, uh-

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  He's talking about the towns growing up in the Delta and taking power away from the the plantation owners. They attracted more and more poor whites from the hills who brought to the Delta's paternalistic social structure and atmosphere of barely repressed violence, a burning need to acquire money and power, and an outspoken racism that neatly suited their purposes. They control most of the newer Delta towns economically and politically. The balance of power was shifting and the and the planter class, never numerically strong, could only watch it shift. The Delta already tense, coiled tighter and tighter. And so that's a lot of what John's talking about, is that sort of sense of that, you know, Mississippi so often gets looked at and people just look at it through the prism of race, but that's two dimensional. You always have to do race and class.

• 1:05:58Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  Because Mississippi, there's always been, in a lot of ways, the black population was caught in the middle of a culture war between two halves of the white population, which made it worse for, I mean, like, it's a really, it's the rock and the hard place.

• 1:06:14Steven Rinella?

  Caught between a battle between rich whites and poor whites.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:06:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Can you explain, um, I've always, my whole life, I've known the term sharecropper.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Steven Rinella?

  But it wasn't until I read your book and Barry's book, kind of as a pair, you know, a little bit. I don't understand what the hell that, like, the economics. Can you explain, like, how it came to be in, like, and when you hear the word sharecropper, like, what exactly are you talking about?

• 1:06:47Speaker 03

  So, uh, uh, 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.

• 1:07:01Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  Now, I can't afford.

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  Land. So what you will do is you will rent me and my family 25 acres of that.

• 1:07:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:13Speaker 03

  You sort of needed a ha- a family every 25 to 40 acres. You would rent me that.

• 1:07:18Steven Rinella?

  Like a large landowner would break parcels off 25, 40 acres.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  And and that's I'm.

• 1:07:23Steven Rinella?

  And the family gets to move there.

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  And you know, you gets to, I mean, has to.

• 1:07:27Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  And so your own houses. And so, uh, basically what happened is you would give me what's called the furnish, which would be, uh, the money I would need to sort of get going for the year.

• 1:07:40Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Uh, you would provide the seeds, you would provide, uh, the equipment, mules. I would farm the land. Uh, I would have a charge account at the local store. What people don't realize is most of these farmers really made their money charging exorbitant interest rates on the stores they all owned. So the plantation owners were also primarily merchants.

• 1:08:06Steven Rinella?

  So me as a landowner, like I own thousands of acres.

• 1:08:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Steven Rinella?

  I I have.

• 1:08:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:11Steven Rinella?

  I run a store.

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Steven Rinella?

  Where I sell supplies.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  To me.

• 1:08:15Steven Rinella?

  To the people that I'm renting.

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  That I have to buy from you.

• 1:08:17Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  And you're charging and you're charging me 20% interest.

• 1:08:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  And so, uh, and so you get to the end of the year and, uh, now you have the right to sell my crop. I can't go sell my crop. So I don't know what price you're getting.

• 1:08:33Steven Rinella?

  Home, who sells the crop?

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  So the landowner sells it.

• 1:08:36Steven Rinella?

  So I'm the landowner, you're the sharecropper.

• 1:08:38Speaker 03

  So I plan.

• 1:08:38Steven Rinella?

  I give you the ground, I give you the seed, I give you a mule, I give you a plow.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:08:42Steven Rinella?

  You do the daily labor.

• 1:08:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:08:44Steven Rinella?

  And then on your patch grows your cotton.

• 1:08:46Speaker 03

  And then.

• 1:08:47Steven Rinella?

  And then and then I go, I will now sell your cotton.

• 1:08:50Speaker 03

  And so you own immediately half of my cotton. That's the deal. You get half, I get half. You sell it, you keep the money from your half. You take the money from my half, you subtract all of the expenses over the years with over the year with 20% interest. And if any money is left, you give that to me.

• 1:09:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but because I sell it, but since I own half of it, I'm incentivized to get the best price for it.

• 1:09:14Speaker 03

  You are, uh, but I don't, I can't check your books.

• 1:09:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  So you might sell it for.

• 1:09:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's no way you're checking my books.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  No, no. And so like, you know, and so like, there's a, there's a gunfight here in this book, where a guy came home from World War One. It was like, you know, war, like a war hero and the, his boss tried to mess him up at settlement time and he just shot him. And you know, because there you had no access to the courts.

• 1:09:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  But that's the way it works.

• 1:09:42Steven Rinella?

  So then, so then at that.

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Steven Rinella?

  You harvest.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:46Steven Rinella?

  You harvest, I sell.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Steven Rinella?

  I sell for $100.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:09:50Steven Rinella?

  50 is yours.

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Steven Rinella?

  And I say to you, okay, you bought 30 bucks worth of stuff at my store.

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:09:56Steven Rinella?

  Interest on the 30 bucks you bought at my store puts that 50 or $49.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  Here's a dollar.

• 1:10:01Steven Rinella?

  Here's a dollar.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:02Steven Rinella?

  And that's sharecropper economy.

• 1:10:04Speaker 03

  That's exactly how it works.

• 1:10:05Steven Rinella?

  Just like, but there was white sharecroppers, wasn't there?

• 1:10:07Speaker 03

  No, 100% white sharecroppers all over.

• 1:10:09Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:10:09Speaker 03

  And, uh, 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. Uh, the only way out of sharecropping was credit markets.

• 1:10:24Steven Rinella?

  But let me, I got another sharecropper.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  I love, yeah, dude, I love.

• 1:10:26Steven Rinella?

  So like, like Emmett Till's people had been sharecroppers.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:30Steven Rinella?

  What would be, what would be a long time that a, that a family would be on a chunk of ground? Like, could you raise your kids all through them being kids?

• 1:10:42Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, no.

• 1:10:43Steven Rinella?

  Working that same chunk.

• 1:10:45Speaker 03

  A lot of people didn't leave. And another thing that's interesting is there are a lot of people who are old, who still live on land in the Delta that, you know, is two owners away from whoever the last owner they worked for. And people are still living in the house.

• 1:11:00Steven Rinella?

  I see. So the sharecropper could outlast the owner.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  Many, yes. And, and so like, uh, And if you found one, so like Will Dockery, who owned Dockery Farms, which is near the barn, uh, had a reputation of being fair with people.

• 1:11:13Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  And so like, uh, you know, Howland Wolf worked on Dockery, uh.

• 1:11:18Steven Rinella?

  As a sharecropper.

• 1:11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Pop Staples, like Mavis Staples dad was a sharecropper on Dockery. Uh, you had Charlie Patton playing there. Uh, the Robert, so the crossroads, the actual crossroads.

• 1:11:29Steven Rinella?

  Been there, man.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. So like, that's right. That's Dockery.

• 1:11:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:33Speaker 03

  And so like.

• 1:11:34Steven Rinella?

  We went there. I was, I was with my friend.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Steven Rinella?

  She took me there.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Steven Rinella?

  Uh, we did all kinds of junk down there the short time we were there. You know what's funny about, do you mind?

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  No, I love this.

• 1:11:45Steven Rinella?

  Funny little stories. I was with my friend Anna Baker.

• 1:11:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Steven Rinella?

  I'm, I still hang out with. And we were in Memphis. She was going to school in Oxford, Mississippi.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:57Steven Rinella?

  So like, we were in Memphis, then we were down in Oxford, Mississippi. Then we went to like Clarksdale.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  So I'm from Clarksdale.

• 1:12:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Steven Rinella?

  So we go there, we went to that bar, like Morgan Freeman had a bar.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Ground Zero. Yeah.

• 1:12:11Steven Rinella?

  Went all around there, went up to that crossroad.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:12:14Steven Rinella?

  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's like, you're not getting out of the car. It took off. It was just like a funny moment, but, uh, and then we had in our head that we were gonna go to New Orleans. Okay? And we were going there. And they're like, ah, there's a hurricane coming. We should bail. Katrina. I'm not kidding you, dude. We were like going from Clarksdale to New Orleans and backed out because of the weather report.

• 1:12:40Speaker 03

  Which was 20 years ago last week.

