"So while the world I know is crashing to bits . . . I will indulge a heart beginning to be fretful by repeating to it the stories that it knows and loves of my own country and my own people."
-- William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son
It is odd and wonderful to have friends who bring up antiques like Will Percy in conversation.
A friend is reading Lanterns on the Levee, Percy's 1941 autobiography. It's surprising to learn he's reading it for the first time, given his erudition. He's struck by his "way beautiful writing about patrician b.s."
Which is probably fair. William Alexander Percy was one of those high Southern aristocrats; he spent a year in Paris before heading to Harvard Law School. He won a Croix de Guerre in World War I, befriended Langston Hughes and William Faulkner, and published four volumes of poetry with Yale University Press. He never married, but is best known for taking in the children of his first cousin.
Leroy Pratt Percy shot himself in 1929. Two years later his widow died in a single car crash that might not have been accidental. Their sons Walker, LeRoy and Phin moved in with their Uncle Will, who wrote poetry, practiced law and presided over a 20,000-acre plantation near Greenville, Miss.
Walker grew up to be a famous novelist and medical doctor. He wrote The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins and a couple of collections of essays on metaphysics and morality that are never far from my desk. (I just turned around and noticed a copy of Lanterns on the Levee on the book shelf as well. I was wondering if I hadn't lost that in the move.)
It goes without saying that I am not a Percy kind of Southerner, and that even if I had reason to believe I might be descended from William the Conqueror (as the Percys didn't mind folks thinking) I wouldn't see any reason to take pride in the fact. Yet I have always admired the Percys, even though I understand they are are as vulnerable to re-assessment and revision as those old Confederate monuments.
They would survive the scrutiny, for they are authentic where the monuments were so much flim-flam, hurried up in the spirit of intimidation, designed to show who was really in charge.
If the South ever existed, it was a nasty place, where the price of apparent consensus was dear. The South was a coercive class-centered community where everyone knew their place, even if they couldn't keep it. There is a cruelty to the concept, and those of us who rather proudly proclaim their Southernness (and even those of us who take it for granted) run the risk of denying the reality around us.
For all the myth-building and glorification of the South, there is a historical record to deal with. As fond as we might be of the old stories, the Mississippi Delta is the poorest part of the country and, despite a surfeit of government attention, not likely to improve anytime soon.
People owned other people here and treated them more or less like beasts of burden. There are people who still hate other people based on the color of their skin. There have been thousands of murders committed by people who--by some evil quirk of the brain--were convinced their victims weren't quite human. These ideas still beat down here.
They beat in other places, too, but this is our place. Our country and our people. And I understand when I hear people say how living here wears them out.
Still, I have a kind of faith about the South, about my own assumed Southerness. I don't believe people are better or worse for where they are born and live. But sometimes they are different, and these differences are worth talking about.
While a Marxist can characterize Will Percy's rhetoric of failure as symptomatic of a kind of exhaustion brought on by repressing sharecroppers, I prefer to believe in Percy's inherent decency. When I read Lanterns on the Levee, I read the wonderful memoir of an extraordinarily sensitive man, not the self-serving apology of a white master.
Will Percy mightn't have been the progressive we wish he'd been--neither was Thomas Jefferson--but his language coaxes faith.
We don't have to overlook Will Percy's flaws to feel an affinity for him; Walker Percy surely loved him but that didn't stop him from satirizing him and his noblesse oblige in The Moviegoer. He puts his Uncle Will's words in the mouth of Binx Bolling's Aunt Emily:
I am not ashamed to use the word "class." I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity's sake . . . we live by our lights, we die by our lights, and whoever the high gods may be, we'll look them in the eye without apology.
I believe in Will and Walker Percy. And even in Aunt Emily. Though I understand a lot of it is patrician b.s. Some of it is way beautiful.
Our country is a kind of primal swamp, the Tigris-Euphrates valley from which springs much of what is valuable about American popular music. Not just the music, but a tradition of communication, of storytelling, and, most of all, of belief.
The proximity between William Faulkner and Elvis Presley is neither accidental nor merely geographic. Ike Turner invented rock 'n' roll not too far away from where W.C. Handy first heard "a lean, loose-jointed negro" playing "the weirdest music." What links Eudora Welty and Robert Johnson, Jimmy Carter and James Brown, Walker Percy and Bessie Smith is a sense of their own delimited humanity, which has as its expression a confidence in things unseen, in haints and angels and a devil that walks the crossroads.
While the South might not be haunted, it's for sure we Southerners are.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 09/03/2019