Confederate Jasmine

Part travelogue, part memoir, part art book, part vague imaginings, this book about writer and artist Lewis's trip to the South is wholly impressionistic. Although her family hails from a small town in Alabama, Lewis had moved from the South to Connecticut, Massachusetts, California and finally settled in Vermont. ""My allegiances,"" she writes, ""are split down the middle--north, south or neither, depending on the sentiment of the moment."" Traveling with her husband Tim, she visits her parents' hometown of Demopolis, Ala., and a cousin who lives on the Gulf Coast, before heading out to explore Mississippi. For a part of the country where cotton was king, perhaps it's not unusual that Lewis's recounting is populated by plants--the eulalia at Faulkner's home in Oxford, Miss.; the nobby kneed cypresses along the Natchez Trace; pine, magnolia, jasmine, kudzu and Spanish moss--each represented in text and by beautiful slide-sized artworks of plants framed by a collage of text, cloth, photographs or pigment. She's less successful with her portrayals of people, however. Lewis started the trip because she found herself ""stirring the same old blackened kettle of stereotypes"" in a now-abandoned novel of the South, but in fact she seems to go out of her way to find those stereotypes--the tough, plain-spoken woman; the belle struggling to keep her ante-bellum Natchez mansion; the elderly occupants of a once grand, now decrepit, mansion; the manic Elvis fan. Lewis's art--subtle, delicate, evocative--achieves admirably what her text strives for. (July)