• 1:12:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because of the weather report.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  The, uh, one of the things.

• 1:12:45Steven Rinella?

  Didn't make it, didn't make it there.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  It, it, I love the landscape of the Mississippi Delta. Like, I love, uh, like, I love riding the levee. I love being on the other side of the levee. Like, my uncle and I liked, like. Ride horses back through the old sort of second growth, but cottonwood trees that you could stick your hand into, you know, this like, uh, there's an abandoned, uh, I think Bungee, the grain company, they have an abandoned sort of elevator complex out there where they used to load up barges and you could ride horses through there and it's like post-apocalyptic because it's real industrial, but it's just in the middle of the woods, in the middle of nowhere. And, you know, I, I love over there. I love being on the Mississippi River. I love the idea of, you know, I love taking my girls out on the Mississippi River. I

• 1:13:31Speaker 03

  love, you know, them running up a boat on a sandbar. Like the, 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 gonna be there, but like, I, uh, I, I, I love that land. And so.

• 1:13:57Steven Rinella?

  Oh, it shows, man.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I really, it's, it's really like, I want to be buried in it.

• 1:14:01Steven Rinella?

  That's one of the things that drew me to wanting to talk to you and like, that I liked about your book is, um, I, I don't, I don't, I'm not trying to end the conversation, just wedge this in there is that, uh, you do a thing that's hard to do, which is like, you love where you're brought up. You love the landscape. You know, it's history and you have, and it, but, and you're also willing to point out a lot of stuff you guys got wrong. And, and I got, it's funny because I don't mean to like, this is not just a Mississippi thing, dude, but a couple of years ago, I went turkey hunting with a, with a new friend of mine down at his place in Mississippi and walking around with him.

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  Is this Taylor?

• 1:14:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:44Speaker 03

  Taylor's my dear friend.

• 1:14:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. He talks very fondly.

• 1:14:48Speaker 03

  He's a good dude.

• 1:14:49Steven Rinella?

  Walking around with him, like, like when I was a kid, if I said the war.

• 1:14:53Steven Rinella?

  My dad fought in World War II.

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Steven Rinella?

  So I was a kid and I said, the war, we all meant like, like the war was World War II.

• 1:14:58Speaker 03

  That's not what we mean.

• 1:15:00Steven Rinella?

  No, but I mean, I was telling Krenan Ciardini, there's not a day goes by, he doesn't point to something. And be like, before the war, after the war, and after, like, he's talking about the Civil War.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  Look, my, my.

• 1:15:12Steven Rinella?

  Like, it's like a defining landscape feature. It'd be like, that dam, something or another, the war.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:15:18Steven Rinella?

  That bridge, something or another, the war.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  Let me tell you.

• 1:15:21Steven Rinella?

  Who owns that land, something or other, the war. And it's just not like, in the north, it is not a thing that comes up.

• 1:15:28Speaker 03

  Well, you know, my, my eighth grade American history teacher, shout out Ms. Hawkins, called it, uh, the Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression.

• 1:15:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, but like, I, I guess the thing about, you know, I, 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, writes is in his, writes in a really sophisticated, sophisticated way about the South. And the thing he calls it is like the duality of the Southern thing. And so like, I've really come to believe that the most intrinsic part of having a Southern identity is living at the intersection of the conflict of these things. So if you're somebody who only says, we're the worst, this sucks, this all his, you know, we're just, you know, everybody is descendants of oppressors. Like, like, but like, that's boring as shit. And it's also, you're missing it.

• 1:16:19Speaker 03

  And if you only defend it and only say, you know, if you try to diminish the other stuff, you don't actually live there. Living there means living at the intersection of these two. It, being Southern means being able to hold two opposing ideas in your head at the same time, and some parts of both of them be true. And so like, when I see people who aren't willing to do that, I just find it odd. And, you know, I think it, you know, like, it's not an accident that so many Southerners, uh.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  Were in favor of tariffs, which everyone's grandparent would have known what a tariff does to a commodity market. It's where being southern used to be about being on the land and living in concert with the seasons and understanding that. And so few people are still connected to the dirt in that way that you have, you know, like you have people out there living in like, you know, angry travel ball suburbs who don't remember anything about what it means to farm, who don't remember what it means to live in concert with the seasons, who don't, you know, who don't move out to the deer camp between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve. You know, you think about, you know, my cousin, uh, second generation president of the Marigold

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  Hunting Club, if you ever get an invitation there, it's, but they have a, they have a communal like dining hall. And so people eat meat like between Thanksgiving and, uh, New Year's Eve, like farmers move their families out there. And so like, I love the parts of Mississippi that are still deeply connected to the rhythms of the land. You know, my uncle Reeves, who has been on our farm every single day since 1968, when he took it over, uh, loves, you know, it's funny, he, uh, uh, man, he's president of two different big deer clubs. Uh, he hasn't shot a deer since 1963. And, and he, he

• 1:18:21Steven Rinella?

  But he still likes deer club.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  But he likes the, he likes the herd management. He's, they got a PhD from Mississippi State, like working with what they're planning and when, and he loves that. And then, you know, we've got three or four duck holes on our farm and he's out there every single day and a lot of times doesn't take a gun, like it's just calling them 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.

• 1:18:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 03

  And like, that's such an important part to me of what it means to be from Mississippi and to be from the South.

• 1:18:54Steven Rinella?

  It's very funny. I have a dear friend of mine, Clay Newcomb, uh, who I work with too. We always laugh because he, he has a lot of Arkansas exceptionalism. And southern except for him. So he'll.

• 1:19:06Speaker 03

  He's over at Stuttgart busting some ducks.

• 1:19:08Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:19:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wait, sorry. I didn't realize music wasn't, I didn't realize music wasn't important in Harlem. Music wasn't important in San Francisco.

• 1:19:27Steven Rinella?

  Detroit.

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, Detroit. This is Motown thing.

• 1:19:30Steven Rinella?

  But there is dude, it's like legitimate. It's thing. I'm gonna get back to share crap.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  Sorry, I giggled. I haven't done that in a really long time.

• 1:19:38Steven Rinella?

  Shows you're having a good time. I, what I hand it to him is like,

• 1:19:44Steven Rinella?

  he does a lot of interviews with, with, I mean, his, his show is largely about southern culture.

• 1:19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:50Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot of interviews and like, there's a thing that I gotta give him. If you just went and randomly pulled a hundred, okay, you randomly pulled a hundred northerners in a room.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Steven Rinella?

  And you randomly pulled a hundred southerners in a room. Okay.

• 1:20:06Steven Rinella?

  And you said like, what way, I want to know what cardinal direction the front door of your house faces. The southerners are gonna kick the shit out of the northern.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  West.

• 1:20:19Steven Rinella?

  If you said, I want to know what is the, the.

• 1:20:22Speaker 03

  How could you not know that? Cause it's the sun.

• 1:20:23Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'm just saying, okay, it's just a thing. If you took a hundred southerners, a hundred northerners, then you said, if you take a piss in your yard, tell me the route that piss would take as runoff.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  I could definitely do that.

• 1:20:36Steven Rinella?

  And what river, what major river would land in the southerners are gonna kick the shit out of the northerners.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  All farm.

• 1:20:41Steven Rinella?

  I don't know why they have this.

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  It's because all.

• 1:20:43Steven Rinella?

  And they can all out hoop.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  All, all.

• 1:20:46Steven Rinella?

  They just can't.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  All farming is really is getting water onto land and getting water off of it.

• 1:20:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  You know, like, one of my favorite things to do is to drive around our farm with my uncle Reeves. Cause he know, his understanding of the drainage, he's like, well, see that culvert goes into the Bog Filia, which is gonna flow into Deer Creek. Like, it's unbelievable. And so like.

• 1:21:08Steven Rinella?

  Southerners are better at it. There's just something about, there's something about the southern experience that, or, or it's everyone had it, but it got, and this is just very general. Like my, my friend Doug Durn is like dying right now. He's in Wisconsin. He can tell you where every piece of water.

