Sheltered Places

About the Book

Sheltered Places is a walk in the 1940´s and ´50´s through the memorable,crazy, mixed up Mississippi Delta, a singular region on the planet. Here is a look at that region during the years before during and after World War II. The author explores the high quality of public education surprisingly provided in the white public schools of the town of Belzoni, Mississippi in that time. He provides a studied glimpse of a physical landscape dominated by a flat terrain laced with murky streams leading to the muddy Yazoo River nearby. He describes the austerity of the region during The War,and the optimism which came at war´s end.In poignant passages he takes us to the heart of Mississippi´s football mania, and to the almost religious fervor attending those radiant Friday nights across the length and breadth of the Delta; and he pays special attention to the Delta´s well known treasure - its incredibly beautiful women. Finally, the author explains how he came to be there in that time and place. He does so by tracing his family´s journey to the Mississippi flatlands beginning with a shipboard marriage of his Scottish ancestors aboard a ship from Ireland to Delaware in 1727. He explores in detail the unique little hill town of Como, Mississippi,-- his mother´s ancestral home -- where it seemed that everybody was somehow related to everybody else. Beyond the Delta, the author takes us to a unique institution of higher learning in the American South, a university whose buildings rise with understated grandeur from the somber landscape of Southern Appalachia. He traces the troubled beginnings of the University Of The South at Sewanee, Tennessee; beginnings occurring a few years before the commencement of Civil War. Then, he provides his reflections of what life was like on that idyllic mountain campus almost a century later in the early 1950´s. Then we are given a tour of Vanderbilt University and its law school in the late 1950´s and an introduction to some of the Vanderbilt people who would later play major roles in the affairs of the nation, including James F. Neal who was the courtroom prosecutor of the Watergate defendants, Halderman, Erlichman, and Mitchell; and David Halberstam, who would later join the elite of American journalism.

About the Author

John Ward Boult was born in Jackson, Mississippi and educated in the free white public schools of the Mississippi Delta in the 1940’s and early 50’s; then at The University Of The South at Sewanee, Tennessee; then at The Vanderbilt Law School in Nashville. He saw four years of service with the U. S. Navy and the U.S. Department Of Justice in Washington, D.C. Thereafter, in the 1960’s, he became a partner in Florida’s largest law firm in its Tampa office. Along the way, as Mississippi began to be overcome by a terrible xenophobia, he became painfully alienated from his Delta origins; only in later years to be encouraged by his gifted boyhood friend, Willie Morris, not to give up on his homeland. These urgings led to several magazine essays, and, after the author’s retirement from his law firm in 1998, to this memoir which seeks to reclaim something of those cherished early years in the Delta and in Tennessee.