Follow Me Down

Shelby Foote's 1950 novel "Follow Me Down" is the story of a murder in Jordan County, Mississippi, as told from the point of view of nine different participants in the drama. Each person's thoughts and dialogue narrate overlapping parts of the case, told in a circular fashion from the trial backwards to the murder and forward to the verdict. Foote writes in the voice and dialect appropriate to each character; readers will recognize a style once made popular by William Faulkner. Foote also captures the gritty life and times of a rural Mississippi Delta town well prior to the arrival of desegration. Old-time religion has a major claim on people's lives, but so does poverty, desire, and disappointment. The accused murderer, a farmer by the name of Luther Eustis, has at the beginning of the book already confessed to the murder of the young girl Beulah, but Foote's multi-layered recounting of the murder and trial add considerable complexity to the case while exploring the motivation of the killer. The end result is unexpected but somehow more satisfying. This book is highly recommended to fans of Shelby Foote looking for a different reading experience than his justly famous history of the Civil War, the basis for Ken Burns' popular TV series on the same subject.

A murder story in a small Mississippi town is told through the first person voices of several involved characters. We know who did it right away, since the novel opens during the criminal trial through the voice of the bailiff. We also immediately know how, when, and where. The question is why, and the text spirals back in time through the various voices in search of that question. This was Shelby Foote's second novel about this town, and the first he considered mature. He was young and fierce, but with a very controlled fire and a precocious knack for narrative suspense and smoothness; it moves right along and you overlook the really radical method of story-telling. The technique is a considered extension and development of Faulkner's multi-voice method in As I Lay Dying, and the reader is required to overlook the fact that illiterate, retarded, and in one instance even a dead person are "writing." Thinking of the voices on stage as in classic Greek drama may help you get over the logical gulf, and that is doubtless a context Foote would have liked you to see him in. This was his break-out book to a mass audience, prior to his famous Civil War series. He was out to duel with Goliath, and if the book does not entirely succeed it is amazing how much is achieved; in any event I give it 4 instead of 5 stars, as he was shortly to set his own 5 star standard in fiction. Persons who know Foote's mellow grandfather personna from the Ken Burns Civil War series on TV will be forced to sit bolt upright, shortly into this saga. It is gritty realism on the level of Erskine Caldwell or Hemingway's To Have and Have Not. Ugly details, while not wallowed in, are not withheld. The South is not romanticized, but neither is it subjected to political correctness. Does Foote tell why the murder happened? That would spoil the read. Suffice it to say that like the most serious fiction writers the world over, Foote's answers lay not in social science, criminal science, psychology, etc. It would be not only a cliche, however, but also off the mark to say he "probes the human heart." The human voice is what the young Foote was probing, and he perhaps would always see it is a somewhat more objectively reliable measure than what "the heart" may or may not have to say about itself.

Follow Me Down tells the story of a fifty-year old man and his wife, a love-lost young woman, a deaf and dumb young man and his mother, and a defense attorney with a chip on his shoulder. Told through the eyes of eight characters, the story revolves around a violent act, recounting the story behind it. The novel is filled with well developed characters overflowing with uncontrollable emotions and the resulting consequences of them. In closing, Shelby Foote's Follow Me Down grabs your attention and holds it until the last page.