Blind into Doom

By Horace Judson

THE CHILDREN OF PRIDE edited by ROBERT MANSON MYERS 1,845 pages. Yale University Press. $19.95.

The Rev. Charles C. Jones, in the year 1854, was a prosperous plantation owner who lived with his intensely pious wife on the Georgia coast south of Savannah. Though aging and in fragile health, he was still noted as a Christian missionary to the Negro slaves. His son Charles was at Harvard, studying law and observing with righteous outrage the schemings of abolitionists and other anarchists. His other son, Joseph, was in Philadelphia studying medicine. Jones' brothers, sisters, cousins, and their swarming children, lived on other coastal plantations or in Marietta and Savannah. They were loyal, often loving. They bustled with industry, yet had spacious leisure. They had, of course, no telephones. So they wrote letters.

How they wrote them! With varying literary distinction, indeed with all the ornamental vices of the time, yet often with attractive energy and at copious length, they wrote to each other monthly, weekly, sometimes daily, for nearly 20 years. What was more unusual, the Jones family saved the letters, all 6,000 of them, 4,000,000 words or more. English Professor Robert Manson Myers selected 1,200, made minor cuts, and knitted the skeins of reply and re-reply into an almost continuous narrative, mostly without intext notes or bridges. Then, in 17 years of fanatic industry, he added 300 pages of biographical notes and index.

The story is irresistibly alive, initially nostalgic, ultimately pitiable. Too raw to be first-rate social history, it never really becomes the true-life epistolary novel which Editor Myers claims. The Joneses wrote of farming and money, hurricanes and family visits, a trip to Niagara and Mammoth Cave, a cousin dead of yellow fever, an uncle disgraced by drink and a woman, a sermon enjoyed, a length of calico purchased. They wrote also about their slaves--referring to them usually, with unsettling reverberations today, as "the people."

The Civil War approaches, welcomed with fat confidence. Young Charles becomes a colonel. Inflation comes, hard times and hunger. The Yankees come, with pillage and emancipation. Defeat comes. At last the family scatters -- to the grave, to New Or leans with a few pickings from their once sumptuous possessions, young Charles to New York and a distinguished career at the bar. Throughout -- and here is the final secret of the book's fascination -- they show them selves at once courageous and uncomprehending, walking upright and blind into doom.

Once only, in a letter from the Rev.

C.C. Jones to his son, dated November 8th, 1854, does a kind of understanding flash forth: "I wish to make the impression on you with the point of a diamond that you never can succeed and attain to any eminence in your profession if you have anything at all to do with the management of Negro property. No man within my knowledge ever has.. sbHorace Judson

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