The End of Kentucky

FORETASTE OF GLORY--Jesse Stuart--Dutton ($2.50).

Cried a woman: "Thar's a burnin' mountain in the sky. Hit looks like a hillside on fire when ye burn a clearin' in the spring."

Cried the Reverend John Whetstone: "It's only an aurora borealis." But most people in the Kentucky mountain town of Blakesburg were terrified. They had never seen or heard of an aurora borealis. Mountain-born and Bible-bred, they thought that the apocalyptic spasms of light which possessed their night sky meant the End of Time. They acted accordingly.

They opened the jail. "Hit's a hell of a poor time to free us now," one prisoner panted to another, as they sprinted for the shelter of a big tree on the courthouse square.

"This is the end of Blakesburg!" shrieked the school principal. "It is the end of Blake County, our State and our Republic! But I shall take the flag of this Republic with me and plant it in the Glory Land where it will bloom forever and forever."

The laundress and local loan-shark, Malinda Sprouse, padded from house to house all night; she collected every outstanding debt in town.

Rosy Mary Blanton was serving supper to her five "laughing happy lovers" when the great lights came. They took off for their homes like whippets while Mary prayed: "Sweet Jesus, I turn to Thee who will not forsake me in this hour of need."

Blakesburg's Negroes, in the borrowed, freshly laundered autos of Blakesburg's white families, were out at a burial. When they saw the lights, they "didn't want to be accountable for borrowed property. . . . They started stepping on the gas." They brought back to Blakesburg "the smell of burning rubber tires, hot engines with radiators boiling over. . . . And all who hadn't gotten lost or wrecked on the highways hunted for the car owners on the Blakesburg streets. Their hurrying home to go into eternity from their native city was a touching scene to the white citizens, who faced with them for the first time, equality of Death and impartiality in the last and final judgment."

The end of Kentucky is a first-rate comic idea, but it requires a comic genius as great as Gogol's to handle it adequately. Ex-Navy Lieut. Jesse Stuart (Taps for Private Tussie, etc.) is no Gogol. But he knows Kentucky hill life inside out (he is a native son). His ability to turn what he knows into corn-fattened pathos and good-natured farce makes Foretaste of Glory a very likable book.

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