I The Barn Willie Reed awoke early Sunday morning to the sound of mockingbirds. Mosquitoes hovered and darted on the bayou behind his house. The cypress floorboards creaked beneath his feet. He stepped outside into a visible wall of humidity. Local kids like Willie had a name for the little riffles rising from the dirt: heat monkeys, animated like a living thing. A Mississippi Delta sunrise is feral and predatory; even at 6:00 a.m., the air feels hot on the way in and stagnant on the way out.

Daylight had broken an hour before Reed started his short walk to Patterson''s country store, one of the many little places out in the country that sold rag bologna and hoop cheese. It was August 28, 1955. His grandfather wanted fresh meat to cook for breakfast. He was eighteen years old, with a boyish face that made him look at least three or four years younger, with almond-shaped eyes and delicate lashes. His girlfriend, Ella Mae, lived a few miles south on Roy Clark''s plantation. Late August meant they were a week into cotton-picking season. In a few hours, after church ended, hundreds of men, women, and children would be pulling nine-foot sacks through the rows of cotton on the other side of the road. The past few growing seasons had been hard on everyone but for the first time in two or three years the price looked good enough for farmers to clear a little profit, depending on the whim of the landlord.

Reed and his family worked for Clint Shurden, one of eighteen siblings who''d all left sharecropping behind to form a little empire around the Delta town of Drew. The Reeds usually made money for a year of work, and Clint also paid Willie three dollars a day to help him out around the place. The people across the narrow dirt road never made a dime working for their landlord, Leslie Milam, who''d moved into the old Kimbriel place a few years back. Milam was the first member of his hardscrabble family to gain a toehold in the fading, cloistered world of Delta landowners. Bald like his brother J.W., with sagging jowls and a double chin, Leslie was renting to own from the kind of family his had aspired for generations to become, the Ivy League-educated Sturdivants, whose empire included at least twelve thousand acres and a sizable investment in a three-year-old business named Holiday Inn. Leslie''s thick brows rose in a perpetual look of surprise above his eyes, which were just a little too close together.

The Black folks who lived in the country between Ruleville and Drew had quickly come to hate Leslie. They had a word for men like him, a whispered sarcastic curse: striver. Leslie Milam was a striver . Just last year he''d told Alonzo and Amanda Bradley that they owed him eleven dollars, which he''d forgive if they stayed another season. They''d also learned to recognize the mean, cigar-chewing J. W. Milam, who came around from time to time. When old Dr.

Kimbriel had farmed the place, the local sharecropper kids like Willie''s uncle James would play in the long, narrow cypress barn just off from the white gabled house. Willie had been inside it once, too. The neighborhood children liked to chase the pigeons, which would fly to safety in the cobwebbed eaves. Nobody chased pigeons once Leslie moved in. That morning Willie turned left on the dirt road mirroring Dougherty Bayou, lined by knobby bald cypress trees. Five million years ago the range of these trees had stretched far to the north of Mississippi, but the Ice Age had reduced them to a narrow band around the Gulf of Mexico. Cypresses, sequoias, and redwoods are some of the oldest trees on the planet, their presence marking a connection to primordial history. Reed walked past the trees, down to the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, which sat between the road and the bayou.

Dougherty Bayou was the name of the water that drained this part of the Delta into the Sunflower River. Mostly the bayou was known locally for its connection to the Confederate cavalry general Nathan Bedford Forrest, whose postwar extracurriculars included a turn as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, which had originally been led by his former staff officers. The old white folks loved to talk about the Wizard of the Saddle, about how he led his cavalry along the Dougherty Bayou as he moved quietly toward Yazoo City. Forrest Trail, they called the old Indian hunting path that would become the Drew-Cleveland Road, which would later be renamed the Drew-Ruleville Road, which had originally been built in the first place by Forrest''s brother. A cavalry once moved down this road to the beat of horse hooves and animal breath. Reed walked the same ground with the quiet shuffle of shoe soles on dirt. The sun had been up for an hour already, enough early light to bring definition to the rows. Abandoned shacks dotted the countryside around Reed''s home.