• 1:21:23Speaker 03

  The guy where you guys go deer hunting on the show?

• 1:21:25Steven Rinella?

  He can tell you where every piece of water in the whole state flows to. So there's exceptions, but I'm saying like.

• 1:21:32Steven Rinella?

  Like the knowledge got scrubbed. It's getting scrubbed everywhere.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37Steven Rinella?

  The knowledge got scrubbed more in the north. It used to be like, it just got scrubbed more in the north.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:21:46Steven Rinella?

  Industrialization came quicker, whatever. Suburbia came quicker. It got scrubbed in the north, fashioned 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.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:22:06Steven Rinella?

  In the south and reading your book, I'm like, this is, you know, and looking at your book, I'm like, this is the kind of thing that I wish there was more of is people being like, the history where you live and what goes on and, and, and connecting it to how much topsoil you got, how much rain you got, what kind of trees grew where you got, you know? And also just this story just gives like, this story gives this like super dramatic, nationally known travesty. A way to go like, okay, let's, let's do this at a place, but we're going to do this at a place that changed America.

• 1:22:42Speaker 03

  Well, and, and this idea that like,

• 1:22:45Speaker 03

  that the, that the rainfall and the cotton or soybean yields have a direct impact on violence.

• 1:22:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Speaker 03

  And that.

• 1:22:56Steven Rinella?

  Like bad crops ain't good.

• 1:22:58Speaker 03

  No. And like you go back and read narrative, like enslaved people's narratives. And they're talking about in 1850, knowing, needing to know what the Liverpool price of cotton was because that was going to determine how violent their day was.

• 1:23:16Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:17Speaker 03

  Like this is.

• 1:23:18Steven Rinella?

  The moods of people.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  It's been tied to that forever. And I mean, you know, the ways and we, I mean, we said this earlier, but the ways in which Mississippi. You know, functioned as an extension of my mother grew up in Shelby, Mississippi, and they got the Manchester Guardian delivered to their house. To track cotton. To track to textile industries and cotton because there was no internet. And even though the paper came once a week, it gave her father just a little more info. And so there's always been, you know, Yazoo City, Mississippi, used to be named Manchester, Mississippi. My uncle Will was the team doctor for Manchester Academy football team forever. And it's named after Manchester, you know? And I mean, Their shit was that tied into that far away thing?

• 1:24:02Speaker 03

  It was so tied into, you know, in New Orleans, all those banks, those are all London banks. New Orleans and New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah were sort of outpost of European capital markets. Yeah. Uh, and it's just like, all of that stuff is fascinating. You know, one of the, there are a lot of these histories of America that I feel like are fatally flawed because they stop at the water's edge. Uh huh. As if, you know, as if like this, like you can watch capital markets move all of this. And one of the heartbreaking things in the book, there are probably five or six different times. The reason I like the Ivory Bill Woodpecker in here is because it represents the mystery to me, and it represents the sort of Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, it's raining flowers and

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  McCondo sort of, uh, active imagination of what could have happened nine different times. This whole thing could have been avoided. And so like, well, 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.

• 1:25:08Steven Rinella?

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• 1:25:51Steven Rinella?

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• 1:26:32Steven Rinella?

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• 1:27:13Steven Rinella?

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• 1:28:03Steven Rinella?

  When we finish, I want to talk about two things. I want to hear about the Ivory Bill Woodpecker. I want to hear about the curse of the killers, but I want to step right now back to something we left off. Why, like Emmett Till's people, his people had been sharecroppers from Mississippi. Why were they up, why were they going to Chicago? Like, like what was going on in the, in the economy and on the land that made it that, that these long time people that had been slaves, then they had been sharecroppers, they gave up on the South? Like, what was happening?

• 1:28:36Speaker 03

  So a couple of things are going on. One, uh, factories are desperate for workers. They're sending,

• 1:28:43Steven Rinella?

  Northern factories. They're sending like labor agents down to the South. Got it.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  Who are being recruiters, recruiters who are being run out of town by the police.

• 1:28:51Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you shit me, really? There's like a tension there.

• 1:28:53Speaker 03

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

• 1:28:58Steven Rinella?

  Cause they're taking the labor.

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  They're taking the labor. Uh, there was, uh, it had gotten, after the price of cotton collapsed, I think, an already tense situation like the, like, uh, the book said, uh, coil tighter and tighter. People were looking to leave. There was so much violence. You know, the, the modern Klan was founded in like, what, 1922, I think, in response to black soldiers coming home from World War I. You know, there was a whole sort of America first after the horror of going to Europe and fighting this war. And so there just was a real retrenchment in the 1920s. And so you had, uh, you know, there were black veterans being killed all over the South.

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  And so like people were trying to get out. And so Mamie Till's father moved in like 1923, 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 gotta get out of here.

• 1:29:57Steven Rinella?

  So it was like, like moving for safety, 22 years before his boy had been killed.

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  Yes, he was moving for safety.

• 1:30:04Steven Rinella?

  Whatever the hell number of years.

• 1:30:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and it was moving for safety.

• 1:30:06Steven Rinella?

  For his grandson to be killed, yeah.

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  It was also like, you know, the first mechanized cotton crop in America was 1943 in Clarkstale at Hobson Plantation. I mean, that was coming. And so, you know,

• 1:30:18Speaker 03

  Our farm, we probably needed in 1950, 400 families living on it to farm it. We farm it now with, I think, 18 people, and that's because the tractors can't turn themselves around. How about we're 10 years away from farming it with four people? And so you can just watch sort of the need for all of this labor run out. One of the sort of ironies of 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.

• 1:30:52Speaker 03

  So many families left the Mississippi Delta after 1955. Every family who lived in money Mississippi, every black family who had a teenage son left. And so the people who couldn't afford the expensive equipment were the only people who were still using sharecroppers. And then the last of the sharecroppers left. And I think by 1965, there were no sharecroppers left in America.

• 1:31:18Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  So it was.

• 1:31:20Steven Rinella?

  So the whole opportunity was evaporated.

• 1:31:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so he, you also have, he arrived at the last gasp of a way of being in the world and didn't know it.

• 1:31:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Yeah. You know what kind of broke my heart in a weird way is, uh,

• 1:31:41Steven Rinella?

  I always have and do hold up World War II guys on a pedestal.

• 1:31:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31:46Steven Rinella?

  Emmett Till's murders, man. World War II guys, and it was like a service pistol.

• 1:31:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they beat him to death with his, uh, with his Ithaca, uh, 45. And, uh,

• 1:31:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, these got like a number of those guys were veterans.

• 1:32:01Speaker 03

  Well, and they were all veterans. And I mean, one of the guy was a veteran from Pellul. And then JW Malum was wounded at the Colmar Pocket. Uh, one of the things in the book is, so all of the, uh, all of his.

• 1:32:18Speaker 03

  Every book ever written about Emmett Till has a sort of huge line of mistakes through it because there was like a typo in J.W. Milam's obituary and it got the net number of his unit wrong. So people in these books will be describing the battles he would have been in, but he wasn't there. And so one of-

• 1:32:34Steven Rinella?

  You know, there's a thing like that. It's so crazy, man. I don't want to get it. There's a thing like that in the history of the American buffalo.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Steven Rinella?

  There's a thing that you can't read a book about that subject that doesn't include a thing that never happened.

• 1:32:45Speaker 03

  Dude, see this makes-

• 1:32:46Steven Rinella?

  Because of a mistake.

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  So it makes, and so, so this makes-

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  And it's in every book.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  So, and 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 end noted. You got to show your work.

