Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  What has happened, of course, is that for the first time in a hundred and fifty years the South and Southerners, and I mean both black and white Southerners, no longer suffer the unique onus, the peculiar burden of race which came to be part of the very connotation of the word “South.” I am not going to argue about what was good and what was bad about the South’s racial experience—we’re only interested here in what was uniquely oppressive for both white and black and which has now vanished. And to say that it has vanished is not to suggest that there do not remain serious, even critical, areas of race relations in all of American society, the South included.

  Such troubles are well known. What is not at all well known is the consequence of this particular historical change. Now that this peculiar preoccupation which engaged Southern energies for so long has been removed, what will be the impact of this suddenly released energy? Or will there be an impact?

  But first let me give you an instance or two of what I mean by the siphoning off of Southern talent, by the obsessive tonguing of this particular tooth. The figure “a hundred and fifty years” I got from the history books. But from my own experience, say the past fifty years, I can give you a simple example of what I have in mind. During my lifetime and up until a few years ago, I cannot recall a single talented Southern politician (and only the rare writer) who was not obsessed with the problem of the relation of white people and black people. It was in fact for better or worse the very condition of being Southern.

  To give you the first names that come to mind: Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, an extraordinarily able and talented man, a man of great character and rectitude. Yet during the many years I recall reading about him, what he was mainly noted for was his skill in devising parliamentary tactics to defeat or delay this or that voting-rights bill.

  I think next of my own kinsman, William Alexander Percy, who devoted a large part of his autobiography to defending the South against “Northern liberals.” He wrote a whole chapter in defense of sharecropping. Again, I am not interested in arguing the issue, pro or con, though I feel sure that in his place and his time I’d have felt the same defensiveness and would probably have written similar polemics.

  Then I think of the novelist Richard Wright, who never really came to terms with his Southernness, his Americanness, or for that matter his blackness.

  The point of course is that the South does not now need defending. That is the astounding dimension of the change. The virtues and defects of the South are the virtues and defects of the nation. At least as far as writers are concerned, it does not now occur to a serious writer in the North to attack the South or to a serious Southern writer to defend the South. I think it is a healthy thing that, as a writer, I feel free to satirize both South and North.

  Now it is possible for a black writer like Toni Morrison to write a novel which is not about North and South as such, nor about white or black as such, nor about white versus black, but about people.

  I cannot speak for the politician, but to a writer it appears that what needs not so much defending as understanding, transforming, reconciling, healing, or affirming is not the Southern experience but the American experience. And since every writer must write of his own experience—or else he doesn’t write at all—the Southern writer necessarily writes of the South, but he writes of it in terms which are translatable to the American experience and, if he is any good, ultimately to the human experience.

  Consider, for example, two Southern novelists who lived during this period of the long Southern obsession and who were great enough to transcend it. They are William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. And they had their problems. O’Connor succeeded, I think, largely by steering clear of it—with a couple of notable exceptions. Mainly she stuck to whites, figuring, I guess, that whites had enough troubles with themselves without dragging in white-black troubles. Faulkner wobbled. He was at his best in The Sound and the Fury with Dilsey and her relationship with the Compsons—no one will ever surpass him on these grounds. But he could also drift into sentimental paternalism and even at times sound like a Mississippi secessionist.

  This brings us to what is, to me at least, the central and most intriguing question of all and one to which I do not pretend to have an answer. It is this: How, into what channels, will Southern energies be directed now that the obsession is behind us? Will Southerners have a distinctive contribution to make—say, in politics or literature? Or will they simply meld into the great American flux?

  One possible future is fairly obvious, is indeed already upon us. To many, this is the future which is not only expected but also, it seems to go without saying, desirable. It is of course the ongoing shift in population and economic power to the Sunbelt. One can simply extrapolate the future from what is happening here and now in the Southern United States, from Hilton Head to Dallas and indeed—and this is what worries me—on to Phoenix and Los Angeles. The likeliest and, to me, the not wholly desirable future of the region is an ever more prosperous Southern Rim stretching from coast to coast, an L.A.–Dallas–Atlanta axis (the Atlanta of the Omni and the Peachtree Plaza); an agribusiness–sports–vacation–retirement–show-biz culture with its spiritual center perhaps at Oral Roberts U., its economic capital in Dallas-Houston, its media center in Atlanta, its entertainment industry shared by Disney World, the Superdome, and Hollywood. In this scenario the coastal plain of the old Southeast will be preserved as a kind of historical museum, much like Williamsburg.

  I don’t say that this prospect is all bad. It is probably better than the hard times suffered by the South from 1865 to 1935. I only wish to take note of what is already happening. And one doesn’t have to be a prophet to predict with considerable confidence that sooner or later the failing Northern cities must either be abandoned or be bailed out by some kind of domestic Marshall Plan—and why not, after all? Everyone else has benefited: Germany, Italy, Japan, Guatemala—everyone except of course the defeated Confederacy after the Civil War. The great cities must be saved and they will be, and guess who will be paying the freight for the next twenty or thirty years; that is, guess who will be paying more than their share of federal taxes while Detroiters, New Yorkers, Bostonians pay less? The taxpayers of the Southern Rim. And perhaps this is not only as it should be but, I must confess, it gives a certain satisfaction if it should come to that, the South having to save the Union. After all, it is our turn.

