Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  Again, Will fled. While his parents grieved, he traveled to the Grand Canyon. He remained there for months. Shortly after he returned, in October 1929, his mother died. Three days later, Will and his father went to the resort of French Lick, Indiana; it was a family favorite, only this time it held no life. On their return LeRoy became ill. Will took him off the train and rushed him to Memphis Baptist Hospital. An old friend who visited him there laughed, “I never expected to find you among the Baptists,” and later recalled, “I think that was the last time he ever smiled.”

  LeRoy improved enough to return to Greenville but remained morose. He hardly ate, hardly spoke. President Hoover sent condolences for his wife’s death and added, “I am happy to know that you are making so good a recovery.” But he was not recovering. His old colleague John Sharp Williams, the warrior who had vanquished Vardaman so many years before and who had finally retired from the Senate, spoke of his own determination to remain in this world “even if only on its outskirts” and pleaded with LeRoy to keep him company.

  LeRoy would not. In his home full of echoes, he and his son waited for death. On Christmas Eve, 1929, LeRoy Percy, son of the Gray Eagle, died quietly. With his passing, a time in history also passed.

  All of white Greenville fell into deep mourning. But blacks told each other that on his deathbed he had said, “No matter what you do, keep your foot on the black moccasin’s head. If you take it off he’s going to crawl away.”

  AFTER HIS FATHER’S DEATH Will wrote: “One of the pleasantest places near the home town is its cemetery. I come here not infrequently because it is restful and comforting. I am with my own people.”

  Will had always found comfort in the past, about which he could weave a personal mythology, rather than with the present or future, which required him to engage realities. His father’s death gave him both an object of devotion, and freedom. He escaped into himself less now; it had perhaps become less necessary. He had always been prolific, but since the flood he had written hardly any poems. Now he stopped altogether.

  In the cemetery he built a shrine; in the midst of the Depression, at a cost of $25,000, he commissioned Malvina Hoffman to sculpt a statue of a knight standing in armor and mail weary and subdued, yet unvanquished, his hands resting upon a great broadsword. A tablet quotes a poem by Matthew Arnold: “They outtalked thee, hissed thee, tore thee…/ Charge once more then and be dumb! / Let the victors, when they come, / When the forts of folly fall, / Find thy body by the wall!”

  It was now Will’s responsibility to live honorably. His cousin’s widow and her three children moved from Birmingham into the Percy home, now Will’s alone, and after her death—perhaps another suicide, perhaps an unpremeditated but opportunistic seizing of death, or perhaps simply an accident—Will adopted the three children, his cousins, Walker, LeRoy, and Phinizy. He was still nothing like his father. But his house was full. His father’s allies continued as his allies. He had the power of money; in one Depression year, a time when a family could live well on $1,500 a year, his personal checkbook balance ranged as high as $19,829 and never fell below $3,700. And he began to come into his own largeness.

  For Will was a large man, only in different ways than his father had been large. His father had once said, “Hypocrisy is the pet vice of Americans, and bunk their favorite diet.” Will’s life became not hypocritical but paradoxical. As his adopted son Walker, the novelist, said, “Though he loved his home country, he had to leave often to keep loving it.” He traveled constantly to escape the Delta and also brought the outside world to the Delta. Unhappy with the pedestrian views of the existing newspaper—even though its owner had supported his father in the Klan fight and him during the flood—he recruited Hodding Carter and his wife, Betty Werlein Carter, to start a new newspaper that soon took over the older one, and later became a national symbol of heroic journalism. His house became a salon, choked with artifacts and objets d’art from Italy, Japan, Tahiti. An enormous Capehart record player sat in the living room; it was designed, although it rarely worked, to automatically lift records and turn them over. Dorothy Parker visited, William Faulkner visited, Stephen Vincent Benet visited, even Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of the Harlem Renaissance, visited. (Will introduced him by saying Hughes had “risen above race,” but Hughes then proceeded to read, Walker Percy recalled, “the most ideologically aggressive poetry you can imagine.”)

