Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  For all their orthodoxy, the churches—and synagogues—have not exactly distinguished themselves in the recent years of racial turmoil. William Styron said that the Negro was betrayed in the South by those two institutions best equipped to help him, the law and religion. In New Orleans the law has somewhat redeemed itself. The homegrown judges of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals have shouldered almost the entire burden of racial justice. The Catholics, like everybody else, have been content to yield moral leadership to the federal bench. Parochial schools integrate only when public schools are forced to. Protestants and Jews are by and large silent. The Episcopalians throughout the state have had their hands full with a different sort of problem, namely, staving off a coup d’église by their own Birchers.

  And yet. The first Negro Catholic bishop in the United States was recently installed in New Orleans and has been received warmly. It is something to see him go into a Birchy parish and confirm a mixed bag of little blacks and whites and afterwards stand outside with his shepherd’s crook, shaking hands with the parishioners and talking with them in the kinfolk idiom Southerners use. “Let me see now, Bishop Perry, where did you say you come from? New Iberia? Do you know so-and-so?”

  The new white archbishop, Philip M. Hannan, moreover, is a man acutely aware of the needs of the poor and of the scandal of preaching the Gospel in air-conditioned churches to people who do not have inside toilets.

  And yet again. The Protestant political hegemony in Louisiana has produced John McKeithen. He is in the Huey Long populist tradition but without the Long megalomania and he seems to be honest in the bargain. Recently McKeithen ran for governor against a wild segregationist (a native of Indiana), came out flat for equal opportunity, and beat his man overwhelmingly.

  The peculiar virtue of New Orleans, like St. Theresa, may be that of the Little Way, a talent for everyday life rather than the heroic deed. If in its two hundred and fifty years of history it has produced no giants, no Lincolns, no Lees, no Faulkners, no Thoreaus, it has nurtured a great many people who live tolerably, like to talk and eat, laugh a good deal, manage generally to be civil and at the same time mind their own business. Such virtues may have their use nowadays. Take food, the everyday cooking and eating thereof. It may be a more reliable index of a city’s temper than mean family income. If New Orleans has no great restaurants, it has many good ones. From France it inherited that admirable institution, the passable neighborhood restaurant. I attach more than passing significance to the circumstance that a man who stops for a bite in Birmingham or Detroit or Queens, spends as little time eating as possible and comes out feeling poisoned, evil-tempered, and generally ill-disposed toward his fellowman; and that the same man can go around the corner in New Orleans, take his family and spend two hours with his bouillabaisse or crawfish bisque (which took two days to fix). It is probably no accident that it was in Atlanta, which has many civic virtues but very bad food, that a dyspeptic restaurateur took out after Negroes with an ax handle and was elected governor by a million Georgians ulcerated by years of Rotary luncheons.

  But it is Mardi Gras which most vividly illustrates the special promise of New Orleans and its special problems. Despite the accusations leveled against it—of commercialization, discrimination, homosexual routs—Mardi Gras is by and large an innocent and admirable occasion. Unlike other civic-commercial shows, Macy’s parade, cotton carnivals, apple and orange festivals (and a noteworthy Midwestern dairy fete which crowns its queen Miss Artificial Insemination), Mardi Gras is in fact celebrated by nearly everybody in a good-sized city. As the day dawns, usually wet and cold, one can see whole families costumed and masked beginning the trek to Canal Street from the remotest suburbs, places which are otherwise indistinguishable from Levittown.

  The carnival balls which have been going on now every night for the past two months end tonight with the Comus and Rex balls. There is a widespread resentment of the parades and balls among tourists and folk recently removed from Michigan and Oklahoma who discover they can’t get in. The balls and parades are private affairs put on by “krewes.” A “krewe” is a private social group, sometimes an eating club, which stages a ball and perhaps a parade. Some seventy balls, elaborate, expensive affairs, are held between Twelfth Night and Ash Wednesday. The older krewes are quite snooty but even they are not socially exclusive in the same sense, as, say, poor-but-proud Charleston society. In New Orleans money works, too. Here, where Protestant business ethic meets Creole snobbishness, the issue is a kind of money pedigree. Like Bourbon whiskey, the money can’t be too green, but on the other hand it doesn’t have to be two hundred years old.

