Reviews for The State of Jones

The average rating for The State of Jones based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-07-12 00:00:00 Stephen Sodaro I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It does not read like a text book...it is non fiction but mixes the historical fact of the civil war with the war that was going on in Mississippi with the Jones County Scouts led by Newton Knight. Knight and a small group of men spent considerable time for two years in the Piney Woods fleeing both the North and the South as they tried to help the Negro claim his independence. Even with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and Reconstruction the black man still suffered for another 100 years before they were not intimidated at the voting polls, were not seen as a second rate citizen, and the "colored" water fountains and restrooms were finally dispensed with. Intermixed was the life that Newton Knight lead. His two "wives", white Serena and black slave Rachel, and all the children he fathered with both women. It tells of his time in the Army, his time fighting against the Army - both Union and Confederate - his leadership of both white and black men, fear for his life even after the conflict ended, detailing his part in the class struggle of the South. Surprisingly this book came about after the movie. Director Gary Ross who did the research on the movie - speaking with the historians, archivists, family and descendants of Newton Knight, Rachel Knight and Serena Knight - pitched the book idea to Doubleday, where it was published in 2009. Goes to show you how long a completed movie sits in the can - at least 9 years after the idea was presented for the book - the movie is just now being presented for viewing.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-12-25 00:00:00 Blaine Whiting 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.