FIRST PERSON RURAL

odding Carter, the most out-of-step newspaper editor in Mississippi (he ns and edits the Greenville Delta Democrat-Times), is in good form in this collection of recent writings. Carter is a civil rights man with an abiding love for his ncivil State. Here he roams nostalgically through his Louisiana boyhood, through emories of his unforgettable (for the reader as well) father, through Africa's veld nd Johannesburg, as well as through Mississippi. Carter's greatest ability is to project his love, and not in the fashion of Harry Golden. In Johannesburg, Carter says, ""we never felt more at home""--because of apartheid. All the South's racist arguments come forth there in fullest bloom and with some unadvertised justifications which never appear in the U.S. press. ""How would a majority of the 162,000,000 white Americans react if the 18,000,000 American Negroes became more than 500,000,000 multi-tribal, culturally disparate, and long-exploited people pressing suffocatingly upon the driver's seat? The whites of South Africa think they know what our answer would be."" The white Afrikaners, who have been in South Africa for 300 years, have homeland to return to and now face either extinction or a status as world-aliens should they leave their land. Also included is a longish article on Faulkner as a camp and crank writing letters of indignation to his hometown newspaper. A collection of random beauty and continuous interest.