  Will lent his weight to other battles too. As the thirties moved into darkness, he opposed Oscar Johnston’s efforts to sell surplus cotton to the Japanese, protesting: “To furnish [Japan] with munitions of war is the rankest form of stupidity…[and] so completely indecent I don’t understand it…. The most dangerous doctrine that can be taught in our country is the doctrine now being taught by Oscar Johnston, that is America will carry on as usual after the Allies are defeated and will do business with Germany.”

  Then there were the blacks. Everything in the Delta always came back to the blacks. Will patronized blacks in ways his father would not have considered, failed to understand them in ways his father could not have. Once several black ministers asked him for a contribution to build a Negro YMCA. Will offered to help build a beautiful facility on one condition: that Greenville Negroes combined their nearly fifty Baptist churches into one. He did not hear from them again. “Their virtues, to Mr. Will, had almost nothing to do with freedom,” Shelby Foote recalled. “It had to do with dignity, and suffering injustice in a better way than most people can.”

  Yet in his own way, Will shielded blacks as his father would have. In 1937 the Mississippi River rose again and tested the new flood control plan. Ultimately, the river was contained, but while it was rising, whites wanted to call out the National Guard to protect the levees and keep blacks working on them. Will prevented it. He recalled the brutality of the Guard in 1927 and warned: “If the Negroes of this county knew the guards were coming, there would be a general exodus…. I have pledged them I would do all in my power to keep the National Guards out of the county now and during a flood as long as they behave like decent citizens.”

  He protected black suspects from beatings by the police, even winning damages for at least one victim. He wrote contracts for his sharecroppers on Trail Lake, his plantation, ordered that they be treated decently (his foreman largely ignored his order), and even proposed that the federal government perform audits to see that sharecroppers were not cheated. He defended that proposal to another planter, arguing that “dishonesty practiced by landlords in this section in their settlements with their tenants…is widespread and disruptive of interracial relations…making the tenant distrust or even hate the white man.”

  And when black men had sex with willing white women, Will protected those blacks too, seeing that they were only hustled out of Greenville and not whipped or lynched. The white men had their black whores on Blanton Street, but the entire white Delta shivered at the possibility of a white woman desiring, submitting to, a black man. For at issue was not only love and pleasure but power; in the sultriness of the Delta, sex represented everything.

  Always Will had hated this part of himself, the part he had discovered in Europe and written about so long before: To think nobility like mine could be / Flawed—shattered utterly—and by… / A slim, brown shepherd boy with windy eyes / And spring upon his mouth! /…and I, who, most of all the world, / Loved purity and loathed lust, / Became the mark of my own scorning. He had always had desires. He had not indulged them in Greenville but his father was dead, and perhaps his father was appeased by the sculpture by his grave.

  Rumors about Will spread through his town. He preferred the women and garden clubs to men and hunting, or poker, or golf. He took young men, both white and black, on trips to Europe and Tahiti, or bought them cars, paid for their flying lessons. “You know he never married,” people said of him, raising their eyebrows.

  Some rumors were not acceptable. The rumors said that blacks had a power over Will. That his chauffeurs, young black men, sh
owed their power to him. One, Ford Atkins, he had called my only tie with Pan and the Satyrs and all earth creatures who smile sunshine and ask no questions and understand. Atkins’ mother was Will’s cook; she became sullen and alcoholic, and he fired her. When Ford once addressed him in a way that was too familiar, Will instantly fired him too. Soon he hired a chauffeur named Senator Canada whose nickname “Honey” came from his charm, not his skin color. Honey had jet black skin, flashing teeth, and wore a mink tie. There were rumors about Will and Honey too. Honey spread them himself, going into the poolroom on Nelson Street, parking Percy’s enormous black car by the door, and shooting pool. Outside, it was said, Will lay on the floor in the backseat to avoid being seen. Then Honey said, “I got to take my who’ home,” laughed, dropped his pool cue, got into the car, and drove away.

