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Don't Go Into That Barn (WORD)
Don't Go Into That Barn (PDF)
With spooky lyrics, why not add it to Halloween? You can play along with the video!
This Tom Waits 2004 song seems to have been based on the 2003 NY Times account of a slave jail in Northern KY, just upriver from Cincinnati. Even then, slowed by a stroke and 70 years past his boyhood toiling in the fields as a tenant farmer, Isaac Lang Jr. could still recall the terrible secrets hidden inside the old tobacco barn. ‘'Dad told us never to go in there,’‘ Mr. Lang, 84, recalled, sitting up in his bed in a nursing home here. ’‘He said, 'Boys, I’m going to tell you the truth. It’s all right to play around that barn, but don’t go inside.’ He said it just wasn’t right. That it was pitiful. He never did tell us why.‘’
The structure that inspired Tom Waits was the John W. Anderson Slave Pen, on a farm near Germantown in Mason County, Kentucky, roughly 50–60 miles east of Cincinnati. It was built around 1830–1832 by John W. Anderson, a Kentucky slave trader. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center describes it as a holding facility where enslaved people were temporarily confined before being sold farther south. And this wasn’t simply a place where a plantation owner kept people he enslaved. Anderson was operating as a dealer in the domestic slave trade. He bought enslaved people from Kentucky and accumulated enough people to make shipments south, where they could be sold for substantially more. The Freedom Center says Anderson would gather at least about 30 enslaved people before sending them south. Some accounts put the numbers considerably higher. The men and older boys weren’t merely locked in a room. The surviving iron rings are physical evidence that people were actually shackled inside.
And then came the terrible journey south. This is where the last part of Waits’s song becomes particularly interesting. Anderson’s captives could be taken down to the Ohio River at Dover, Kentucky, and then transported by flatboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers toward the slave markets of Natchez, Mississippi, and sometimes New Orleans. The Freedom Center describes both overland and river transportation. Overland groups could be chained together in a coffle; by water, enslaved people were transported down the rivers. That’s why Waits suddenly starts naming places in succession: Dover → Covington → Louisville → Henderson → Smithland → Memphis → Vicksburg → Natchez. Those aren’t random spooky-sounding place names. They’re evoking the route into the Deep South slave market.
Anderson died in 1834, only a few years after establishing his slave-trading operation. According to the Freedom Center’s historical account, he died while pursuing a runaway enslaved person. Then the slave pen disappeared—inside a barn. Here’s where the title of Waits’s song becomes almost literal. After Anderson’s death, the property changed hands. Eventually, the little log slave pen was incorporated into a larger tobacco barn. Over generations, people largely forgot what the structure inside the barn had been. But local people retained a memory that something terrible had happened there. That’s the origin of the extraordinary testimony that Waits encountered in the 2003 New York Times article. Isaac Lang Jr.’s father apparently knew that something terrible had happened there but didn’t explain exactly what it was.
How was it rediscovered? This is another remarkable part of the story. In the late 1990s, the property was owned by Raymond Evers, who was apparently preparing to demolish the old structure. Then he noticed something unusual inside: iron rings and other evidence that the building had once been used as a jail. Historical research subsequently connected it to John W. Anderson. The original 1834 probate records actually referred to the structure as a “slave jail.” Archaeologists also investigated the surrounding property and recovered thousands of artifacts associated with the site. One of the logs even bore an “J. W. Anderson” mark, providing additional physical evidence tying the structure to Anderson. Rather than being demolished, the building was dismantled and transported to Cincinnati. It was reconstructed at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, where it remains one of the museum’s most important artifacts. The Freedom Center describes it as the only known surviving rural slave pen of its kind.
And now you can see exactly what Waits was writing about. Waits didn’t merely take the general idea of an old haunted barn and invent a horror story. He lifted historical details from the 2003 New York Times article and transformed them into a surreal blues/horror narrative. The most revealing line is probably the one describing the barn as being: “like a slave ship upside down”. That image comes directly out of the historical interpretation of the structure. And then Waits combines the historical slave-trading story with invented characters—Everett Lee, Champion, Saginaw Calinda, the drunken escapee, the mysterious night-time events—to make the barn feel like a living repository of everything that happened there.