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

Transcript

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

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear.
• 0:15
  Speaker 2: Listening past, you can't predict.
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: Anything brought to you by first Light. When I'm hunting,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds, no compromise,
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: just gear that works. Check it out at first light
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: dot com. That's f I R S T L I
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: T E dot com. All right, everybody join today? By
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Right Thompson, four time New York Times best selling author,
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: grew up in the Mississippi Delta. Yes, sir, if you
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: recognize that name, you might know him because uh right.
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: As a senior writer for ESPN dot Com ESPN the
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: magazine worked at all kind of newspapers over the years,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: covering all aspects of sports. He wrote the book Pappy Land,
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: The Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: And he wrote The Cost of These Dreams, sports stories
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: and other serious business. He was the editor for a
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: time and the best American sports writing, Oh yeah, man,
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: I had over the years made it into a handful
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: of the best American essays and travel writing and all
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: that kind of stuff. Not essays travel writing. But yeah,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: never never got a nod from the old sports writing.
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: Well that now I know who to blame.
• 1:38
  Speaker 3: You should definitely blame me. That's a tremendous oversight, only
• 1:42
  Speaker 3: because like my favorite sports writing is outdoors writing.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: You know, I thought they were being prejudiced against this.
• 1:49
  Speaker 3: Well they they probably were, I added in one version
• 1:51
  Speaker 3: of it. It's just like like I only screwed you
• 1:54
  Speaker 3: once got its school someone else.
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: I'm over it now, man, I'm over it.
• 1:58
  Speaker 3: Uh.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: We're here today to talk about well, we're here today
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: to talk about a book, but particularly like a Let
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: me start over explaining this. First off, here's the book
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: we're here to talk about. It's called The Barn. Now
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: take note of the title. It's called The Barn. The
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: subtitle is the subtitle is the secret history of a
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: murder in Mississippi. When I was a little kid growing up,
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: I was aware of I was aware of the outlines
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: of the murder of Emmett.
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: Till in what year, in nineteen fifty five as a kid.
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: When I at the point when I hit college, I
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: could have told you that Emmett Till was a boy
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: who was murdered in Mississippi for whistling at cat calling
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: something some affront to a white woman.
• 2:50
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: And he was killed. The killers weren't punished, and his
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: body turned up in in uh what river?
• 3:00
  Speaker 3: A hatchy river?
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: His body I knew his body turned up into river,
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: and I knew it was tied to some piece of
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: heavy equipment.
• 3:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah, to the a cotton gin fan.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Yep, I knew that. And this tells that story. But
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: the reason I wanted to have you on and talk
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: to you is I want people to understand that story.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: But I think that it's fascinating to me. And even
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: when I knew you were working on the book and
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: coming out that you were calling the book the Barn,
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: where in the book you take a very unique way
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: of looking at a patch of ground. And I think
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: that this way of looking at a patch of ground
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: is applicable to people's lives who love nature, who love
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: the outdoors, who like the hunt, and who like the fish, whatever,
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: people who have a close relationship to the land, which
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: is something I encourage. I try to encourage and go
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: and pick a piece of ground right and ask yourself elf,
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: not only like, not only what is the history of
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: this piece of ground. But what are the things that
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: happened that made it be that this piece of ground
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: is now where you find inspiration or whatever? Right, Meaning,
• 4:17
  Speaker 1: if you have some hunting cabin up north that you
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: would or a honey cabin down south whatever the hell
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: where I'm from in Michigan, like everyone's hunting cabin is
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: for whatever reason, is always to the north. Just probably
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: parts of the country where everybody's hunting cabin is east, south,
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: whatever the hell. But for us in the Upper Midwest,
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: every the action is always perceived to be up north. Yeah,
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: so you have a hunting cabin up north, and by
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: looking at how you handle this piece of ground, and
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: the barn is on a patch of ground, and m
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: Attill was murdered in a barn. Yep, Bizarrely, I would
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: never have guessed this is true. Bizarrely that barn still
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: sits there today.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: I mean, and it is. It's a guy's barn. I mean,
• 5:04
  Speaker 3: there are Christmas decorations in it, All of his duck
• 5:07
  Speaker 3: hunting gear is in it. The owner of the barn,
• 5:09
  Speaker 3: who I love and gotten to know really well. You know,
• 5:13
  Speaker 3: he duck hunts every day of duck season. And it's
• 5:16
  Speaker 3: a barn sitting on a piece of land. And I
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: mean you know this well, but it was a uniquely
• 5:22
  Speaker 3: American idea for the Land Ordnance Act of seventeen eighty five,
• 5:27
  Speaker 3: which is Thomas Jefferson, which essentially dropped a grid over
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: America and divided it into townships and ranges. And so
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: the barn is in section two of Township twenty two north,
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: range four west, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. And like,
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: the thing that I thought was important is it's a
• 5:45
  Speaker 3: thirteen hundred year history of this square of land.
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: And that yeah, that is when we get going on this,
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: Like that is one of the things I want to
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: focus on, is this idea that anyone in an America
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: who has an attachment to a place or maybe it's
• 6:03
  Speaker 1: a place where something horrible happened, like in the case
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: of your book, can learn to understand their spot, can
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: like learn to understand their spot in a deep history sense.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: That's right, Like the culturally transactionally, like what are the
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: things that needed to happen? Who are the people that
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: needed to live? What are the actions that needed to occur?
• 6:26
  Speaker 1: That has it be that your favorite spot?
• 6:31
  Speaker 3: You know?
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, like why is it there? And why are you there?
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: And how did how did we get here? I mean,
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: like I have this fantasy that we could do the
• 6:41
  Speaker 3: entire country this way like I did one thirty six
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: square mile block. I would love it if people would
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: take their own version of that, whether it's it's like
• 6:52
  Speaker 3: you said, whether something terrible happened here, or whether is
• 6:55
  Speaker 3: this the thirty six square miles where the last cattle
• 6:57
  Speaker 3: drove was in this part of Montana exactly? And now
• 7:00
  Speaker 3: tell me every single human being whoever went in and
• 7:03
  Speaker 3: out of this square of land, and every dollar that
• 7:06
  Speaker 3: went in and out. I mean, one of my favorite
• 7:08
  Speaker 3: parts of this was I felt like, you know, there
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: are long stretches of nature writing in here, because I
• 7:13
  Speaker 3: felt like you had to evoke the world pre civilization,
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: like what was this like before people got here? You know?
• 7:20
  Speaker 3: And the Mississippi Delta was, as you know you've been
• 7:23
  Speaker 3: down there. I mean, it was a vast, almost uninhabitable
• 7:27
  Speaker 3: hardwood swamp until around nineteen hundred and then they started
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: clearing it and building sort of the last generation of
• 7:34
  Speaker 3: cotton plantations there, and so trying to understand how what
• 7:39
  Speaker 3: should have been a swamp became, you know, a man
• 7:44
  Speaker 3: made cotton factory. I mean, I you know nothing about
• 7:48
  Speaker 3: the Mississippi Delta unless you cross the levee where all
• 7:50
  Speaker 3: those hunting camps are. Nothing about the Mississippi Delta has
• 7:54
  Speaker 3: any of its roots in nature. I mean, this is
• 7:56
  Speaker 3: man made land, and I think that's an important thing
• 8:00
  Speaker 3: to talk about.
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm struggling like a little bit. The story you
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: tell is so complicated.
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: Yeah, let's.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Let's do this, man, if you don't mind it, first off,
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: give a little, give a little. How did you get
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: into sports writing?
• 8:15
  Speaker 3: So it's funny. I wanted to write about music and
• 8:18
  Speaker 3: I was randomly assigned to the sports section at the
• 8:20
  Speaker 3: college newspaper. But I fell in love with it because
• 8:26
  Speaker 3: you know, there's nothing you can't write about through the
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: prism of sports. And there's something incredible about a locker room,
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: because like, these people have nothing in common except they've
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: won some genetic lottery. And so I've always found that
• 8:39
  Speaker 3: to be fascinating. And I'm most interested in tribes and
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: tribalism and how we organize ourselves and how belief systems
• 8:49
  Speaker 3: are handed down from generation to generation, sort of that
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: as the ultimate inheritance. And so much of sports is
• 8:55
  Speaker 3: rooted in sort of how we code our sort of
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: tribal inheritance to hand from generation to generation. And I mean,
• 9:05
  Speaker 3: I think that's also true for hunting and fishing. I mean,
• 9:07
  Speaker 3: the ways in which we pass on the things that
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: are important to us about ourselves that we inherited from
• 9:14
  Speaker 3: our parents or our grandparents, and how do we transfer
• 9:18
  Speaker 3: those to another generation of people. And I feel like
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: hunting and fishing is a huge part of that, you know,
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: in sports like that. You know, I've always been fascinated
• 9:31
  Speaker 3: by the role the games we love play and shaping
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: of our identity. And so I've liked that from the
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: I've liked that forever, you know, and I've liked you know,
• 9:41
  Speaker 3: I started working for ESPN twenty years ago, and it's
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: you know, it's the you know, it's the greatest job
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: in the world because you just get to sort of
• 9:50
  Speaker 3: follow your obsessions. Yeah, you know, so you're still active.
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: You write about sports now, and you're right about everything
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: for like Kentucky derby basketball, football.
• 9:59
  Speaker 3: It's just it's like whatever, Uh, It's it's really lucky
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: because it's just the thing that I'm into at that moment.
• 10:06
  Speaker 3: I mean, I'm doing a thing right now on a
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: tennis star who became a spy, you know, and that's
• 10:13
  Speaker 3: and like it so it's a World War two thriller
• 10:16
  Speaker 3: and so like it's just whatever you're I've been very
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: lucky in that sense to get to follow obsessions. Yeah uh.
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: And I imagine you like to pull a cork too,
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: And that's why you wrote about bourbon.
• 10:25
  Speaker 3: Uh yeah, man, let me tell you the Uh that
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: was when you can still have non reimbursable work expenses
• 10:31
  Speaker 3: written off on your taxes before they close that loophole.
• 10:35
  Speaker 3: Uh uh that was great. I mean, like, you know,
• 10:39
  Speaker 3: I had to write I finally had to turn the
• 10:41
  Speaker 3: book in because I'd already spent all the advance on whiskey.
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: I was like, well, I can't, you know, there is
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: no money to give back. But that was fun man.
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: And and yeah, they were with the tax code stuff.
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: They really screwed writers because they and then now they're
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: handing all that out to people that operate on tip functions. Well,
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: and they screwed writers in the and now they're turnaround
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: and basically given the whole it's in the whole world
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: to tip people. Well, and also are they so much
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: more important than writers?
• 11:10
  Speaker 3: Well, and also in screwing over writers, they really screwed
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: over small business owners because the h you spend money
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: on your small business to like it's an it's an
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: investment in the idea of it in the future. And
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: so when you you know, if I'm doing if I'm
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: trying to build my my business, there are legitimate tax
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: write offs that are really important that you just can't
• 11:38
  Speaker 3: do anymore. And so like there was you know, there
• 11:41
  Speaker 3: are things you there are things you can't go do
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: on a flyer being like you know, I think this
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: is for instance, I think this is a great story.
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: I can't get anybody to bite unless I go spend
• 11:52
  Speaker 3: a little bit of money to go aboard it. And
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: so you know, that whole ecosystem was just eliminated almost overnight.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: No one wants to hear about that. We'll have to
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: take that offline.
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: No, that's right. But the only writer, by the way,
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: like that. There are eleven people right now who are like, yeah,
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: like leaning in, that's right.
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: They're like that's true. Yeah, uh, next thing I want
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: to do. Yeah, just because we're we're gonna, of course
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: step back and go forward. Of course, layout layout I
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: kind of gave a quick outline of the murder of
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: Mmett Till. Yeah, but like it's is as quickly as comfortable. Yeah,
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: tell the story of the murder of Emmett Till so
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: we can so we can start talking about this barn
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: that's right, like this piece of ground.
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: So, uh, Emmett Till had just turned fourteen years old
• 12:40
  Speaker 3: and he lived in Chicago. Very much a boy I mean,
• 12:43
  Speaker 3: he still liked comic books. Uh, he had just gotten
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: interested in girls. At his fourteenth birthday party, his mother
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: and her friends overheard him and his friends playing spin
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: the bottle, okay, and so like, you know, that's in
• 12:56
  Speaker 3: an age where you still like, you know, I want
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: to kiss a girl, you have a rush own, but
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: also still like comic books. Like that's such a specific
• 13:04
  Speaker 3: moment of boyhood. And he went south to visit his family.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: He's from Chicago, but they were all sort of Mississippi
• 13:12
  Speaker 3: expats and they were going to take the train down
• 13:14
  Speaker 3: just before the end of summer before schools started, and
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: he was going with his cousin, next door neighbor and
• 13:19
  Speaker 3: best friend. There was a guy named Wheeler Parker and
• 13:21
  Speaker 3: so this was nineteen fifty five. This was the year
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: after Brown v. Board of Education, which is only important
• 13:27
  Speaker 3: because the whole South, that's the Supreme Court case that
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: integrated schools. The whole South just ignored it. So the
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: next year they had to do Brown two. So the
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: Supreme Court had to come in and be like, no, really,
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: we minute, you have to do this. So that whole summer,
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: everybody was waiting on that Supreme Court decision to come out. Meanwhile,
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: there was a governor's election in Mississippi where they were
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: all sort of it was a race to the bottom
• 13:53
  Speaker 3: for these votes, and so their whole campaign was about
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: school segregation. So they these you should get on newspaper
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: com and read these speeches these politicians were giving because
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: they just were saying outlandish stuff, and so it comes South.
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: He doesn't really know any of this is going on.
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: He gets down. You have to understand, he's overweight, he
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: has a stutter. The first day he gets there, he
• 14:22
  Speaker 3: goes out to work because it's they're picking cotton now,
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: and he goes out to work with his cousins and
• 14:27
  Speaker 3: his family, and he makes it about a half day.
• 14:31
  Speaker 3: It's really hot out there, and he gets sent back
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: to the house to help the women and so you know,
• 14:37
  Speaker 3: so this is this thirteen year old just turned fourteen
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: year old boy who is down with his cousins, who
• 14:44
  Speaker 3: is not having a great week. And on that Wednesday,
• 14:48
  Speaker 3: they go to a little store in town to go
• 14:51
  Speaker 3: get like ice cream and sodas and things, and so
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: all the boys drive in and he's in the store
• 14:57
  Speaker 3: for a minute alone. But it's a sq door later,
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: Carolyn Bryant, who was the woman that he whistled at,
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: and her husband and his step brother, his half brother
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: are the ones who killed him. She is in there.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: She said she made up this outlandish story of all
• 15:15
  Speaker 3: the things he said to her. You know, I've ft
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: white women before. One, everyone on the porch could hear
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: every word being said in the store, and that never happened.
• 15:24
  Speaker 3: And two he had a stutter, he couldn't have said it.
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: And so she comes outside and he you know, I
• 15:32
  Speaker 3: so relate to this, remembering being a fourteen year old boy.
• 15:35
  Speaker 3: I think he's trying to show off for the older kids,
• 15:37
  Speaker 3: and he whistled at her cat call whistle, and he
• 15:41
  Speaker 3: looked around and saw in his cousin's eyes real quick.
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: Over the years, there's been a lot of debate, Yeah,
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: about who said what and how long the exchange.
• 15:52
  Speaker 3: Was, so what actually happened. And a lot of this
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: is well intentioned accidental misinformation because made me tell sort
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: of had a certain version of how she thought her
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: son's last days went. The last living eyewitnesses a guy
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: named Reverend Wheeler Parker, who I just saw down in
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: Mississippi last weekend, and he was standing next to him
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: when he whistled, and Emmett saw the fear in his
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: cousin's eyes and was like, something's wrong, and so they ran.
• 16:25
  Speaker 3: That was on a Wednesday. The thing you have to
• 16:27
  Speaker 3: understand is it was less than twenty four hours after
• 16:31
  Speaker 3: the election of that governor's race. I was telling you
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: about where these governors had been. These candidates had been
• 16:37
  Speaker 3: saying outlandish stuff. A lot of talk about bayonets, a
• 16:42
  Speaker 3: lot of talk about violence, a lot of talk about
• 16:44
  Speaker 3: defending your way of life. And you know, most of
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: the voters understood they were just politicians chasing votes, but
• 16:52
  Speaker 3: some people heard them and took them serious. And so
• 16:54
  Speaker 3: you know, in Mississippi especially, there's such a direct link
• 16:58
  Speaker 3: between political rhetoric and violence. I mean, it's not an
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: accident that the day after John F. Kennedy gave his
• 17:05
  Speaker 3: famous civil rights speech, Medgar Evers was shot. I mean,
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: those things are, those things are, especially in Mississippi, always
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: really closely related. So he steps down into this cauldron
• 17:15
  Speaker 3: where the population has been whipped up into a frenzy
• 17:18
  Speaker 3: by months of five people trying to prove they are
• 17:21
  Speaker 3: more segregated than anyone else. And so then there's just
• 17:25
  Speaker 3: a kid in the middle of that. You know, being
• 17:27
  Speaker 3: fourteen is about testing boundaries, and the dominant culture of
• 17:32
  Speaker 3: Mississippi was about protecting boundaries.
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: And I mean this is right where you grew up.
• 17:38
  Speaker 3: I mean, my family farm is twenty three miles from
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: the barn, and so and so they go to town.
• 17:45
  Speaker 3: Emtt and his cousins go to Greenwood for Saturday night
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: to go to the movie. They stopped at a plantation
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: on the way home. At a party, both Wheeler and
• 17:53
  Speaker 3: Emmett had their first ever SIPs of alcohol, a little
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: sip of moonshine. They didn't like it, but there that age.
