Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  He returned as a captain with the Croix de Guerre and gold and silver stars. Father and mother were proud and met him at the dock in New York. He had been to a place his father envied and could not reach. Their relationship had matured and mellowed. They became closer. Will returned home and resumed living in the family mansion on Percy Street. He and his father walked to work together each day, and talked. Will later said, “Of all my experiences, our daily walks…are those I least want to forget.”

  But they had only built a bridge across a chasm between them. The two did not so much see things differently; they saw different things. Ironically, Will, who had been through a war that made most intellectuals bitter cynics, remained the romantic. And as if to compensate for what he must have regarded as his own personal evil, in Greenville he continued to insist on moral perfection and condemned scandal. LeRoy, perhaps remembering the timing of his own marriage, tolerated human weakness and condemned no one. LeRoy understood passion; Will endured it.

  They viewed blacks differently as well. LeRoy saw all men, including blacks, as pieces in a larger game. It was almost entirely a question of economics to him, and he could accept an individual Negro as a man, if not a social equal. But then he accepted few whites as social equals. He wrote John Sharp Williams: “The negroes are going to leave the South gradually more and more until the standard of wages is raised throughout the South more nearly to the level of what it is elsewhere. When the negroes once scatter throughout the United States, there would cease to be any sectional or local negro issue, and any issue there would be, would be an issue between the whites and blacks throughout the entire country.”

  Will had less tolerance for racial differences than his father. In 1921, while LeRoy lobbied former Senate colleagues against all immigration restrictions, Will wrote Williams, “I can’t see why we should not adopt a definite policy for the exclusion of Orientals.” His feelings about blacks were far more complex, beginning with a naive paternalism. In his autobiography he claimed that the Delta was settled as “slaveholders began to look for cheap fertile lands farther west that could feed the many black mouths dependent on them.” His father would have considered absurd the idea that slave owners moved hundreds of miles for the good of their slaves.

  Will did protect blacks out of a sense of noblesse oblige. He stopped wearing a hat because that meant tipping it to a white woman but not to a black, and later would have blacks—such as the poet Langston Hughes—as guests in his home, an extraordinary occurrence in the South of the time. Yet, unlike his father, he had difficulty seeing an individual black as a full man. To Will blacks were unknowable, primal. Their mystery and darkness drew him. He wondered, “[W]hat can a white man, north or south, say of them that will even approximate the truth?” He envied “their obliterating genius for living in the present” and noted, “The Negro’s moral flabbiness is both his charm and his undoing.”

  He certainly knew of the liaisons between white men and black women, many semipermanent, and of the huge house on Blanton Street called “The Mansion,” where nice clean colored girls entertained white gentlemen. He disapproved, even while suffering his own passion, even while continuing to travel around the world to pursue—and evade—his own dark places and the hunger that repelled him. He wrote a poem about Taormina, home of the dark-skinned young shepherd boys. In the Delta, blacks presented an opaque smiling face to whites, but they were everywhere, unnoticed but knowing everything about whites. Some, it was rumored, might know Will far too well. He called his black personal servant in Greenville “my only tie with Pan and the Satyrs and all earth creatures who smile sunshine and ask no questions and understand.” Sometimes self-disgust filled him. In his poem “Medusa,” he spoke of “turn[ing] to stone with terror of facing quietly a flawless mirror.”

  Yet he demanded respect, and got it. He was after all a Percy. But his father had never demanded respect; he had commanded it. So had LeRoy’s father, William Alexander Percy, after whom Will had been named.

  Indeed, by the time the first William Alexander was forty-two, he had led a regiment in war, reorganized the state’s levee system, faced down a mob to stop a lynching, led the “Redemption” of the county, started a railroad, and served as Speaker of the state legislature. By the time LeRoy himself was forty-two, he had brought railroads to the Delta, hunted with the president, maneuvered with and against the Mississippi River Commission, run plantations totaling 30,000 acres, negotiated with the mayor of Rome for Italian immigrants, defended Negroes against white demagogues, advised such financiers as J. P. Morgan, and become the strongest figure in the Delta and one of the strongest in the South.