  So far, we are talking about economics and climate and such simple home truths as the fact that a great many people who live in Michigan or Cleveland or Buffalo would rather live in Florida or Georgia or Tucson and that many have in fact moved, and that it costs less to run a factory in Louisiana and Texas than it does in New England or Ohio.

  Undoubtedly then, the lower Mississippi between Baton Rouge and New Orleans will become, is already becoming, the American equivalent of the Ruhr Valley. In the year 2000, Peachtree Street may have replaced Madison Avenue. Pittsburgh may well be known as the Birmingham of the North.

  I find these possibilities quite likely but not terribly interesting and certainly not decisive insofar as the real issues of the future are concerned. They represent economic inevitabilities, more or less what was bound to happen once the South with its advantages in climate, resources, and energy got past the historic disaster which befell it, mainly as a piece of extreme bad luck when two unrelated events turned up at the same time, the invention of the cotton gin and the availability of slave labor, and when it came to pass that the two, put together, were extremely profitable—profitable to some, that is, at the expense of a great many others. When I say expense, I am thinking not merely of economic exploitation but of the massive expenditure of political, intellectual, literary, and emotional energies required to defend the old system.

  But what is more interesting than the present economic resurgence of the South is the question I hinted at earlier: How will Southern talent, brains, and energy express themselves apart from business enterprise, which we already know about a
nd which is not only all to the good but indispensable—because, for one thing, and from the point of view of a writer, if businessmen and -women did not prosper and make money, who would buy our books?—but how will these energies be expressed in such fields as politics and literature now that the old burden is removed? In a word and in the case of those of you who are the future Richard Russells and Walter Georges and William Faulkners and Flannery O’Connors and Allen Tates—what will you be doing twenty years from now? If you are going to be successful businessmen and -women, well and good, but we already know that. It is the future of the other enterprises that we don’t know.

  One thing is certain: you will not have Southern slavery or Southern racial segregation either to defend or to attack; in short, to be preoccupied with. You won’t be able to blame Northern liberals for your troubles. And if you’re a Northern liberal, you won’t have the South to blame. We whites can blame the blacks if we want to and the blacks can blame the whites, but it won’t really work as well in the future as it did in the past.

  In this context and in speculating about what the future holds, one can’t help but wonder what it was like to live in the South before the bad thing happened, however one might wish to express the bad thing: getting seduced by the economics of cotton and slavery, or, as Faulkner would have put it in stronger language, the country committing what amounted to its own Original Sin and suffering the commensurate curse. I am thinking of the times in both colonial and revolutionary America and in the early 1800s when Southerners felt free to develop their talents and energies, both as Southerners and as Americans, business and agricultural talents, political talents, technical talents, artistic and creative talents. I suspect they felt much as Southerners are beginning to feel now; that is, conscious of being Southerners, yes, and glad of it, not especially self-consciously so, but rather as members of a new society where one is both challenged by a remarkable new world and remarkably free to respond to the challenge.

  I am no historian but I take it as a commonplace that the early Southern political and juridical talent was unusual. One thinks of the Virginians—Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Marshall—but also of Oglethorpe, and there were many others. It is not difficult in fact to defend the thesis that the U.S. Constitution as well as the Declaration of Independence were largely Southern creations.

  If there were such a thing as a Southern gift for politics in the larger sense, not just the knack of getting elected or of filibustering in the Senate, but in the sense of discerning what is the greater good of the people, that is, the commonweal, and how best to bring it to pass, I wonder if we have not now come into a new age when these same energies are once again free to do just that.

  The case for the arts is less clear and always was. If one tries to think, for example, of writers of the first rank in the early South—or for that matter the South before the publication of The Sound and the Fury and the Vanderbilt poets and critics—that is, of writers who were not overwhelmed by the political obsession which overwhelmed every Southern politician from Senator Calhoun to Senator Russell, it is difficult to get beyond Edgar Allan Poe, and perhaps the only thing that saved him was his preoccupation with his own personal demons.

  The fact is, there was never any question about the political talent of the South, even when it was badly sidetracked, and even now there is no difficulty in seeing signs of a renascence in a new breed of Southern politicians, white and black.