• 18:00
  Speaker 3: Both of them had their first drink. That night, fourteen
• 18:02
  Speaker 3: and sixteen, they rode home. They accidentally hit a dog
• 18:07
  Speaker 3: on the way home, and Emmett was begging them to
• 18:10
  Speaker 3: stop the car and go check on the check on
• 18:12
  Speaker 3: the dog, and it was too dark, and his cousins
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: wouldn't And so they drove home in silence while Emmett
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: quietly cried in the back seat of the car over
• 18:21
  Speaker 3: the dog. They went to bed. Two and a half
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: hours later, Roy Bryant and his brother JW. Milem show
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: up at the house beating on the door, asking to
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: see that boy in Chicago that did the talking. They
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: pointed the gun in Whigler Parker's face. First. He still
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: remembers the staring down the barrel of a nineteen eleven
• 18:43
  Speaker 3: forty five. He was just like, the barrel's a lot
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: wider than you think it's going to be, and like
• 18:47
  Speaker 3: he remembered that. He remembered the smell of the whiskey
• 18:50
  Speaker 3: on their breaths, on their breath They went and got
• 18:53
  Speaker 3: emmet up. He was sleeping with his cousin, Simeon Wright.
• 18:57
  Speaker 3: He sime And remembered he died probably ten years ago,
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: but Simeon remembered his whole life. How long it took
• 19:04
  Speaker 3: him and to get his shoes on. Because he was scared,
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: They took him out. They drove him around all night.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: They took him to Roy and j W's brother Leslie's barn.
• 19:16
  Speaker 3: The barn they you know, they tortured him the pistol,
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: whiped him with the forty five, and there was a
• 19:24
  Speaker 3: witness named Willie Reid who heard him crying out for
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: his mom. And then they killed him and threw his
• 19:32
  Speaker 3: body in the Talahatchie River where he would have stayed.
• 19:35
  Speaker 3: You know, I went to the banks one time with
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: a member of his family, was Sharon Wright, who's Moses right,
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: Moses Wright's niece. Moses Right is Emmatt's uncle. That's whose
• 19:44
  Speaker 3: house he was staying in the night he was kidnapped.
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: And I'm standing on the banks of the Talahatchie River
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: with her, and I just sort was like, what do
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: you think about when you're here? And she's like, I'm
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: just so grateful, and I'm like what, and she's like
• 19:55
  Speaker 3: The Talahatchie River in Mississippi is known by black families
• 19:58
  Speaker 3: as the Singing River because there were been so many
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: dead bodies thrown in it. And she looked at there,
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: she looked at me, and he goes he got out
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: of the river, and you know, they tried to State
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: of Mississippi saw the body and tried to bury it immediately.
• 20:11
  Speaker 3: There was a whole doug the East Money Church of
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: God in Christ. They had a preacher, they had pallbearers,
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: they had the body out there. By the way. The
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: embalmer did an incredible job at the Black funeral home.
• 20:25
  Speaker 3: His name was Champ Jackson. Champ Jackson's daughter works at
• 20:28
  Speaker 3: the Delta Crown Room in the Memphis Airport. She's in there.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: She's in there right now. See her all the time.
• 20:34
  Speaker 3: And so they had him out there. They were going
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: to bury him. They had a whole doug. And then
• 20:38
  Speaker 3: in Chicago, the steel Workers Union went to war for
• 20:42
  Speaker 3: him until and so they were so because one of
• 20:45
  Speaker 3: the most powerful guys in the steel workers union lived
• 20:48
  Speaker 3: in their neighborhood and knew him. And so they got
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: the mayor of Chicago to get the governor of Illinois
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: to get the governor of Mississippi to call the sheriff
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: of Lafour County and stop the burial. And so they
• 21:00
  Speaker 3: put him on a train and took him to Chicago,
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: where his mother insisted on an open casket. And that's
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: how we know the story, hm, I mean, it's really
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: you know, there when I started doing this book, there
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: were probably twelve people left alive who knew him, and
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: now they're probably eight. I mean they've been dying in
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: front of me. Oh man.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and you hit it, You hit it right, you
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: get to talking to people.
• 21:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And so what's so interesting is and it sort
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: of goes back into the land. And you know, one
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: of the reasons I wanted to do the book is
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: set as a history of the land, because in Mississippi,
• 21:35
  Speaker 3: people lie, but the land does not. The land tells
• 21:38
  Speaker 3: the story. The land. The history of Mississippi is embedded
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: in those courthouse records and who owned what land and
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: how it moved. And Emmett Till's family, even though they've
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: lived in Chicago for seventy years, feel like Mississippians, Like
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: they are definitely people in exile. You know, we grow
• 21:58
  Speaker 3: sweet corn on our farm, and they would always want
• 22:01
  Speaker 3: me to bring him up sweet corn. You know, they
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: want hickory wood from the Mississippi Delta for their smokers.
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: They kept trying to plant magnolia trees in their yard
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: in Chicago, but they just wouldn't. And so there's a
• 22:14
  Speaker 3: real sense of people who were disconnected from the you know,
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: Moses Right had to leave his farm. There were so
• 22:23
  Speaker 3: many death threats. He couldn't harvest his last crop. The
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: trial was in September. They were already picking cotton. He
• 22:29
  Speaker 3: tried to hang on to get his crop out of
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: the field and couldn't. He had to give away his dogs.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: There was a newspaper reporter there the day he left,
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: while he was giving his dogs away, weeping, and so
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: like everybody had to leave in the middle of the night.
• 22:42
  Speaker 3: Willy Reid, the witness, he had to. He got so
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: many death threats that a couple of days after he testified,
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: Moses Right and Willy Read were the first black people
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: to go into a court in Mississippi and accuse a
• 22:56
  Speaker 3: white man of murder. And that was nineteen fifty five.
• 22:59
  Speaker 3: That had never happened before. And so Willie Reid had
• 23:02
  Speaker 3: to walk six miles down a gravel road, down the
• 23:04
  Speaker 3: Druda Uval Road, which is the road. The barn is
• 23:07
  Speaker 3: on the Druda Ruval Road. If you want to sort
• 23:09
  Speaker 3: of play with the idea that like in like that
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: sort of one hundred years of solitude way the time
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: isn't real. That road was built by Nathan Bedford Forest brother,
• 23:19
  Speaker 3: so and Nathan Bedford Forrest in the Winner of eighteen
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: sixty three and sixty four, marched his cavalry down that
• 23:26
  Speaker 3: road past the Doherty Bio. So I think in some
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: world where time doesn't exist like we think it does,
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: those horses in JW. Milem's green and white Chevrolet two
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: tone pickup truck past each other night after night after
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: night after night. And so Willy Reid walked down that
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: road past Fanniel lou Hamer's Freedom Farm and it didn't
• 23:47
  Speaker 3: exist yet, past where it would be, and there was
• 23:49
  Speaker 3: a car waiting for him at the intersection of the
• 23:51
  Speaker 3: drud Uval Road and Highway eight. And the man driving
• 23:55
  Speaker 3: that car was Mud Grevers, and it was the sort
• 23:57
  Speaker 3: of first civil rights thing he had ever done. And
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: Willie Reid moved Chicago, changed his name, and he was
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: married to Juliet who I know. I just saw her
• 24:08
  Speaker 3: in Mississippi. Was married to her ten years, maybe before
• 24:13
  Speaker 3: she knew that he had some other history. So like,
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: these are people who were forced to leave a place.
• 24:18
  Speaker 3: You know, I'm sure it's a coincidence. But Moses Wright
• 24:22
  Speaker 3: took a job where he cleaned a local theater in Chicago,
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: and he went to work every night at the exact
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: same time that the kidnappers had knocked on his door.
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: And he kept a garden because he's a country boy.
• 24:36
  Speaker 3: He hunted and he fished, you know. Wheler Parker told
• 24:40
  Speaker 3: me about his dad. One time a tornado hit their
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: house when they still lived in Mississippi, and it ripped
• 24:44
  Speaker 3: the roof off the smokehouse and it was in the
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: middle of the night in the rain, and his dad
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: had them out there finding bacon and hams and sausages
• 24:51
  Speaker 3: because it had all been thrown all over the field.
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: And he's like, holy shit, you know, we got to
• 24:54
  Speaker 3: go like yeah. And so, you know, these were people who,
• 24:58
  Speaker 3: for general like had real rhythms in a country way
• 25:01
  Speaker 3: of life. Moses right, like to hunt and liked to fish.
• 25:04
  Speaker 3: He liked to make his own sausage with that sage
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: in it. He liked brains and eggs every morning for breakfast.
• 25:11
  Speaker 3: And he lived in concert with the land. And then
• 25:16
  Speaker 3: was just sent to a city to move into a
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: housing project and they let him. The Illinois Central Railroad
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: gave him a patch of land and he did this
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: incredible garden. They made fake mules out of like wheelburrow wheels,
• 25:30
  Speaker 3: wheelbarrow wheels, and they went out, and that was the
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: closest he ever felt to home again is in his garden.
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: And another old man who'd sort of been forced to
• 25:39
  Speaker 3: leave Louisiana did it with him, and that was Fred
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: Hampton's father, the founder of the Black Panthers. So Emmett
• 25:48
  Speaker 3: Till's uncle and Fred Hampton's father worked a garden together
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: in suburban Chicago.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: HM. In order for you to start tracking the history
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: of this piece of ground barn, you had to kind
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: of settle, or at least in the book, you go
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: through the process of settling where the murder occurred, because
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: there was like a lot of oh like people like
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: you think, like how would you lose sight of that?
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: But there was all these different versions of where it happened,
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: so that one of the first things in the book
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: is exploring where was it.
• 26:21
  Speaker 3: So what's crazy about it is so the killers sold
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: their story a confession to a national magazine because they
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: needed money. And so in the process of doing that,
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: there were a lot more people at the barn that
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: night than just two guys. I mean, they were eight
• 26:37
  Speaker 3: to ten probably, and so most of those people got
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: away with it. So they had to tell a phony
• 26:44
  Speaker 3: version of the confession couldn't be real because they were
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: protected by double but they couldn't. And it was a
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: family who did it. I mean, it's you know, in
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: that barn that night. There were three brothers and a
• 26:56
  Speaker 3: brother in law, you know, and so this is like,
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: this is one family killing, like it's very tribal, and
• 27:06
  Speaker 3: so they had to write everybody else out of the story,
• 27:11
  Speaker 3: and so they moved everything. And you know, there are
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: a lot of history books that quote from the fictitious
• 27:18
  Speaker 3: account that ran and Look magazine. So you know, Leslie Milam,
• 27:23
  Speaker 3: who's barnet is Leslie Milam in nineteen seventy three called
• 27:26
  Speaker 3: his preacher, Macklin Hubble in Cleveland, Mississippi, who I interviewed
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: before he died, and said, you know, his wife actually
• 27:34
  Speaker 3: called the preacher and said, Leslie needs to see you.
• 27:36
  Speaker 3: Can you come over? And he goes out to this
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: sort of ranch house on a sun baked dead end
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: street that dead ends into a cotton field on the
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: very outskirts of Cleveland, Mississippi, and there's this guy dying
• 27:48
  Speaker 3: on the front couch of the room and it's Leslie Milam.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: And before he dies, he wants to confess to his
• 27:54
  Speaker 3: preacher that he was one of the people who killed him,
• 27:56
  Speaker 3: until and his preacher listens and they pray together, and
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: the preacher leaves. The preachers so shook that he left
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: there and drove out to the store and money just
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: to sort of commune with it. And then Leslie Miham
• 28:07
  Speaker 3: died before the sun came up. And so like there
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: were people you know, made till got asked late in life,
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: how does it feel that these killers got away with
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: this murder? And she sort of smiled, What do you
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: mean they got the death penalty? You know, they all
• 28:18
  Speaker 3: died young, riddled up with cancer.
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: That's the thing I want to touch on later is
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: they got acquitted, but they were cursed.
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: Man, they were definitely they were definitely cursed.
• 28:29
  Speaker 1: And like it was kind of like what we talked
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: about before we started recording. Yeah, it's like oj Simpson,
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: well just he got acquitted, but he was cursed.
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, there's a sense of like one of
• 28:37
  Speaker 3: the things that you want to do is excavate the
• 28:40
  Speaker 3: blood and the dirt. You know, Like I've made a
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: real point to follow, you know, if this is a
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: story about memory and erasure. Within eyesight of the barn
• 28:53
  Speaker 3: there is the Harvard's Peabody Museum started digging, and it's
• 28:57
  Speaker 3: a Native American city. And the reason it's archeologically interesting,
• 29:01
  Speaker 3: and this is, you know, right in township twenty two north,
• 29:05
  Speaker 3: right where the barn is. The reason it's so interesting
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: is that a whole civilization rose and fell there, and
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: in many ways it mirrors the sharecropping civilization that would
• 29:17
  Speaker 3: rise up centuries later in the same place, almost a
• 29:20
  Speaker 3: thousand years later. But what's interesting to the Harvard and
• 29:25
  Speaker 3: all the other archaeologists who've been digging on this site
• 29:27
  Speaker 3: for years is there's something there that shouldn't be there.
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: So there's palisade walls, there's a there battlement architecture, and
• 29:36
  Speaker 3: there were like loopholes, arrow loopholes within the walls with
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: like interlocking fields of fire like this, like somebody was
• 29:44
  Speaker 3: defending themselves here and all of that that's all been erased.
• 29:49
  Speaker 3: We don't know who was the aggressor, we don't know
• 29:52
  Speaker 3: who was the defender. We don't know anything about these
• 29:56
  Speaker 3: tribes that live there, other than by the time Ernando
• 30:00
  Speaker 3: de Soto rolled along, they were all gone. And this
• 30:04
  Speaker 3: is so on this piece of land, there was a
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: mono crop culture that where the elites lived on the hills,
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: on the mound structures inside the gates, and then other
• 30:17
  Speaker 3: people lived in little cabins sort of out as they
• 30:21
  Speaker 3: worked the land, and it mirrored so completely the ecosystem
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: that would rise and fall. I mean, in some ways
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: nineteen fifty five, in some ways the murder of Emmettil
• 30:31
  Speaker 3: was the death of sharecropping, because the first mechanized crop
• 30:35
  Speaker 3: ever planted had been nineteen forty three. You want to
• 30:38
  Speaker 3: do something fun, you can lay down these timelines of
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: histories of the research and development, production and then mass
• 30:46
  Speaker 3: production of cotton pickers and the electric guitar. Because it's
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: almost month to month. So as the technology is invented,
• 30:55
  Speaker 3: that is pulling the last people out of the Mississippi
• 30:57
  Speaker 3: Delta because you don't need because it's become mechanized. On
• 31:02
  Speaker 3: a parallel track, the technology is being invented for the
• 31:06
  Speaker 3: music of those people. You could hear an acoustic guitar
• 31:09
  Speaker 3: ring out across a field or in the country, but
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: in a dark loud bar, you need electricity, and so
• 31:15
  Speaker 3: you can watch those things develop in tandem. But anyway,
• 31:19
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's fascinating to me to understand that there
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: was on the spot where Emmett Till was killed, there
• 31:28
  Speaker 3: was an entire civilization that rose and fell, and we
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: say history is going to remember, but that just isn't true.
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: I mean, history almost exclusively forgets. And then in that
• 31:39
  Speaker 3: same square of land you have Docre Farms, which is,
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: you know, the home and birthplace of both the Delta
• 31:44
  Speaker 3: Blues and therefore all American music, I mean, all protest
• 31:48
  Speaker 3: music is rooted there. You know. Charlie Patton, who grew
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: up I mean almost with an eyesight of the barn,
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: was the first real blue Star Paramount Records. In nineteen
• 31:58
  Speaker 3: twenty nine. He sang first person songs, name checking local cops.
• 32:03
  Speaker 3: I mean this was I mean, this was protests. This
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: is ten soldiers and Nixon's coming. This is fuck you,
• 32:09
  Speaker 3: I won't do what you tell me. This is f
• 32:12
  Speaker 3: the police, this is you know, it's not an accident
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: that Easy's grandparents owned a grocery store sixteen blocks up
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: Broadway from the house where one of them, at Tills
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: Killers lived. I mean, these are, like you know, Sam Cook,
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: a change is gonna comes from the same little town
• 32:29
  Speaker 3: in the Missisippi, Delta's Muddy Waters. I'm a man. You know,
• 32:33
  Speaker 3: Nate Dogg is from that same little town. So every
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: time you're listening to any g funk, there is a
• 32:39
  Speaker 3: like direct line back to township twenty to north range
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: four west. And so you know, you've got Nathan Bedford
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: Forest family. There, You've got Fannie Lou Hamer's Freedom Farm. There.
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: There was a Nazi pow camp in between Drew, Mississippi
• 32:54
  Speaker 3: and the barn in the forties where they were bringing
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: Nazi prisoners to work in the cotton fields. And interesting
• 33:00
  Speaker 3: that the uh, the local people realized that uh, the
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: they were helping the Nazis uh soldiers like cheat and
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: teach them how to like how you way down, like
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: you know, how to get how to get up on
• 33:17
  Speaker 3: the people running it. But some of the Nazi soldiers
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: stayed and married local women and are still there. And uh,
• 33:24
  Speaker 3: you know they were the Nazi soldiers were treated a
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: lot better than their sort of the black sharecroppers who
• 33:29
  Speaker 3: were working alongside of them. But uh, but you know
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: this was real. I mean, there was a whole universe
• 33:35
  Speaker 3: in this square of land, and you know it's it
• 33:41
  Speaker 3: would be interesting if you could we could do this,
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: Like I would love to know the history of the
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: square of land where men where we're like where we
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: are sitting right now.
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: Someone needs to do a project where you track every
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: like every section all not every section, but every township.
• 33:54
  Speaker 3: Every town Someone should do a whole the United States
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: township by township, because I would love.
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: To know some townships wouldn't have many readers.
