Elizabeth Spencer, Landscapes of the Heart: A Memoir. By Elizabeth Spencer. New York: Random House, 1998. 346 pages. $24.00.

Elizabeth Spencer's new memoir is one of considerable charm, with vivid details, entertaining stories, and incisive characterizations. She has won acclaim for her nine novels and three short story collections, and her new autobiography will surely add to her reputation. This gentlewoman of Southern letters evokes the past, from growing up in Carrollton, Mississippi, to her time in New York City, Italy, and Canada. It is a discreet book, though, in which she conveys the sights and sounds and, especially, the marvelous stories of the people she has known but not how these experiences moved her emotions. She does not bare her soul, but her observations and insights of people and places are reward enough.

Spencer's childhood was "a time of enchantment and love," and she tells of playing among pecan trees, eating cold watermelon on summer days, and roller skating through town during long afternoons, seeing "Lawyer Yewell asleep in his office window." She summons haunting memories of family and townsfolk from Carrollton, Mississippi. She loved visiting her aunt who "would talk a blue streak--visiting she called it." Her uncle had a weakness for miracle cures, including the Crazy Water Crystals that many Southerners trusted. Spencer comes to see that "my memories have more in common with country life as described by Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev than with the America of that time as we read about it in Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis."

Spencer grew up with racial segregation, "the ugly system," she calls it, taking it for granted as "part of the eternal" as a child. The vicious beating of her family's cook by a townsman seared into her soul, becoming "the greatest horror I can in all my life remember" and a key incident in her novel A Voice at the Back Door (1956). Spencer etches a memorable portrait of the complexity of the Southern social system in general, noting its "gentle and soft" aspects but not flinching from its painful memories.

The second half of this memoir shows Spencer moving into wider worlds. She studied at Vanderbilt University, working with the Agrarian legend Donald Davidson, and taught for several years, including at the University of Mississippi in the late 1940s. She tells of Ella Somerville, "the Oxford lady to reckon with," whose dinners and parties were legendary, and of Stark Young, who delivered a memorable lecture during the Southern Literary Festival at the University.

She moved on to New York City to devote full time to writing. Winning a Guggenheim Fellowship, she lived in Italy, which became her most significant literary source after the South. She finds beauty everywhere, from the statues and fountains that are a part of everyday life to the pleasures of the opera she discovers. She meets her future husband, John Rusher, in Italy, and they eventually move to Canada, where she long taught.

Spencer picnics with Saul Bellow in Paris, discusses Faulkner with his friend Phil Stone, sips whiskey with Philip Rahv (editor of Partisan Review), attends the Bread Loaf writers' conference in Vermont, has a memorable supper with Robert Frost and Donald Davidson, and visits often with Robert Penn Warren and, particularly, her friend Eudora Welty, who lovingly recurs throughout. Each real-life character is finely drawn, and Spencer entertainingly recreates her encounters with the famous and the ordinary with detail and verve.

--Charles Reagan Wilson

Editor's Note: Elizabeth Spencer will "come home to Mississippi" in March to participate in the fifth Oxford Conference for the Book.

Body Parts. By Jere Hoar. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997. 286 pages. $26.00.

Body Parts, the first collection by Jere Hoar, emeritus professor of Journalism at the University of Mississippi and an attorney, contains 11 stories spanning the last 60 years. The volume has been warmly received, as a few excerpts from reviews indicate. Kirkus Reviews: "Many of Hoar's tales are set in the same region of Mississippi that Faulkner wrote about--but his closest literary ancestor is really Erskine Caldwell. That's especially true in 'The Snopes Who Saved Huckaby.' . . . It's a delightful story, funny as Caldwell, but gentler, with a hilarious sequel, 'How Wevel Went.' . . . By contrast, 'Tell Me It Hasn't Come to This' is mindful more of Flannery O'Connor."