  Will was known only for being his father’s son, even while others of his generation had emerged as leaders, such men as Billy Wynn, also a captain in the war whose law office was in the same building as Percy & Percy. Five years earlier when LeRoy had confronted the Klan, Will had stood beside him, always steadfast, always courageous, yet still in the shadows. Even in the midst of that battle he had been busy filling their library with delicate and exquisite volumes, conducting a warm correspondence with bookshops in New York: “I understand that Harper’s has published the first volume of Elie Faure’s History of Art, translated by Walter Pach. Won’t you please get this for me? Have you been able to find ‘Nostrom’ yet?…The dark blue limp leather edition is the one I like best.”

  He had accepted a few community tasks, such as raising money for good causes. Fellow alumnus Monte Lemann of Monroe & Lemann in New Orleans convinced him to raise money for Harvard Law School. And he became chairman of the Washington County Red Cross. He disliked asking for contributions, but it was his duty and he realized that only with difficulty did someone in the county refuse a Percy.

  The Mississippi River had abruptly changed everything. Now, in the emergency, he suddenly had real responsibility. Now the mayor of Greenville, after a conversation with LeRoy, named Will head of a special flood relief committee. The appointment, coupled with his chairmanship of the county Red Cross, gave Will near absolute control over the county during the emergency, and over the care of tens of thousands of refugees. The job would require more of Will than he had ever given anything except his poetry. It would also put everything that mattered to him at risk.

  It would be Will’s chance to prove himself a true Percy, and to learn precisely what that meant. What he did would have an impact far beyond the Delta, on the nation at large.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE MOUNDS LANDING LEVEE broke at seven-thirty on the morning of April 21. While Greenville waited for the water to reach the city’s rear protection levee, the city was in panic. Few fled by car, afraid of being caught by the water on the flat Delta land, but trains out of the city were packed. Grocery stores and wholesale suppliers of every imaginable good were packed. Meanwhile, late that morning, Will, representing the Red Cross, went to the Opera House, a three-story building one block from the levee, and sat down with Will Whittington, the Delta’s congressman, General Curtis Green, head of the Mississippi National Guard, A. G. Paxton, the local National Guard commander, and Billy Wynn, a rising power in the county, to plan for the disaster. Even if Greenville remained dry, refugees from the rest of the county would inundate it. Will was nominally in charge, but the meeting was disorderly and chaotic. Paxton spoke first. He was short and officious, and he loved the military (a general in Korea, his men nicknamed him “Bullwhip Shorty”). He stated that he had “commandeered” the building where they were meeting, and spoke of assigning labor battalions as though he were moving armies about. The congressman uselessly promised to demand federal aid. Green arranged for more men and matériel to hold the protection levee. Wynn did the most useful thing: he took responsibility for setting up kitchens for refugees. When the meeting adjourned, Will returned home and began working on his poetry. He would write feverishly deep into that night. He knew it could be his last opportunity for weeks.

  While he wrote, the water reached David Cober’
s house outside the city. Cober remembers: “We heard this storm coming through the woods. It wasn’t a storm. It was the water.” It came in as rolling surf first, five-foot-high breakers, crashing against the house; the house shook under the attack, then the water rose. “Our house was six or seven feet off the ground. The water came in fourteen or fifteen feet deep.” The house had only one story; water entered and forced them to stand on tables. It kept rising. In the darkness of the night, Cober dove down into the swirling water looking for an ax, kept diving until he found it, then hacked a hole in the roof and his family climbed out onto it.

  The Greenville protection levee stood eight feet high. The water paused briefly, then ripped the levee apart as smoothly as if unzipping it. The fire whistle went off. The sound was, Will said, “like zero made audible.”