• 1:33:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Speaker 03

  And I was like, so I'm not taking anything for granted. And so I found, I found every obituary that had ever been published that mentioned this unit because I didn't know it was a typo yet. And so I just believed it. I just, so I found every, every single obituary that mentioned that. And then I called the eldest son of every one of those dead veterans and said, or emailed or called and said, hey, did your dad bring home anything from the war? And this really nice guy outside of Fort Worth, Texas was like, my dad was like the logistics officer for that unit and he brought home a copy of every single piece of paper. They're in my filing cabinet. You want to come see them? So I went and spent a couple of days at this guy's house and I went through every piece of paper from this unit and J.W. Milam's name wasn't on any of it. And so then I went to these incredible,

• 1:33:48Speaker 03

  there's this guy named Eric who works in the archives in St. Louis. So in the 1973, there was a terrible fire in St. Louis at the American Archives and it burned up almost every single World War II veterans' personnel file. They're all gone. They all burnt. The unit files with like the morning reports, all of that is still there. So you can recreate someone's service record, but it's unbelievably tedious.

• 1:34:15Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  And so I eventually recreated his entire service record. And then I went to France and then I walked the battlefields, you know, like walked through the forest where the foxholes were, wrote all of this and then cut it all out of the book. So but yeah, but I but I spent a lot of time with JW Mylum's. You know, JW Mylum legitimate, you know, people claimed he won a Silver Star. I don't think that's true, but definitely wounded in the Cold War pocket, like right there on the border. Where was that? It's like. I nodded like I knew, but I don't know. No, it's right on the border between Germany and France. Okay. Uh, so like, uh,

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  Strausberg, like when I when I'd went there, I flew into Stuttgart in Germany and drove across the border. I see. As opposed, that was the closest airport. Yeah. So you really tracked these guys down? I did, you know, and I had a whole Pellou thing on Melvin Campbell. And like, it's it's just.

• 1:35:17Speaker 03

  When a legitimate war hero thinks that it is necessary to torture and kill a child to preserve something that he feels is being lost, like, you know,

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  you know, I say in every book talk, like, yeah, forces had a lot to do with him until his death, but forces didn't kill him. Everybody in that barn that night had free will. But what's so interesting is you watch these people move across the South. You know, my family sort of moving roughly the same places, generation by generation that the Mylums are like, you know, the Mylum family was married at one point into the DuPont family, you know, and so you watch them generation by generation.

• 1:36:04Speaker 03

  Poor lifespans get shorter, not longer. You were watching a family keep going west to try to try again with the next generation, failing generation after generation, continuing to move west until there's nowhere left to move west. And so the generation that sort of washed up and there was nowhere left to go was like JW and Roy's parents' generation.

• 1:36:30Speaker 03

  And so they were in the hills. They had their noses pressed up against the glass of the last great gold rush in the cotton industry. And they didn't get down into the delta until right after it collapsed. And so for generations, they've been trying to get into this place where this land was. And they get there and then the promise of it is all gone. And, you know, four generations of the Myla, of Myla men either killed someone violently or were killed violently. And you just watch, you're just watching a family disintegrate. And Emmett Till, with his hope and with his young teenage sense of adventure and of boundary stretching and of looking for the line.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  He, you know, he intersected, he was on the way up and he intersected with a group of people who had been auguring in for generations. And like, that has something to do with all of this. You know, I mean, it's like, you just forget, like, you know, there's a storage unit in Chicago right now that the Till family has that has Emmett Till's toy train in it.

• 1:37:40Steven Rinella?

  No kidding.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  I mean, is it, you know, I mean, like, this is 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.

• 1:37:57Steven Rinella?

  Corinne and I were having a conversation yesterday in, in preparation for you coming. And somehow, like many conversations I'm in, came around to OJ.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  Look, I

• 1:38:11Steven Rinella?

  I got a weird, I, oh, man.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  I met OJ once.

• 1:38:13Steven Rinella?

  And, oh, it's a great story.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Steven Rinella?

  You should start by your, your quick OJ story. Then I'm gonna talk about the conversation we were having about you that turned into a conversation about OJ, which I'm gonna turn into a conversation about the acquittal. But go ahead.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  That's perfect. The, uh, uh, and then I'm gonna riff off of the acquittal and turn it back to OJ. All right, no, the, uh, uh.

• 1:38:32Steven Rinella?

  You don't know what point I'm gonna make.

• 1:38:33Speaker 03

  Did you put LSD in this coffee?

• 1:38:35Speaker 00

  Nope.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  The, uh, and so, uh, uh.

• 1:38:40Speaker 03

  I was at a Kentucky Derby and I asked, I ran into OJ at a like 6 a.m. cocktail party. And uh, cause the horses were training and uh, I asked him who was gonna win and he said lawyer, lawyer Ron, cause he had, uh, he said he had lots of positive experiences with lawyers.

• 1:38:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  And then I obviously went and took a shower. Like, yeah, Jesus Christ.

• 1:39:02Steven Rinella?

  Wow.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  I was just like, you decapitated somebody. I gotta get away from you, man.

• 1:39:07Steven Rinella?

  So.

• 1:39:08Speaker 03

  Allegedly.

• 1:39:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. The gloves don't fit.

• 1:39:11Speaker 03

  No, you must have quit.

• 1:39:13Steven Rinella?

  Um, Corinne and I were conversing about, I was telling her, she was sweating that she hadn't finished your book.

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  Oh, come on.

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 1:39:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:26Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:39:46Steven Rinella?

  we're gonna acquit you, but I don't want nothing to do with you from here on out.

• 1:39:52Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 1:39:53Steven Rinella?

  And with, with OJ's jury,

• 1:40:00Steven Rinella?

  they weren't, they weren't considering whether he did it or not.

• 1:40:05Steven Rinella?

  You know, it was like, it was about the LAPD.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Steven Rinella?

  And it was kinda like, we're gonna let you go, right?

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  Cause these guys are totally, even though you did it, they're also the worst.

• 1:40:17Steven Rinella?

  We, we 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.

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:23Steven Rinella?

  This is about at the LAPD.

• 1:40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Steven Rinella?

  So like, your guilt or not guilt, like, you know.

• 1:40:28Speaker 03

  That's not, that's not what's on trial here.

• 1:40:29Steven Rinella?

  Piece of shit, but this is not what I'm talking about.

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Steven Rinella?

  Piece of garbage.

• 1:40:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:34Steven Rinella?

  But this is not what I'm talking about.

• 1:40:36Steven Rinella?

  That that kind of that was so surprising that like the the the jury, the jurors that acquit them have a like tacit acknowledgement. You did it. And that's bad. But we're not going to participate in this system somehow. Or like, like, maybe you could explain it better. But like, they weren't deciding if they did it or not. It was something different.

• 1:41:02Speaker 03

  So one of the things that's so interesting is in the the sort of white establishment, you know, the the the defense attorneys who are all very, very well educated, you know, a couple of Princeton guys. And

• 1:41:17Steven Rinella?

  Chris is not a Princeton person.

• 1:41:18Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:41:19Steven Rinella?

  What'd you do at Princeton?

• 1:41:20Speaker 00

  Politics.

• 1:41:22Steven Rinella?

  Hold on, your whole four year degree?

• 1:41:25Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 1:41:25Steven Rinella?

  You ever told me that?

• 1:41:27Speaker 03

  She likes to say I went to school in Boston.

• 1:41:29Speaker 00

  Politics of the Middle East, that was my.

• 1:41:30Steven Rinella?

  Hold on, you went to college at Princeton? Maybe I knew that and forgot it.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  She's

• 1:41:35Speaker 00

  I don't really talk about it too much.

• 1:41:37Steven Rinella?

  Rich guy over here.

• 1:41:38Speaker 03

  What are we gonna do?

• 1:41:39Speaker 00

  That's not the case.

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:41:43Steven Rinella?

  Big rich guy over here.

• 1:41:44Speaker 00

  Their financial aid package.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  What's your name like Van Cacklehorse the fourth? What are you like?

• 1:41:50Speaker 00

  Schneider.

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  Oh, the knight?

• 1:41:53Speaker 00

  My dad's from Brooklyn and my mom is from Beijing.

• 1:41:56Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, so they so you don't, there's not some big like

• 1:41:59Steven Rinella?

  She didn't like inherit the position at Princeton.

• 1:42:01Speaker 03

  Oh, so I just, oh, okay. I didn't know if there was like a, you know, a Schneider industrial challenger sitting out here at the at the Jets Center.

