Shelby Foote Quote
But it was one thing to condemn him when court had adjourned and you looked back on what he had done, and it was another different thing entirely when you were sitting on the jury with a man’s life in your hands and Nowell was walking up and down in front of the rail in that crisp white linen suit, stopping every now and then and leaning forward to speak in a voice that was barely above a whisper, the courtroom so quiet you could hear your neighbor holding his breath and every time Judge Holiman raked one of those matches across the bench it was like the crack of doom, Nowell throwing law at you with one hand and logic with the other, until finally you got to thinking you were all that was left in this big wide ugly world to save a poor victim of malice and circumstance from being lynched by the State of Mississippi.
But it was one thing to condemn him when court had adjourned and you looked back on what he had done, and it was another different thing entirely when you were sitting on the jury with a man’s life in your hands and Nowell was walking up and down in front of the rail in that crisp white linen suit, stopping every now and then and leaning forward to speak in a voice that was barely above a whisper, the courtroom so quiet you could hear your neighbor holding his breath and every time Judge Holiman raked one of those matches across the bench it was like the crack of doom, Nowell throwing law at you with one hand and logic with the other, until finally you got to thinking you were all that was left in this big wide ugly world to save a poor victim of malice and circumstance from being lynched by the State of Mississippi.
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About Shelby Foote
With geographic and cultural roots in the Mississippi Delta, Foote's life and writing paralleled the radical shift from the agrarian planter system of the Old South to the Civil Rights era of the New South. Foote was little known to the general public until his appearance in Ken Burns's PBS documentary The Civil War in 1990, where he introduced a generation of Americans to a war that he believed was "central to all our lives".
Foote did all his writing by hand with a nib pen, later transcribing the result into a typewritten copy. While Foote's work was mostly well-received during his lifetime, it has been criticized by professional historians and academics in the 21st century.