  The carnival ball itself is a mildly preposterous formal charade. It is a singular occasion for one good reason. Unlike the rest of American society, the balls, the parades, the krewes, the entire carnival season, even the decorating, are managed by men. Women have nothing to say about it. Even the queens are chosen by the all-male krewes at sessions which can be as fierce as a GM proxy fight. New Orleanians may joke about politics and war, heaven and hell, but they don’t joke about society. This male dominance is probably more admirable than otherwise in a national culture where most males seem content to be portrayed as drudge and boob, a nitwitted Dagwood who leaves everything to Mama.

  What is right and valuable about carnival in New Orleans is that it is a universal celebration of a public occasion by private, social, and neighborhood groups. It is thus an organic, viable folk festival, perhaps the only one in the United States.

  What is wrong seems to have gone wrong inadvertently and almost by bad luck. It is this: while the unquaint white Protestant businessman is now very much a part of it, the emerging Negro, the sober unquaint middle-class Negro, is left out. Mardi Gras is the least of the Negro’s troubles but is nevertheless a neat instance of his finding himself curiously invisible, present yet unaccounted for. For there is hardly a place for him in the entire publicly sponsored “official” celebration of Mardi Gras. White Orleanians will point out that the Negroes have their own Mardi Gras over on Dryades Street. They do. There is, moreover, a Negro parade, headed by King Zulu, who traditionally gets drunk and falls off the float while the parade founders. These doings were all quite innocent and unself-conscious and pleased everyone, black and white, though for different reasons. It was only a few years ago, in fact, that Louis Armstrong consented to be King Zulu. But for better or worse, times have changed. It is harder and harder to find a Negro to play the happy-go-lucky clown who, in a symbolically appropriate role, loses his way and passes out cold in the street.

  New Orleans’s people—black and white—may yet manage to get on the right road. The city may still detour hell but it will take some doing. Le craps was introduced to the New World by a Creole. Now the stakes are too high to let ride on the roll of the dice. If they do, Johnny Crapaud and his American cousin will surely crap out.

  1968

  The City of the Dead

  THE TITLE IS NOT quite ironic and only slightly ambiguous. It refers mainly of course to the remarkable cemeteries of New Orleans, true cities of the dead, and to a certain liveliness about them. But it also refers to my own perception of New Orleans as being curiously dispirited in those very places where it advertises itself as being most alive; for example, its business community and its official celebration, Mardi Gras. Compared with Dallas and Houston and Atlanta, New Orleans is dead from the neck up, having no industry to speak of except the port and the tourists—happily for some of us who wouldn’t have it otherwise, unhappily for half the young blacks who are unemployed. As for Mardi Gras, boredom sets in early when Rex—“Lord of Misrule,” as he is called, though he never quite looks the part, a middle-aged businessman—toasts his queen at the Boston Club, daughter of another middle-aged businessman. The boredom approaches deep coma at the famous balls, which are as lively as high-school tableaux. The real live festival of Mardi Gras takes place elsewhere, in the byways, in the neighborhood truck parades. As for famous old Bourbon Street, it
is little more now than standard U.S. sleaze, the same tired old strippers grinding away, T-shirt shops, New Orleans jazz gone bad, art gone bad, same old $32 painting of same old bayou.