  THE FIRST SENTENCE of Will Percy’s autobiography Lanterns on the Levee reads, “My country is the Mississippi Delta, the river country.” The river had created the Delta, and the white man—the Percys and men like them—had brought the blacks to the Delta to clear it and tame it and transform it into an empire. Together they had done that. They had built that empire.

  Will believed he was watching that empire disintegrate. Near the end of his autobiography, completed only months before his death in 1941, he wrote: “The old Southern way of life in which I had been reared existed no more and its values were ignored or derided. A tarnish has fallen over the bright world; dishonor and corruption triumph; my own strong people have become lotus-eaters; defeat is here again, the last, the most abhorrent.”

  He seemed to accept that defeat, if only because he accepted the absurd and, finally, himself. The final chapter of his autobiography is titled “Home,” and it is about the cemetery. He wrote: “I wish a few others out there, under the cedars, could be in this plot of ours…. I should like to bring from that far corner where the poor sleep well one brown-eyed lad who sleeps alone there, for he had loved me.” Then he wrote, “I know that the wickedness and the failures of men are nothing and their valor and pathos and effort everything.”

  A SOCIETY does not change in sudden jumps. Rather, it moves in multiple small steps along a broad front. Most of these steps are parallel if not quite simultaneous; some advance farther than others, and some even move in an opposite direction. The movement rather resembles that of an amoeba, with one part of the body extending itself outward, then another, even while the main body stays back, until enough of the mass has shifted to move the entire body.

  The Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927 forced many small steps. Even in the narrowest and most direct sense the flood’s legacy was felt in Washington, in New Orleans, in Greenville, in every community along the banks of the Mississippi River and its tributary rivers, and in the nation’s black community. Even in terms of just physical issues, the 1927 flood created a legacy of new problems that engineers must deal with today. But the flood also left a far larger, if more ambiguous and less tangible, legacy.

  Like the blues music born in the Delta, languid and roiling at the same time, it penetrated to the core of the nation, washed away surface, and revealed the nation’s character. Then it tested that character and changed it. It marked the end of a way of seeing the world, and possibly the end of that world itself.

  It shifted perceptions of the role and responsibility of the federal government—calling for a great expansion—and shattered the myth of a quasi-feudal bond between Delta blacks and the southern aristocracy, in which the former pledged fealty to the latter in return for protection. It accelerated the great migration of blacks north. And it altered both southern and national politics. The changes would not all come quickly. But they would come.

  In 1927 the Mississippi River had gone coursing once again over the land it had created, reclaiming the empire the Percys had taken. Then the waters left. In their wake black Delta sharecroppers looked north to Chicago and west to Los Angeles, and out onto the freshly replenished fields. There, in the fields, the Mississippi had deposited one more layer of earth upon the land.

  Appendix:

  THE RIVER TODAY

  TODAY what the Corps of Engineers calls “Project Flood” protects the lower Mississippi River valley from a flood considerably greater, the Corps says, than that of 1927. In its present form this plan has finally ended in compromise the great and bitter rivalry of James Eads, Andrew Humphreys, and Charles Ellet begun so long ago. But the plan itself has created a major new problem, and it also has serious flaws.

  Over the years Project Flood has undergone many changes, but its engineering backbone remains the original 1928 law, the Jadwin Plan, which set standards for levees far higher and thicker than those of 1927, but did not rely on levees alone. Instead, it embodied the chief principle articulated by Ellet, that the river cannot be contained within levees. So in addition the Corps has built reservoirs on several Mississippi tributaries, and also allows the Mississippi itself room to spread out through a series of various flood control features.

  On the main river, the plan’s northernmost flood control feature is a “floodway,” essentially a parallel river 5 miles wide and 65 miles long, running from Birds Point, Missouri, south to New Madrid, Missouri. The river enters it through a “fuse-plug” levee, a levee lower than those surrounding it that is designed to blow out in a great flood. (If it holds, the Corps will dynamite it.) This floodway diverts a maximum flow of 550,000 cubic feet of water per second. It has been used only once, in 1937. At New Madrid the water returns to the Mississippi.