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: Well no, but I mean like going too. Let me
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: tell you, I mean like the there's that Frank and
• 34:06
  Speaker 3: Deborah Popper who are in academics. Oh yeah, the Buffalo Commons,
• 34:10
  Speaker 3: the Buffalo Commons, right, So I'm way into the Buffalo Commons.
• 34:13
  Speaker 3: Because if in the this is actually interesting, it speaks
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: to this. But like if the wellspring of the American
• 34:21
  Speaker 3: identity is the fact that manifest destiny was achieved. And
• 34:25
  Speaker 3: if you look at Frank and Deborah Popper's research, that
• 34:28
  Speaker 3: many of the places settled in the Mad Rush West
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: almost immediately started depopulating. So they're vast stretches of the
• 34:35
  Speaker 3: country now that are technically frontier. And if we didn't
• 34:38
  Speaker 3: actually settle it, what does that suggest? And one of
• 34:41
  Speaker 3: the things is a lot of this book is a
• 34:44
  Speaker 3: mapping and so I've got this great railroad map that
• 34:48
  Speaker 3: shows around nineteen hundred, and it's the railroads coming up
• 34:52
  Speaker 3: from the north, south, west, and east, and and you
• 34:58
  Speaker 3: see them just stop because they haven't connected yet. So
• 35:01
  Speaker 3: this is twenty years after Frederick Turner's essay. This is
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: twenty years after this was.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: What Right's referring to is there was a the US
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: government used to define frontier.
• 35:12
  Speaker 3: Is a certain number of people per square.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: Mind by population density. Yeah, and there was a point
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: at which the Frontier officially closed in America, Yeah, because
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: the population density had been met.
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: That's right there.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: And then there was the observation later that all of
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: a sudden it went, it went unremarked upon, but all
• 35:31
  Speaker 1: of a sudden places kind of went back to frontier.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: That's right, because people would come out in homestead, these
• 35:37
  Speaker 1: forty acre chunks on arid land, but it wouldn't work, Yeah,
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: and so they leave then, and so technically went back
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: to frontier.
• 35:44
  Speaker 3: I mean, and by the way, almost immediately. And so
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: you know, in nineteen hundred, the Missy Delta, like I said,
• 35:49
  Speaker 3: was largely uninhabited hardwood Swell.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to I want you to jump into
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: that a little bit like, so you were talking about
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: Native American history, but kind of explain the Delta as
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: one of the last great wildernesses.
• 36:01
  Speaker 3: So the from seventeen fifty somebody listening, who knows more? Whenever,
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: from whenever, the spinning jenny was invented until the DuPont
• 36:12
  Speaker 3: Laboratory in Wimington, Delaware, in nineteen thirty three invented nylon
• 36:16
  Speaker 3: and made petroleum the world's most important commodity. From the
• 36:20
  Speaker 3: spinning genny to nylon, cotton was the world's most important commodity.
• 36:25
  Speaker 3: I mean the thing that seeds out. No, but no,
• 36:28
  Speaker 3: the seventeen sixty four it's the thing that starts to
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: allow mass production, so you can turn one worker into ten.
• 36:35
  Speaker 3: And what is it? And so it's a wee tool.
• 36:37
  Speaker 3: It's a weaving situation like a Manchester. You know, it's
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: not an accident that that during the Civil War in Manchester,
• 36:47
  Speaker 3: the Irish factory workers were raising money for the newly
• 36:50
  Speaker 3: freed enslaved people, and the factory owners were flying Confederate
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: flags above the factories. I mean, it's not an accident.
• 36:56
  Speaker 3: Like Manchester, Mississippi function for a very long time as
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: a colony of Manchester and Liverpool in London. But anyway, okay,
• 37:04
  Speaker 3: so because they were sending cotton, they were sending cotton.
• 37:08
  Speaker 3: As a side note, it's hilarious in the way that, like,
• 37:12
  Speaker 3: you know, the entire Civil War was based on the
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: idea that Europe would force a quick end to the
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: war because no one would want to make war on
• 37:19
  Speaker 3: King Cotton was the quote, And it's so funny, like
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: my family still farms cotton. And the most important thing
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: to know when you're trying to sort of loosely predict
• 37:28
  Speaker 3: what the price of cotton will be is what's the carryover?
• 37:31
  Speaker 3: Like how many bales of cotton live in the global
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: sort of textile supply chain, sitting in warehouses that haven't
• 37:38
  Speaker 3: been brought into the facilities to be turned into stuff.
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: And so the largest carryovers in history to date were
• 37:44
  Speaker 3: eighteen fifty nine and eighteen sixty, which means that no
• 37:48
  Speaker 3: textile mill in the world needed an ounce of American
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: cotton until at least November of sixty three, at which point,
• 37:57
  Speaker 3: so the entire war was based on a completely fall
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: economic idea that that the I think they're like the
• 38:04
  Speaker 3: politicians who caught the car, like they were just out
• 38:07
  Speaker 3: there saying stuff and so uh, like one economist could
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: have stopped the whole thing. Just but guys, you're you're
• 38:15
  Speaker 3: totally flawed, but so meaning.
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: Like that that, yeah, like this is the cotton market.
• 38:20
  Speaker 3: Like it was a wrong time to start the war
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: because they didn't need it was the weakest the South
• 38:25
  Speaker 3: had ever been, which was it's not an unrelated You
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: only really start wars when you're weak. You know, it
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: started when you're strong. But uh, anyway, like the Mississippi
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: Delta was the center of the cotton economy for a
• 38:37
  Speaker 3: little while, and then it, you know, it moved around
• 38:39
  Speaker 3: the world. Like oil, does you know they're finding oil
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: all over the world. Cotton was like that, and so
• 38:44
  Speaker 3: it moved from Mississippi Egypt, Brazil, India, Pakistan, Texas. You know,
• 38:51
  Speaker 3: it's all over the world. And then the last place
• 38:54
  Speaker 3: it came back to before King Cotton died forever was
• 38:58
  Speaker 3: back to the Mississippi Delta. Mississippi Delta was mostly hardwood swamps.
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: The railroad companies were buying huge swaths of land, and
• 39:08
  Speaker 3: the great the Northern Woods were running out of wood,
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: and so those timber companies came down to Mississippi the
• 39:15
  Speaker 3: big plantation adjacent to the barn was owned by a
• 39:18
  Speaker 3: timber company from New York. And so like these timber
• 39:21
  Speaker 3: companies were coming down. That's why Teddy Roosevelt, that's Teddy Bear.
• 39:25
  Speaker 3: He had been sure. So Teddy Roosevelt spent the night
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: in township twenty to north range four west, and he
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: gave as his gift to the plantation homeowners it's Taylor
• 39:34
  Speaker 3: and Crate, I think it's right from New York. He
• 39:37
  Speaker 3: gave them two ginko trees to plant as his housewarming
• 39:42
  Speaker 3: gift for having him there. And one of those ginko
• 39:45
  Speaker 3: trees is still alive, and there's a tire swing in it,
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: and it's out there on the road. You go see it, Yeah,
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: the tire swing. Yeah. The people who had the house
• 39:52
  Speaker 3: don't know. It's just behind like a it's not a trailer,
• 39:54
  Speaker 3: it's like a corrugated ten house. And they have Teddy
• 39:56
  Speaker 3: Roosevelt's Ginko tree in the backyard.
• 39:59
  Speaker 1: And man, the book, yeah.
• 40:01
  Speaker 3: That's in there. And so uh and so like the
• 40:04
  Speaker 3: uh the land that railroad companies, in concert with the
• 40:07
  Speaker 3: timber companies, they bought all this land, they cleared it
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: and then.
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: To sell lumber, to sell lumber and to ship.
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: It where and all over like crates and and by
• 40:17
  Speaker 3: the way, when Mississippi ran out of hardwood, most of
• 40:19
  Speaker 3: these companies went to Oregon. And there's a reason that
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: their Mississippi town names in Oregon because it's sort of
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: you know, like Schlitz Brewing Company bought a timber yard
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: so they could make their kegs and so uh anyway
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: out of hardwood, out of hardwoods, all hardwoods. And so
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: they were, uh, they were cleared in this land that
• 40:38
  Speaker 3: the cotton plantations were almost an afterthought, like what are
• 40:41
  Speaker 3: we going to do with this? They cleared it for
• 40:43
  Speaker 3: they cleared it for lumber. They're like, what are we
• 40:45
  Speaker 3: going to do with it? And so you know, they
• 40:46
  Speaker 3: were selling all of this land and this was cotton's
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: last gasp.
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: And uh, I remember you had some statistics about that
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: land that uh, like the depth of the top soil.
• 40:59
  Speaker 3: Oh, it in some ways it went it was like
• 41:01
  Speaker 3: we call that ice cream soil man. In some ways
• 41:03
  Speaker 3: it went like two hundred feet deep. Yeah, I mean
• 41:05
  Speaker 3: incredible soil. I mean one of the all that deposition
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: from the river.
• 41:10
  Speaker 1: I remember I remember it being blown away that you
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: could dig down like that and hit like alluvial soil.
• 41:15
  Speaker 3: And it goes all the way down, and I mean
• 41:17
  Speaker 3: it's it's millions of years of floods. I mean one
• 41:20
  Speaker 3: of the things that you know, millions of years of floods,
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: all of that, all of those natural processes were just stopped,
• 41:28
  Speaker 3: and so the land has sort of been decaying. I mean,
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: the yields are not great in a lot of these places,
• 41:34
  Speaker 3: and so the price of cotton collapsed. In nineteen nineteen,
• 41:38
  Speaker 3: the price of cotton was a dollar a pound. I
• 41:41
  Speaker 3: think today it's sixty six cents, and so maybe sixty eight,
• 41:46
  Speaker 3: and so it was a dollar a pound.
• 41:48
  Speaker 1: It was the last It's lower today by forty cents,
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: even adjusted for ina. No, yeah, not not adjusted, I'm
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: saying no, No.
• 41:56
  Speaker 3: It's thirty two cents lower than it was in nineteen nineteen.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 42:00
  Speaker 3: And by the way, if you talk to it like
• 42:02
  Speaker 3: this is going to be the this year is going
• 42:04
  Speaker 3: to be so catastrophic for farmers. I mean our neighbors
• 42:07
  Speaker 3: that are going out of business, like people.
• 42:09
  Speaker 1: The cotton prices being low.
• 42:10
  Speaker 3: Cotton prices and soybeans, so we grew our farm is cotton, soybeans, rice,
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: and corn, and China buys all of our soybeans, and
• 42:20
  Speaker 3: this year they haven't bought a single pod of American
• 42:22
  Speaker 3: soybeans because of all the terrifying Yeah, all the terrifying
• 42:25
  Speaker 3: it's just killing American farmers. But anyway, they cleared the
• 42:29
  Speaker 3: price of cotton collapsed in nineteen twenty three, and then
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: for ten years they tried to fix it. And then
• 42:35
  Speaker 3: in nineteen thirty three the Roosevelt administration took over the
• 42:40
  Speaker 3: American cotton economy, and in some ways the it's yeah,
• 42:45
  Speaker 3: Franklin Roosevelt. And so like, here's the thing I'm going
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: to try to find because like, I think this explains
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: it's the only thing I ever really read, because I
• 42:55
  Speaker 3: think there's something interesting here about how cotton releon, how
• 43:01
  Speaker 3: the cotton economy put Mmett till at the exact place
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: at the exact wrong time. And so here we go.
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: I find this right now, No, golhead, I got it.
• 43:12
  Speaker 3: Here we go. The great Mississippi Delta cotton boom lasted
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: twenty years. The suffering and killing and decay that would
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: follow for the next century were the price of three
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: great years and a dozen good ones. Those two decades
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: also marked the peak of the Lost Cause mythology. Consider
• 43:27
  Speaker 3: when all these Confederate statues went up around the state,
• 43:30
  Speaker 3: and consider the history of cotton and the Delta. The
• 43:33
  Speaker 3: land clearing finished around nineteen hundred, the price of cotton
• 43:36
  Speaker 3: collapsed for good in nineteen twenty three, and what happened
• 43:39
  Speaker 3: in between Port Gibson and Aberdeen race statues in nineteen hundred,
• 43:43
  Speaker 3: Macon in nineteen oh one, Fayette in nineteen oh four,
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: Carrollton and Beulah and Okolona in nineteen oh five, Tuplo
• 43:50
  Speaker 3: and ole Miss in nineteen oh six, Brandon and Oxford
• 43:53
  Speaker 3: and West Point in nineteen oh seven, Cleveland and Lexington
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: and Raymond and duck Hill in nineteen oh eight, Greenville
• 43:59
  Speaker 3: and Winona and nineteen oh nine, Hattiesburg twice in Grenada
• 44:03
  Speaker 3: in nineteen ten, Gulf Port and Kasiesco Equipment and Ripley
• 44:06
  Speaker 3: in Brooksville and Heidelberg in nineteen eleven, Columbus and Laurel
• 44:10
  Speaker 3: and Meridian and Philadelphia and Vaiden in nineteen twelve, Greenwood
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: and Sumner in nineteen thirteen, Greenwood again in nineteen fifteen,
• 44:17
  Speaker 3: Hazelhurston nineteen seventeen, Louisville and nineteen twenty one. Many of
• 44:22
  Speaker 3: these were placed quite intentionally on the lawns of local courthouses.
• 44:26
  Speaker 3: Most of the monuments around the state were built during
• 44:28
  Speaker 3: the brief but emotionally powerful cotton boom. Not a single
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: courthouse statue in the state of Mississippi was erected after
• 44:35
  Speaker 3: nineteen twenty three. Wow, it's all like, the history is
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: all in. It's in the price of cotton, it's in
• 44:43
  Speaker 3: the land. I mean, when you look at the equation
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: of agriculture even now, you don't control the price of siege.
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: You don't control the price of equipment. You don't control
• 44:54
  Speaker 3: the price of chemicals. You don't control the weather, you
• 44:58
  Speaker 3: don't control the price of water. You don't control how
• 45:00
  Speaker 3: much water you need. On the other side of the equation,
• 45:03
  Speaker 3: you can't control how much you're selling it for. Because
• 45:05
  Speaker 3: you can't control the markets. The only X and the
• 45:08
  Speaker 3: long variable of an American farm that you have any
• 45:11
  Speaker 3: control over is labor. And so now you have a
• 45:16
  Speaker 3: system in Mississippi from nineteen thirty three where the government,
• 45:20
  Speaker 3: the government is stepping in and taking over the cotton industry.
• 45:25
  Speaker 3: And if it's you know, they wrote the Agricultural Adjustment
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: Act of nineteen thirty three, and then they had to
• 45:31
  Speaker 3: it was declared unconstitutional. They had to do it again
• 45:33
  Speaker 3: in either thirty six or thirty eight, I forget. But
• 45:36
  Speaker 3: one of the things about that that was so interesting
• 45:38
  Speaker 3: is they're trying to figure out, well, what is a
• 45:41
  Speaker 3: subsidy supposed to do for an American farmer. And the
• 45:44
  Speaker 3: thing that they settled upon was it used to be
• 45:47
  Speaker 3: called something called parity payments, and now there's a different structure,
• 45:50
  Speaker 3: but the fundamental ideas are the same. They wanted people
• 45:54
  Speaker 3: to be able to live like they were living in
• 45:58
  Speaker 3: nineteen nineteen. And so if it ever feels like Mississippi
• 46:02
  Speaker 3: is stuck in the past, it's because like statutorily, it
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: literally is. You know, a lot of the American farm
• 46:09
  Speaker 3: bills are designed to sort of to sort of recreate
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: that purchasing power. And you know, the a thing that
• 46:20
  Speaker 3: happened between say thirty three and fifty five is you
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: have king Cotton is dying. The as mechanization comes in,
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: you have to have a significant amount of capital to
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: be able to buy all this equipment, So it's sort
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: of changing who could even farm. So you have a
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: like you have an entire world that is collapsing in
• 46:43
  Speaker 3: on itself, separate from the Supreme Court decisions and you know,
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: integrating the schools. I mean, you just have an entire
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: way of life collapsing in on itself. Prices are spiraling.
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: Nineteen fifty four nineteen fifty five were arable crops, and
• 47:02
  Speaker 3: so what you have is and then you have you know,
• 47:06
  Speaker 3: black people in Mississippi had no access to the courts,
• 47:10
  Speaker 3: so there was no way for them to do anything
• 47:12
  Speaker 3: if their landlord was cheating them. And so you just
• 47:16
  Speaker 3: created this situation where people were desperate and almost had
• 47:24
  Speaker 3: unchecked power over other human beings. And then m. Mantil
• 47:27
  Speaker 3: decides to go visit his family on vacation.
• 47:32
  Speaker 1: Right before I read your book, I read John Barry,
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: Oh the Great Rising Tide, Rising Tide, you know.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: And by the way, the nineteen twenty seven the Levy
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: broke in Scott Mississippi. It broke exactly at where Delta
• 47:48
  Speaker 3: Pine and Land Plantation is. It was dpl was one
• 47:53
  Speaker 3: of the first landowners in township twenty two north range
• 47:56
  Speaker 3: four West, which the whole book is about. And uh
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: it was owned then by the Manchester Fine Doublers and
• 48:04
  Speaker 3: Spinners Association, which was the world's largest manufacturing conglomerate that
• 48:08
  Speaker 3: was buying up Mississippi Delta Plantations to vertically integrate its
• 48:11
  Speaker 3: supply chain. You know, that company still exists. It's a
• 48:14
  Speaker 3: different name, but they make lingerie for Victoria's Secret and
• 48:17
  Speaker 3: Marster Spencer. I mean, companies all still exist. That plantation
• 48:21
  Speaker 3: was later owned by Monsanto and it's now owned by
• 48:23
  Speaker 3: Bear the aspirin people. Uh huh uh and so but
• 48:27
  Speaker 3: like where that where the levee broke was at a
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: plantation that was owned by a Manchester manufacturing conglomerate. Yeah, anyway,
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: sorry I interrupted you. Oh no, it's a phenomenal book,
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: Rising Tide. I love that book.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we're gonna have mom but he canceled last minute
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: or something happened. Flights, I'm sorry, flights got cancer. It's
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: fascinating books. It's really good. It introduces a thing about
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: between that book and your book, and I want you
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: to explain sharecropping in a minute. Yeah, but uh, it
• 48:59
  Speaker 1: introduces like introduced me anyways to a weird bit in
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: American history where from agri from like the history of agriculture.
