Appreciation: Shelby Foote, man of the South
Shelby Foote, the author who died in Memphis June 27 at the age of 88, never imagined fame would come the way it did. As a youth in Mississippi, he dreamed of being a great novelist, like William Faulkner, whom he and his boyhood pal Walker Percy once visited. Foote wrote novels but none as acclaimed as those of either Faulkner or Percy. It was his gigantic piece of nonfiction–a three-volume, 2,934-page, 1.5 million-word history, The Civil War: A Narrative–that convinced critics of Foote's remarkable skills. But despite the 20 years of research and writing he put into his monumental work, most Americans would never have heard of Shelby Foote. That changed over the course of one week in 1990–the week the writer became a talker.
In five consecutive nights in the autumn of that year, Foote made 89 appearances on Ken Burns's PBS series The Civil War. Fourteen million viewers saw him in his Memphis study talking about the war as if it had happened the day before. His detailed knowledge, Delta drawl, and courtly manner helped make the series a smash hit and turned him into a prime-time star, a status ironically that he did not totally enjoy. He lamented "this hoorah" and "this ruckjack," the commotion that brought forth a "horrendous" flow of letters and phone calls, not to mention nosy questions from journalists. When one reporter asked if he had any hobbies, he replied: "Absolutely not." Then he added, "I drink from time to time."
When I first met him in the spring of 1991, he was sitting on a bar stool on the steamboat Delta Queen, a few months into the hoorah and ruckjack. I was among more than 200 Dixiephiles from California to New England enrolled in a grits-and-egghead ride–"the College of Southern Studies on the Water"–down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans. Foote, hired by the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, was on board to enjoy the trip with his wife, Gwen, and his son, Huger, and to do a talk on the Battle of Vicksburg.
Just before our bar chat, the Delta Queen had docked in Greenville, Miss., where the levee was festooned with "Shelby Foote Day" banners hailing the city's native son. Foote shook a lot of hands at a riverside ceremony but said little. Back on the boat, he told me how he and Walker Percy were influenced by Percy's uncle, William Alexander Percy, Greenville's planter-poet of the 1920s and '30s. "Mister Will raised Walker, and Mister Will was like a daddy to me," he recalled. "He was not an adviser or even a model but an example. If he could write books, we could write books."
We discussed the exodus of Jews from the small-town South, a subject mentioned in a Delta Queen lecture by Eli Evans, the North Carolina-reared New Yorker who wrote Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate. I noted that the synagogue in my Mississippi hometown, Natchez, had hundreds of members in the early 1900s but now barely 15 or 16. A similar decline, Foote said, happened in Greenville. "I remember when we had more Jews than Baptists in the Greenville Country Club," he said. "They were the people who insisted on having good libraries and good schools."
As the steamboat approached Vicksburg, passengers filled the Orleans Room to hear Foote tell how U.S. Grant, in a siege that had townspeople eating rats and mule meat, took the city in 1863 and cut the Confederacy in half. My tape recorder was running as several other topics came up.
"There's one thing that people have been asking me all over this boat," Foote said, "and that is, 'Why does the South keep harping on the Civil War?' In my experience, it hasn't been southerners who bring up the Civil War. It's northerners who accuse southerners of never forgetting the Civil War. I'll spend a whole evening with somebody, and finally they'll say, 'I'll tell you the trouble with you people: You can't forget the Civil War.' I haven't mentioned the Civil War.
"I maintain that we don't live in the war as much as you think we do, but we do live in it. It's a thing that stays with us. The state of Mississippi in the year after the war, 1866, spent a solid one fifth of its total income on artificial arms and legs for returning veterans. Don't tell me to forget it. There's no way I can forget it. I saw the old ladies whose sweethearts were killed in the war. They were the old maids tottering around.
"We were a defeated nation. Nobody ever got beat more thoroughly than the Confederacy, and nobody got ground into the dirt more after it was over. Reconstruction was one long act of vindictiveness. It was not until Franklin Roosevelt came along that the differentiation in freight rates was straightened out. That was a punitive thing that lasted more than 50 years, a result of their being able to do what they wanted to with us. Not that we didn't deserve it. Maybe we did."
He challenged modern perceptions of the roots of the war. "The thing that people have a hard time understanding is how anybody could claim that one man could own another man. That's unthinkable. Another thing is that you can secede from the Union. That's madness. Everybody knows you can't do that. But they didn't know it then. They did not consider owning another person necessarily a bad thing. When the 13 colonies were formed, not a single one, including Massachusetts, would have joined that federation if it had not been easy to get out. In reading history, you have to go back to the time when people lived it."
Nor was he sanguine about the future. "Racism predates anything that ever happened in this country. It is a horrible disease. As long as there are as many as two races, we're going to have racism. It's such a convenient thing to grab hold of and blame your defeats on. I don't see any solution except the disappearance of all the races on the face of the Earth into a common bloodstream. When we are all sort of cafe au lait-colored, everything will be fine. Until then, I don't see any end to it."
When Foote ended his talk, most of the passengers left for a tour of the Vicksburg battlefield. But he remained on board for another talk, this one to a group of history students from the city's half-white, half-black school system. "The only thing I would caution you to do," he told the teenagers, "is to look and listen and be part of in an observant way everything that is going on around you, because there is a great deal to teach you. You are very fortunate to live in a place so diverse."
He then recalled his years as a young writer in New York. "I would be in a party sitting around with strangers, and one would say, 'You're from Mississippi, aren't you?' I'd say yes. They'd say, 'What do you people do down there?' I'd say, 'Don't do much.' 'Well, how can you stand it, living like that, away from everything that has meaning and value?' I'd say, 'Well, we do some things.' They'd say, 'Tell me some things you do.' 'Well, who do you think is the best woman writer in the United States? You reckon maybe it's Eudora Welty? She's from Mississippi. Who do you think is the best playwright in the United States? You think maybe it's Tennessee Williams? He's from Mississippi. Who do you think is the best writer in the United States? Think it might be William Faulkner? He's from Mississippi. We do some things down there rather well.'
"They have no notion of us," Foote continued. "They have no notion that they are the provincials and not us. They are the ones who are blocked off from the wide experience. If we could consolidate black and white together, there is nothing we couldn't do."
The next day, when the boat docked in Natchez, my parents came aboard for a cocktail party preceding a B.B. King concert. I introduced my father to Foote, and they discovered that they both worked at the U.S. Gypsum Co. wallboard plant in Greenville in the late 1930s, though not quite at the same time. Daddy had a job in the lab. Shelby lifted and moved logs in the wood yard–work so hot and grueling, he said, that management later had only black men doing it.
"I remember getting a raise," Shelby said. "I was making 25 cents an hour. They raised it 7 cents."
"No," my father said. "They raised it 7½ cents."
Shelby gave my dad a long look. "Earl, you're right," he said. "It was 7½ cents. I forgot that half cent."
But Shelby Foote never forgot that war.