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

• Author: Rocawich, Linda
• Position: Brief Article

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...