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: He explains how there's always been like you just mentioned
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: there's always been a labor problem, yeah, when it comes
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: to cotton production. Yeah, agriculture in general, particularly cotton production.
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: And he lays out this thing that the labor problem
• 49:27
  Speaker 1: kind of emerged upon emancipation of the slaves, where for
• 49:30
  Speaker 1: a while the labor problems you just owned the labor. Yeah,
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: and then all of a sudden they're faced with this
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: thing that you have to entice, well, you have to
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: be able to entice willful laborers.
• 49:42
  Speaker 3: And the thing that's wild is after the war, all
• 49:45
  Speaker 3: anyone wanted was can I just have forty acres where
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: I can protect my family? And so the global capital
• 49:51
  Speaker 3: markets are freaking out about this. You know, you can
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: read the minutes of like you know, because like the
• 49:57
  Speaker 3: way we have business conferences now in Las Vegas, they
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: had those in Brussels in eighteen sixty. I mean they've
• 50:02
  Speaker 3: been you know, those aren't new. So you can read
• 50:04
  Speaker 3: the minutes of these like think tank meetings where they're
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: essentially trying to invent sharecropping in real time. Sharecropping was
• 50:11
  Speaker 3: the compromise between labor and capital because they tried a
• 50:15
  Speaker 3: couple of different things that didn't work. And so you
• 50:19
  Speaker 3: can watch the global capital markets. And we go into
• 50:22
  Speaker 3: this in the book because it's sort of you watch
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: the markets coerce people into living in a way that
• 50:28
  Speaker 3: they didn't want to live, like people wanted. People just
• 50:32
  Speaker 3: thought of war. People wanted to go You know, I
• 50:34
  Speaker 3: love that line from that Dire Strait song, Someday You'll
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: return to your valleys and your farms. It makes the
• 50:39
  Speaker 3: hair stand up on my arm. You know, I love
• 50:41
  Speaker 3: that because it like it gets it's something so existentially true.
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: And people just wanted to go home and live on
• 50:47
  Speaker 3: their land. And there was this brief moment in township
• 50:50
  Speaker 3: twenty two north range four west, all over the South
• 50:53
  Speaker 3: where you had white and black people, You had veterans
• 50:57
  Speaker 3: of the Confederacy and veterans from the Union an army.
• 51:00
  Speaker 3: You had people setting up forty acre little homesteads and
• 51:06
  Speaker 3: trying to sort of make a go of being what
• 51:08
  Speaker 3: Thomas Jefferson would have called a yeoman farmer. And you
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: watched those people get just chewed up and spit out
• 51:14
  Speaker 3: by the global capital markets who had to have these
• 51:17
  Speaker 3: lands in large blocks. And so, you know, the people
• 51:22
  Speaker 3: who just wanted to go hunt and fish and you know,
• 51:26
  Speaker 3: grow a little cotton to have a little cash, but
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: have big vegetables, with big vegetable gardens, with homegrown tomatoes.
• 51:33
  Speaker 3: And you know, my dad was a small town lawyer
• 51:36
  Speaker 3: and he had a client who was a drug dealer
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: who would pay him in tomatoes, and like it was
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: the best thing ever man. All summer we'd eat these
• 51:43
  Speaker 3: homegrown tomatoes. And you know, our big meal in the
• 51:46
  Speaker 3: summer was was dinner in the middle of the day,
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: and then like supper was always just like leftovers, but
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: it's usually like bacon and tomato sandwiches in the summer.
• 51:56
  Speaker 3: And so anyway, they just wanted these huge gardens and
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: to live with their families and and you know, especially
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: if you're a formally enslaved person, try to start. You know,
• 52:08
  Speaker 3: roots in your own land were like the most precious thing,
• 52:12
  Speaker 3: and you just watch the global capital markets make that impossible.
• 52:18
  Speaker 1: I want to finish this point about that. He makes
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: some rising tide or sing. He explains, is it was
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: very surprising to me that once you had to you
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: have the responsibility of like enticing and holding labor, like
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: willful people to get to work. One of the conflicts
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: that comes up in this area along the Mississippi. He explains,
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: is it As the ku kox Klan emerges, there are
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: agricultural people. There are farmers who are fighting against the clan,
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: oh saying this argument, stop scaring away all the labor.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: Like that's their tape. Their take on it is, if
• 53:01
  Speaker 1: you are making a hostile for people that want to
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: be here and work, you're working against our interests. And
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: that was their argument against the clan. No, you covered
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: so much that same something. It was this weird that
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: I happened to read these two books at the same time,
• 53:14
  Speaker 1: because I was like, something that never even occurred to me,
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: is like this huge problem of like how do you
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: get people to work the land well and farm when
• 53:22
  Speaker 1: you can't just make them do it well?
• 53:24
  Speaker 3: And you know, the thing that's there was a huge
• 53:27
  Speaker 3: fight between poor, working class white people and white planners
• 53:34
  Speaker 3: and landowners. And so the Delta was seen in large
• 53:38
  Speaker 3: part as a safe space from the clan because like
• 53:43
  Speaker 3: the very paternalistically racist, but like the landowners just weren't
• 53:48
  Speaker 3: letting that on their land.
• 53:49
  Speaker 1: I mean, they don't want their labor for us to
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: be terrorized.
• 53:52
  Speaker 2: No.
• 53:52
  Speaker 3: And one of the things that's interesting is the and
• 53:56
  Speaker 3: even so we'll come back to this, but they used
• 53:59
  Speaker 3: to send trains down at the Mexican border to bring
• 54:03
  Speaker 3: up for picking because they didn't have enough people. One
• 54:05
  Speaker 3: of the reason the hot tomali is like the stereotypical
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: food of the Delta is that it's tomali's made with
• 54:11
  Speaker 3: Mississippi Delta ingredients. So instead of masa, it's just staple
• 54:15
  Speaker 3: corn meal and it's pork and like anyway, all over
• 54:19
  Speaker 3: the Mississippi Delta by hot tomali's. And that's why because
• 54:23
  Speaker 3: the black sharecroppers were looking at the hot tomali cans
• 54:27
  Speaker 3: at the end of the road that the folks brought
• 54:30
  Speaker 3: up to help pick, and we're like, that looks better
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: than whatever lunch we got, So they started doing that.
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: But the but to your point about like about John's book,
• 54:39
  Speaker 3: I mean that they really nail is that, you know,
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: the the planners were trying to fight off the clan.
• 54:46
  Speaker 3: The only spot in the Mississippi Delta, this is wild.
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: The only spot in the Mississippi Delta where there were
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: a big concentration of small, poor white farmers aka like
• 54:57
  Speaker 3: prime clan material was right where the barn is. And
• 55:02
  Speaker 3: it's because the sunflower plantation that was owned by the
• 55:05
  Speaker 3: New York Timber people where Teddy Roosevelt spent the night
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: was sold as part of the New Deal. It was
• 55:12
  Speaker 3: broken up into blocks. And so the Roosevelt administration very
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: into sort of progressive era America, very into we're gonna
• 55:22
  Speaker 3: have best practices, We're going to find the best farmers
• 55:24
  Speaker 3: to put on this field these fields, and they're application
• 55:28
  Speaker 3: processes about understanding science and all this stuff. And so
• 55:31
  Speaker 3: what you had was the Roosevelt administration kicking off all
• 55:36
  Speaker 3: of the black sharecroppers who had worked the sunflower plantation
• 55:39
  Speaker 3: who wanted to stay there. So they were fighting to
• 55:42
  Speaker 3: kick these people off and replace them with all white
• 55:45
  Speaker 3: farmers from Georgia and Alabama, and the local plantation owners
• 55:51
  Speaker 3: were fighting the Roosevelt administration own behalf of the sharecroppers,
• 55:55
  Speaker 3: basically saying these people have been here for generations, like
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: these are great neighbors, Like their churches are here, their
• 56:03
  Speaker 3: cemeteries are here, Like how could you possibly kick these
• 56:05
  Speaker 3: people off? So like the other thing that's constantly shaping
• 56:08
  Speaker 3: the Mississippi Delta is like the unintended consequences. And so
• 56:13
  Speaker 3: it's not an accident that Emmett Till is killed in
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: the one square of land where there were lots of poor,
• 56:18
  Speaker 3: angry white people. I mean, I don't know if you
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: ever read the Robert Palmer book De Deep Blues, but
• 56:24
  Speaker 3: what he's talking about as the price of cotton collapses,
• 56:27
  Speaker 3: this is like nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty, he says,
• 56:31
  Speaker 3: he's talking about the towns growing up in the Delta
• 56:34
  Speaker 3: and taking power away from the plantation owners. They attracted
• 56:39
  Speaker 3: more and more poor whites from the Hills who brought
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: to the Delta's paternalistic social structure an atmosphere of barely
• 56:45
  Speaker 3: repressed violence, a burning need to acquire money and power,
• 56:48
  Speaker 3: and an outspoken racism that neatly suited their purposes. They
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: control most of the newer Delta towns economically and politically.
• 56:55
  Speaker 3: The balance of power was shifting, and the planter class
• 56:59
  Speaker 3: never knew mare Strong could only watch it shift. The
• 57:02
  Speaker 3: Delta already tense, coiled tighter and tighter. And so that's
• 57:05
  Speaker 3: a lot of what John's talking about, is that sort
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: of sense of that. You know, Mississippi so often gets
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: looked at and people just look at it through the
• 57:13
  Speaker 3: prism of race, But that's two dimensional. You always have
• 57:16
  Speaker 3: to do race and class because Mississippi there's always been
• 57:20
  Speaker 3: in a lot of ways. The black population was caught
• 57:24
  Speaker 3: in the middle of a culture war between two halves
• 57:27
  Speaker 3: of the white population, which made it worse for it.
• 57:30
  Speaker 3: I mean, like it's a really it's the rock in the.
• 57:32
  Speaker 1: Heart's in a battle between rich whites and poor whites.
• 57:35
  Speaker 3: Yes, very much so, and very much sort of weaponized
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: in that fight, with very little regard to what would
• 57:41
  Speaker 3: actually be best for these working families. Can you explain.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: I've always my whole life, I've known the term sharecroppers,
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: but it wasn't ntil I read your book and in
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: Barry's book kind of as a pair, you know, a
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: little bit I don't unsaid, like what the hell that?
• 57:58
  Speaker 1: Like the economics, like like how it came to be
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: in like and when you hear the word share crop
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: or like what exactly are.
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: You talking about? So black people had no virtually no
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: access to credit markets, so the only way you could
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: get out of poverty was with a crop loan. So
• 58:16
  Speaker 3: the way this would work, say you owned a thousand acres,
• 58:20
  Speaker 3: Now I can't afford land. So what you will do
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: is you will rent me in my family twenty five
• 58:30
  Speaker 3: acres of that. Okay, you sort of needed a family
• 58:33
  Speaker 3: every twenty five to forty acres. You would rent me
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: that like a large landowner would break parcels off twenty
• 58:40
  Speaker 3: five forty acres and that's I'm and the family gets
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: to move there, and you know, it gets to I
• 58:45
  Speaker 3: mean has tokay and so your own houses. And so
• 58:49
  Speaker 3: basically what happened is you would give me what's called
• 58:52
  Speaker 3: the furnish, which would be the money I would need
• 58:57
  Speaker 3: to sort of get going for the year. You would
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: provide the seeds, you would provide the equipment mules, I
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: would farm the land. I would have a charge account
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: at the local store. What people don't realize is most
• 59:15
  Speaker 3: of these farmers really made their money charging exorbitant interest
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: rates on the stores they all owned. So the plantation
• 59:22
  Speaker 3: owners were also primarily merchants.
• 59:25
  Speaker 1: So me, as a landowner, like I own thousands of acres,
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: I have, yeah, I run a store, yeah, where I
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: sell supplies to me that people that them rented.
• 59:35
  Speaker 3: I have to buy from you, and your charge me
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: twenty percent interest and so and so you get to
• 59:43
  Speaker 3: the end of the year and now you have the
• 59:47
  Speaker 3: right to sell my crop. I can't go sell my crop,
• 59:50
  Speaker 3: So I don't know what price you're getting home. Who
• 59:52
  Speaker 3: sells the crop? So the land owner sells it.
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: So I'm the landowner.
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: You're the share crop. So I plan.
• 59:57
  Speaker 1: I give you the ground, I give you the seed,
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: I give you a mule, give you a plow. Yes,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: you do the daily labor. Yes, And then on your
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: patch grows your cotton. And then and then and then
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: an I go, I will now sell your cotton.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 3: And so you own immediately half of my cotton. That's
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 3: the deal. You get half, I get half. You sell it,
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: You keep the money from your half, You take the
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 3: money from my half. You subtract all of the expenses
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 3: over the years, with over the year, with twenty percent interest,
• 1:00:24
  Speaker 3: and if any money has left, you give that to me. Yeah.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: But because I sell it, but since I own half
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: of it, I'm incentivized to get the best price for it.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 3: You are, but I don't. I can't check your books,
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 3: so you might sell it for there's no way you're
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 3: checking my book. No, no, And so like you know, and
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 3: so like there's a gun there's a gun fight here
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 3: in this book where a guy came home from World
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 3: War One. It was like, you know, a war like
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 3: a war hero and his boss tried to mess him
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 3: up at settlement time and he just shot him. And
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 3: you know, because there you had no access to the courts.
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 3: But that's the way it works.
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: So then so then at that you harvest, you harvest.
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: I sell, I sell for one hundred dollars. Fifty is yours.
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: And I say to you, okay, you bought thirty bucks
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: worth of stuff at my store. Interest on the thirty
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: bucks you bought it, my store puts that fifty or
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: forty nine dollars. Here's a dollar, here's a dollar, and
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: that's sharecropper cut.
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: That's exactly what it was.
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: Just like but there was white sharecroppers.
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: Was one white sharecroppers all over Okay, and and especially
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 3: sort of going Alabama, Georgia. No, I mean, sharecropping wasn't
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 3: a thing that only happened. Sharecropping happened to lots of
• 1:01:36
  Speaker 3: poor people. The only way out of sharecropping was credit markets.
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 3: But let me I got another sharecroper.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: I love, yeah, I love so like like em at
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: Till's people had been sharecroppers.
• 1:01:48
  Speaker 3: Yes, what would be what would be.
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: A long time that a that a family would be
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: on a chunk of ground, like could you raise your
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: kids all through them being kids.
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, no, working that same chunk, A lot of
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 3: people didn't leave. And another thing that's interesting is there
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 3: a lot of people who were old who still live
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 3: on land in the delta that you know, his two
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 3: owners away from whoever the last owner they worked for,
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 3: and people are still living in the house. I see.
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: So the sharecropper could outlast.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 3: The owner many yes, and and so like uh and
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 3: if you found one, so it will Dockery, who owned
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: Dockery Farms, which is near the barn, had a reputation
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 3: of being fair with people and so like uh, you
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 3: know Howl and Wolf worked on Dockery. Uh as a
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 3: sharecraft Yeah. Pop Staples like Mayvis Staples dad was a
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 3: sharecropper owned Dockery. Uh. You had Charlie Patton playing there.
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: Uh the Robert So the crossroads the actual crossroads there man. Yeah,
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 3: so like that's right, that's Dockery and so.
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: Like right there, I was with my friend, Yeah, she
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: took me there. Yeah, we did all kinds of junk
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: down there the time we were there. You know what's funny
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: about do you mind?
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: I know that she said?
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 1: The funny little story is I was with my friend
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: ann A Baker. Yeah, I still hang out with And
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: we were in Memphis. She was going to school in Oxford, Mississippi.
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: So like we were in Memphis. Then we were down
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: in Oxford, Mississippi. Then we went to like Clarksdale, so
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: I'm from Clarkstone, yeah, yeah, yeah, So we go there.
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: We went to that bar like Morgan Freeman had a bar. Yeah,
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: went all around there, went out to that crossroad yep.
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 1: And I was like, man, I'm gonna get out of
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: the car, you know, and sell sell my soul to
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: the devil, you know. She said, you know, I get
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: out of the car and took off.
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 3: It's just like a funny moment. But uh.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: And then we had in our head that we were
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: going to go to New Orleans, okay, and we were
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: going there and they're like, ah, there's a hurricane coming,
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: we should bail Katrina.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: I'm not kidding, dude.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: We were like going from Clarksdale to New Orleans and
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: backed out because of.
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 3: The weather report, which was years ago last week.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because of the weather report. The one of the
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: things I didn't make it didn't make it there.
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 3: I love the landscape of the Mississippi Delta, like I
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 3: love like I love riding the levee. I love being
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 3: on the other side of the levee like my uncle
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 3: and I liked like ride horses back through the old
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: sort of second growth but cottonwood trees that you could
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 3: stick your hand into. You know, there's like, uh, there's
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 3: an abandoned I think Bungie the Grain Company. They have
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 3: an abandoned sort of elevator complex out there where they
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 3: used to load up barges and you could ride horses
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 3: through there. And it's like post apocalyptic because it's real industrial,
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: but it's just in the middle of the woods, in
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 3: the middle of nowhere, and you know, I love over there.
