There are some things that just hit you differently when you have kids. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a powerful novel for anyone, but once you’re a parent, it’ll wreck you. A book like To Kill A Mockingbird is fun to read in high school, but you appreciate Atticus Finch differently when you are at an age where you identify more with the adults than the children in that story.
The story of Emmett Till, on the contrary, is no work of fiction. Instead it’s a tragic, terrible episode of American history, one that every student ought to learn in school, with each detail of his story only growing more devastating after you have children of your own. In Wright Thompson’s moving and haunting book The Barn, one stands out: As the men barge into the home of Emmett’s great uncle Moses Wright to seize the boy they’ve decided to terrorize and likely murder, they grow increasingly frustrated with how long it takes Emmett to get his shoes on. Obviously, he’s struggling with them because he is scared. But there’s another more humanizing reason that every parent reading will implicitly understand: He’s fumbling with the laces because kids just take forever to do stuff. And the more you rush them, it seems, the longer it can sometimes take. In this seemingly mundane detail, we’re able to see Till for what he actually was—not a historical figure or even a persecuted minority but an ordinary 14-year-old boy, exactly like the one you may have at home.
As we’ve said, being a parent opens you up. It turns on a special sensitivity, an acuteness that allows you to see and hear and notice things your younger, less experienced self might have glossed right over. But it also sharpens our sense of responsibility—to bear witness, to tell the truth, to insist that the world confronts what it would rather look away from.
This is what Emmett’s mother Mamie-Till did by insisting on an open-casket funeral for her son, forcing the country to see the brutal reality of racial violence within its borders. It was an act of defiance and unimaginable strength, especially in Jim Crow America, but one that hits you differently when you can for the first time imagine that you are a parent having to plan your boy’s funeral. This is why when Wright came on the Daily Stoic podcast (a must-listen episode), he said “Mamie-Till might be one of the bravest people who ever lived.” In fact, her courage would go on to inspire and galvanize the Civil Rights Movement, including notable activists like Rosa Parks, who later said she thought of Emmett Till when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus.
Parenthood doesn’t just change how we feel—it compels us to act. It demands that we confront painful truths and it challenges us to meet them with the same courage as those heroes, fictional and real, who came before us.
P.S. Over at the Painted Porch, you can grab copies of The Barn, which we couldn’t recommend reading more highly this February during Black History Month. And over at The Daily Stoic YouTube channel, you can watch Ryan’s full podcast episode with Wright, who discussed untangling myth from history in America and reckoning with the South’s secrets as a native Southerner.
