Summer wheat, heavy with grain, waved in the July wind, and when touched by the afternoon sun, cast a golden glow on the rocks of Cemetery Ridge. Jonathan stood with his countrymen, rifle drawn, wiping sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of a ragged Confederate uniform. Then the nod, Longstreet to Pickett, whose men charged screaming the blood-curdling Rebel yell. Brave soldiers, strength pressed to the breach, fell like autumn leaves. Blood ran freely down the hill. Gettysburg was a trough. Jonathan could see with horrifying clarity from the hillside that Kemper, Armistead, and Semmes were dead. Garnett, already wounded in the leg, gallantly rode his horse in the charge facing certain death, and it was so. Jonathan reached the crest of the hill, slashing Union soldiers with every move, the grotesqueness of the hour searing his consciousness. He took a saber slash through the leg, grabbed the rogue Yank, and pulled him from his horse. With his bowie knife, he put an end to the savagery. But Jonathan was a savage himself. Both countries had gone mad and, in madness, had taken along every southern gentleman.

Jane Bennett Gaddy has captured in her third installment of the Payne family, JOAB, a piece of the history for Faulkner's "little postage stamp of native soil" with a combination of history and fiction. She places Joab in Oxford, known as Jefferson in the Faulkner novels, at a time when this town was at its lowest. History and fiction sometimes come together and Gaddy has given us something, as Oxonians, to think about in our "little postage stamp of native soil." -Jack Lamar Mayfield, Columnist, "The Oxford Eagle"

I was born in the flat fertile Mississippi Delta in 1940. I grew up in a white clapboard plantation house, on the heels of the Great Depression, when cotton was still running the show in the south, and well before the Civil Rights Movement. Love took me out of the Delta, and it was love that brought me back, for there are some things that cannot be forgotten or left behind. So, here it is. After all the years that have come and gone, here is a Delta girl seeing the grand old South through a window, all but closed now. There were days hot enough to melt lead, and bitter winters that tested and forged the human spirit. And in a way, that's how I felt looking back on it. There we all were, scratching at the ground for our white gold and imagining the world beyond the cotton rows. It's my life and a heritage of pride in my homeland, my view of America, of family, of love, and ultimately of the "House Not Made With Hands."

Summer wheat, heavy with grain, waved in the July wind, and when touched by the afternoon sun, cast a golden glow on the rocks of Cemetery Ridge. Jonathan stood with his countrymen, rifle drawn, wiping sweat from his eyes with the sleeve of a ragged Confederate uniform. Then the nod, Longstreet to Pickett, whose men charged screaming the blood-curdling Rebel yell. Brave soldiers, strength pressed to the breach, fell like autumn leaves. Blood ran freely down the hill. Gettysburg was a trough. Jonathan could see with horrifying clarity from the hillside that Kemper, Armistead, and Semmes were dead. Garnett, already wounded in the leg, gallantly rode his horse in the charge facing certain death, and it was so. Jonathan reached the crest of the hill, slashing Union soldiers with every move, the grotesqueness of the hour searing his consciousness. He took a saber slash through the leg, grabbed the rogue Yank, and pulled him from his horse. With his bowie knife, he put an end to the savagery. But Jonathan was a savage himself. Both countries had gone mad and, in madness, had taken along every southern gentleman.

I was born in the flat fertile Mississippi Delta in 1940. I grew up in a white clapboard plantation house, on the heels of the Great Depression, when cotton was still running the show in the south, and well before the Civil Rights Movement. Love took me out of the Delta, and it was love that brought me back, for there are some things that cannot be forgotten or left behind. So, here it is. After all the years that have come and gone, here is a Delta girl seeing the grand old South through a window, all but closed now. There were days hot enough to melt lead, and bitter winters that tested and forged the human spirit. And in a way, that's how I felt looking back on it. There we all were, scratching at the ground for our white gold and imagining the world beyond the cotton rows. It's my life and a heritage of pride in my homeland, my view of America, of family, of love, and ultimately of the "House Not Made With Hands."