• 1:04:44
  Speaker 3: I love being on the Mississippi River. I love the
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 3: idea of you know, I love taking my girls out
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 3: of the Mississippi River. I love, you know, them running
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 3: up a boat on a sandbar, like the idea that,
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 3: like Mike, that they're growing up in concert with that
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 3: river and uh, you know, our farm runs up to
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: the levee and like it's interesting because uh, in some
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 3: ways this is almost like a user's manual for like
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 3: if you're going to be there, But like I I
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 3: love that land and so oh it shows man I
• 1:05:17
  Speaker 3: really it's it's really like I want to be buried
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 3: in it.
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: That's one of the things that drew me to want
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 1: to talk to you. And like that I liked about
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 1: your book. Is I don't I don't not try to
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: end the conversation, just wedge just in there, is it? Uh,
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: you do a thing that's hard to do, which is like,
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 1: you love where you're brought up, You love the landscape.
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 1: You know it's history and you have but and you're
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: also willing to point out a lot of stuff you
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: guys got wrong. Well and I got it. It's funny
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: because I don't mean, like this is not just a
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: Mississippi thing, dude. But a couple years ago, I went
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: turkey hunting with a with a new friend of mine
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: Don at his place in Mississippi and walking around with him.
• 1:06:00
  Speaker 3: Is this Taylor? Taylor's my dear friend.
• 1:06:02
  Speaker 1: Okay, Yeah, he talks very fondly. He's a good dude,
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 1: walking around him. Like like when I was a kid,
• 1:06:09
  Speaker 1: if I said the war, my dad fought World War two,
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 1: So I was a kid, I said the war, we
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: all meant like, like the war was World War two?
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 3: That's not what we mean. No, But I mean, I.
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 1: Was telling Crine ther day, it's not a day goes by.
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: He doesn't point to something and be like before the war,
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: after the war, and everybody like he's talking about the
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: Civil War, look like it's like a defining landscape feature.
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: It'd be like that damn something in another the war,
• 1:06:36
  Speaker 1: well that bridge something war, who owns that land something
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 1: or other? The war, And it's just not like in
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: the North, it is not a thing that comes up.
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 3: Well, you know, my my eighth grade American history teacher,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 3: shout out, Miss Halcomb called it the Civil War the
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 3: War of Northern aggression. Yeah, sure, yeah, But like I
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 3: guess the thing about you know, I love the I
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: love the band the Drive By Truckers. Uh. And I
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 3: think like Patterson Hood, who writes a lot of their songs,
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 3: Rights is in Us, writes in a really sophistical, sophisticated
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 3: way about the South and the thing he calls it
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 3: is like the duality of the Southern thing. And so like,
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 3: I've really come to believe that the most intrinsic part
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 3: of having a Southern identity is living at the intersection
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 3: of the conflict of these things. So if you're somebody
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 3: who only says we're the worst. This sucks, this all
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 3: his you know, we're just you know, everybody is descendants
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 3: of oppressors like like, but like that's boring as shit,
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 3: and it's also you're missing it. And if you only
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 3: defend it and only say you know, if you try
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 3: to diminish the other stuff, you don't actually live there.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 3: Living there means living at the intersection of these two.
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 3: It Being Southern means being able to hold two opposing
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 3: ideas in your head at the same time in some
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 3: parts of both of them be true. And so like
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 3: when I see people who aren't willing to do that,
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 3: I just find it odd and you know, I think it,
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 3: you know, like it's not an accident that so many
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 3: Southerners were in favor of tariffs, which everyone's grandparent would
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 3: have known what a tariff does to a commodity market.
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 3: It's where being Southern used to be about being on
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 3: the land and living in concert with the seasons and
• 1:08:28
  Speaker 3: understanding that. And so few people are still connected to
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 3: the dirt in that way that you have, you know,
• 1:08:36
  Speaker 3: like you have people out there living in like you know,
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 3: angry travel ball suburbs who don't remember anything about what
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 3: it means to farm Who don't remember what it means
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 3: to live in concert with the seasons? Who don't you know,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 3: who don't move out to the deer camp between Thanksgiving
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 3: and New Year's Eve? You know, you think about you know,
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 3: my cousin, second generation president of the Mayor Gold Hunting Club.
• 1:09:00
  Speaker 3: If you ever get an invitation there, it's but they
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 3: have a day of a communal like dining hall, and
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: so people eat meat like between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve,
• 1:09:12
  Speaker 3: like farmers move their families out there, and so like
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 3: I love the parts of Mississippi that are still deeply
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 3: connected to the rhythms of the land. You know, my
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 3: uncle Reeves, who has been on our farm every single
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 3: day since nineteen sixty eight when he took it over,
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 3: loves you know, it's funny. He managed, he's president of
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 3: two different big deer clubs. Uh, he hasn't shot a
• 1:09:36
  Speaker 3: deer since nineteen sixty three and and he he but
• 1:09:40
  Speaker 3: he likes the he likes the herd management. They got
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 3: a PhD Fromsissippi State, like working with what they're planning
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 3: and when, and he loves that. And then you know,
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 3: we've got three or four duckoles on our farm, and
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 3: he's out there every single day and a lot of
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 3: times doesn't take a gun, like it's just calling him in.
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 3: Just likes to be there and wants to be on
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 3: not land, wants to be on his land, you know,
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 3: wants to be buried in his land. And like, that's
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: such an important part to me of what it means
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 3: to be from Mississippi and to be from the South.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: That's very funny. I have a dear friend of mine,
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 1: Clay Nukem, who I work with too. We always laugh
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: because he has a lot of Arkansas exceptionalism and Southern
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: exceptional So he'll.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 3: He's over at Stuttgart busted some ducks.
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 1: He'll he'll say, quite freely. He's like, well, in the South,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: music is very important to us, and I'm like, okay,
• 1:10:35
  Speaker 1: I didn't realize that it's not. I didn't realize it's
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: not important.
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah. Wait, sorry, I didn't realize music wasn't I didn't
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 3: realise music wasn't important in Harlem, music wasn't important San Francisco, Troy, Detroit,
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 3: this is motown thing.
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 1: But there is, dude, It's like legitimate, and I want
• 1:10:52
  Speaker 1: to get back to sharecrowd.
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 3: Sorry I giggled. I haven't done that in a really
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 3: long time.
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 1: Shows you're having a good time. But I have it
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: to him is like he does a lot of interviews
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: with with I mean, his his show was largely about
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: Southern culture. There's a lot of interviews, and like, there's
• 1:11:10
  Speaker 1: a thing that I got to give them. If you
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 1: just went and randomly pulled a hundred okay, you randomly
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: pulled a hundred Northerners in a room, and you randomly
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 1: pulled a hundred Southerners in a room, okay, and you said, like,
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 1: what way, I want to know what cardinal direction the
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 1: front door of your house faces. The Southerners are going
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: to kick the ship out of the Northern If you said,
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: I want to know what is the.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 3: How could you not know that? Because it's the sun.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 3: I'm just okay, it's just a thing.
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 1: If you took one hundred Southerners and one hundred northerns
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: and you said, if you take a piss in your yard,
• 1:11:50
  Speaker 1: tell me the route that piss would take as runoff
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 1: could definitely do that, and what river, what madjeor river
• 1:11:56
  Speaker 1: would land in the Southerners are going to kick the
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 1: shit out of.
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: The northerns all fine.
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 1: I don't know why they have.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: It's because all they can They just can't. All farming
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 3: is really is getting water on to land and getting
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 3: water off of it. Yeah, you know, Like one of
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 3: my favorite things to do is to drive around our
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 3: farm with my uncle Raeves because he knows his understanding
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 3: of the drainage. He's like, well, see that culvert goes
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 3: into the Bogue Falia which is going to flow into
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 3: Deer Creek, Like it's unbelievable.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, And so like Southerners are better at it. There's
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 1: just something about there's something about the Southern experience that
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 1: or it's everyone had it, but it got And this
• 1:12:36
  Speaker 1: is just very general. Like my friend Doug Duran's like
• 1:12:39
  Speaker 1: dying right now. He's in Wisconsin. He can tell you
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 1: where every piece He's.
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 3: The guy where you guys go Deer Honey on the show.
• 1:12:44
  Speaker 1: He can tell you where every piece of water, and
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: the whole state flows too. So there's exceptions, but I'm
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: saying like, like the knowledge got scrubbed. It's getting scrubbed everywhere. Yeah,
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: the knowledge got scrubbed more in the North Earth. It
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: used to be like it just got scrubbed more in
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 1: the north. Industrialization came quicker. Whatever suburbia came quicker, it
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 1: got scrubbed in the north. Fashion out scrubbed the South.
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: So when I look down there, I'm like, like living
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 1: with living with deep history, living with with landscape, understanding
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: the limitations of land. It just feels more alive in
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: the South. And reading your book, I'm like, this is
• 1:13:27
  Speaker 1: you know, and looking at your book, I'm like, this
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 1: is the kind of thing that I wish there was
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: more of. Is people being like the history where you live,
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: at what goes on and connecting it to how much
• 1:13:41
  Speaker 1: top soil you got, how much rain you got, what
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 1: kind of trees grew, were you got, you know, and
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: it is just this story just gives like this story
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: gives this like super dramatic, nationally known travesty a way
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 1: to go, like, Okay, let's let's do this at a place,
• 1:13:58
  Speaker 1: but we're gonna do this at a place that changed America.
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 3: Well, and this idea that like that the that the
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 3: rainfall and the cotton or soybean yields have a direct
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 3: impact on violence.
• 1:14:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and that crops ain't good.
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 3: No, And like you go back and read narrative like
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 3: enslaved people's narratives. And they're talking about in eighteen fifty
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 3: knowing needing to know what the Liverpool price of cotton
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 3: was because that was going to determine how violent their
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 3: day was. Like this is the moods of the It's
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 3: been tied to that forever. And I mean, you know
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 3: the ways in I mean we said this earlier, but
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 3: the ways in which Mississippi you know, functioned as an
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 3: extension of man My mother grew up in Shelby, Mississippi,
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 3: and they got the Manchester Guardian delivered to their house
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 3: to track cotton, to track to textile industries in cotton
• 1:14:58
  Speaker 3: because there was no internet, and even though the paper
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 3: came once a week, it gave her father just a
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 3: little more info. And so there's always been you know, uh,
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 3: Yazoo City, Mississippi used to be named Manchester, Mississippi. My
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 3: uncle Will was the team doctor for Manchester Academy football
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 3: team forever, and it's named after Manchester, you know, and
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 3: I mean that tight. Yeah, it was so tied into
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 3: you know, in New Orleans, all those banks, those are
• 1:15:25
  Speaker 3: all London banks, New Orleans and New Orleans, Charleston and
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 3: Savannah were sort of outpost of European capital markets. Yeah uh,
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 3: And it's just like all of that stuff is fascinating,
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 3: you know, one of the there are a lot of
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 3: these histories of America that I feel like are fatally
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 3: flawed because they stop at the water's edge, as if
• 1:15:45
  Speaker 3: you know, as if like this, like you can watch
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 3: capital markets move all of this and one of the
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 3: heartbreaking things in the book. They're probably five or six
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 3: different times. The reason I like the Ivory Bill Woodpecker
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 3: in here is because it represent it's the mystery to me,
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 3: and it represents the sort of Gabrielle Garcia Marquez, It's
• 1:16:05
  Speaker 3: raining flowers in Macondo's sort of active imagination of what
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 3: could have happened. Nine different times this whole thing could
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 3: have been avoided, and so like rolling through the history
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 3: of the land, you see over and over times where
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 3: a decision, like one decision, and none of this would
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 3: have even ever been there.
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: When we finished it, I talked about two things I
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 1: want to hear about the Ivory Bill Woodpecker. Yeah, I
• 1:16:31
  Speaker 1: want to hear about the Curse of the Killers. But
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: I want to step right now back to summer we
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 1: left off. Why like Emmett Tills people. Yeah, his people
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 1: had been sharecroppers from Mississippi.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: Why were they up? Why were they going to Chicago?
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 1: Like what was going on in the in the economy
• 1:16:50
  Speaker 1: and on the land that made it that these long
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 1: time people that had been slaves then they had been
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 1: sharecroppers they gave up on the South? What was happening?
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 3: So a couple of things are going on. One, factories
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 3: are desperate for workers. They're sending northern factories they're sending
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 3: like labor agents down to the South. God, who are
• 1:17:12
  Speaker 3: being recruiters, recruiters who are being run out of town
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: by the police.
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: Oh you shit me? Really, there's like a tension.
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 3: No, no, dude, they were like arresting and running them
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 3: out of town and like no, it was a huge tension.
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 1: And they're taking the labor.
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 3: They're taking the labor there was it had gotten after
• 1:17:30
  Speaker 3: the price of cotton collapsed. I think an already tense
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 3: situation like the like the book said, uh coil tighter
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 3: and tighter. People were looking to leave. There was so
• 1:17:42
  Speaker 3: much violence, you know, the modern clan was found in
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 3: like what nineteen twenty two, I think in response to
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 3: Black soldiers coming home from World War One. You know,
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 3: there was a whole sort of America first after the
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 3: horror of going to Europe and fighting this war, and
• 1:17:57
  Speaker 3: so there just was a real retrenchment in the eighteen twenties,
• 1:18:01
  Speaker 3: and so you had, you know, there were black veterans
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 3: being killed all over the South and so like people
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 3: were trying to get out. And so Maymi Till's father
• 1:18:11
  Speaker 3: moved in like nineteen twenty three, I think because he
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 3: was like he didn't feel like he had daughters and
• 1:18:18
  Speaker 3: he didn't feel like he could protect his daughters, and
• 1:18:20
  Speaker 3: he was like, we got to get out of here.
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: So it was like moving for safety, twenty two years
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: before his.
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 3: Boy would be killed. Yes, it was moving for safety,
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 3: whatever the hell number years, Yes, and it was moving
• 1:18:30
  Speaker 3: for safety grandson be killed.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 3: And it was also like, you know, the first mechanized
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 3: cotton crop in America was nineteen forty three in Clarksdale
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 3: at Hobson Plantation. I mean that was coming. And so
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 3: you know, our farm we probably needed in nineteen fifty
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 3: four hundred families living on it to farm it. We
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 3: farm it now with I think eighteen people. And that's
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 3: because the tractors can't turn themselves around. How about we're
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 3: ten years away from farming it with four people, and
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 3: so you can just watch sort of the need for
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 3: all of this labor run out. One of the sort
• 1:19:00
  Speaker 3: of ironies of the of Emmett Till's murder is that
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 3: it was very much an effort by a sort of
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 3: class and race of people to protect what they felt
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 3: was a world running through their hands. So many families
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 3: left the Mississippi Delta after nineteen fifty five, Every family
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 3: who lived in Money, Mississippi, every black family who had
• 1:19:25
  Speaker 3: a teenage son left, And so the people who couldn't
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 3: afford the expensive equipment were the only people who were
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 3: still using sharecroppers. And then the last of the sharecroppers left,
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 3: and I think by nineteen sixty five there were no
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 3: sharecroppers left in America, got it.
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: Yeah, So it was the whole opportunity was evaporation.
• 1:19:46
  Speaker 3: Yeah. And so you also have he arrived at the
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 3: last gasp of a way of being in the world
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 3: and didn't know it.
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: You know what kind of uh broke my heart in
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: a weird way, is uh? I always have and and
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: do hold up World War two guys, pedestal. Oh yeah,
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 1: M Mattill's murders man the World War two guys and
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: it was like a service pistol.
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, they beat him to death with his uh, with
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 3: his ithaca uh forty five and uh yeah.
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: These got like a number of those guys were veterans.
• 1:20:26
  Speaker 3: Well, and they were all veterans, and I mean one
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 3: of the guys was a veteran from Pelolu. And then JW.
• 1:20:33
  Speaker 3: Milem was wounded at the Colmar Pocket. One of the
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 3: things in the book is so all of the all
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 3: of his every book ever written about m until has
• 1:20:45
  Speaker 3: a sort of huge line of mistakes through it. Because
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 3: there was like a typo in JW. Milem's obituary and
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 3: it got the number of his unit wrong. So people
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 3: in these books would be describing the battles he would
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 3: have been in, but he wasn't there. And so on.
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: One of the does a thing like that. It's so
• 1:21:01
  Speaker 1: crazy it makes me I don't want to get it.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 1: There's a thing like that in the history of the
• 1:21:04
  Speaker 1: American Buffalo. Yeah, it was a thing that you can't
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: read a book about that subject that doesn't include a
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: thing that never happened.
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 3: Dude, See this because of a mistake, so it makes
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 3: it and so so, and it's in every book, so
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 3: then you'll love this. So I was like, this doesn't.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 3: I just didn't believe it. I think, like, if you're
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 3: going to write something that is like this, you have
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 3: to there's a reason it's so endnoted. You got to
• 1:21:26
  Speaker 3: show your work. Yeah, And I was like, so, I'm
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 3: not taking anything for granted. And so I found I
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 3: found every obituary that had ever been published that mentioned
• 1:21:36
  Speaker 3: this unit, because I didn't know it was a typo yet,
• 1:21:39
  Speaker 3: and so I just believed it. I just so I
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 3: found every every single obituary that mentioned that. And then
• 1:21:45
  Speaker 3: I called the eldest son of every one of those
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 3: dead veterans and said or emailed or called and said, hey,
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 3: did your dad bring home anything from the war. And
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 3: this really nice guy outside of Fort Worth, Texas was like,
• 1:21:56
  Speaker 3: my dad was like the logistics officer for that unit,
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 3: and he brought home a every single piece of paper.
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 3: Theyre in my filing cabinet. You want to come see them.
