Seven books returned this week and unusually for me the winner of the lot was a book that thoroughly pissed me off. The State of Jones by Sally Jenkins and John Stauffer is non-fiction about Jones County Mississippi from the 1850s through the early 1900s. Specifically about Unionist, Newton Knight and his guerrilla war against the Confederacy during the Civil War.
The part that disgusted me was its unflinching look at the collapse of Reconstruction which led to the lynchings and oppression that has mired our country since. The book, as you may guess, does not end on an up note. At least three times I tossed this book aside in disgust, not at the writing (which was excellent) or the biography (which was fascinating), but at the truth (which was heart- and gut-wrenching).
Plus the hated-filled rhetoric of a terrified white male middle-class echoed too well in my modern ears. That in 1870 it boiled over into decades of violence and vigilantism is a lesson we'd do well to remember. (Since we're already spending the day remembering other, more-recent horrors)
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