  The cemeteries, true cities of the dead, seem at once livelier and more exotic to the visitor newly arrived, say, from the upper Protestant South where cemeteries are sedate “memorial gardens,” or from New York City, where mile after mile of Queens is strewn with gray stone, a vast gloomy moraine. A New Orleans cemetery is a city in miniature, streets, curbs, iron fences, its tombs above ground—otherwise, the coffins would float out of the ground—little two-story dollhouses complete with doorstep and lintel. The older cemeteries are more haphazard, tiny lanes as crooked as old Jerusalem, meandering aimlessly between the cottages of the dead. I remember being a pallbearer at St. Louis No. 1, one of the oldest cemeteries, stepping across corners and lots like Gulliver in Lilliput. The tombs are generally modest duplexes, one story per tenant, for good and practical reasons. It could actually accommodate an extended Creole family, for, given a decent interval when presumably coffin and tenant had gone to dust, the bones were shoved back into a deep crypt at the rear, room for one and all. After all these years a bothersome question of my childhood was answered: Where will people live when cemeteries take up all the space on earth?

  They, the little cities, are liveliest on All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day when families turn out to fix up the family tomb, polishing or whitewashing the stone, scrubbing the doorstep for all the world like Baltimore housewives scrubbing the white steps of row houses. Not many years ago the lady of the house might be directing black servants in this annual housekeeping, as much mistress here of the dead as of the living at home. There are still iron benches in place where Creole ladies, dressed in the highest winter fashion, received friends all day. Even now, All Saints’ and All Souls’ have a more festive air than otherwise—should they not?—startlingly different from the unctuous solemnity of Forest Lawn. Crowds throng the tiny streets, housekeeping for the dead, setting out flowers real and plastic, perhaps regilding the lettering, while vendors hawk candy and toys for the children, and on All Souls’ saying a not noticeably sad prayer or two for the dead.

  Mark Twain once said that New Orleans had no architecture to speak of except in the cemeteries. As usual, he exaggerated, because the Spanish houses and their courtyards in the “French” Quarter and the little Victorian cottages, “shotguns,” all over town are charming and unique. But on approaching New Orleans, one might well agree with Mark Twain. The major architectural addition in the past hundred years is the Superdome and the skyline looks like standard U.S. glass high-rises set like Stonehenge around a giant Ban roll-on. Not so in the cemeteries, where every conceivable style is rendered by taste or whim, from the simple two-storied “beehive” to toy Greek and Egyptian temples and even miniature cathedrals—to a small artificial mountain containing the mausoleum of the Army of the Tennessee, General Albert Sydney Johnston atop, astride his horse and still in command. The great Texas general gazes at Robert E. Lee himself atop his column across town. It is easy to imagine a slightly bemused expression on the faces of these stern Anglo-Saxon commanders as they contemplate between them this their greatest city and yet surely the one place in the South most foreign to them.

  1984

  Going Back to Georgia

  IT IS A PLEASURE and an honor to be invited here to Athens for the Ferdinand Phinizy Lecture. I may as well make a clean breast of it at the outset and admit that I am a member of the Phinizy family and that it is probably nepotism that got me here—even though nepotism implies a nephew relationship and I am not Phinizy Spalding’s nephew. Actually, we’re first cousins. But perhaps there are instances where nepotism is not only pardonable but justified. And this is surely one of them. I mean, how else can a poor novelist living in the boondocks of Louisiana be expected to support himself if not by kinship relations and occasional largesse from Georgia, which has emerged as the leading state of the Sunbelt, mother of Presidents, major source of national political leadership, to say nothing of Georgia-Arab banking alliances from which Louisiana is altogether excluded. (Lacking Georgia expertise, we in Louisiana have been trying for years to sell the Superdome to the Arabs, with a singular lack of success.)

  Georgia, that is to say, has changed, and what I propose to talk about briefly, and a little more seriously, has to do with the nature of this extraordinary phenomenon of change, change in the South, the United States, as well as in Georgia. It is impossible, for example, to drive through Atlanta without thinking about this phenomenon—especially if one had been used to the Atlanta of the 1930s. I avoid the Chamber of Commerce word “progress”because it does not do sufficient justice to the ambiguity of the change.

