BOOKS

...Friday morning, November 4, to talk on the radio with Erwin about his book...

...It's good to help your friends with their books...

...Robert Allen Warrior has written occasionally for The Progressive on issues of interest to Native Americans...

...Read John Egerton's book...

...Books evolve as they get researched and written, and so Speak Now Against the Day begins not in 1945 but in 1932, with a few flashbacks to the generation that came before...

...Their story is here, in Liberty and Sexuality...

...There was talk of politics and strategy, of course, but also of spirituality...

...Bear hug" is the only way to describe his purpose...

...But I can tell you this: When John Egerton showed up in Madison two days after Erwin's death, he brought me a package of cornmeal personally ground by the Reverend Will Campbell at his gristmill in Tennessee...

...Turn to Page 237 and make yourself some spoonbread...

...Women and men fought hard, for decades, to achieve the right to choose...

...The situation is different now...

...Rummaging—with permission—through the papers of Jim Dombrowski (one of those people whose name would be on any list of exemplars of the "progressive South"), I found among his papers—carbon copies of letters to the likes of Eleanor Roosevelt and the secretary general of the United Nations—a sheet ripped out of a Big Chief Tablet...

...It had the magazine's logo across the front, with a line underneath proclaiming us to be The Journal of the Progressive South...

...I'm not sure how to render Liz's accent, a sort of British-Texan combination, onto the printed page...

...I received the galleys of the book just a couple of weeks ago, and they drew me back to that Friday, November 4. After our day was done, John Egerton and I went to the last hour or so of a conversation about the case of Indian activist (and prisoner) Leonard Peltier, between writer Peter Matthiessen and a group of students and activists at the University of Wisconsin's student union...

...Several years ago, when Garrow began this book, it looked as if a woman's right to choose abortion, as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, was in jeopardy...

...Well, that conversation didn't happen, of course...

...And so I turn to a book that deserved its place in these pages but never got it...

...This is not the biography Johnny deserves...

...Talking with John about his book, I remembered a T-shirt that we had printed up ten or twelve years ago at Southern Exposure, where I was then an editor...

...In colorful crayon, I read the words: "Dear Uncle Jimmy, Thank you for the pajamas you sent for my birthday...

...Linda Rocawich is the Managing Editor of The Progressive...

...It's a book about the movement before the movement...

...Oh, sweetie, it's all right...

...Well, "all right" is what Burton's book is...

...Up until now, though, my favorite has been Southern Food, a tour through the South's foodways and restaurants and recipes...

...It's a bane of existence, if you edit the book section of a magazine, to have reviewers who never quite manage to get you the review...

...John Henry Faulk was a presence not to be ignored in Texas during the ten years I lived there (1970-1980), sittin' up in Madisonville plotting against the strip miners, flyin' off to Nashville every so often to tape a few months' worth of Hee-Haw, comin' down to Austin and waxing enthusiastic about something or other on the second-story front porch of The Texas Observer and the Texas Civil Liberties Union...

...And it's a good beginning, but Fear on Trial, Johnny's personal tale of the lawsuit is better...

...Naturally enough, though, you should expect to read of spiritual traditions here, too...

...It deals primarily with the thinking of Vine Deloria Jr...

...Generations won the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Award, and The Americanization of Dixie is a classic...

...A friend of Erwin's for more than thirty years, and a friend of mine since long before I first met Erwin in the summer of 1985, John was scheduled to be in Madison at 7:15 a.m...

...Don't forget them...

...the Court's decision looks like a lasting one, but women's right to choose is shredding into nothingness as the anti-abortion movement intimidates doctor after doctor after doctor into giving up their abortion practices...

...As we were leaving, an Indian man with a flowing white beard and flowing white braids came up to me...

...The first time I heard about Egerton's latest project, he was interested in the return to the South of the black veterans of World War II, a moment, he thought, that should have ushered in the civil-rights movement at least a decade before it actually began to happen...

...I don't remember now whether I made that spoonbread or not...

...I also remembered a letter I got from someone in Virginia demanding to know "what the hell is this ' progressive South' you're talking about...

...David J. Garrow...

...I didn't have a simple answer, but the answer involves Southerners, black and white, who tried to change their homeland for the better...

...Erwin is not dead...

...This biography by Michael C. Burton, John Henry Faulk: The Making of a Liberated Mind (Eakin Press), doesn't cover those years...

...There was one dark, dank day last winter when I was in need of cheering up, and John gave it to me: "Linda, have you got my food book handy...

...BOOKS by Linda Rocawich The last conversation I had with Erwin Knoll, late on Tuesday afternoon, November 1, concerned John Egerton and his new book, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (Knopf...

...Then he said, "Listen: In the Indian way, and in the Zen way, death is just another form of life...

...They fit perfect...

...John Egerton is the author of numerous previous works of nonfiction...

...A few years ago, John needed some things looked up at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, which is a mile or two from my home and which is, ironically, the repository of many of the papers of the Southern Civil Rights Movement...

...And for now, it's all there is...

...Too numerous to mention here by name, they were the who and what that John Egerton and I talked about that morning, the who and what he wrote about in this book...

...It covers his childhood in Austin, on through the years of his blacklisting and the magnificent lawsuit, he won against the blacklisters...

...His most recent contribution to this magazine was an interview with Lani Guinier (September 1993 issue) and whose previous book Bearing the Cross, a biography of Martin Luther King Jr., won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, and now he has written a worthy successor...

...I'm recommending this next book with reservations...

...So I want to tell you about his book, since you won't be hearing us talk about it on the radio...

...It's full of tales about the progressive South and its important people who, like Dombrowski, turn out to be human beings, too...

...It's another written by a friend whose name will be familiar to our faithful readers...

...and John Joseph Mathews, whom he describes as "two American Indian intellectuals of this century...

...Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (Macmillan) is a thorough, exhaustive, chatty, and gossipy history of the movement for reproductive rights, beginning in the living rooms of Connecticut where the birth-control case (Griswold v. Connecticut) was born, through the garage sale in Texas that led to Roe v. Wade, and on to the Supreme Court's two hearings of arguments about Roe, its decision, and its aftermath...

...His book, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions, has just been published by the University of Minnesota Press...

...I kept the date with John, but it's now as if that conversation didn't happen, either—the tape was accidentally erased...

...A few months ago, I asked Liz, his widow, what she thought...

...What went wrong was his question...

...He's just looking for a new body...