  THEN CAME THE CHAOS. Water roared and hissed, the fire whistle blasted, church bells clanged, animals barked and neighed and bellowed in terror. In Newtown, the black neighborhood closest to the protection levee, hundreds of families began to wade through the rising water to the Mississippi levee, the highest ground in the Delta. Twenty-five hundred others fled to the courthouse, packed it tight. The water rose quickly to 3 feet, 5 feet, 8 feet, dark churning water, chocolate with brown foam. The currents poured into downtown, sweeping the streets empty. “Water was just rolling in, like you see the waves down in Gulfport,” recalled Jesse Pollard. “They were high—you saw horses and cows floating. If you were standing on the levee, you could see people floating who had drowned. It was a sight you never forget.”

  One last train tried to escape. But outside the city the crevasse water was roaring over the railroad embankment, washing it away in its entirety, leaving the rails turned upright like a picket fence. A mile beyond the city limits the train derailed. It would remain there, a twisted Gargantua lying helpless, for months.

  In the Percy home, father and son were on the phone long before dawn, collecting information, tracking the water, locating food supplies and boats, contracting for boats to be built. Now in the early daybreak, LeRoy told his son wearily, “Guess you better go while you can. I’ll be along.” Will headed for a meeting with the relief committee in the poker room of the Knights of Columbus hall. Then his mother, Camille, and the cook went out to gather what final groceries they could find.

  LeRoy was finally alone. He had spent his life building the Delta. His two greatest adversaries had always been the river and the shortage of labor. The river was invading his home now, snaking down his street, Percy Street, flooding his garden, overflowing his tennis court—the only one in the city—climbing the steps of his porch. And he knew the river would send blacks flooding north, stripping the Delta of labor.

  The life he had known was dying. It had been so at least since Vardaman had so bitterly defeated him. He expected it to die. But if he was fatalistic, he had never simply yielded to fate. One did all that one could. He could do nothing about the river. But he could still control men. He picked up the telephone.

  He first tracked down the governor and said he wanted the state to guarantee Delta banks that any funds expended for relief would be repaid. Murphree agreed. Then Percy got on the phone to New York bankers and began soliciting money, both as contributions and loans.

  Meanwhile, Will and the relief committee were trying to establish order. They needed to take charge of boats, food supply, drinking water, kitchens, lights, transportation, sanitation, police. But there were crossed lines of authority, not enough resources, not enough food, no shelter for the refugees.

  Rescuers were depositing thousands of refugees from all over the Delta on the levee, to join the city’s own thousands already there. Farmers moved cattle, mules, horses, and pigs to the levee as well. The Mississippi River lay on one side, the flood on the other. The levee crown was only 8 feet wide, its landside slope an additional 10 to 40 feet wide before touching water. A line of people already stretched north from downtown for more than a mile.

  At midday LeRoy called his son, who dispatched a boat to take him to the relief headquarters. LeRoy’s presence mattered. People too busy to come to the phone for Will or Paxton came to the phone for him. Though Will nominally gave the orders, Hunter Kimbrough, who stayed in the Percy home for the first ten days of the flood, recalls, “Senator Percy was in charge.” Despite the shortage of boats, LeRoy had a 17-foot motorboat, a driver, and a mechanic assigned to him personally. That first day he, Will, Billy Wynn, and Paxton decided to declare “voluntary” martial law. They had no legal authority to do so. The mayor had no role in the decision, nor the city council, nor the county board of supervisors. But the next edition of the newspaper announced: “All citizens of Greenville, all refugees…and all property necessary in Relief work are subject to orders from this [National Guard] headquarters…. Disobedience will not be tolerated.” The authority came from the signatures: Will, as chairman of the Washington County Relief Committee, T. R. Buchanan, the Red Cross relief expert assigned to the county, and LeRoy for “the Citizens.”