• 1:42:09Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, not that Schneider.

• 1:42:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:11Speaker 00

  We're a family Taylor's.

• 1:42:13Steven Rinella?

  Schneider Von Thurston.

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  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. It's it, there's a series of shell companies, so you'll never find out.

• 1:42:28Steven Rinella?

  I think it's coming back to me now. I think I knew that.

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  So but like the lawyers.

• 1:42:33Steven Rinella?

  I just think of her as the lady that makes earrings out of claws and peckerbones and whatnot.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Where did you guys meet?

• 1:42:40Steven Rinella?

  Right here.

• 1:42:42Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:42:43Steven Rinella?

  At a different building. Same same space, different building.

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  The so, you know, one of the things that the defense lawyers clearly understood was that they were going to use this case. I mean, they talked about this openly, like all of their record, you can go read now all the stuff. They talk openly amongst each other that like. We're gonna use this murder as our shocking act of violence to try to maintain some control that because of these court rulings we're losing. So you know, like JW

• 1:43:11Steven Rinella?

  They wanted to tie it into desegregation.

• 1:43:14Speaker 03

  Yet very much.

• 1:43:15Steven Rinella?

  Desegregation.

• 1:43:15Speaker 03

  So they shaped the, dude, when you read, go read the Look magazine story that's all phony. They make JW Milam sound like he's Plato. Do you know what I mean? Like, like Aristotle? He's the most sophisticated. Like, there's a newspaper reporter I won't name, but I'm always convinced this guy makes stories up because every time he quotes a cab driver, I'm like, dude, I've had a lot of cab drivers. I've never had a cab driver, like, who says the exact, perfect, eloquent, philosophical thing I need at the, like, you're, that just didn't happen. So, but the lawyers are making up these quotes that are coming out of JW Milam. And the way you realize it is, when you, at Ohio State, they have a huge tranche of, of some of these notes.

• 1:43:59Steven Rinella?

  But I can't move on. Who's the writer?

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  I can't tell you.

• 1:44:03Steven Rinella?

  Is he alive?

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  Yes. I'll tell you later.

• 1:44:06Steven Rinella?

  There's a funny quote that someone was saying that stand-up comedians, stand-up comedy is mostly acting outraged by something of you said that you made up that a fake friend said.

• 1:44:16Speaker 03

  By the way, this, by the way, that's really good. Like, there is no stand-up without the straw man. Like, I gotta say.

• 1:44:25Steven Rinella?

  You make up a friend, you make up a thing he said, and then that thing pisses you off and you talk about that.

• 1:44:30Speaker 03

  That's right. Or it's like, yeah, or like, you know, the, the great Louis C.K. bit about, uh, uh, every, someone else on the airplane being pissed about the wifi. He's giving a minute, it's gotta go to space. And you're like, when I heard that, I'm like, oh, he's clearly both people in this scenario. He's both the person having a temper tantrum and also the other version of him who is self-aware enough to know that, like, so anyway, the, uh, uh, but maybe, no, anyway, I love, uh.

• 1:44:59Steven Rinella?

  So you're not gonna tell me the writer?

• 1:45:00Speaker 03

  No. And so, uh, I filibustered that. And so, the, uh, but you, you see things that are coming out of JW Milam'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 Milam 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,

• 1:45:39Steven Rinella?

  What, which people?

• 1:45:40Speaker 03

  The murderers.

• 1:45:40Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:45:41Speaker 03

  At the end of Roy Brown's life.

• 1:45:42Steven Rinella?

  The people, the, the, the families that, the, the people that acquitted, like, they didn't want them around.

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  No, and they couldn't get crop loans and they couldn't, you know, Leslie Malum became a drug dealer and JW Malum, uh, was arrested for food stamp fraud and like,

• 1:45:57Steven Rinella?

  That, that was one of the biggest ironies, I think, is that if you'd asked, if you went and asked people, it'd be like, um, you know, if you said like, hey, give me the, give me your like prejudice views on what like minorities are up to.

• 1:46:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Steven Rinella?

  Like, oh, food stamp fraud, drug dealing, and the dudes that killed Emmett Till.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  Well,

• 1:46:23Steven Rinella?

  Food stamp fraud, drug dealing.

• 1:46:26Speaker 03

  So, so, I mean, I don't know if, how it is here, but like, especially in Mississippi, the accusation is always the confession. Like, people only get mad at other people.

• 1:46:35Steven Rinella?

  I read that quote and I told that quote to my wife and then I had to try to explain it to her because you did a better job of explaining that the accusation is the confession.

• 1:46:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, you, you only ever despise in other people what 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. Uh, JW Malum is one of the, uh, main bootleg runners for the sheriff. Who's investigating his murder. I mean, there's a whole theory of the case that Sheriff Strider made sure to claim jurisdiction because the body was found in Tallahatchie County. The kidnapping happened in LaFlore County. The murder happened in Sunflower County. And the, but the case was tried in Tallahatchie County because it was the most conservative.

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  And it's also where the killers were from. A bunch of the members of the jury were like, related to them. This is very much, this is not a random act of violence. This is one tribe, members of one tribe of people killing a child of another tribe of people to send a message.

• 1:47:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:45Speaker 03

  You know, and like, you know, you, and

• 1:47:49Speaker 03

  And like the, the, the grand conspiracy of what, so when, when the FBI wanted to reopen the case in, in 2004, oh three, oh four, they had to exhume the body. And so the reason they had to exhume Emmett Till's body was because the jury had said that that wasn't Emmett Till that they had pulled out of the river. So what the, the defense's theory of the case that the jury bought was that the NAACP in cahoots with the Communist Party had gotten a body out of a morgue, thrown it in the Mississippi, in the Tallahatchie River, weighted it down just enough, you know, obviously understanding the deep science of your body releasing decomp gases.

• 1:48:31Speaker 03

  So they would know exactly how much weight to have so that it would sink, but then float again, you know, somebody had really done some work. And that this body that, and then Mamie Till had said it was her son in exchange for getting a payout of a life insurance policy and that Emmett Till was alive. And that all of this had been done to, uh, to make, uh, to make Mississippi look bad and to help the Communist Party take over America. And that was the case that the jurors made, that was the case the lawyers made. And that was what the jury bought. So they had to exhume him and do a DNA test to make sure that the body in Borough Cemetery in Chicago was Emmett Till. And I mean, and of course it was. And you know, so the, and then like, I'm gonna find this thing real quick, cause I like,

• 1:49:16Speaker 03

  you know, you talk, this is what is being taught about, this is from a textbook, uh, that's being taught right now in the Mississippi Delta about the Emmett Till murder. I mean, you talk about the accusation is always a confession, only, sort of, only a state that has so actively rewritten history to such a degree would be worried that someone else was come, come along and do it the other way. So like, you know, Mississippi has been banning textbooks forever and rewriting texts, like, my Mississippi history textbook stopped before the civil rights movement. Uh, so this is what is, this is from a textbook. And this is the only thing in the textbook that is about Emmett Till. And this is, this is being taught right now.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  In 1955, J. P. Coleman, the attorney general from Choctaw County, was elected governor of Mississippi and was elected governor in Mississippi's first general election after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Coleman promised to keep the schools segregated. He proved to be a moderating force during a very difficult time. Just after the election, Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago, allegedly made allegedly made a pass at a white woman in a rural store. Two men kidnapped him, beat him, killed him, and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River. The coverage of the trial and acquittal of his accused murderers, who later admitted their guilt in an article in a national magazine, painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens. That's the textbook. And so like.

• 1:50:44Steven Rinella?

  Well, what about that? Like, like, help me understand.

• 1:50:47Speaker 03

  So the thing for me is that the entire murder is still taught in the context of the death of a the worst part about a death of a child.

• 1:50:56Steven Rinella?

  Or is it a poor image?

• 1:50:57Speaker 03

  Or is it sure made the the

• 1:50:59Steven Rinella?

  No, I understand.