• 1:22:04
  Speaker 3: So I went and spent a couple of days this
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 3: guy's house and I went through every piece of paper
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 3: from this unit and JW. MILEMS name wasn't on any
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 3: of it, and so then I went to these incredible
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 3: There's this guy named Eric who works in the archives
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 3: in Saint Louis. So in the nineteen seventy three there
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 3: was a terrible fire in Saint Louis at the American Archives,
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 3: and it burned up almost every single World War Two
• 1:22:25
  Speaker 3: veterans personnel file. They're all gone. They all burned the
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 3: unit files with like the morning reports. All of that
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 3: is still there. So you can recreate someone's service record,
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 3: but it's unbelievably tedious. And so I eventually recreated his
• 1:22:42
  Speaker 3: entire service record. And then I went to France and
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 3: then I walked the battlefields, you know, I like walked
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 3: through the forest where the foxholes were. Wrote all of
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 3: this and then cut it all out of the book.
• 1:22:53
  Speaker 3: So I but I spent a lot of time with JW.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 3: Milems you know JW. Miles legitimate. You know, people claimed
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 3: he will want a silver star. I don't think that's true.
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 3: But definitely wounded in the coal Maar pocket, like right
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 3: there on the border between It's like no, it's right
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 3: on the border between Germany and France. Uh so like
• 1:23:17
  Speaker 3: uh Strausburg, like when I when I went there, I
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 3: flew into Stuttgart in Germany and drove across the border
• 1:23:26
  Speaker 3: as that was the closest airport.
• 1:23:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so you really track these guys down.
• 1:23:31
  Speaker 3: I did, you know. And I had a whole pelolu
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 3: thing on Melvin Gamble, uh and like it's it's just
• 1:23:41
  Speaker 3: when a legitimate war hero thinks that it is necessary
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 3: to torture and kill a child to preserve something that
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 3: he feels is being lost, Like you know, you know,
• 1:23:56
  Speaker 3: I say in every book talk like, yeah, forces had
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 3: a lot to do with him until his death, but
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 3: forces didn't kill him. Everybody in that barn that night
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 3: had free will. But what's so interesting is you watch
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 3: these people move across the south. You know, my family
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 3: sort of moving roughly the same place as generation by
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 3: generation that the Milems are, like, you know, the Mylem
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 3: family was married at one point in the DuPont family,
• 1:24:23
  Speaker 3: you know, And so you watch them generation by generation,
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 3: poor life spans get shorter, not longer. You were watching
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 3: a family keep going west to try to try again
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 3: with the next generation, failing, generation after generation, continuing to
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 3: move west until there's nowhere left to move west. And
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 3: so the generation that sort of washed up and there
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 3: was nowhere left to go, was like JW. And Roy's
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 3: parents generation, and so they were in the hills. They
• 1:24:55
  Speaker 3: had their noses pressed up against the glass of the
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 3: last great gold Rush and the cotton industry, and they
• 1:25:02
  Speaker 3: didn't get down into the delta until right after it collapsed.
• 1:25:05
  Speaker 3: And so for generations they've been trying to get into
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 3: this place where this land was, and they get there
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 3: and then the promise of it is all gone. And
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 3: you know, four generations of the mile of mile of
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 3: men either killed someone violently or were killed violently, and
• 1:25:20
  Speaker 3: you just watch, You're just watching a family disintegrate. And
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 3: m Until with his hope and with his young teenage
• 1:25:33
  Speaker 3: sense of adventure and of boundary stretching and of looking
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 3: for the line. He uh, you know, he intersected. He
• 1:25:44
  Speaker 3: was on the way up, and he intersected with a
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 3: group of people who had been auguring in for generations.
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 3: And like that has something to do with all of this,
• 1:25:53
  Speaker 3: you know, I mean it's like, uh, you just forget.
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 3: Like you know, there's a storage you know in Chicago
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 3: right now that the Till family has that has him
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 3: it Tills Toy train in it No kidding. I mean
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 3: you know, I mean like this was a child who
• 1:26:09
  Speaker 3: ran into a family that was had been so disillusioned
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 3: by whatever they had been sold about the possibility of
• 1:26:18
  Speaker 3: where they lived that it had curdled into something terrible.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: Krin and I were having a conversation yesterday in preparation
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 1: for you coming, and somehow, like many conversations I'm in,
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: came around at OJ.
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 3: Look I got a weird man. I met OJ once
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 3: and it's a.
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: Great story, quick OJ story. I was not gonna talk
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: about the conversation we were having about you that turned
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 1: into a conversation about OJ, which I'm going to turn
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: into a conversation about the acquittal ahead.
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 3: That's perfect. The uh. And then I'm going to riff
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 3: off of the acquittal and turn it back to OJ.
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 3: All right, No the uh?
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: Uh you don't know what point I'm gonna make.
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 3: Did you put LSD in this coffee? The uh? And
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 3: so uh Uh. I was at a Kentucky derby and uh,
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 3: I asked, I ran into OJ at a like six
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 3: am cocktail party and uh because the horses were training,
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 3: and uh, I asked him who was gonna win? And
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 3: he said, lawyer, lawyer, Ron because he had he said
• 1:27:20
  Speaker 3: he had lots of positive experiences with lawyers. And then
• 1:27:23
  Speaker 3: I obviously went and took a shower, like Jesus Christ. Wow,
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 3: I was just like, you decapitated somebody. I got to
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 3: get away from you, man, so allegedly, Yeah, gloves don't
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 3: fit now, you must have quit.
• 1:27:38
  Speaker 1: Krin and I were converse about I was telling her
• 1:27:42
  Speaker 1: she was sweating that she hadn't finished your book, and
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 1: I'm like, I read the whole damn thing, so we're covered. Anyways,
• 1:27:47
  Speaker 1: I was explaining to her a little bit about the curse,
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 1: and I was saying that one of the surprising aspects
• 1:27:54
  Speaker 1: and I'm gonna bring us around. Oh yeah, and you
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 1: caught you loose one of the surprising aspects. When these
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 1: peoples come unity, these murders, you know, they're judged by
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: their peers. They're they're tried in their home area, and
• 1:28:06
  Speaker 1: the attitude of the jurors is, we're gonna acquit you,
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 1: but I don't want.
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 3: Nothing to do with you from here on out, very
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 3: much so.
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 1: And with with OJ's jury, they weren't they weren't considering
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: whether he did it or not. You know, it was
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: like it was about the l A p D. Yeah,
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: And it was kind of like, we're gonna let you go,
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: right because.
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 3: These guys are totally there even though you did it, we.
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: Know you did it, like we know you did it.
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: We're gonna let you go. You're not a good person,
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: but this isn't even about you. This is about at
• 1:28:48
  Speaker 1: the LAPD. So like you're guilt or not guilt, like
• 1:28:52
  Speaker 1: you know, that's not that's not what's trial. Here's the ship,
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: but this is not what I'm talking about. Piece of garbage,
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: but this is not what I'm talking about. That that
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 1: kind of that was so surprising that like the jury,
• 1:29:05
  Speaker 1: the jurors that acquit them have like tacit acknowledgment you
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 1: did it and and that's bad, but we're not going
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 1: to participate in this system somehow or like yeah, maybe
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: you can explain it better, but like they weren't deciding
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: if they did it or not. It was something different.
• 1:29:26
  Speaker 3: So one of the things that's so interesting is in
• 1:29:29
  Speaker 3: the the sort of white establishment, uh you know, the
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 3: defense attorneys who are all very very well educated. You know,
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 3: a couple of Princeton guys and uh.
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: Chris, is that a Princeton person? Mm, hmm, what you
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 1: do at Princeton politics? Well mean your whole four year
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: degree here told me.
• 1:29:50
  Speaker 3: That she likes to say, I would sco Boston.
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: You went to college at Princeton. Maybe I knew that
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 1: and forgot it.
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 2: She I don't really talk about it too much.
• 1:30:02
  Speaker 3: Rich guy over here, what are we gonna do? That's
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 3: not the case, Jesus Christ.
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 2: Rich financial aid package?
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 3: What's your name? Like Van Cockle Horse the fourth? What
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 3: are you like? Schneider the ninth.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 2: My dad's from Brooklyn and my mom is from.
• 1:30:21
  Speaker 3: So so you don't there's not some big like she
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 3: inherit the position of okay, I didn't know if there
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 3: was like a you know, a Schneider Industrial Challenger sitting
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 3: out here at that at the Jet Center.
• 1:30:34
  Speaker 2: That Schneider the family.
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 3: That's no, that's right, that's exactly right. That's exactly right.
• 1:30:43
  Speaker 3: She actually owns all of this. You just don't know it.
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 3: She really liked you. She's the investor. There's a series
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 3: of shell companies, so you'll never find out.
• 1:30:52
  Speaker 1: I think it's coming back to think so. But like
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 1: the lawyers, her as a lady that makes ear out
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: of the claws and pecker.
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 3: Bones and whatnot.
• 1:31:04
  Speaker 1: Where did you guys meet right here but at a
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: different building? Same the uh so.
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 3: Uh. You know. One of the things that the defense
• 1:31:15
  Speaker 3: lawyers clearly understood was that they were going to use
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 3: this case. I mean they talked about this openly, like
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 3: all their record you can go read now all the
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 3: stuff they talk openly amongst each other that like, we're
• 1:31:27
  Speaker 3: going to use this murder as our shocking act of
• 1:31:30
  Speaker 3: violence to try to maintain some control that because of
• 1:31:33
  Speaker 3: these court rulings we're losing. So you know, like JW.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: They wanted to tie it into very segregation.
• 1:31:40
  Speaker 3: So they shaped the Dude, when you read go read
• 1:31:43
  Speaker 3: the Look magazine story that's off phony. They make J. W.
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 3: Milems sound like he's Plato, do you know what I mean,
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 3: Like like Aristotle, he's the most sophisticated. Like there's a
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 3: newspaper reporter I won't name, but I'm always convinced this
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 3: guy makes stories up because every I mean quotes a
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 3: cab driver. I'm like, dude, I've had a lot of
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 3: cab drivers. I've never had a cab driver like who
• 1:32:06
  Speaker 3: says the exact, perfect, eloquent philosophical thing I need at
• 1:32:10
  Speaker 3: the Like you're that just didn't happen. So, but the
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 3: lawyers are making up these quotes that are coming out
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 3: of JW. Milum. And the way you realize it is
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 3: when you at Ohio State. They have a huge trunch
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 3: of some of these notes in the law.
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: But I can't move on. Who's the writer. I can't
• 1:32:27
  Speaker 1: tell you is he alive? Yes, I'll tell you later.
• 1:32:31
  Speaker 1: There's a funny quote that someone was saying that stand
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: up comedians, Yeah, stand up comedy is mostly acting outraged
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: by something of you said that you made up that
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: a fake friend said.
• 1:32:42
  Speaker 3: By the way, this, by the way, that's really good,
• 1:32:46
  Speaker 3: Like there is no stand up without the straw man,
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 3: Like I gotta.
• 1:32:50
  Speaker 1: Say that you make up a friend, You make up
• 1:32:51
  Speaker 1: a thing, he said, and then that thing pisces you
• 1:32:54
  Speaker 1: off and you talk about that that's.
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 3: Right, or it's like yeah, or like you know the
• 1:32:58
  Speaker 3: the Great Louis c k fit about uh, every someone
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 3: else on the airplane being pissed about the Wi fi.
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 3: He's given a minute, it's got to go to space.
• 1:33:07
  Speaker 3: And you're like, when I heard that, I'm like, oh,
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 3: he's clearly both people in this scenario. He's both the
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 3: person having a temper tantrum, and also the other version
• 1:33:15
  Speaker 3: of him who is self aware enough to know that, like,
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 3: so anyway, the uh uh but maybe no anyway, I
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 3: love uh.
• 1:33:24
  Speaker 1: So you're not gonna tell me, the writer.
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 3: No, and so I filibustered that, and so the uh.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 3: But you see things that are coming out of JW.
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 3: Malm's mouth that are verbatim from notes that the writer
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 3: took from interviews with the lawyers, and so you you're
• 1:33:40
  Speaker 3: watching the lawyers shape it. And so one of them,
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 3: one of the lawyers, said, we need people like JW.
• 1:33:47
  Speaker 3: Milem to fight our wars and to keep people in line.
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 3: And so there was very much a sense of like
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 3: we're gonna it's exactly what you said, like we're gonna
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 3: circle the wagons. But like these people were totally ostracized.
• 1:34:01
  Speaker 3: I mean at the end of his life. Uh, which
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 3: people the murderers, Oh yeah, at the end of Roy Bryance,
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 3: like the.
• 1:34:06
  Speaker 1: People that the families that the people that had quit them,
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 1: like they didn't want them around.
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 3: No, and they couldn't get crop loans and they couldn't
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 3: you know. Leslie Malham became a drug dealer and JW.
• 1:34:17
  Speaker 3: Malham was arrested for food stamp fraud and like that.
• 1:34:22
  Speaker 1: That was one of the biggest ironies I think is
• 1:34:25
  Speaker 1: that if you'd asked, if you went and asked people,
• 1:34:30
  Speaker 1: I'd be like, you know, if you said, like, hey,
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: give me the give me your like prejudice views on
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 1: what like minorities are up to. Yeah, like oh, food
• 1:34:43
  Speaker 1: stamp fraud, drug dealing, and the dudes that killed Emmett
• 1:34:47
  Speaker 1: till Well food stamp fraud, so drug dealing.
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 3: So I mean, I don't know how it is here,
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 3: but like, especially in Mississippi, the accusation is always the confession.
• 1:34:57
  Speaker 3: Like people only get mad at other people.
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: Read that quote and I told that quote my wife
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: and then I had to try to explain it to
• 1:35:03
  Speaker 1: her because you did a better job explaining that the
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: accusation is the confession.
• 1:35:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah, like you only ever despise in other people, which
• 1:35:12
  Speaker 3: you actually despise in yourself. I mean that's just sort
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 3: of like, I mean, that's almost universally true, and so
• 1:35:17
  Speaker 3: like you have Yeah, I mean, you know, these guys
• 1:35:21
  Speaker 3: are bootleggers. They're making whiskey. JW. Milem is one of
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 3: the main bootleg runners for the sheriff. It was investigating
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 3: his murder. I mean, there's a whole theory of the
• 1:35:32
  Speaker 3: case that Sheriff Strider made sure to claim jurisdiction because
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 3: the body was found in Tallahatchie County, the kidnapping happened
• 1:35:41
  Speaker 3: in Lafleur County, the murder happened in Sunflower County, and
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 3: the but the case was tried in Tallahatchie County because
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 3: it was the most conservative and it's also where the
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 3: killers were from. A bunch of the members of the
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 3: jury were like related to them. This is very much
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 3: this is not a random act of violence. This is
• 1:36:02
  Speaker 3: one tribe, members of one tribe of people killing a
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 3: child of another tribe of people to send a message,
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 3: you know, and like you know and like the grand
• 1:36:14
  Speaker 3: conspiracy of what. So when when the FBI wanted to
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 3: reopen the case in two thousand and four three four,
• 1:36:22
  Speaker 3: they had to exhume the body. And so the reason
• 1:36:26
  Speaker 3: they had to exhume Mmitt Till's body was because the
• 1:36:29
  Speaker 3: jury had said that that wasn't Emmett Till that they
• 1:36:32
  Speaker 3: had pulled out of the river. So what the defenses
• 1:36:35
  Speaker 3: theory of the case that the jury bought was that
• 1:36:40
  Speaker 3: the NAACP in cahoots with the Communist Party, had gotten
• 1:36:44
  Speaker 3: a body out of a morgue, thrown it in the
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 3: Mississippi in the Tallahatchee River, weighed it down just enough,
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 3: you know, obviously understanding the deep science of your body
• 1:36:54
  Speaker 3: releasing decom gases, so they would know exactly how much
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 3: weight to have so that it would sink but then
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 3: flow again. You know, somebody really done some work and
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 3: that this body that and then Mamie Till had said
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 3: it was her son in exchange for getting a payout
• 1:37:09
  Speaker 3: of a life insurance policy, and that Emmettil was alive,
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 3: and that all of this had been done to make
• 1:37:19
  Speaker 3: to make Mississippi look bad and to help the Communist
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 3: Party take over America. And that was the case that
• 1:37:24
  Speaker 3: the jurors made. That was the case the lawyers made,
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 3: and that was what the jury bought. So they had
• 1:37:29
  Speaker 3: to exzuom him and do a DNA test to make
• 1:37:31
  Speaker 3: sure that the body in Burroke Cemetery in Chicago was Mt.
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 3: Til and I mean and of course it was, and
• 1:37:37
  Speaker 3: you know, so the and then like I'm gonna find
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 3: this thing real quick because I like you talk about
• 1:37:41
  Speaker 3: this is what is being taught about This is from
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 3: a textbook that's being taught right now in the Mississippi
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 3: Delta about the Mmettil murder. I mean you talk about
• 1:37:50
  Speaker 3: the accusation is always a confession only sort of Only
• 1:37:54
  Speaker 3: a state that has so actively rewritten history to such
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 3: a degree would be worried that someone else was come
• 1:38:02
  Speaker 3: along and do it the other way. So, like you know,
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 3: Mississippi has been banning textbooks forever in rewriting text like
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 3: my Missippi history textbook stopped before the Civil Rights movement.
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 3: So this is what is. This is from a textbook,
• 1:38:16
  Speaker 3: and this is the only thing in the textbook that
• 1:38:19
  Speaker 3: is about Mt. TIL And this is this is being
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 3: taught right now. In nineteen fifty five, J. P. Coleman,
• 1:38:25
  Speaker 3: the Attorney general from Choctaw County, was elected governor of
• 1:38:28
  Speaker 3: Mississippi and was elected governor in Mississippi's first general election
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 3: after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Coleman promised
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 3: to keep the schools segregated. He proved to be a
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 3: moderating force during a very difficult time. Just after the election,
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 3: Emmett Till, a young black man from Chicago, allegedly made
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 3: allegedly made a pass at a white woman in a
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 3: rural store. Two men kidnapped him, beat him, killed him,
• 1:38:51
  Speaker 3: and threw his body in the Tallahatchee River. The coverage
• 1:38:53
  Speaker 3: of the trial, an acquittal of his accused murderers, who
• 1:38:56
  Speaker 3: later admitted their guilt in an article in a national magazine,
• 1:39:00
  Speaker 3: painted a poor picture of Mississippi and its white citizens.