  Martial law solved little. Virtually the entire county was underwater, as much as 20 feet of water. The current everywhere was ferocious. People took shelter in railroad boxcars, in the upper stories of cotton gins, oil mills, houses, and barns. Thousands clung to roofs or trees, or sat on the levee awaiting pickup. The rain and cold continued. By the second day after the crevasse, despite the several thousand, nearly all whites, who fled the city, refugees pushed Greenville’s normal population of 15,000 to nearly 25,000. Every hour rescuers were bringing hundreds more in from around the county. Twenty-five thousand more people were scattered around the rest of the county. The city was cut off from supply. The National Guard had only 5,000 rations.

  By now five miles of the narrow levee were crammed with refugees, almost all of them there black, and refugees were still pouring in. Thousands of head of livestock extended farther. The number of refugees and livestock would keep growing. Without shelter or dry clothes in the continuing rain, with temperatures dropping into the forties at night, with only the sparest of rations, the refugees stood in mud, sat in mud, slept in mud. The Greenville Democrat-Times reported: “Flood conditions continue to grow worse in Greenville as refugees continue to be brought in from outlying sections and are huddled in every available space…. Cold weather added to the suffering as food and water supply here becomes lower.”

  The situation was becoming life-threatening. Rumors began to spread of sickness, of a possible epidemic. An urgent call for typhoid serum went out. Dogs swarmed over the levee; without food or their owners, they were barking endlessly and rapidly turning wild, making rabies a real threat. The levee was a madhouse. General Malin Craig, commander of the Army’s IV Corps in Atlanta, was unsympathetic to the refugees in general and shipped out tents and field kitchens only reluctantly, at a niggardly pace. But even he warned the War Department: “Conditions Greenville area critical.”

  Rescue barges already full began squeezing white women and children aboard in Greenville to take them to Vicksburg, where they could make rail connections elsewhere or remain in well-organized camps. The barges also removed some of the blacks to Vicksburg. Yet Greenville’s population continued to grow as even more refugees arrived.

  Then the city water supply became contaminated and useless. An Associated Press dispatch reported, “The situation here, with the water supply gone, most of the food destroyed, and…ten thousand…camping on the levee, was desperate.” Will, as chairman of the relief committee, had tried to respond. He had just sent out an urgent plea for 20,000 loaves of bread. But even if bread came, the logistic problems were long-term, not short-term. The flood had cut off the city for weeks, possibly months. Without rail connections, supplying Greenville would be nearly impossible.

  The most obvious solution was to evacuate the refugees. But evacuation would denude Washington County of its labor supply, particularly sharecroppers. They would have nothing to return to. Most of them had with them on the levee the little the
y had been able to salvage before the flood washed their homes away. All that remained were their debts to the planters. It could take years to replace the croppers. They might never be replaced.

  The question of evacuation went to the essence of Will’s concept of a worthy aristocracy, of noblesse oblige, even of honor. Keeping the refugees on the levee risked their lives. There was no question of what was right, and therefore no choice.

  Yet a decision of such import had to have at least the appearance of broad support. Will did not consult Paxton, a cotton broker, or Wynn. He consulted only his Red Cross committee, Percy loyalists. Its vice chairman was Judge Emmet Harty, another bachelor who had gone to war with Will and was his closest friend in Greenville, and its members included Charlie Williams, who ran the Percy cotton compress, and Will Hardie, the manager of Percy’s Trail Lake Plantation. “Whatever Senator Percy wanted, that’s what white folks in this county did,” says the son of another committee member, B. B. Payne.

  Will told them the refugees had to be evacuated. They believed he spoke for his father. Still, several committee members objected. Will insisted. They faced a great human disaster. One could not risk hundreds of lives simply over an economic question. Grudgingly but unanimously, they approved Will’s plan.

  On April 23, the Greenville paper, whose owner served on Will’s committee and was another longtime supporter, said, “The city will almost be evacuated within a few days.” Will informed Governor Murphree, who declared, “It is the plan of state authorities to remove from Greenville all the refugees and all other persons who desire to leave the city.”