Jordan County

Jordan County is one of Shelby Foote's early works written before he undertook his classic history of the Civil War. He wrote this imaginary narrative of Jordan County, Mississippi. It is a place where the sufferings of slavery, war, and Reconstruction are very real. The book is a collection of seven stories taking place in Jordan County. They move backward in time, from 1950 to 1797. Some of the stories are very short - only four pages. Some are longer - 150 pages. They all help us experience the county and traditions through the lives of characters as diverse as a black cornet player doomed by tuberculosis and his racial background. We encounter the Wingate-Sturgis family. They are the beleaguered and inadequate end of the century and end of an era leaders of the local aristocracy. We experience a half-wild frontiersman who builds a plantation in Choctaw territory only to watch it burn at the close of the Civil War. Foote's characters are magnificent. The book is more character-based than story based. They are intensely personal stories focusing on the feelings of the characters than the history they are living. The stories are an up and down experience to read. At times the story fails to carry the character contained within them. Shelby Foote gives us a determined though disconcerting work of fiction. His writing shows the influence and traditions of a William Faulkner. Foote's work is doggedly inimitable. Not recommended as a first read for someone new to Foote. Shiloh and Follow Me Down are better books to read if you are new to Foote.

I bought this book of Mr. Foote's after finishing "The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy" (another great read, by the way). I had read Foote's accounting of this work in progress in his letters to Percy and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Having already read "Shiloh" and a good portion of his three-volume Civil War narrative, I was already prejudiced in Foote's favor and expected the best. I was not disappointed in the least. His series of unrelated short stories of life in the fictious Mississippi community is Southern literature at it's finest. It is unyielding and unappologetic in it's honesty. The book is obviously written by a Southerner who loves his home, warts and all, and has drawn a magnificant picture of it. Having grown up in small town Arkansas, born not long after the begining of the book, I can say with authority that Foote's descriptions of life there are laser-sharp, penetrating, honest, and endearing. Read it.