Tom Drury, New York Times Book Review: "In 11 stories, the writer ranges across seven decades and three or four modes of storytelling to present a rough survey of the mythology and manners of the 20th-century South. Thus we find moving Depression memories next to raucous tall tales next to violent modern satire. Jere Hoar draws comparisons to O'Connor here, Barry Hannah there, Erskine Caldwell somewhere else; and sometimes the stories take over, drawing no comparison at all."

Brett Lott, Raleigh News and Observer: "Jere Hoar is the real thing. Which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing: In a time when books seem increasingly homogenized and diluted, force-fed to us through literary IV tubes hooked directly to the thin drip of New York publishing conglomerates, Hoar's voice is a welcome, refreshing aberration. Rock-hard and crystal-clear, his lines and their images give us a world we have no choice but to acknowledge as here with us, its heart beating so furiously we can't help but look up from the page to our own world, and in that moment see the truth this writer speaks. The curse: It takes a university press, and along with it all the attendant difficulties of distribution and marketing that smaller presses have to get the truth out. Be ready to have to special-order this one, although it will certainly be worth the wait."

Managing Ignatius: The Lunacy of Lucky Dogs and Life in the Quarter. By Jerry E. Strahan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. 264 pages. $24.95.

With the posthumous publication of John Kennedy Toole's comedic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, LSU Press introduced the world to one of the most compelling, appalling, and ultimately entertaining characters in the history of Southern letters. Walker Percy, in his introduction to the novel, termed Ignatius J. Reilly a "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one."

Percy claimed that Reilly has "no progenitor in any literature I know of," and anyone who has been fortunate enough to read Toole's novel would be hard pressed to take Percy to task. Even more difficult than imagining Ignatius's progenitor is imagining his progeny. The mind reels.

With the publication of Managing Ignatius by Jerry Strahan, LSU Press has brought to light not one but many possible progeny. As longtime manager of the troupe of street vendors who peddle Lucky Dog hot dogs in the New Orleans French Quarter, Strahan--a historian by training and a "conservative redneck" from Sullivan's Hollow, Mississippi, by birth--has seen and heard it all. Though Ignatius's antics may have ruffled a few feathers at Paradise Vendors (Toole's fictional equivalent of Lucky Dogs), Strahan's deadpan delivery and sly wit give readers the impression that Ignatius would have been the least of his worries.

"Ex-carnies, phony clergymen, seamen between ships, disillusioned doctoral candidates, the love-scorned, the sex-crazed, and wayfarers simply looking for an alternate lifestyle"--Strahan has had them all in his employ. Reading of his travails, you can't help but laugh. Through it all, Strahan professes to be unfazed by the circus that is his job. But even Strahan has his limits, as evidenced by his appraisal of one of his veteran vendor's taste in attire: "Smitty came in the shop wearing red hot pants, fishnet stockings, pink ballerina slippers, a ruffled tuxedo shirt, a bra, a Prince Valiant-style wig, and smoking a pipe. He insisted on working his cart like that. I told him absolutely not. Board of Health regulations dictated that the pipe had to go."

Author Jerry Strahan will speak at the fifth Oxford Conference for the Book, scheduled for March 13-15, 1998.

--John T. Edge

Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms. By Charles Hudson. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997. 561 pages. $34.95.

In Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms, Charles Hudson, one of the most preeminent American scholars, places the capstone on a 15-year-long effort in scholarship, publications, and debate. Using the chronicles of the Hernando De Soto and other early Spanish expeditions and much archeological evidence, Hudson and his colleagues in the past decade and a half have produced the best-argued reconstruction of the trail of De Soto through the Southeastern United States, and in the course of this reconstruction, they have come to a deep understanding of the native polities, or chiefdoms, through which De Soto and his army of 600-plus passed. Hudson brings all of this research together in a volume that itself reads like one of the De Soto chronicles--only one written by an acute observer, intelligent scholar, and precise anthropologist.

Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun lands the reader at Tampa Bay and then takes her through La Florida, as North America was called at the time. Hudson gives an almost day-by-day account of De Soto's movements and the grueling hardships of life on the march through a territory fiercely defended by its native inhabitants. In truth, it is these native inhabitants, and not De Soto, that Hudson has pursued so doggedly. But it was De Soto's footsteps through the 16th-century South that led the way to understanding Southeastern Indian society at the moment of European contact. Through painstaking examination of De Soto's movements, Hudson and his colleagues were able not only to place Southeastern Indian chiefdoms on a modern map, but also to discover something about the internal structure and dynamics of these political orders, the daily lives of the people, and the relationships between chiefdoms.

The Indians that De Soto encountered were quite different from the Southern Indians with which most people are familiar. The people living in the South during the 16th-century were constituents of well-defined political territories, ruled by an elite believed to be descended from the Sun, and with political and religious centers dominated by large earthen mounds and other monumental architecture. They were also heirs to a centuries-old military tradition. Apalachee, Cofitachequi, Coosa, Tascaluza, Quizquiz, Guachoya, Quigualtam, Anilco--these are the names of the some of the South's ancient chiefdoms that Hudson restores to our historical consciousness. Moreover, Hudson brings these chiefdoms to the forefront of the historical stage as the powerful caciques, or rulers, and their fearless warriors confront, cajole, harangue, acquiesce, accommodate, and otherwise interact with Hernando De Soto and the others in this premodern Spanish army trekking through La Florida in what turned out to be a futile search for riches and an altogether doomed expedition. Hudson's narrative style emphasizes the daily encounters between the knights of Spain and the warriors of the Sun as single events, with some being mundane and with some being quite spectacular. However, he never loses sight of the larger significance within which these encounters took place, and he places all of these events within a longer-term historical context. The end result is not only an account of the De Soto expedition and a reconstruction of the conquistador's route, but also an extraordinary volume on the life and ways of 16th-century Native Americans in the South.

--Robbie Ethridge

The Natures of John and William Bartram. By Thomas P. Slaughter. New York: Vintage Books, 1997. 304 pages. $14.00 paper.

Attention, bird people, travelogue people, art people, plant people, environmental people, 18th-century people, people people, and Cold Mountain fans: here is the book for deep winter reading. In The Natures of John and William Bartram Thomas P. Slaughter, a history professor at Rutgers University, examines the lives of John Bartram, one the greatest botanists of the Colonial era, and his son, William, America's first native-born naturalist painter. Not only does Slaughter use the lives of the two Bartrams to illuminate the worth of 18th-century science, exploration, and environmental ethics (not such a modern concept, after all), but he examines the father/son relationship of the men, especially the curse of the son who must grow up in the father's very long shadow. William's fecklessness, melancholia, and bad luck make his life much the more interesting of the two; he eventually became his own man, writing his Travels (Penguin, $13.95 paper), in which are many exquisite descriptions and watercolors of the Southeast, its flora and fauna and native people. Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, used Bartram's Travels as the spiritual compass and crutch upon which the wounded Civil War soldier, Inman, depended to guide him home. (See Southern Register, Fall 1997.)

Thomas Slaughter, who will speak at the fifth Oxford Conference for the Book, March 13-15, 1998, is also the editor of William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings (New York: Library of America, 1996).

--Lisa N. Howorth

Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South. By Brenda E. Stevenson. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. 457 pages. $35.00, cloth, $16.95 paper.

Stevenson details the differences of the meanings family and community had for free people and slaves in antebellum Loudoun County, Virginia. While whites defined themselves and their hopes for permanence and status through their households, slaves struggled to maintain control over their family lives. Like many historians, Stevenson stresses the adaptive nature and malleable definition of slave families, but unlike most, she sees the potential for tension, frustration, and suffering that accompanied that adaptability. Full of the stories of individuals and addressing an important topic, this fine book may become a classic in Southern scholarship.