There weren''t as many people around as there had been just a few years before. Many of his neighbors had already left the Mississippi Delta. These were the last days of a way of life. With each passing year more and more sharecropper houses sat empty as machines replaced people. Modern civilization spun just a few hours north, connected by family ties and railroads and telephones but separated by what Black expats in Chicago called the Cotton Curtain. Local high schools would soon start scheduling reunions in Chicago, since that''s where all the graduates were living. Reed took a left to cut through Leslie Milam''s farm, aiming to cross over the dark, slow-moving Dougherty Bayou, full of crappie and bream the perfect size for a cast-iron skillet. That''s when he heard the pickup truck.

He turned and looked down the road and saw a two-tone Chevrolet kicking up dirt. A white cab with a green body. The truck turned directly in front of him. The driver pulled up to the long cypress barn. Four white men sat shoulder to shoulder in the cab. In the back, three Black men sat with a terrified Black child. The child was fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. He had two terrible hours left to live.

I first heard about the barn four years ago. An activist named Patrick Weems said we needed to take a drive through the Mississippi Delta during one of those endless days of the early pandemic. I''d been driving a lot during lockdown. My response to the world ending was to go home. I am from Clarksdale, Mississippi, one of those faded Delta farm towns built to support the sharecropper South that emerged in the decades after the Civil War. My family farms the same land we farmed in 1913, just twenty-three miles northwest of the barn Weems insisted I travel to see. I''d been almost completely separated from the agricultural part of my history as a child. My family''s farm had seemed like a past I wanted to leave behind.

Then being back home in the stillness of the pandemic forced me to consider where and how I''d grown up. What I found as I drove was that all that running hadn''t really taken me anywhere at all. I remained a child of the Delta. I''d stop on the levee, a bandanna tight around my mouth and nose to keep out the trailing wake of dust, looking out at the land of my birth. I''d let the red dirt settle and I''d stare out at the endless, flat farms. This was some of the most fertile ground in the world-an alluvial plain and not an actual river delta-made rich by the nutrients deposited by a million years of flooding rivers. If you could fly into the air like one of the extinct songbirds that once called this land home, you could see fingers of water stretching out like a hand from the wide, violent Mississippi into the flatland, rivers like the Yazoo, Sunflower, and Tallahatchie, bayous like Dougherty and Hushpuckena and the Bogue Phalia. Black citizens called the Tallahatchie the Singing River because of all the lynching victims who''d been thrown into its dark water.

Their souls sang out from the water, the wellspring of Black death and white wealth. Farming at its essence is just the practice of getting water onto land and then getting it off again, and the eighteen-county teardrop of the Mississippi Delta did this as well as anywhere on earth. On the eastern boundary between the Hills and the flatland a series of reservoirs trapped the runoff water, and on the western edge levees kept the big river from flooding out crops and people. Humans had stopped the natural order of things, halting the patterns that created their fertile home, working with puritanical resolve to strip out the bounty that had taken a million years to create. Nothing about the physical appearance or ecosystem of the Delta carried any of the Creator''s fingerprints. This land is man-made. Never once until learning about the barn had I considered the idea that removing God''s dominion from his creation might also remove his protection, his grace, and his oversight, leaving this corner of the world undefended from the impulses and desires of man. When I was growing up, the seasons still dominated life.

Little towns came alive with planting and harvest festivals. The romantic smell of my childhood world is that sweet, decaying blanket of defoliant that settles on my hometown in the last days of summer. Little yellow airplanes streak across the sky with billowing clouds of poison spraying from nozzles underneath the wings. My mother walks into our front yard when picking season begins and breathes deeply. She''s a child again and her father is coming home for dinner, the big midday meal, hanging his fedora by the front door and talking with pride about his stand of cotton. The house is alive with the shuffle of cards and the pop of grease and the understated Methodist prayers for themselves and their neighbors. Her dad got his ship shot out from beneath him in the Pacific Ocean and every.