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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 He has not, so far as I know, wasted his time writing cheap, unpublished novels, as I did.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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