The State of Jones Book

I loved the Matthew McConaughey movie FREE STATE OF JONES so much that I grabbed this book right away from the library. It's the true story of a poor white farmer from Mississippi who deserted from the Confederate army in the Civil War. But he didn't just desert. He disappeared into the swamps with a small group of friends, and gradually built up a small army of deserters and runaway slaves that was able to take an entire county back from the Confederacy. After the war, Newton Knight not only married a black woman but he fought a decades long battle to see to it that their children could own their own land and have access to education.

This is a great story, but sadly it's not a great book. The authors do their best, but unlike the movie, they can't simply invent dramatic scenes, or love scenes, and they can't have Newton Knight say much of anything in his own words. So much of the narrative breaks down into one random gun fight or ambush after another, with tons of generic background thrown in about the Civil War. And over and over again the authors say, "We don't know how Newt felt about this," or "It's not hard to guess how Newt reacted when this happened." Of such stuff is compelling drama not made. Where the movie benefits from a sensational star turn by Matthew M. the book has a shadow for a hero, a man who was basically "disappeared" from all the Southern history books for a hundred years. Also, the movie makes it look as if the Knight rebellion was a series of flashy big-scale battles, but the book makes it look more like a series of low-down Clint Eastwood style shoot-outs, with good guys and bad guys alike mostly sneaking up on each other and firing into cabins late at night.

Ironically, the best sections of the book are probably the ones at the end. The authors do a great job of showing how Newton Knight's legacy lasted for generations, and how dozens of black, white, and mixed race people named Knight (or McKnight) live in Jones county to this day. The drama of seeing the "white" Knights challenging the racist school system to have their children admitted to white schools in the nineteen forties was much more compelling than the shadowy gun fights. And there was one sentence about a lynching that really grabbed me, where the authors mention almost by chance that a black man who was lynched in the 1920's was hung on the same tree where three white Union men were hung in the 1860's.

Now that's the kind of story William Faulkner won't write.