• 1:39:04
  Speaker 3: That's the textbook, m H. And so like, well, what
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 3: what about that? Like to help me understand? So the
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 3: thing for me is that the entire murder is still
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 3: taught in the context of the death of The worst
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 3: part about a death of a child image, well is
• 1:39:22
  Speaker 3: that it sure made the sure made the white people look bad.
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 3: And like, you know, I think like somewhere along the line,
• 1:39:34
  Speaker 3: learning our history was transformed into sort of relentlessly attacking
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 3: people with it. And I think, like, you shouldn't be
• 1:39:42
  Speaker 3: using You shouldn't learn the history of the Mississippi Delta
• 1:39:44
  Speaker 3: to determine who is currently politically problematic, who should be canceled.
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 3: You should learn the history just to know it. And
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 3: so like, I don't feel guilty, Like I don't, I
• 1:39:58
  Speaker 3: don't have some weird like Southern guilt thing, but I
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 3: do think it's a combent upon me to know what
• 1:40:03
  Speaker 3: happened on this land if I'm going to farm it.
• 1:40:06
  Speaker 3: And you know, and I do think that that it
• 1:40:09
  Speaker 3: is essential to be able to say this is what
• 1:40:13
  Speaker 3: happened here, and you know, it's not like you know,
• 1:40:17
  Speaker 3: we're still on the land. You know, it's not like
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 3: I haven't I failed to understand how learning the history
• 1:40:24
  Speaker 3: of this in any way negatively affects me. I mean
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 3: I've thought about that a lot, because that's so that
• 1:40:28
  Speaker 3: you know, that conversation is in the air so much,
• 1:40:31
  Speaker 3: and like, I just failed to understand how teaching this
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 3: history in a school could do a single thing to
• 1:40:37
  Speaker 3: me or anyone related to me.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what kind of opposition to your work have you encountered?
• 1:40:50
  Speaker 2: Or threats or people trying to undermine it?
• 1:40:55
  Speaker 3: Are not? Really because you know there is that when
• 1:40:58
  Speaker 3: I'm from there, and like there's the you know, there's
• 1:41:01
  Speaker 3: that great I think it's Willie Ray Wiley Ray Hubbard
• 1:41:05
  Speaker 3: wrote it, But like Robert O'Kane does the sort of
• 1:41:08
  Speaker 3: version I know he's like I may not wear a
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 3: stet Son, but I'm willing to bet son that I'm
• 1:41:12
  Speaker 3: as big a Texan as you are. Like I sort
• 1:41:15
  Speaker 3: of feel like we've been I've been there from a
• 1:41:17
  Speaker 3: long We've been there a long time, We're going to
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 3: be there a long time. I can kind of say
• 1:41:21
  Speaker 3: whatever the hell I want. There's a sense of also
• 1:41:24
  Speaker 3: it's just true, and like the people who are from
• 1:41:26
  Speaker 3: there know it, you know, and and and are much
• 1:41:31
  Speaker 3: more nuanced about this than our two dimensional politicians would
• 1:41:34
  Speaker 3: lead you to believe, like, you know, like Mississippi is Mississippi,
• 1:41:40
  Speaker 3: and Mississippians are complicated and and so there've been very
• 1:41:47
  Speaker 3: little pushback. And you know, it's interesting because I mean,
• 1:41:56
  Speaker 3: I love the Mississippi Delta. I didn't know hardly any
• 1:42:01
  Speaker 3: of this. I certainly didn't understand, you know, Paul the
• 1:42:04
  Speaker 3: Paul Simon song. That's just it's not the highway through
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 3: the cradle of the Civil War. But I don't think
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 3: I knew that until this. I mean, there's there's just
• 1:42:11
  Speaker 3: a lot about the actual history of the land and
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 3: the way that both you know, I think Faulkner is
• 1:42:20
  Speaker 3: so often misunderstood. I think if you go read the Bear,
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 3: you go read Go Down, Moses, you go down and
• 1:42:24
  Speaker 3: read as you go read Absolom Absolom, Like I think
• 1:42:27
  Speaker 3: one of if not the most animating things in all
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 3: of his work is the bewilderment at the Mississippi Delta,
• 1:42:34
  Speaker 3: going from uninhabited swamp to a agricultural factory in twenty
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 3: five years. I mean, it would have taken a thousand
• 1:42:42
  Speaker 3: years in Bavaria to kill a forest that big. And
• 1:42:45
  Speaker 3: I think like the idea of civilization as the enemy
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 3: of nature and how that flows through Faulkner's work. I mean,
• 1:42:55
  Speaker 3: like when I read The Bear, when I go read
• 1:42:57
  Speaker 3: like I said, go down Moses or Absolom, like I feel.
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 3: I mean, I feel like Faulkner's read now only through
• 1:43:04
  Speaker 3: the prism of race, and like, I actually think that's
• 1:43:07
  Speaker 3: not how you have to read Faukner through the prism
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 3: of his deep bewilderment at the sort of existential loss
• 1:43:16
  Speaker 3: and trauma of having that much wilderness just erased, and
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 3: like what that does to a people, Like I mean,
• 1:43:24
  Speaker 3: it's not an accident that like nothing about the land
• 1:43:28
  Speaker 3: where immit Till was killed has anything to do with God,
• 1:43:33
  Speaker 3: Like this is not this is man made land, this
• 1:43:35
  Speaker 3: is not none of this bears the fingerprint of the
• 1:43:38
  Speaker 3: creator God. And yeah, it just has nothing to do
• 1:43:42
  Speaker 3: with that what And so you know, if you ever
• 1:43:45
  Speaker 3: go out to that barn and wonder, like God, did
• 1:43:48
  Speaker 3: God forsake this place? Maybe the answer is yes.
• 1:43:52
  Speaker 1: History man, Like, I get what you're saying. History's history
• 1:43:57
  Speaker 1: is so tough and the telling of it's so top.
• 1:44:02
  Speaker 1: The other day I took my kids. We were in
• 1:44:04
  Speaker 1: New Mexico for a wedding. Yeah, and I took my
• 1:44:08
  Speaker 1: kids to Bandolier. Yeah, okay, the sight of old ancestral
• 1:44:12
  Speaker 1: to Blowing Settlements. There's a big sign. You get up
• 1:44:16
  Speaker 1: in this high overlook and you can see Los Animals
• 1:44:18
  Speaker 1: laboratories off to the west. Okay, and there's a sign there,
• 1:44:23
  Speaker 1: and it's a National Park Service sign, and the sign
• 1:44:26
  Speaker 1: is about The sign is exclusively about that Puebloan people
• 1:44:34
  Speaker 1: weren't allowed to go on the Los Alamos land starting
• 1:44:39
  Speaker 1: in nineteen forty three or whatever the hell it was, Okay,
• 1:44:42
  Speaker 1: and the freedom to go there slas and been restored.
• 1:44:46
  Speaker 1: I said to my kids, like I called more. I said, man,
• 1:44:51
  Speaker 1: I want you to understand what this sign is, and
• 1:44:53
  Speaker 1: I want you to understand what's not here.
• 1:44:55
  Speaker 3: Well, and I'm like that's crazy. Well, well, would you
• 1:44:58
  Speaker 3: want to not be on this where we test nuclear weapons.
• 1:45:01
  Speaker 1: I said, if I was going to write this sign,
• 1:45:04
  Speaker 1: you call my kids in here and ask. I said,
• 1:45:06
  Speaker 1: if I was going to write this sign, I would say,
• 1:45:10
  Speaker 1: and it's worth pointing out the thing they invented on
• 1:45:15
  Speaker 1: that site over there saved probably two hundred and fifty
• 1:45:20
  Speaker 1: thousand American lives because we would have had to have
• 1:45:22
  Speaker 1: invaded the mainland of Japan, you know. And so I'm like,
• 1:45:26
  Speaker 1: there's just I was. I was like kind of lecturing them,
• 1:45:29
  Speaker 1: I'm like, there's just always more to the story.
• 1:45:31
  Speaker 3: And also like if you don't want someone to drop
• 1:45:35
  Speaker 3: an atomic bomb on you, maybe don't attack them, because
• 1:45:38
  Speaker 3: like there's a certain degree of don't start shit, won't
• 1:45:41
  Speaker 3: be no shit, I know.
• 1:45:42
  Speaker 1: And it's like like once you become like like your
• 1:45:44
  Speaker 1: point being, once you become aware, like you did, like
• 1:45:47
  Speaker 1: you got obsessed. Yeah, and you you attempted your book.
• 1:45:51
  Speaker 1: You attempted your book to do to unravel every little bit.
• 1:45:56
  Speaker 1: We're trying to like whoa, who's this guy that happened
• 1:45:59
  Speaker 1: to walk by one day, I'm going to track his
• 1:46:01
  Speaker 1: family back one hundred years.
• 1:46:02
  Speaker 3: Well, because you know, there's a sense that like we're
• 1:46:07
  Speaker 3: trying to turn our descriptions of American history into tweets
• 1:46:11
  Speaker 3: and like it's too complicated for a sign over you like,
• 1:46:17
  Speaker 3: you can't do in a sign the interplay between the
• 1:46:21
  Speaker 3: Pueblo people and the atomic bomb, or like, you know,
• 1:46:25
  Speaker 3: I got deep into the history. I didn't realize that,
• 1:46:28
  Speaker 3: like the Choctaw and the Chickasaw, that the Chickasaw were
• 1:46:33
  Speaker 3: sort of deeply intermarried into the British and the Choctaw
• 1:46:35
  Speaker 3: were deeply intermarried into the French, and so that the
• 1:46:40
  Speaker 3: last free band of Natchez Indians in Mississippi was sold
• 1:46:44
  Speaker 3: into slavery by the Choctaw and the French. And we're
• 1:46:49
  Speaker 3: sent down to work the plantations in Haiti, and a
• 1:46:52
  Speaker 3: French military officer there ran into years later, one of
• 1:46:56
  Speaker 3: those last Natchez chiefs, and he was down in the
• 1:46:59
  Speaker 3: harbor and whatever the town it's cap Haiti now, I
• 1:47:02
  Speaker 3: can't remember what the name was then, and it was
• 1:47:05
  Speaker 3: sort of like what are you doing? And he was
• 1:47:06
  Speaker 3: just staring longingly up at home, and so like, you know,
• 1:47:09
  Speaker 3: if you're gonna tell the history of uh, you know,
• 1:47:14
  Speaker 3: if you're gonna tell the history of the native settlements
• 1:47:17
  Speaker 3: in the Mississippi Delta, you have to talk about like,
• 1:47:22
  Speaker 3: you know, tribes were being erased by other tribes. Tribes
• 1:47:26
  Speaker 3: were being erased by the French. Tribes were being erased
• 1:47:29
  Speaker 3: by the British. The Choctaw, and the Choctaw and the
• 1:47:34
  Speaker 3: Chickasaw sort of picked there were a bunch of powers
• 1:47:39
  Speaker 3: down there, and nobody picked the Us, and so they
• 1:47:42
  Speaker 3: sort of you know, like you understand like there are
• 1:47:45
  Speaker 3: these warring factions, and like when you get into the history,
• 1:47:48
  Speaker 3: it is so complicated. And you know, all of the
• 1:47:51
  Speaker 3: Indian mounds in Mississippi. I didn't realize this. They elites
• 1:47:56
  Speaker 3: built their houses on top of them as a way
• 1:47:58
  Speaker 3: to sort of like symbol luckily, stand on the shoulders
• 1:48:01
  Speaker 3: of the ancestors. So you know, it's like it's like
• 1:48:04
  Speaker 3: if your last name is Whitney or something. You know,
• 1:48:06
  Speaker 3: it's the same kind of idea. And it just occurred
• 1:48:09
  Speaker 3: to me researching all this history. How little history we
• 1:48:13
  Speaker 3: actually know. Like I don't like, go back to the
• 1:48:17
  Speaker 3: native town right there, I don't know, we don't know
• 1:48:21
  Speaker 3: who the good guys and the bad guys were. You know,
• 1:48:24
  Speaker 3: we preserve these mound structures, but we don't know what
• 1:48:27
  Speaker 3: the people who are living in the houses on top
• 1:48:29
  Speaker 3: of those mounds were doing to those working folks sort
• 1:48:33
  Speaker 3: of out in the cornfields. And like, so I just
• 1:48:36
  Speaker 3: I know an incredible amount about the history of this
• 1:48:38
  Speaker 3: piece of land, but like mostly what I know is
• 1:48:42
  Speaker 3: like the sheer tonnage of a what I don't know,
• 1:48:47
  Speaker 3: And some of it I just probably not a good
• 1:48:49
  Speaker 3: enough reporter to find. But a lot of it is
• 1:48:51
  Speaker 3: just unknowable. And so I found that to be like
• 1:48:55
  Speaker 3: I think with history, I don't I don't think we
• 1:48:58
  Speaker 3: need some like sort of weird jug sign. I just
• 1:49:00
  Speaker 3: think we need to know everything we can possibly know
• 1:49:04
  Speaker 3: about a square of land because the truth of it,
• 1:49:08
  Speaker 3: it's going to be so much more complex than we realize.
• 1:49:11
  Speaker 3: The truth of it will never fit into sort of
• 1:49:14
  Speaker 3: one ideological sides version of this. I mean, you know this,
• 1:49:19
  Speaker 3: the book sort of goes after tenets of a bunch
• 1:49:23
  Speaker 3: of the truth is not helpful to ideology.
• 1:49:26
  Speaker 1: You know, A little thing that's hit me reading it.
• 1:49:29
  Speaker 3: Does that make sense at all? Yeah?
• 1:49:34
  Speaker 1: I mentioned my friend, my friend Doug Darren, Yeah, who
• 1:49:36
  Speaker 1: lives like on his family's farm.
• 1:49:39
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:49:40
  Speaker 1: Uh, he lives a very deep history existence where it
• 1:49:45
  Speaker 1: seems like the past like when you're hanging out with them,
• 1:49:50
  Speaker 1: it seems like the past is all happening right now.
• 1:49:54
  Speaker 3: I love that.
• 1:49:55
  Speaker 1: Do you follow me? Like like every like little true
• 1:49:59
  Speaker 1: or like trees and what it's all like, it's all
• 1:50:01
  Speaker 1: it's all compressed.
• 1:50:02
  Speaker 3: Well. I love the idea that, like the places I
• 1:50:06
  Speaker 3: like best, or the membrane between the president and the
• 1:50:08
  Speaker 3: past is so thin you can see through it. And
• 1:50:10
  Speaker 3: so like, I feel like there's a version of the
• 1:50:12
  Speaker 3: Mississippi Delta where this is all happening at once. Yep,
• 1:50:17
  Speaker 3: and it's all happening right now. And you know, Nathan
• 1:50:21
  Speaker 3: Bedford Forrest Cavalry is walking the same road as JW.
• 1:50:25
  Speaker 3: Milms driving, as Willie Reid is walking as you know,
• 1:50:31
  Speaker 3: if you ever listen to Crossroads, Uh go see my
• 1:50:34
  Speaker 3: friend Willy Brown. Willy Brown lived right by the barn.
• 1:50:37
  Speaker 3: And so like, like, I think there's a way in
• 1:50:39
  Speaker 3: which all of this is happening all the time, over
• 1:50:42
  Speaker 3: and over simultaneously.
• 1:50:45
  Speaker 1: He there's this thing, Doug, you when you're getting the
• 1:50:48
  Speaker 1: local tour, there's this thing Doug does it that Like
• 1:50:51
  Speaker 1: like I was like, has reminiscent of Emmett Till in that.
• 1:50:57
  Speaker 1: Uh you go buy this farm, and Doug's like, so
• 1:51:02
  Speaker 1: in the past because in his father's time, some kids
• 1:51:06
  Speaker 1: stole some gas, Yeah, some egg gas from the farmer.
• 1:51:10
  Speaker 1: The farmer comes running out, and the kids jump in
• 1:51:13
  Speaker 1: the car and take off, and the farmer takes a
• 1:51:15
  Speaker 1: shotgun and shoots one of the kids.
• 1:51:18
  Speaker 3: Right in the back of the head.
• 1:51:21
  Speaker 1: High school kids. He gets acquitted. He thought it was
• 1:51:26
  Speaker 1: bird shot, is their argument. Yeah, he thought bird shot,
• 1:51:32
  Speaker 1: not buckshot or slug or whatever the hell he killed
• 1:51:34
  Speaker 1: the kid.
• 1:51:35
  Speaker 3: The idea that it's a sophisticated hunter doesn't know what's.
• 1:51:38
  Speaker 1: Well, that's just like that's just and like it's just
• 1:51:43
  Speaker 1: funny a way of looking at you know, history, and
• 1:51:45
  Speaker 1: it has all these same things like like when it
• 1:51:47
  Speaker 1: was logged and who cleared it. But it's like in
• 1:51:50
  Speaker 1: his when when you're out with Doug, Yeah, it's like
• 1:51:55
  Speaker 1: that kid's driving down the road right now, do you
• 1:51:57
  Speaker 1: know what I'm saying? Well, I love that kind of
• 1:51:59
  Speaker 1: like I love I like that kind of experience. And
• 1:52:01
  Speaker 1: that's so much what I got from your book is
• 1:52:04
  Speaker 1: this way of just like taking chunks of ground and
• 1:52:08
  Speaker 1: like really getting them.
• 1:52:10
  Speaker 3: So I made a map of everything that had happened.
