Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South.

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

Well, that conversation didn't happen, of course. I kept the date with John, but it's now as if that conversation didn't happen, either--the tape was accidentally erased. So I want to tell you about his book, since you won't be hearing us talk about it on the radio.

John Egerton is the author of numerous previous works of nonfiction. Generations won the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Award, and The Americanization of Dixie is a classic. Up until now, though, my favorite has been Southern Food, a tour through the South's foodways and restaurants and recipes. 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? Turn to Page 237 and make yourself some spoonbread."

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

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. What went wrong was his question. 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. It's a book about the movement before the movement.

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. It had the magazine's logo across the front, with a line underneath proclaiming us to be THE JOURNAL OF THE PROGRESSIVE SOUTH. 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?"

I didn't have a simple answer, but the answer involves Southerners, black and white, who tried to change their homeland for the better. 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's good to help your friends with their books. 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. 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. In colorful crayon, I read the words: "Dear Uncle Jimmy, Thank you for the pajamas you sent for my birthday. They fit perfect."

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