• 1:50:59Speaker 03

  Sure made the white people look bad. And like, you know, I think like

• 1:51:07Speaker 03

  somewhere along the line, learning our history was transformed into sort of relentlessly attacking people with it. And I think like, you shouldn't be use you shouldn't learn the history of the Mississippi Delta to determine who was currently politically problematic, who should be canceled. You should learn the history just to know it. And so like, I don't feel guilty. Like, I don't I don't have some weird like southern guilt thing, but I do think it's a combat upon me to know what happened on this land if I'm gonna farm it. And, you know, and I do think that that it is essential to be able to say, this is what happened here.

• 1:51:50Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's not like, you know, we're still on the land. You know, it's not like I haven't. I failed to understand how learning the history of this in any way negatively affects me. I mean, I've thought about that a lot because that's so that, you know, that conversation is in the air so much. And like, I just failed to understand how teaching this history in a school could do a single thing to me or anyone related to me.

• 1:52:14Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Steven Rinella?

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• 1:53:00Steven Rinella?

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• 1:54:26Steven Rinella?

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• 1:55:07Speaker 00

  What kind of opposition to your work have you encountered or threats or people trying to undermine it?

• 1:55:19Speaker 03

  Not really, because you know, there's that one I'm from there and like, there's the, you know, is that great, I think it's Willie Ray, Willie Ray Hubbard wrote it, but like Robert Earl Keen does the sort of version I know. He's like, I may not wear a Stetson, but I'm willing to bet, son, that I'm as big a Texan as you are. Like, I sort of feel like, we've been, I've been there from a long, we've been there a long time. We're gonna be there a long time. I can kind of say whatever the hell I want. There's a sense of also, it's just true. And like, the people who are from there know it, you know, and, and are much more nuanced about this than our two dimensional politicians would lead you

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  to believe. Like, you know, like Mississippi is, Mississippi and Mississippians are complicated. And, and so there's been very little pushback. And, you know, it's interesting because, I mean, I love the Mississippi Delta. I didn't know hardly any of this. I certainly didn't understand, you know, is it Paul, the Paul Simon song that's just, it's not the highway through the cradle of the Civil War. But I don't think I knew that until this. I mean, there's, there's just a lot about the actual history of the land and the way that both, you know.

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  I think Faulkner is so often misunderstood. I think if you go read The Bear, you go read Go Down Moses, you go down, read Abs- you go read Absalom, Absalom. Like, I think one of, if not the most animating things in all of his work is the bewilderment at the Mississippi Delta going from uninhabited swamp to a agricultural factory in 25 years.

• 1:57:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  And it would have taken a thousand years in Bavaria to kill a forest that big. And I think like, the idea of civilization as the enemy of nature and how that flows through Faulkner's work.

• 1:57:19Speaker 03

  I mean, like, when I read The Bear, when I go read, like I said, Go Down Moses or Absalom, like, I feel, I mean, I feel like Faulkner's read now only through the prism of race. And I like, I actually think that's not, I think you have to read Faulkner through the prism of his deep bewilderment at the sort of existential loss and trauma of having that much wilderness just erased.

• 1:57:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:45Speaker 03

  And like, what that does to a people. Like, I mean, it's not an accident that like, nothing about the land where Emmett Till was killed has anything to do with God. Like, this is not, this is man-made land. This is not, none of this bears the fingerprint of the Creator.

• 1:58:03Steven Rinella?

  Got it. And so wholly overridden.

• 1:58:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:58:16Steven Rinella?

  History, man, like, I get what you're saying. And history's, history's so tough and the telling of it's so tough.

• 1:58:27Steven Rinella?

  The other day, I took my kids, we were in New Mexico for a wedding.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Steven Rinella?

  And I took my kids to Bandelier.

• 1:58:33Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:34Steven Rinella?

  Okay. The site of old ancestral Puebloan settlements. There's a big sign, you get up in this high overlook and you can see Los Alamos laboratories off to the west, okay? And there's a sign there. And it's a National Park Service sign. And the sign is about...

• 1:58:53Steven Rinella?

  The sign is exclusively about that Puebloan people weren't allowed to go on the Los Alamos land, starting in 1943, or whatever the hell it was. Okay. And the freedom to go there still hasn't been restored. I said to my kids, uh, like, I called more, I said, man, uh, like, I want you to understand what this sign is. And I want you to understand what's not here.

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:59:20Steven Rinella?

  And I'm like.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  That's crazy.

• 1:59:21Steven Rinella?

  Well.

• 1:59:22Speaker 03

  Well, I. Wouldn't you want to not be on a site where we test nuclear weapons?

• 1:59:25Steven Rinella?

  I said, if I was gonna write this sign, you could call my kids in here and ask them. I said, if I was gonna write this sign, I would say, um, and it's worth pointing out that the thing they invented on that site over there saved probably 250,000 American lives. And. Cause we would have had to have invaded the mainland of Japan.

• 1:59:49Speaker 03

  Eh eh eh.

• 1:59:49Steven Rinella?

  You know, it's something like, there's just, I was, I was like, kind of lecturing them. I'm like, there's just always more to the story.

• 1:59:56Speaker 03

  And, and also like, if you don't want someone to drop an atomic bomb on you, maybe don't attack them. Cause like, there's a certain degree of don't start shit, won't be no shit.

• 2:00:06Steven Rinella?

  I know. And it's like.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  Like.

• 2:00:07Steven Rinella?

  Once you become, but like.

• 2:00:08Speaker 03

  Like.

• 2:00:09Steven Rinella?

  The point being, once you become aware, like you did, like you got obsessed.

• 2:00:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:00:13Steven Rinella?

  And you, you attempted your book, you attempted your book to do

• 2:00:19Steven Rinella?

  to unravel every little bit.

• 2:00:20Speaker 03

  We're, we're, we're trying to turn.

• 2:00:21Steven Rinella?

  You're gonna unravel like, whoa, who's this guy that happened to walk by one day? I'm gonna track his family back a hundred years.

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  Cause you know, there, there's a sense that like, uh, we're trying to turn our descriptions of American history into tweets. And like, it's too complicated for a sign over, you can, like, you can't do in a sign the interplay between the Pueblo people and the atomic bomb. Or like, you know, I got deep into the history. I didn't realize that like the Choctaw and the, uh, Chickasaw, that the Chickasaw were sort of deeply intermarried into the British and the Choctaw were deeply intermarried into the French.

• 2:01:02Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:02Speaker 03

  And so that the, uh, the last free band of Natchez Indians in Mississippi was sold into slavery by the Choctaw and the French. And were sent down to work the plantations in Haiti and a French military officer there ran into years later, one of those last Natchez chiefs. And he was down in the harbor and whatever the town, it's Cap Haitien now, I can't remember what the name was then. And it was sort of like, what are you doing? And he was just staring longingly up at home. And so like, you know, if you're going to tell the history of, you know, if you're going to tell the history of the native settlements in the Mississippi Delta,

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  you have to talk about like, you know, tribes were being erased by other tribes, tribes were being erased by the French, tribes were being erased by the British, the Choctaw and the Choctaw and the Chickasaw sort of picked, there were a bunch of powers down there and nobody picked the US. And so they sort of, you know, like you, you understand like there are these warring factions and like, when you get into the history, it is so complicated. And, you know, all of the Indian mounds in Mississippi, I didn't realize this, they elites built their houses on top of them as a way to sort of like symbolically stand on the shoulders of the ancestors. Yeah.

• 2:02:27Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's like, it's like if your last name is Whitney or something, you know, it's the same kind of idea. And it just occurred to me, researching all this history, how little history we actually know. Yeah. Like, I don't like, go back to the, the, the native town right there. I don't know. We don't know who the good guys and the bad guys were. You know, we, we preserve these mound structures, but we don't know Yeah. 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. Hmm. And like, so I, I just, I know an incredible amount about the history of this piece of land, but like.