  For the next 250 miles of river, to the mouth of the Arkansas, the Jadwin Plan originally called for only stronger levees to contain the water. At the mouth of the Arkansas, where in 1927 the river carried its greatest volume, Jadwin wanted to build a second, massive floodway that would have run for 155 miles and inundated 1.3 million acres, in effect duplicating the natural flooding that had occurred before the Corps closed the Cypress Creek outlet in 1921. Not surprisingly, this plan aroused intense opposition in Arkansas and Louisiana, intense enough to force a search for another solution.

  Eads had one. He had always insisted that shortening the river by making “cutoffs,” cutting across the neck of horseshoe bends, would move water much faster and thus lower flood heights. For decades the Corps and most civilian engineers had rejected Eads’ argument, but after the 1927 flood William Elam, an engineer for the levee board in Greenville, took up Eads’ call. The Corps and the Mississippi River Commission resisted, but Hoover, then president, was convinced that the proposal deserved a test. When Jadwin retired in 1929, the secretary of war recommended ten different men as chief of engineers. Hoover refused to nominate any of them and finally hand-picked the man he wanted, General Lytle Brown. The hydraulics laboratory previously opposed by the Corps was built, and tests there and observations of a natural cutoff confirmed Eads’ predictions. In the 1930s and 1940s the Mississippi River Commission made cutoffs that shortened the river by more than 150 miles, largely by eliminating a series of sharp curves called “the Greenville bends.” The cutoffs worked dramatically, and lowered flood heights 15 feet, obviating the need for the floodway that Jadwin had proposed.

  The next feature of Project Flood appears at a point called Old River, halfway between Natchez and Baton Rouge, where the Atchafalaya begins to flow from the Mississippi to the sea. Here, Project Flood is designed to handle its maximum flow of 3,030,000 cubic feet per second by dividing the water.

  To direct this flow, the Corps built the Old River Control Structure and, 20 miles south, the Morganza floodway, immense masses of concrete and steel designed to divert approximately 600,000 cfs each into the Atchafalaya. In 1963 a massive dam sealed off the natural flow between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya; since then the Old River structure has controlled the flow between the two rivers. The Morganza structure has been opened only once, in the 1973 flood.

  In total, Project Flood sends 1,500,000 cfs—the water diverted from the Mississippi plus all the flow of the Red River
—down the Atchafalaya River, and two floodways that parallel it, to the sea. The plan allows 1,500,000 cfs to continue down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. This exactly reverses the old policy called for by the levees-only theory; prior to the 1927 flood, the Corps of Engineers had planned to separate the Atchafalaya entirely from the Mississippi, and send all flood water past New Orleans.

  The final flood control feature is a concrete spillway at Bonnet Carré, 30 miles above New Orleans, designed to subtract a final 250,000 cfs from the Mississippi when it is in flood; guide levees direct the outflow across 7 miles of land into Lake Pontchartrain. This spillway was first used in 1937, when it carried 318,000 cfs, the most it has ever handled; it was also opened in 1945, 1950, 1973, 1975, 1979, and 1983. According to plan, then, no more than 1,250,000 cfs will pass the city of New Orleans.

  But Project Flood has several weak spots, and its solutions have created at least one new problem. First, the Corps claims its plans will handle a flood greater than that of 1927, 11 percent greater in the vicinity of the Mounds Landing crevasse. This claim is based on the Corps’ official 1927 reading of 2,544,000 cfs at the mouth of the Arkansas. In fact, James Kemper and several other civilian engineers independently measured the flow there at over 3,000,000 cfs. Even Army engineers, before being ordered by Jadwin to design an inexpensive plan, unofficially put the flow at over 3,000,000 cfs. This flow exceeds the design capacity of Project Flood by more than 100,000 cfs.