• 1:52:12
  Speaker 3: It's on my phone of everything that had happened in
• 1:52:15
  Speaker 3: this square of land. It's interesting because the map doesn't
• 1:52:18
  Speaker 3: show sort of gradiations based on chronology. It's just all there,
• 1:52:22
  Speaker 3: so you're sort of drive I can drive around and
• 1:52:24
  Speaker 3: look at the stuff, and it's like and I also
• 1:52:26
  Speaker 3: made a map just like that of the South side
• 1:52:29
  Speaker 3: of Chicago and so like and uh, that's where my
• 1:52:33
  Speaker 3: dad was brought up. Oh yeah, I mean, like it
• 1:52:36
  Speaker 3: is my firm. But well, first of all, the South
• 1:52:38
  Speaker 3: side of Chicago is the capital of the Mississippi Delta,
• 1:52:40
  Speaker 3: like the only professional sports team in the state of Mississippi,
• 1:52:43
  Speaker 3: or the Chicago White Sox, you know in Chicago until
• 1:52:47
  Speaker 3: they started dying. Big mississipp high schools would have their
• 1:52:49
  Speaker 3: reunions in Chicago, like Greenwood High School, Greenville High School.
• 1:52:53
  Speaker 3: Because so many people had moved Chicago, it was easier
• 1:52:56
  Speaker 3: for the six people still in Mississippi to go up
• 1:52:58
  Speaker 3: there than for all four hundred to come back. And
• 1:53:01
  Speaker 3: so like, you know, Mississippi functioned as a you know
• 1:53:06
  Speaker 3: Argo Summit, Illinois, where Emmettil's family settled. They all worked
• 1:53:10
  Speaker 3: at the Argo starch plant. They make argo cornstarch. Oh yeah,
• 1:53:15
  Speaker 3: they may still make it. Yeah, and they make Cairo
• 1:53:16
  Speaker 3: syrup and make your pecan pie with and uh. They
• 1:53:20
  Speaker 3: all lived there, and they called it Little Mississippi, like
• 1:53:22
  Speaker 3: there were so many Mississippians and so you know, I
• 1:53:26
  Speaker 3: feel like, I mean, one of the things I love
• 1:53:28
  Speaker 3: to do is drive people from the Delta around the
• 1:53:31
  Speaker 3: south side of Chicago, like Hyde Park, sort of south
• 1:53:35
  Speaker 3: and like, you know, because it's mile after mile after
• 1:53:37
  Speaker 3: mile after mile of perfectly manicured, middle class bungalows and
• 1:53:43
  Speaker 3: I'm like, you know, if you drive the Mississippi Delta,
• 1:53:45
  Speaker 3: it's super decayed. And the Missippi Delta is like it's
• 1:53:47
  Speaker 3: like Dori and Gray, you know, whereas its sins on
• 1:53:49
  Speaker 3: the outside and they're just abandoned buildings and collapse cotton
• 1:53:52
  Speaker 3: gins and feels like a failed experiment, which is at
• 1:53:55
  Speaker 3: what it was. I mean, the global capital markets came here,
• 1:53:57
  Speaker 3: stripped out their ten percent, and then moved on and
• 1:54:00
  Speaker 3: left the rest of us there to clean up the mess.
• 1:54:02
  Speaker 3: And you get this sense that like that you know
• 1:54:08
  Speaker 3: that that that all of that money that's on the
• 1:54:11
  Speaker 3: south side of Chicago should still be in the Mississippi Delta,
• 1:54:15
  Speaker 3: like all of those like that's what it should look
• 1:54:17
  Speaker 3: like anyway, I I you know, I don't. Ever my
• 1:54:22
  Speaker 3: accent gets pegged all the time on the south side
• 1:54:25
  Speaker 3: of Chicago is from Mississippi. Like can people just hear it?
• 1:54:29
  Speaker 3: They'll know and like uh. Or if you're in Chicago
• 1:54:33
  Speaker 3: and you ever have to give your driver's license, either
• 1:54:35
  Speaker 3: at a hotel or like at a will call, like
• 1:54:38
  Speaker 3: you if you go to a baseball game, almost inevitably
• 1:54:41
  Speaker 3: the person working will look at it and see that
• 1:54:45
  Speaker 3: it's mess to be driver's license and say something that
• 1:54:47
  Speaker 3: happens to me more in Chicago than it doesn't.
• 1:54:50
  Speaker 1: I mean like that, you know, there's connections that strong.
• 1:54:52
  Speaker 3: And then the other thing that's interesting is so many
• 1:54:54
  Speaker 3: people are retiring back to the South. So in the
• 1:54:57
  Speaker 3: same way that there are lots of Southern foods in Chicago,
• 1:55:00
  Speaker 3: they're now like polishes and high Italian beef places in
• 1:55:02
  Speaker 3: the Mississippi Delta because people are coming back home and
• 1:55:05
  Speaker 3: they're bringing the food of their old home with them.
• 1:55:09
  Speaker 1: As a last thing, Yeah, before we wrap up, can
• 1:55:11
  Speaker 1: you hit me with the what you take on ivory
• 1:55:13
  Speaker 1: build woodpeckers. We've covered that bird good, all right? So
• 1:55:17
  Speaker 1: you remember we saw that one. We did, we got
• 1:55:19
  Speaker 1: to handle one. It's dead.
• 1:55:22
  Speaker 3: Oh yeah, so the look well, one of the things
• 1:55:25
  Speaker 3: that's crazy is like they.
• 1:55:26
  Speaker 1: Had a little foot tag on them, all dried out
• 1:55:28
  Speaker 1: in that drawer, remember that.
• 1:55:31
  Speaker 3: That's right. So the there's a huge fight, as you know,
• 1:55:34
  Speaker 3: between the scientist at Cornell and then those folks down
• 1:55:38
  Speaker 3: in Louisiana, Arkansas, Misissippi who claimed to have seen one.
• 1:55:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah there's the guy because.
• 1:55:44
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but they're always what they're looking at is is
• 1:55:47
  Speaker 1: uh pilliated?
• 1:55:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah? Wood? And there's that's the argument. And then there's
• 1:55:51
  Speaker 3: a double like there's a there there, there's the double knock.
• 1:55:54
  Speaker 3: Is that the there's something about the call that's specific to
• 1:55:56
  Speaker 3: the Ivory build versus the affiliated woodpecker. Anyway, I went
• 1:55:59
  Speaker 3: out for a couple of days in the swamps. It's
• 1:56:03
  Speaker 3: all around the Stennis Space Station. And what's interesting is that, Pa.
• 1:56:11
  Speaker 1: You know, we didn't do what just to recap people.
• 1:56:13
  Speaker 1: There's a bird. The Ivy built woodpecker went extinct in
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 1: the fifties.
• 1:56:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well and.
• 1:56:17
  Speaker 1: All that they knew where the last one was and
• 1:56:20
  Speaker 1: it was in a nest and they cut its treet down.
• 1:56:21
  Speaker 3: Here we go. In April nineteen forty four, a human
• 1:56:25
  Speaker 3: being made the last confirmed sighting of an ivory bill woodpecker.
• 1:56:29
  Speaker 3: The fight to save them had failed. The last large
• 1:56:32
  Speaker 3: hardwood patch in the Lower Mississippi Valley was eighty thousand
• 1:56:35
  Speaker 3: acres in Louisiana called the Singer Tract, named after the
• 1:56:38
  Speaker 3: sewing machine company that owned it. There were four nests
• 1:56:41
  Speaker 3: in John's Bio and a confirmed roost tree in max Bio.
• 1:56:46
  Speaker 3: The company leased the land to the state as a
• 1:56:48
  Speaker 3: hunting refuge, but sold the timber rights to a big
• 1:56:51
  Speaker 3: lumber firm out of Chicago. When the war began, Chicago
• 1:56:54
  Speaker 3: Mill and Lumber World War one or World War two,
• 1:56:57
  Speaker 3: I mean signed a contract with the military to deliver wood.
• 1:57:00
  Speaker 3: It began cutting immediately. The National Autobund Society went to
• 1:57:04
  Speaker 3: work to save the woodpecker habitat, lining up state and
• 1:57:07
  Speaker 3: national support, even getting the War Department to agree to
• 1:57:10
  Speaker 3: accept less wood in exchange for saving the bird. The
• 1:57:13
  Speaker 3: company cut it all down anyway. The company executive, who
• 1:57:17
  Speaker 3: answered all of these pleas, responded by saying, we are
• 1:57:20
  Speaker 3: just money grubbers. We are not concerned as our u
• 1:57:23
  Speaker 3: folk with ethical considerations. So many animals had vanished from
• 1:57:27
  Speaker 3: these river hardwood swamps. The red wolf, the cougar, the
• 1:57:30
  Speaker 3: Carolina parakeet, and now the saws had come for the
• 1:57:33
  Speaker 3: Lord god bird itself, the ivory built woodpecker. The wood
• 1:57:38
  Speaker 3: got turned into military packing crates and plywood gasoline tanks
• 1:57:41
  Speaker 3: for fighter planes. The Autobund Society sent a researcher back
• 1:57:44
  Speaker 3: into the vanishing forest to see if any birds remained.
• 1:57:48
  Speaker 3: He found one. The researcher told a colleague, who was
• 1:57:51
  Speaker 3: also an artist, that if he ever wanted to draw
• 1:57:53
  Speaker 3: an ivory bill from a living bird, the time was now.
• 1:57:56
  Speaker 3: Don Eckleberry, just twenty three, went south to the swamps.
• 1:58:00
  Speaker 3: He searched and followed, and looked for specific nests and trees.
• 1:58:03
  Speaker 3: Walking through a swamp while looking up his a learned skill,
• 1:58:07
  Speaker 3: one evening around dusk, his barred owl sang in anticipation
• 1:58:10
  Speaker 3: of a nighttime kill. Eckleberry and his traveling companions heard
• 1:58:14
  Speaker 3: the double knock. They silently waited. Thirteen minutes later, the
• 1:58:18
  Speaker 3: bird swooped through the clearing, flying above the broken tree
• 1:58:21
  Speaker 3: corpses left by the lumberman. Eckleberry notated the details in
• 1:58:25
  Speaker 3: his journal. He stared at the last known ivory bill woodpecker,
• 1:58:29
  Speaker 3: and would never forget its face, hysterical pale eyes, he wrote,
• 1:58:34
  Speaker 3: And so also the lumber. The family that cut down
• 1:58:37
  Speaker 3: those forests is the family that founded and nurtured and
• 1:58:42
  Speaker 3: invented aspen. So like people who love their wilderness don't
• 1:58:45
  Speaker 3: give a shit about yours. Huh you know what I mean?
• 1:58:48
  Speaker 3: Oh shit, yeah, and like uh oh man really yeah,
• 1:58:51
  Speaker 3: and so like it's infuriating me, Like you come down,
• 1:58:54
  Speaker 3: you're gonna cut down my wilderness and then go somewhere
• 1:58:57
  Speaker 3: else and preserve wilderness and act like your vacation spot.
• 1:59:00
  Speaker 3: That's right, And that's a hearty fuck you to them. Sorry,
• 1:59:03
  Speaker 3: Phil oh good. I don't do the TV. It's just
• 1:59:08
  Speaker 3: somebody else's past, you know, trying to look out for them.
• 1:59:11
  Speaker 3: That's fine.
• 1:59:12
  Speaker 1: I called Clayven beeps out when someone says, like, gosh,
• 1:59:15
  Speaker 1: durn clail beep.
• 1:59:16
  Speaker 3: He's so opposed. You would be really funny if you
• 1:59:18
  Speaker 3: beeped out stuff that wasn't cursing and make it look
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 3: like somebody.
• 1:59:21
  Speaker 1: Is just yeah, that'd be a great trick to do
• 1:59:23
  Speaker 1: on somebody. Yeah, just his mom be like.
• 1:59:26
  Speaker 3: You should be shamed yourself, My mom, is always like, uh,
• 1:59:29
  Speaker 3: because my mom listens to all of these and she's
• 1:59:31
  Speaker 3: always you need to leave the locker room. Talk in
• 1:59:33
  Speaker 3: the locker room.
• 1:59:34
  Speaker 1: So do you think there's still if you build Woodpecker's
• 1:59:36
  Speaker 1: around if you had to guess, And I'm talking the
• 1:59:40
  Speaker 1: kind of guests where there's a gun to.
• 1:59:42
  Speaker 3: Your head, gun to my hat. Gun.
• 1:59:44
  Speaker 1: There's here's why I like the latest kind of thing out.
• 1:59:46
  Speaker 1: There's an omniscient being that knows all truth. This omniscient
• 1:59:51
  Speaker 1: being has a pistol. Yep, it says, I know the
• 1:59:55
  Speaker 1: omniscient being. I know if there are are not, I'm
• 2:00:00
  Speaker 1: going to ask you the question. If you get it right,
• 2:00:03
  Speaker 1: you live, If you get it wrong.
• 2:00:06
  Speaker 3: You die. Okay, this is a fun game. And then
• 2:00:08
  Speaker 3: I go, what's that line from the West Wing? If
• 2:00:09
  Speaker 3: the oscars were like that, I'd watch.
• 2:00:12
  Speaker 1: And I say to you. Then I say to you then,
• 2:00:14
  Speaker 1: So there's no being cute, there's no being like what
• 2:00:17
  Speaker 1: you wish was true. There's no being cute, there's no
• 2:00:19
  Speaker 1: Devil's advocate. It's just pure.
• 2:00:22
  Speaker 3: You live or die. Here's what I think.
• 2:00:24
  Speaker 1: And I say, are there I you Bill Woodpecker's alive
• 2:00:26
  Speaker 1: right now? My answer is no, right with the gun to.
• 2:00:29
  Speaker 3: My head, all right, So I will say this. My
• 2:00:32
  Speaker 3: answer is not going to be no, although I am
• 2:00:36
  Speaker 3: hesitant to offer a wilderness hot take in the corporate
• 2:00:40
  Speaker 3: headquarters of meat Eater with mister meat Eater, so I
• 2:00:44
  Speaker 3: don't want. I feel like you probably know more about
• 2:00:47
  Speaker 3: this than I do. I say that I think there
• 2:00:51
  Speaker 3: is because no, man, here's why, and here's why. No no,
• 2:00:57
  Speaker 3: no no, And now.
• 2:00:58
  Speaker 1: The omniscient being is like, geez, maybe I'm no.
• 2:01:00
  Speaker 3: So here the here are the two reasons that I that.
• 2:01:03
  Speaker 3: Here's why I think that. I think One, I think
• 2:01:07
  Speaker 3: that there is a tremendous desire from sort of the
• 2:01:14
  Speaker 3: ornithology establishment for it to not be true. And so
• 2:01:17
  Speaker 3: something about the argument against it feels a little bit
• 2:01:20
  Speaker 3: to me like the Lady Duth protest too much. There's
• 2:01:23
  Speaker 3: something about how aggressive there being that makes me think
• 2:01:26
  Speaker 3: that they're operating from a place of weakness, not confidence.
• 2:01:29
  Speaker 3: And then and then the other thing I think is
• 2:01:32
  Speaker 3: that I think you know, I love to watch your show,
• 2:01:39
  Speaker 3: and one of the reasons is because I like to
• 2:01:41
  Speaker 3: watch you guys move through a universe the scale of
• 2:01:47
  Speaker 3: which is so unimaginable to me. Like we're sort of
• 2:01:50
  Speaker 3: glassing over three valleys and just thinking, like we don't
• 2:01:55
  Speaker 3: there's so much we don't know about what goes on
• 2:01:59
  Speaker 3: in the wildern that like I tend to think that
• 2:02:03
  Speaker 3: like whatever we think we know, I feel like will
• 2:02:09
  Speaker 3: be proven wrong. I just think they're mysteries that you know,
• 2:02:14
  Speaker 3: And maybe I'm just romanticizing the idea of wilderness, but like,
• 2:02:17
  Speaker 3: I just think they are secrets, and they're mysteries that,
• 2:02:24
  Speaker 3: like the deep ocean, remain unknown and almost unimaginable, and
• 2:02:28
  Speaker 3: they're sort of wondering surprise. That would be my argument.
• 2:02:31
  Speaker 1: Great, I'm gonna holster my pistol. Well I'm not the
• 2:02:35
  Speaker 1: omniscient being.
• 2:02:36
  Speaker 3: Well yeah, I was about saying, By the way, the
• 2:02:38
  Speaker 3: moment you fake shot me was the moment you actually
• 2:02:41
  Speaker 3: you're inner narcissism revealed that, like in this story, you're
• 2:02:45
  Speaker 3: the omniscient being. So I'm glad. I'm like, I'm like
• 2:02:48
  Speaker 3: wait a minute. I'm like wait a minute. I'm like
• 2:02:51
  Speaker 3: you he just shot Oh shit, Steven.
• 2:02:53
  Speaker 1: Is I know I somehow got I somehow got into
• 2:02:56
  Speaker 1: the role. I didn't want the role, but there I was.
• 2:02:59
  Speaker 3: If thanks gentlemen, if nominated I will know that's right.
• 2:03:04
  Speaker 1: Get your brain if you want to stretch your brain out,
• 2:03:06
  Speaker 1: real good, like a real good brain stretching. Pick up
• 2:03:12
  Speaker 1: the Barn. The Secret history of a murder in Mississippi
• 2:03:18
  Speaker 1: by a man who was born and raised twenty miles
• 2:03:21
  Speaker 1: down the road from that murder. It's a landscape history.
• 2:03:26
  Speaker 1: It's American culture, it's politics, it's agriculture. It's everything, man,
• 2:03:32
  Speaker 1: it's everything. It's the whole everything, squeezed beautifully and elegantly
• 2:03:40
  Speaker 1: into a single book. Right, Thompson, thank you very much
• 2:03:42
  Speaker 1: for coming on, man, man, thanks so much for having
• 2:03:44
  Speaker 1: me appreciate it. Thanks