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:03:16Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Speaker 03

  And so I, I found that to be like, I think with history, I don't, I, I don't think we need some like sort of weird judgy sign. I just think we need to know everything we can possibly know about a square of land because the truth of it is going to be so much more complex than we realize. The truth of it will never fit into sort of one ideological sides version of this. I mean, you know, this, the, the book sort of goes after tenants of a bunch of, the truth is not helpful to ideology.

• 2:03:51Steven Rinella?

  You know, a little thing that's hit me reading it.

• 2:03:53Speaker 03

  Does that make sense at all?

• 2:03:54Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:56Steven Rinella?

  The, um, earlier I mentioned my friend, my friend Doug Dern.

• 2:04:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:00Steven Rinella?

  Who lives, uh, like on his family's farm.

• 2:04:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:05Steven Rinella?

  Uh, he lives a very deep history existence. Where it seems like

• 2:04:12Steven Rinella?

  the path, like when you're hanging out with them, it seems like the past is all happening right now.

• 2:04:18Speaker 03

  I love that.

• 2:04:19Steven Rinella?

  Do you follow me like, like every, like little tree or like trees and whatever? It's all like, it's all, it's all compressed.

• 2:04:27Speaker 03

  Well, I, I love the idea that like the places I like best are with a membrane between the present and the past is so thin you can see through.

• 2:04:34Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:34Speaker 03

  And so like, I feel like there's a version of the Mississippi Delta where this is all happening at once.

• 2:04:41Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:04:42Speaker 03

  And it's all happening right now. And, you know, Nathan Bedford Forrest Cavalry is walking the same road as J W Miles driving as Willie Reed is walking as, uh, you know, if you ever listen to Crossroads, uh, go see my friend Willie Brown. Willie Brown lived right by the barn. And so like, like, I think there's a way in which all of this is happening all the time, over and over simultaneously.

• 2:05:09Steven Rinella?

  He, there's this thing Doug, when you, when you get in the local tour, there's this thing Doug does it that like, like I was like, has reminiscent of Emmett Till.

• 2:05:20Steven Rinella?

  In that, uh, you go by this farm and Doug's like, so.

• 2:05:26Steven Rinella?

  In the past, because in his father's time, some kids stole some gas.

• 2:05:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:32Steven Rinella?

  Some ag gas from farmer.

• 2:05:35Steven Rinella?

  The farmer comes running out and the kids jump in the car and take off. And the farmer takes a shotgun and shoots one of the kids right the back of the head.

• 2:05:45Steven Rinella?

  High school kids.

• 2:05:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:05:47Steven Rinella?

  Um, he gets acquitted. He thought it was bird shot.

• 2:05:53Steven Rinella?

  Is their argument. What? Yeah, he thought it was bird shot, not buckshot or slug or whatever the hell he killed.

• 2:05:59Speaker 03

  The idea that a sophisticated hunter doesn't know what's.

• 2:06:02Steven Rinella?

  Well, that's just like.

• 2:06:03Speaker 03

  That's just ridiculous.

• 2:06:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that's ridiculous. And like, it's just funny a way of looking at, you know, history and it has all these same things like, like when it was logged and who cleared it. But it's like in his, when you're out with Doug. Um, yeah, it's like that kid's driving down the road right now. Do you know what I'm saying?

• 2:06:22Speaker 03

  Well, that.

• 2:06:22Steven Rinella?

  I love that kind of like, I love, like, I like that kind of experience and that's so much of what I got from your book is, is um, this way of just.

• 2:06:31Steven Rinella?

  Like taking chunks of ground and like really getting them.

• 2:06:34Speaker 03

  So I, I made a map of everything that had happened. It's on my phone of everything that had happened in this square of land. And it's interesting because the map doesn't show sort of gradations based on chronology. It's just all there. So you're sort of drive, I can drive around and look at the stuff and it's like, and I also made a map just like that of the South Side of Chicago. And so like, and uh.

• 2:06:56Steven Rinella?

  That's, that's where my dad was brought up.

• 2:06:58Speaker 03

  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 are the Chicago White Sox. You know, in Chicago, until they started dying, big Mississippi high schools would have their reunions in Chicago. Like Greenwood High School, Greenville High School, because so many people had moved to Chicago, it was easier for the six people still in Mississippi to go up there than for all 400 to come back. And so like, you know, Mississippi functioned. As a, you know, Argo Summit, Illinois, where Emmett Till's family settled, they all worked at the Argo starch plant. They make Argo cornstarch.

• 2:07:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I know that brand. They still make it.

• 2:07:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they make caro syrup, make your pecan pie with, and they all live there. They called it Little Mississippi. Like, there were so many Mississippians. And so, you know, I feel like, I mean, one of the things I love to do is drive people from the Delta around the South Side of Chicago, like Hyde Park, sort of south, and like, you know, because it's mile after mile after mile after mile of perfectly manicured, middle-class bungalows. And I'm like, you know, if you drive through the Mississippi Delta, it's super decayed. And, you know, Mississippi Delta is like, it's like Dorian Gray, you know, it wears its sins on the outside. And they're just abandoned buildings and collapsed cotton gins, and it feels like a failed experiment, which is what it was.

• 2:08:20Speaker 03

  I mean, the global capital markets came here, stripped out their 10%, and then moved on and left the rest of us there to clean up the mess. And you get this sense that like, that, you know, that, that, that all of that money that's on the South Side of Chicago should still be in the Mississippi Delta. Like, all of those, like, that's what it should look like. So anyway, I, I, you know, I don't ever, my accent gets pegged all the time on the South Side of Chicago. It's from Mississippi. Like, people, people just hear it.

• 2:08:54Steven Rinella?

  They'll know.

• 2:08:54Speaker 03

  And know. And like, or if you're in Chicago, and you ever have to give your driver's license, either at a hotel, or like at a will call, like, you know, if you go to a baseball game, almost inevitably, the person working will look at it and see that it's Mississippi driver's license and say something. That happens to me more in Chicago than it doesn't. I mean, like, you know, they're

• 2:09:15Steven Rinella?

  The connection's that strong.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  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, there are now like Polish's and hot 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.

• 2:09:33Steven Rinella?

  As a last thing, before we wrap up, can you hit me with the, what's your take on Ivory-billed Woodpeckers? We've covered that bird good.

• 2:09:40Speaker 03

  All right, so.

• 2:09:41Steven Rinella?

  Remember, we saw that one.

• 2:09:43Steven Rinella?

  We did.

• 2:09:43Steven Rinella?

  We got to handle one. It's dead.

• 2:09:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. So the law, well, one of the things that's crazy is like they.

• 2:09:50Steven Rinella?

  Had a little foot tag on them, all dried out in that drawer. Remember that?

• 2:09:54Speaker 00

  Cornell University.

• 2:09:55Speaker 03

  The, that's right. So the, there's a huge fight, as you know, between the, the scientist at Cornell and then those folks down in, in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, who claimed to have seen one.

• 2:10:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:06Speaker 03

  There's the guy.

• 2:10:07Steven Rinella?

  Cause what they're always, yeah, what they're always, what they're looking at is, is a piliated.

• 2:10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:13Steven Rinella?

  Woodpecker. That's the argument.

• 2:10:15Speaker 03

  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 bill versus the piliated woodpecker. Anyway, I went out for a couple of days in the, in the swamps. It's all around the Stennis Space Station.

• 2:10:30Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  And, uh, uh, what's interesting is that.

• 2:10:35Steven Rinella?

  You know what we didn't do?

• 2:10:36Speaker 03

  What?

• 2:10:36Steven Rinella?

  Just to recap for people. There's a bird, the ivory bill woodpecker went extinct in the 50s.

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, and.

• 2:10:42Steven Rinella?

  Now that they knew where the last one was and it was in a nest and they cut its tree down.

• 2:10:46Speaker 03

  Here we go. And, and in April, 1944, a human being made the last confirmed sighting of an ivory bill woodpecker. The fight to save them had failed. The last large hardwood patch in the lower Mississippi Valley was 80,000 acres in Louisiana called the Singer Tract, named after the sewing machine company that owned it. There were four nests in John's bio and a confirmed roost tree in Max's 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.

