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PUB NOTES
by PETE McCOMMONS
LISTEN TO JOHN EGERTON!
When I got out of the newspaper business for
a while, I decided to hold myself out as a free
lance writer, until 1 ran into Warren Leamon,
who in spite of being a writer himself was always
careful to hang onto his day job teaching
English at the university. "A freelance writer?"
Warren responded. "Isn't that the same thing as
being unemployed?"
^.In my heart, I knew Warren, with his usual
caustic wit, was right, at least in my case. That's
why I'm filled with awe at John Egerton, who
has not only made a living as a freelance
writer, he has made a life.
He has not, so far as I know, wasted
his time writing cheap, unpublished
novels, as I did. Instead, he has
looked at the world around him,
which has frequently happened
to be the South* and he has
written insightfully and prolifi-
cally about his region.
John believes and has demon-
• strated that it all comes down to
food, and along with all his other
writing, he was for a couple of years the
food columnist for the Atlanta Journal-
Constitution, following in the floury footsteps of
Mrs. Gerald R. Dull, the pre-eminent authority
on Southern cooking until Egerton slouched
along. His 1987 book, Southern Food, is a mas
sive tome that celebrates the people of the
South along with their food. Egerton went then,
and is still going, to great lengths to show how
our food unites us, that Southern food cuts
across the color line. "Soul food" also happens to
be what most white people call "home cooking"
in the South: grits, collards, corn bread, black-
eyed peas, banana pudding, pecan pie (III stop
before the vegetarians bail).
Hill Street Press
Editor Judy Long says
that at a recent food
conference Egerton
was espousing his
thesis that we all eat
the same food. At
lunch he took some of
the participants to a
meat-and-three cafe,
and his guests immedi
ately accused nim of
setting up the whole
outing just to make
his point. There they
all were: the lawyers
in their three-piece
suits, the plumbers,
the laborers, the
housewives, the busi
ness people—all races,
all sitting down
together to enjoy the
same food.
Back when I was
growing up, we used
to read the Atlanta
Journal every afternoon. Right on the front
page, seven days a week, there was a column by
the editor, Ralph McGill. Before anybody even
suggested to me that there was anything wrong
with our segregated society, I read Ralph McGill
every day because he was always interesting. I
didn't really know what good writing was: I just
read Mr. McGill because he was nght there on
the front page in that single column with his
picture, loolung kind of worned, holding his eye
glasses and maybe chewing on the stem.
Around me and beyond me in the 1950's,
South people were trying to make things happen
that would break us out of that segregated
society that pitted white against black and kept
many of both races poor and lacking in the
basics of life.
I didn't know that there were people on both
sides of the color line who had the conviction
and the courage to try to bring people together
in spite of the official line and the politicians
who kept people apart.
John Egerton has written a book about all
that, too: his 1994 massive work Speak Now
Against The Day, is subtitled "The Generation
Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South."
Egerton goes back beyond the more familiar Civil
Rights movement of the '60s and shows where it
came from, the indigenous blacks and whites
trying to do the right thing. He puts that
period into a perspective that is still
handy, since we're still fighting those
same battles. Speak Now tells the
history that we have forgotten
and are condemned to repeat.
Ralph McGill is an integral
part of that history: a Southerner
who kept on upholding that view
of the South as a region needing
uniting rather than further divisive
ness, an editorialist who earned the
sobriquet "Rastus" McGill fiom those who
preferred to anoint their state flag with the
battle flag of the Confederacy.
In spite of all the personal attacks on him,
Ralph McGill kept on writing with a love for the
South and its people, even those he thought
were wrongheaded. He kept on writing with
understanding and with wit long after many
white Southerners had hardened their hearts
against him. Too bad for them, for they lost out
on a dialogue about our country and its people.
Too bad for those who in the present day cannot
allow the South to be about the things that
bring us together instead of those that tear us
apart.
Now comes John
Egerton, appropriately,
to give the annual
Ralph McGill lecture at
the University of
Georgia. Hell speak at
10:30 a.m. (I can't
imagine a more incon
venient hour) on
Wednesday. Nov. 15 in
the Chapel on campus.
Hell tell us about the
correspondents who
were on the front lines
as the Civil Rights
Movement erupted
across the South.
Be forewarned:
John Egerton is not a
firebrand. He won't
shout. But his words
will hit home with
authority leavened by
wit. John Egerton is a
Southern gentleman
and an intellectual; he
is a writer who gets
out of his study and rinds out what's on people's
minds and on their tables. He is filled with sto
nes but is not full of himself. Even if you are a
dyed-in-the-wool, conservative, Barry Goldwater
(remember him?). Southern, good-old-person
redneck, you will enjoy John Egerton. He knows
your views from long experience in our common
region, and he respects you. Egerton is coming, I
believe, so that we may reason together, and
he'd much rather talk to you than preach to the
choir.
As a Southerner, a journalist, a wculd-have-
been freelance writer, a connoisseur of corn-
bread, an eager listener to a well-turned story
and an admirer of those with the courage of
theu principles 1 look forward to Egerton's visit.
Hell say a mouthful, I guarantee yc .. C
"McGill's Army: Civil'.
Rights Reporting,
Then and Now."
John Egerton gives
the 23rd annual
Ralph McGill Lecture
at the University of
Georgia in the Chapel
on Wednesday, Nov. 15
at 10:30 a.m. FREE!
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NOVEMBER 8, 2000