VICKSBURG - It was 1993 or thereabouts. Lenore Barkley, then director of tourism for Vicksburg, phoned. She said she needed a favor. There was an inflection in her voice indicating it might be something I'd enjoy.
It was.
Shelby Foote, she said, was arriving at City Front aboard the Delta Queen. The author and historian needed to be back in his Memphis home that night.
Could I get away from the office, pick him up from the passenger steamer on which he'd been riding as a guest lecturer and drive him back north?
"Not a problem," I said.
The series created by Ken Burns for PBS, "The Civil War," had aired for the first time in 1990. Burns' then untested approach, repeated several times since, was to intersperse music and narrations, including diary entries, with period photographs. It was a compelling blend and although many qualified people spoke as the story of a nation divided unfolded, Shelby Foote eclipsed them all.
The reason was clear. He wasn't talking about historical figures. To him, U.S. Grant and Stonewall Jackson and field officers and foot soldiers and people held in bondage and people newly freed weren't characters. They were acquaintances. He knew them like we know our contemporaries - their strengths, weaknesses, eccentricities. He saw them in tragic situations, and shared them. He saw them in comedic situations and chuckled as he talked.
That morning I pulled my car near the gangplank and waited. Eventually, Foote ambled off the steamer and toward me with a worn leather grip in one hand. I introduced myself as his driver and we set out. He told me he just needed to get to Greenville, where he'd left his car at the airport, but asked if I would drive him around Vicksburg a little first.
Foote had been born in Greenville, but had lived in Vicksburg for a while as a teen. He wanted to ride up Speed Street. We did, but he failed to recognize the frame shotgun residence at 801 where the city directory of that period showed his family residing.
A lot had happened since then; his service starting in 1940 in the Army and ending in discharge (something about a woman) before he re-enlisted in the Marines for the duration of World War II. He'd had a less-than-stellar collegiate experience at the University of North Carolina and had worked short stints in a variety of writing-related and non-writing jobs before, during and after.
The Footes had been among Mississippi's landed aristocracy before his time, but one grandfather lost the family wealth gambling and the other in the Great Depression. His father was moved around by the meat-packing company that employed him. They weren't in Vicksburg long.
Out on the highway, Foote talked. He spoke in slow, measured, carefully chosen words. "Turn here for a minute," he said as we neared Rolling Fork. We left Highway 61 and quickly arrived at the town cemetery. Foote showed me the graves of some of those ancestors, mentioned he wouldn't mind being buried near them - and then we were back on the road.
For the remaining hour to Greenville, he talked … told stories. It was that same voice, same demeanor from the PBS series - but I felt privileged to be the exclusive audience.
Later I learned that Foote, author of the definitive three-volume "The Civil War: A Narrative" that stacks nearly 8 inches tall, considered finishing 75 words a good day's writing. I could see why. Even in more or less idle conversation, his words were chosen for absolute precision.
Foote was also a skilled novelist, but his deeply personal account of the nation divided is his masterpiece. To him, the war wasn't about tactics, it was about people.
Commenting on why so many Southerners remained interested in those years, Foote replied, "I had maybe, it's a rough guess, 50 fistfights in my life. Out of those 50 fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that's one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does."
At Greenville, we parted at the airport car rental counter, where the clerk accepting his parking fee asked his name. "Shelby Foote," he said. "S-h-e-l-b-y F-o-o-t-e." She didn't recognize him. He didn't mind.
Foote died June 27. He wasn't buried in Rolling Fork, but in historic Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis alongside more than 1,000 soldiers and 22 generals from the Civil War.
It was fitting. They were family, too.
