To Understand Mississippi, I Went to Spain

T he city of Seville awoke early, the old streets alive with singing birds and distant bells. The cobblestone alleys smelled faintly of hidden gardens. I’d flown here for a chance to hold a 480-year-old map in my hand. The archive’s curators had given me no guarantees but said that I could come, in person, to make the request. For a century after Christopher Columbus, this town was the white-hot center of global exploration, teeming with sailors who’d been to the New World and returned to tell the tale. Now it was mellow and quaint.

I’d come researching my new book, The Barn , a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955. The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine , sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer ; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow. It’s borne witness to the creation of the blues at Dockery Plantation; to the erasure of a Native American community; and, of course, to the death of Till. With so much violent history in such proximity, this project almost inevitably became a mapping. That led me on a hunt for the very first map of this land, which was likely drawn in 1544 by a Spanish cartographer named Alonso de Santa Cruz. (There had been earlier maps of the North American shoreline, but none of the interior until this one.)

The map lives in the Archive of the Indies, where records of every ounce of conquistador gold and every atrocity committed in the quest for it are carefully preserved. The Spanish invented the modern world and ruled without equal until the English defeated the armada and invented the factory. The archive sits in a plaza by the crenellated castle walls and a gate to the old palace. Moss grows on the stones. I stood outside the archive and waited for the building to open. Other researchers waited too.

The 9 o’clock bells finally rang all over the city, and a man let me inside.

“Second floor,” he said.

I live a bifurcated life. On the one hand, I am a journalist, and I write for what I hope is a sophisticated global audience. On the other hand, I am from a Mississippi Delta farming family, with land in our possession for more than a century. As a son of Mississippi, particularly a son of old, land-owning Mississippi, I have an obligation to understand what it means to inherit this dirt, and to pass it on to my children. Our farm is 23 miles from the barn where Till was murdered, for instance, and I never heard his name until I left the state for college.

[ From the September 2021 issue: Wright Thompson on what we still don’t know about Emmett Till’s murder ]

Many, many volumes have been written about the Delta, and I think I’ve read them all. None really captured for me what it felt like to claim it as home, to have a firm grasp on the economics of the place, to understand the alluvial insidiousness that drove our history. Often the very act of setting a story in Mississippi creates a portrait of a puppet but accidentally erases the strings. Mississippi didn’t make itself; it was shaped by far-flung investors and speculators, by a river of global capital flowing through it. Malcolm X famously said that everything south of Canada is Mississippi. I liked to ask myself how close was too close to live to the barn? Fifty feet? A mile? A thousand miles? Seeing Mississippi requires seeing all of its history all at once, more of a collage than a chronology.

And that required mapping a buried world. Finding out who owned the land, then and now, understanding how capital moved in and out of my home, following the profit. As I collected dozens of maps of the Delta, I imagined uncovering the very first one, the one whose blank spaces were an animating call to commerce and arms—to all the people and forces unleashed on a place that would one day be called Mississippi.

The archive staff showed me to a reading station, No. 18, at a wooden table in a high-ceilinged room. I requested the document, and waited.

I could hear horse hooves clip and clop on the cobblestones outside, pulling tourists in old-fashioned carriages. I looked up to see a man standing over me, gently holding a big white paper envelope. The map. With slow, exaggerated movements, he opened the folds. There it was, two steno pads wide and a steno and a half tall. He pointed to little drawings of houses in what is now the Mississippi Delta.

“ Indios ,” he said.

I held it in my hand. The ink on Santa Cruz’s map is now the color of copper. The white space covering most of the bottom third of the page is the Gulf of Mexico; Florida is labeled and recognizable on the far right. Santa Cruz drew little circles just south of what is now Miami. The Florida Keys. He drew three small circles just to the west and called them the Tortugas. Moving up the west coast of Florida, he marked a large bay with islands, then two rivers, then another bay. As the coastline turned west and flattened into the panhandle, he drew a big, cloud-shaped body of water fed by a river. That’s Mobile Bay, Alabama. He drew many rivers that he’d apparently heard about but that didn’t exist. The sixth river, moving east to west starting from the southern tip of Florida, was named Flores, and the seventh was named Los Angeles. The ninth river, however, did exist. This was the Río del Espíritu Santo—the river, nearly every scholar agrees, that local tribes called the Mississippi .