--Ted Ownby

Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925. By Paul Harvey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. 330 pages. $17.95.

Studying all Baptists in the postbellum South, Harvey's work proceeds along two parallel tracks, showing how whites and then African Americans dealt with four themes: organizing churches and associations, addressing issues of middle-class respectability, the place of preachers in a congregational polity, and ideas and limits of progressivism. In doing so, Harvey shows that Baptists were a complex group, full of questions and tensions and not the group so many have found so easy to stereotype.

--Ted Ownby

The World Don't Owe Me Nothing: The Life And Times Of Delta Bluesman Honeyboy Edwards. By David Honeyboy Edwards. Foreword by Albert Murray. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1997. $24.00.

This is the oral autobiography of Honeyboy Edwards, as told to Janis Martinson and Michael Frank, who are to be congratulated for deftly piecing together interviews with Honeyboy conducted over a five-year span without sacrificing the distinctive, highly readable flow of his speech.

Honeyboy Edwards was born in 1915 in Sunflower County, Mississippi, and could be the original die used to cast the Mississippi-born, Chicago-bred itinerant bluesman. Edwards, a man who proclaimed early in life that "I had three ways of making it: the women and my guitar and the dice," gives firsthand accounts of plantation life in the Mississippi Delta including the flood of 1927. Honeyboy also shares the particulars of small town dances, vagrancy laws, and county cotton farms that were often worked by black men brought in on trumped-up charges coincidentally at harvest time.

Driven by an amazing wanderlust, Honeyboy experienced much that has become part of the blues lexicon. He often traveled by hopping legendary trains such as the Pea Vine, the Southern, and the Yellow Dog. He performed in such blues Meccas as Memphis, Helena, Dallas's Deep Ellum, and Chicago's Maxwell Street Market in its prime with a list of companions that include Big Joe Williams, Tommy McClennan, Charlie Patton, Memphis Minnie, and Robert Johnson to name just a few.

Besides giving accounts of people, places and events which have gone on to become synonymous with the blues, The World Don't Owe Me Nothing is also an amazing read because of Honeyboy's gift for storytelling and language. For those off-put by the absence of footnotes, Michael Frank has added appendices to clarify the dates and other particulars of the stories.

The World Don't Owe Me Nothing is a major accomplishment in the field of black autobiography and is a must-read for anyone with an interest not only in the blues, but in Afro-American history, Southern culture, or oral history.

--Scott McCraw

Conversation with the Blues. By Paul Oliver. Illustrated with photographs by the author. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. $49.95.

This is a beautiful hardback reissue of Paul Oliver's 1965 classic which, along with Blues Fell This Morning and his other works, established him as one of the earliest scholarly exponents of the blues. Compiled from interviews Oliver conducted in 1960, Conversation with the Blues features the words of blues performers from New Orleans to Chicago and all pertinent points in between. We are given the words of rural and urban artists of various levels of popularity or obscurity speaking on all aspects of blues culture.

Oliver's contributions include a lengthy introduction that reveals his love and respect for the blues as a poetic medium of black culture, detailed notes on the speakers, and stunning photographs, which alone would make a formidable volume.

This new edition is accompanied by a CD that includes some of the book's moving narratives that were taken from Oliver's field tapes of the 1960s.

--Scott McCraw

Southern Writers. Photographs by David G. Speilman and Text by William W. Starr. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. 150 pages. $24.95.

This pictorial of 72 critically and popularly acclaimed writers of the contemporary American South on their native ground reveals each bard's sense of place, work methods, and habits. Photographer David G. Speilman delights in the interplay between a writer's work space and his literary genre while book critic Starr offers insightful sketches that attend to each subject's life, work, and critical reception. This is a photographic album of the best sort, picturing a distinct time in the literary life of the South. With its informal portraits of favorite and as yet unread authors, it is a visual guidebook to contemporary Southern literature.