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  The National Audubon Society went to work to save the woodpecker habitat, lining up state and national support, even getting the war department to agree to accept less wood in exchange for saving the bird. The company cut it all down anyway. The company executive who answered all of these pleas responded by saying, we are just money grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folk with ethical considerations. So many animals had vanished from these river hardwood swamps. The red wolf, the cougar, the Carolina parakeet, and now the saws had come for the Lord God bird itself, the ivory bill woodpecker. The wood got turned into military packing crates and plywood gasoline tanks for fighter planes.

• 2:12:07Speaker 03

  The Audubon Society sent a researcher back into the vanishing forest to see if any birds remained. He found one. The researcher told a colleague who was also an artist that if he ever wanted to draw an ivory bill from a living bird, the time was now. Don Eccleberry, just 23, went south to the swamps. He searched and followed and looked for specific nests and trees. Walking through a swamp while looking up is a learned skill. One evening around dusk, as barred owl sang in anticipation of a nighttime kill, Eccleberry 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. Eccleberry notated the details in his journal.

• 2:12:50Speaker 03

  He stared at the last known ivory bill woodpecker and would never forget its face. "Hysterical pale eyes," he wrote. And so also the lumber, the family that cut down those forests is the family that founded and nurtured and invented Aspen. So like people who love their wilderness don't give a shit about yours. You know what I mean?

• 2:13:12Steven Rinella?

  No shit.

• 2:13:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like.

• 2:13:14Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man, really?

• 2:13:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so like it's infuriating me. Like you come down, you're gonna cut down my wilderness and then go somewhere else and preserve wilderness and act like.

• 2:13:23Steven Rinella?

  Your vacation spot.

• 2:13:24Speaker 03

  That's right. And that's hardy fuck you to them. Sorry, Phil.

• 2:13:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh, good. I don't do the TV edits as somebody else's problem.

• 2:13:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's fine.

• 2:13:36Steven Rinella?

  I call Clay even beeps out when someone says like, gosh darn, Clay will beep it out.

• 2:13:41Speaker 03

  You know, it'd be really funny if you beeped out stuff that wasn't cursing and make it look like somebody is just.

• 2:13:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that'd be a great trick to do on somebody. Yeah, his mom be like, you should be shaming yourself.

• 2:13:51Speaker 03

  My mom is always like, uh, cause my mom listens to all of these. And she's always, you need to leave the locker room, talk in the locker room.

• 2:13:58Steven Rinella?

  So do you think there's still ivory bill woodpeckers around? If you had to guess, and I'm talking the kind of guess where there's a gun to your head.

• 2:14:07Speaker 03

  Gun to my head?

• 2:14:08Steven Rinella?

  And there's, here's what I like the latest kind of thing out. There's an omniscient being that knows all truth. This omniscient being has a pistol.

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:14:18Steven Rinella?

  It says, I know the omniscient being. I know if there are or not. I'm going to ask you the question. If you get it right, you live. If you get it wrong, you die.

• 2:14:31Speaker 03

  Okay, this is a fun game.

• 2:14:32Steven Rinella?

  And then I go.

• 2:14:33Speaker 03

  What's that line from the West Wing? If the Oscars were like that, I'd watch.

• 2:14:36Steven Rinella?

  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.

• 2:14:46Steven Rinella?

  It's just pure, you live or die.

• 2:14:48Speaker 03

  Here's what I think.

• 2:14:48Steven Rinella?

  And I say, are there Ivy Bill Woodpeckers alive right now? I, my answer is no.

• 2:14:52Speaker 03

  All right.

• 2:14:52Steven Rinella?

  If with the gun to my head.

• 2:14:53Speaker 03

  All right, so I will say this. Uh, my answer is not going to be no. Although I am hesitant to offer a wilderness hot take in the, uh, corporate headquarters of Meat Eater with Mr. Meat Eater. So I, I don't want, I feel like you probably know more about this than I do. I say that I think there is because, no, and here's why. And here's why.

• 2:15:21Steven Rinella?

  No, I hope you're right.

• 2:15:21Speaker 03

  No, no.

• 2:15:22Steven Rinella?

  See now the omniscient being is like, geez, maybe I'm wrong.

• 2:15:24Speaker 03

  No, so here the, here are the two reasons that I, that here's why I think that. I think one, uh, I think that there is a tremendous

• 2:15:35Speaker 03

  desire from sort of the ornithology establishment for it to not be true. And so something about the argument against it feels a little bit to me like the lady does protest too much.

• 2:15:46Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:15:47Speaker 03

  There's something about how aggressive they're being that makes me think that they're operating from a place of weakness, not confidence.

• 2:15:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:15:54Speaker 03

  And then the, and then the other thing I think is that, uh, I think, you know, I love to watch your show. And one of the reasons is because I like to watch you guys move through a universe, the scale of which is so unimaginable to me. Like we're sort of glassing over three valleys and just thinking like, we don't, there's so much we don't know about what goes on in the wilderness.

• 2:16:24Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:16:25Speaker 03

  That like, I tend to think that like,

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  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're secrets and they're mysteries that

• 2:16:48Speaker 03

  like the deep ocean remain unknown and almost unimaginable and they're sort of wonder and surprise. That would be my argument.

• 2:16:55Steven Rinella?

  Great. Uh, I, I, I'm gonna holster my pistol. Well, I'm not the omniscient being.

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, I was about to say, by the way, the moment you fake shot me was the moment you actually, your inner narcissism revealed that like, in this story, you're the omniscient being. So I'm glad. I'm like, I'm like, wait a minute.

• 2:17:13Steven Rinella?

  I don't know how I got into that role.

• 2:17:14Speaker 03

  I'm like, wait a minute. I'm like,

• 2:17:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:16Speaker 03

  He just shot, oh shit, Steven is the omniscient being.

• 2:17:18Steven Rinella?

  I know. I somehow got, I somehow got into the role. I didn't want the role,

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  No.

• 2:17:22Steven Rinella?

  but I did. There I was.

• 2:17:24Speaker 03

  If, if,

• 2:17:24Steven Rinella?

  Ladies and gentlemen.

• 2:17:24Speaker 03

  If nominated, I will, that's right.

• 2:17:27Steven Rinella?

  Uh, get your brain, if you want to stretch your brain out real good, like a real good brain stretching, uh, pick up The Barn, The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi.

• 2:17:42Steven Rinella?

  By a man who, who was born and raised 20 miles down the road from that murder. Uh, it's a landscape history. It's American culture. Um, it's politics, it's agriculture. Um, it's everything, man. It's everything. It's the whole, everything squeezed uh, beautifully and elegantly in, into a single book. Uh, Wright Thompson, thank you very much for coming on, man.

• 2:18:07Speaker 03

  Man, uh, thanks so much for having me.

• 2:18:09Steven Rinella?

  Appreciate it. Thanks.

• 2:18:37Steven Rinella?

  If you spend a lot of time outdoors, you got dogs, you got kids, you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean. A thing we do in our, in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household, if you go look, open the door on any one of them, they all got WeatherTech. We get a car, we throw the mats out and put in WeatherTech. Cause that way, when there's a mess, it's like your kid's fault, your dog's fault, it's the weather's fault, doesn't matter. You take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new. I'm telling you, if you've got a vehicle, put WeatherTech in there, you're gonna be happy you did it. And check this out, American-made floor liners and cargo liners, okay? They laugh in the face of all weather. Go take a look for yourself today at weathertech.com.

• 2:19:17Speaker 04

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• 2:20:15Speaker 04

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• 2:20:17Steven Rinella?

  Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday, okay? The best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer hunters plan everything else around. And OnX Hunt's rut calendar does this for you and helps take the guesswork out of your planning. It tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area so you know when to book the time off, when to have the whole camp locked in and ready, or conversely, when it's still too early to burn out your best spots. You only get so many rut hunts in your life, so use the rut calendar within OnX Hunt to make

• 2:21:01Steven Rinella?

  the most of the whitetail rut this fall.

• 2:21:04Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.