Santa Cruz’s map shows an oval expanse, covering the whole Mississippi Delta and stretching north to include the future city of Memphis—the land where the barn would one day exist. Santa Cruz marked some scattered Native settlements, but mostly he left empty space. The whole future sat there, unwritten yet ordained, on the page. The map signaled the birth of the Age of Exploration, of extraction, of colonies pumping raw materials into swelling empires. It foreshadowed the violence that protected the profit margins, even if the people getting really rich never had to raise a finger against another man. Enslavement, sharecropping, the rise of cotton, and the physical and economic coercion that fueled the whole global system—this map made that future possible. The starting gun for all the ships headed across the ocean to remake a world.

[ KING: The Atlantic’s project on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. ]

A security guard walked over to look at the old map.

“Florida,” he said with a point and a smile.

The map had been repaired carefully along its central fold. There’s a water stain in the gulf and an ink stain in southern Louisiana. It’s beautiful with its delicate copper lines.

I just sat for a long time and stared. Everything that would happen in or near that oval was set in motion when it appeared empty on a map: the lynching of Emmett Till, the murder of three civil-rights workers in 1964, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. The dominant urge of the Industrial Revolution was to fill every space on every map with people who could extract resources and multiply wealth.

I kept turning it over in my hands, the heavy paper, which made faint but perceptible rustles when it moved. The emotion the map provoked surprised me.

Finally, I nodded at the clerk.

“Finished?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

A woman came over carrying a heavy black-and-white wooden box with a black plastic handle. She folded the map back in the white paper and slid it into the box, tying the edges tight with red ribbon. It went back on a cart, which returned it to the bowels of the archives.

I walked down the stairs and went outside. A horse cantered over the stones, pulling a carriage with bright-yellow rims. The old part of Seville exists outside time. Game of Thrones filmed here in Season 5. They didn’t need to change a thing. Street musicians played, and their music filled the alleys. The absence of ruling nobles contemplating the next frontier—replaced now by stroller-pushing tourists—is a reminder that what rose here also fell.

In 1503, the Spanish government created La Casa de la Contratación, which was responsible for maintaining the Padrón Real—a secret, constantly updated map of the known world. As early as 1575, rumors started reaching the royal court about the terrible state of the map. Finally, in 1593, an audit prepared for the king revealed that the Padrón had not been updated since 1567. Private mapmakers still created their own charts, but because the government required all pilots to carry and use authorized copies of the faulty Padrón, some pilots began keeping two charts. They used the real ones to sail and the phony ones to tick boxes for a swollen government office.

In 1599, the government finally replaced the Padrón with six different charts of the various routes sailors might take. Seven years later, in 1606, Andrés García de Céspedes published a new navigational guide. Sailors had previously been instructed to report back on the cultures of the people they met, but the crown was no longer interested in anthropology. Only raw data mattered. The new system wanted information, just the facts, not a poet’s mix of mathematics and literature. An era ended in Seville. The only thing left of that world is the buildings. The sailor-quarter alleys glow now with neon. The older bars have faded bullfighting posters above the doors. Working people eat thin slices of grilled meat with red wine or cold beer, with olives or radishes on the side. There are often ceramic squares depicting Don Quixote hanging near the kitchen.

Miguel de Cervantes, a contemporary of Santa Cruz’s, published the book in two parts, a decade apart, and in the second installment, characters have read the first one. The first volume was published in 1605, just as the Padrón Real ceased to exist and the Spanish empire teetered. The second arrived in 1615, the year before Cervantes died . His novel captured the fever and foolishness of the Sevillian Century. It evoked the signature residue of an epoch change. New forces had been unleashed by all these maps, which marshaled a violent remaking of a new world as much as a rational depiction of an old one.

Three years after Cervantes died, as war burned throughout Europe, a ship of enslaved people arrived in the New World, less than 200 years after it had been discovered by the Spanish and carefully drawn by Santa Cruz. The boat landed in Virginia, 833 miles northeast of the barn.

This article appears in the October 2024 print edition with the headline “Mapping Mississippi’s Violent Past.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.