  I’d like to give you two small personal instances of what I mean. I used to live here in Athens. It was a long time ago and I’ve been here only occasionally since. When I thought of coming back to Athens, two oddly assorted memories came to mind. Driving in, we passed the place on Milledge Avenue where I used to live. It was my grandmother’s house, a fine old 1890 Victorian mansion, now vanished, gone with the wind, replaced by a sorority house apparently conceived as a Hollywood-Selznick version of Tara. Now, I have nothing against sororities, and this building is undoubtedly better suited to the needs of sorority life. Yet there is a certain ambiguity about the change. It is a change in this case from the reality of a slowly recovering South of the 1890s, a business-minded and mercantile South, a reality we shared with the rest of the country—back to a reality of a more dubious character, a reality with certain mythic and romantic components which may or may not do us much good.

  The other thing I remembered about living in Athens was the time I met and shook the hand of the great Catfish Smith, All-American end for the University of Georgia. I was a small boy and I was flying a model airplane in Sanford Stadium. It flew into the middle of a Georgia scrimmage. A player brought it over to me, none other than the legendary Catfish Smith; he said a few words, admired the plane, shook my hand, and went back to the game.

  I mention this extremely nonmemorable event in order to call attention to the magnitude of the change which has occurred since. You know, historical change can be so profound, so swift, so all-encompassing that those caught up in it may in a sense lose their reference points and so may not be able to grasp its significance. It may take another hundred years before somebody can look back and see what is really happening now. What I am saying is that it struck me at the time as a memorable event to meet an All-American end from Georgia. Now a Georgian is President of the United States and no one gives it a second thought. If anybody had proposed in the 1930s that a Southerner, even a Northern Southerner, a Virginian, or Kentuckian, could be elected President of the United States in our lifetime, no one would have taken him seriously.

  What is notable is that people all over the country either like or dislike President Carter but almost invariably do so for reasons which have nothing to do with his Southern origins.

  But there is another related change, or rather possibility of change, which I think has been insufficiently noticed, but which we had better be aware of if we are to have anything to say about the future course of the change. For, beyond a doubt, the change is occurring and has already occurred—again so momentous a change that we are, I think, only vaguely aware of its implications.

  The change can be expressed by two simple propositions, one of which seems to me axiomatic, the other perhaps a bit more problematic. One, the South has entered the mainstream of American life for the first time in perhaps a hundred and fifty years; that is, in a sense in which it had not been the case since perhaps the 1820s or 1830s. Not only that, but through a strange repetition of history and conjunction of circumstances, perhaps a faltering of national purpose, perhaps the ongoing economic and political power shift to the Southern Rim, perhaps also because of a Southern talent for politics, the burden of national leadership may well fall to the South for better o
r worse, just as it did in the early 1800s, then certainly for better. The question now is: Which is it going to be now, better or worse? The question also is: Are we even aware of what is happening? We know something is changing, and changing fast, but do we know what it is?

  You drive through Atlanta (or, for that matter, Dallas or Houston) and take a look around, and up, and you wonder, what is this place? Is this a place? What’s going on here? Is this place trying to outdo New York or be something new under the sun? Is this progress, and if it is progress, is progress good or bad or both, and if both, how do you tell the good from the bad?

  Like most great historical changes, the change happens before our inkling of it and before its consequences begin to dawn on us. It is really a bit too much to take in, considering the history of the past one hundred and fifty years. The South in its present state might be compared to a man who has had a bad toothache for as long as he can remember and has all of a sudden gotten over it. So constant and nagging had been the pain that he had long since come to accept it as the normal unpleasant condition of his existence. In fact, he could not imagine life without it. How does such a man spend his time, energies, talents, mental capacities? In seeking relief from the pain, by drugs, anesthesia, distraction, war, whatever—or, failing that, by actually enjoying the pain, the way one probes an aching tooth with one’s tongue.

  Then one morning he wakes to find the pain gone. At first he doesn’t know what has happened, except that things are different, radically different. Then he realizes what has happened and takes pleasure in it. He can’t believe his good fortune. But, as time goes on, he discovers that he is faced with a new and somewhat unsettling problem. The problem is, what is he going to do with himself now that he no longer has the pain to worry about, the tooth to tongue?