Shelby Foote, one of the finest Southern voices in recording the history of the Civil War, has written here a series of stories, all taking place in Jordan County, MS, and beginning at the close of World War II and working backward in time. Each is powerful in its own way, and the writing of Shelby Foote is, as always, a wonder to behold.

The opening story, Rain Down Home sees a soldier returning from the battlefield to find the town of Bristol, MS a changed place, and I’m sure, he finds himself a changed man.

The second story, Ride Out is a tale of a homecoming of a different sort. It opens with the setting up of the mobile electric chair for an execution and backtracks to the events that led to that day. It is somber and wrenching.

As if knowing that the human heart can only take so much of sorrow, Foote’s third story, A Marriage Portion is riddled with a bit of humor.

Number four, Child by Fever is long enough to be considered a novella vs. a short story, and has a Faulknerian flavor. It is a discourse on loneliness, isolation and irony, and it leaves you with an empty feeling of helplessness and sorrow. It was also a textbook study in the effective use of irony.

The fifth, The Freedom Kick addresses the newly found freedom of blacks in the post Civil War South. I found this line particularly apt:

They burnt crosses every night all around us, and a man who burns what he prays to, he’ll burn anything.

Pillar of Fire was my favorite of the collection. Perhaps Foote’s voice is the strongest when he addresses the Civil War itself, or perhaps my own affection for the time period, in all its inglorious sadness, affects this. This story stung, the way the blues sting, the way the opening chords of the theme from Gone With the Wind expresses truth and sadness so beautifully that it makes one cry.

The final entry is a tribute to the first displaced people of the area. Long before the Civil War would scar the land, and before the pioneers would settle it, there are the Choctaw. The Sacred Mound fittingly tells us a bit of their story, if it is only the last gasp of their civilization.

Shelby Foote does not disappoint. His writing is hauntingly real...as if he had been there to witness each stage and know each person. He understands the South, and he treats it with love and respect, but without sentiment. If you listen to him closely, the leaves will rustle with the steps of a past that is only just beyond our reach and whispering behind the porticoes.

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