  But it also seems to be the case that the South has not yet had the time—paradoxically enough, for the republic is two hundred years old—to produce those ultimate incarnations of great cultures, its true cultural heroes—and I’m not talking about politicians and generals. In this connection, I’d like to quote a man I greatly admire, James McBride Dabbs of South Carolina. Some years ago he wrote: “The South could create neither poets nor saints—I mean, great region-shaping poets and saints. For it is such persons as these that shape a region, though first the region must have, by the grace of God, sufficient energy and unconscious purpose to create the poets and saints. They, as they come into being, offer a criticism of life. They create in art, and in life itself, the image of their world, of their time and their region, seen under the aspect of eternity. They substantiate, and they make substantial, the soul of their people. Looking at them and their works, their fellows see where they are trying to go, wherein they have succeeded and wherein they have failed. The poets and saints offer us a criticism of life, not just of life in the abstract but of our life now. The poets see our world; the saints—usually—live in it, in all its richness, complexity, and ambiguity, against a simplicity that lies at the heart both of the world and of themselves … Since the South was never able to create poets in prose or verse, or saints, it never really quarreled with itself. As we shall see when we come to discuss politics, it became, on the contrary, adept at quarreling with others, and for this purpose it developed the instruments of rhetoric and eloquence.”

  I think he is probably right. Lee was the nearest thing we had to a saint—and it is no accident that our saint was a general. Faulkner and Tate are perhaps the nearest we have to great cosmos-shaping poets and it is no accident that what they achieved was done so almost in spite of the political passions to which they periodically fell prey.

  But since Dabbs wrote these words, it has become a new ball game. Somewhere, in the sixties maybe and thanks to white people like Dabbs and black people like Martin Luther King, we got back on the track we either left of our own accord or got pushed off in the 1830s.

  I am not qualified to talk about sanctity, but what about the present state and the future of literature in the South? The so-called Southern renascence is over—that is, the remarkable thirty years or so when writers like Faulkner, O’Connor, Welty, Richard Wright, and Caldwell traded on the very exoticness, the uniqueness of the Southern phenomenon. It was a rich vein to mine and Faulkner, Warren, O’Connor, Tate-and-company pretty well mined it out. So, the Southern novelist today finds himself in a transition period analogous to the political situation of the South itself. Now he, too, like his fellow novelists in the Western world, is faced with the larger questions about the dilemma, not of the poor white or the poor black, decadent gentry, but of modern urban and suburban man. He can’t imitate Faulkner and O’Connor, or at least he’d better not try. In the present context, that of the political reentry of the South into the American mainstream, the writer’s dilemma takes on a peculiar and even paradoxical coloration. I’ll give you one example of this rather baffling divergence of attitudes. President Carter has often said that the American people are good, fundamentally sound, sensible, and generous; in a word, much better than their politicians, who often fail to live up to them. I find it hard to disagree with him. On the other hand, the American novelist seems to be saying something quite different; namely, that something has gone badly wrong with Americans and with American life, indeed modern life, and that people are suffering from a deep dislocation in their lives, alienation from themselves, dehumanization, and so on—and I’m not talking about poverty, racial discrimination, and women’s rights.

  I’m talking about the malaise which seems to overtake the very people who seem to have escaped these material and social evils—the successful middle class. What engages the novelist’s attention now is not the Snopeses or the denizens of Tobacco Road or Flannery O’Connor’s half-mad backwoods preachers or a black underclass. It is rather the very people who have overcome these particular predicaments and find themselves living happily ever after in their comfortable exurban houses and condominiums. Or is it happily ever after? Either the novelists are all crazy or something has gone badly wrong here, something which has nothing to do with poverty or blackness or whiteness. The characters in most current novels are not nearly as nice as the people President Carter describes.

  Then who is right, President Carter or the novelists? It is possible that both are, that it is the politician’s function from Jefferson to Carter to inspire p
eople to live up to the best that is in them, and that it is the novelist’s vocation from Dostoevsky to Faulkner to explore the darker recesses of the human heart, there to name and affirm the strange admixture of good and evil, the action of the demonic, the action of grace, of courage and cowardice, of courage coming out of cowardice and vice versa; in a word, the strange human creature himself—an admixture now that is perhaps stranger than ever.

  So now we’ll see. I have no idea whether in the year 2000 we—and by “we” I mean you of the Southeast, the old Confederacy—will simply have become a quaint corner of the teeming prosperous Southern Rim, some hundred million people with its population center and its spiritual heartland somewhere between Dallas and L.A., whether your best writers will be doing soap opera in Atlanta, your best composers country-and-Western in Nashville, your best film directors making sequels to Walking Tall and Macon County Line in Hollywood, whether our supreme architectural achievement will be the Superdome, our supreme cultural achievement will be the year Alabama ranked number one, the Falcons won the Super Bowl, and another Bobby Jones made it a grand slam at Augusta.

  There is nothing wrong with any of these achievements. The name of the game is always excellence, excellence in business, politics, literature, or sports—which is why I admired Catfish Smith. The difference is that now the door is open to all fields and the South, like the rest of the country, has no excuses.

  Of course, something else could happen in the old Southeast, something besides the building of new Hyatts and Hiltons and the preserving of old buildings, something comparable to the astonishing burst of creative energy in Virginia two hundred years ago.