Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Yet the victory of the Snopeses is not altogether a bad thing. At least the choice is clarified. It would not help much now to have Gavin Stevens around with his talk about “man’s struggle to the stars.”

  The old way is still seductive, however, and evokes responses from strange quarters. Ex-Governor Ross Barnett was recently revealed as a mellow emeritus statesman in the old style, even hearkening to the antique summons of noblesse oblige. A newspaper interview reported that the governor was a soft touch for any Negro who waylaid him in the corridor with a “Cap’n, I could sho use a dollar.” The governor, it was also reported, liked to go hunting with a Negro friend. “We laugh and joke,” the governor reminisced, “and he gets a big kick out of it when I call him Professor. There’s a lot in our relationship I can’t explain.” No doubt, mused the interviewer, the governor would get up at all hours of the night to get Ol’ Jim out of jail. It is hard to imagine what Gavin Stevens would make of this new version of the old alliance. Unquestionably, something new has been added. When Marse Ross dons the mantle of Marse Robert, Southern history has entered upon a new age. And perhaps it is just as well. Let Governor Barnett become the new squire. It simplifies matters further.

  Though Faulkner liked to use such words as “cursed” and “doomed” in speaking of his region, it is questionable that Mississippians are very different from other Americans. It is increasingly less certain that Minnesotans would have performed better under the circumstances. There is, however, one peculiar social dimension wherein the state does truly differ. It has to do with the distribution, as Mississippians see it, of what is public and what is private. More precisely, it is the absence of a truly public zone, as the word is understood in most places. One has to live in Mississippi to appreciate it. No doubt, it is the mark of an almost homogeneous white population, a Protestant Anglo-Saxon minority (until recently), sharing a common tragic past and bound together by kinship bonds. This society was not only felicitous in many ways; it also commanded the allegiance of Southern intellectuals on other grounds. Faulkner saw it as the chief bulwark against the “coastal spew of Europe” and “the rootless ephemeral cities of the North.” In any case, the almost familial ambit of this society came to coincide with the actual public space which it inhabited. The Negro was either excluded, shoved off into Happy Hollow, or admitted to the society on its own terms as good old Uncle Ned. No allowance was made—it would have been surprising if there had been—for a truly public sector, unlovely as you please and defused of emotional charges, where black and white might pass without troubling each other. The whole of the Delta, indeed of white Mississippi, is one big kinship lodge. You have only to walk into a restaurant or a bus station to catch a whiff of it. There is a sudden kindling of amiability, even between strangers. The salutations, “What you say now?” and “Y’all be good,” are exchanged like fraternal signs. The presence of fraternity and sorority houses at Ole Miss always seemed oddly superfluous.

  One consequence of this peculiar social structure has been a chronic misunderstanding between the state and the rest of the country. The state feels that unspeakable demands are being made upon it, while the nation is bewildered by the response of rage to what seem to be the ordinary and minimal requirements of the law. Recall, for example, President Kennedy’s gentle appeal to the university the night of the riot when he invoked the tradition of L. Q. C. Lamar and asked the students to do their duty even as he was doing his. He had got his facts straight about the tradition of valor in Mississippi. But, unfortunately, the Kennedys had no notion of the social and semantic rules they were up against. When they entered into negotiations with the governor to get Meredith on the campus, they proceeded on the reasonable assumption that even in the arena of political give and take—i.e., deals—words bear some relation to their referents. Such was not the case. Governor Barnett did not double-cross the Kennedys in the usual sense. The double cross, like untruth, bears a certain relation to the truth. More serious, however, was the cultural confusion over the word “public.” Ole Miss is not, or was not, a public school as the word is usually understood. In Mississippi as in England, a public school means a private school. When Meredith finally did walk the paths at Ole Miss, his fellow students cursed and reviled him. But they also wept with genuine grief. It was as if he had been quartered in their living room.

  It is this hypertrophy of pleasant familial space at the expense of a truly public sector which accounts for the extraordinary apposition in Mississippi of kindliness and unspeakable violence. Recently, a tourist wrote the editor of the Philadelphia, Mississippi, newspaper that, although he expected the worst when he passed through the town, he found the folks in Philadelphia as nice as they could be. No doubt it is true. The Philadelphia the tourist saw is as pleasant as he said. It is like one big front porch.

  How can peace be restored to Mississippi? One would like to be able to say that the hope lies in putting into practice the Judeo-Christian ethic. In the end, no doubt, it does. But the trouble is that Christendom of a sort has already won in Mississippi. There is more church news in the Jackson papers than news about the Ole Miss football team. Political cartoons defend God against the Supreme Court, On the outskirts of Meridian, a road sign announces: THE LARGEST PERCENTAGE OF CHURCHGOERS IN THE WORLD. It is a religion, however, which tends to canonize the existing social and political structure and to brand as atheistic any threat of change. “The trouble is, they took God out of everything,” said W. Arsene Dick of Summit, Mississippi, founder of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. A notable exception to the general irrelevance of religion to social issues is the recent action of Millsaps College, a Methodist institution in Jackson, which voluntarily opened its doors to Negroes.

  It seems more likely that progress will come about—as indeed it is already coming about—not through the impact of the churches upon churchgoers but because after a while the ordinary citizen gets sick and tired of the climate of violence and of the odor of disgrace which hangs over his region. Money has a good deal to do with it, too; money, urbanization, and the growing concern of politicians and the business community with such things as public images. Governor Johnson occasionally talks sense. Last year the mayor and the business leaders of Jackson defied the Citizens’ Councils and supported the token desegregation of the schools. It could even happen that Governor Johnson, the man who campaigned up and down the state with the joke about what NAACP means (niggers, alligators, apes, coons, possums), may turn out to be the first governor to enforce the law. For law enforcement, it is becoming increasingly obvious, is the condition of peace. It is also becoming more likely every day that federal intervention, perhaps in the form of local commissioners, may be required in places like Neshoba County where the Ku Klux Klan has been in control and law enforcement is a shambles. Faulkner at last changed his mind about the durability of the old alliance and came to prefer even enforced change to a state run by the Citizens’ Councils and the Klan. Mississippians, he wrote, will not accept change until they have to. Then perhaps they will at last come to themselves: “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?”

  Much will depend on the residue of good will in the state. There are some slight signs of the long-overdue revolt of the ordinary prudent man. There must be a good many of this silent breed. Hazel Brannon Smith, who won a Pulitzer Prize as editor of the Lexington Advertiser, recently reported that in spite of all the abuse and the boycotts, the circulation of the paper continues to rise. The Mississippi Economic Council, the state’s leading businessmen’s group, issued a statement urging compliance with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and demanding that registration and voting laws be “fairly and impartially administered for all.” In McComb, several hundred leading citizens, after a reign of terror which lasted for a good part of 1964, demanded not only law and order but “equal treatment under the law for all citizens.”

  It may be that the corner has been turned. Mississippi, in the spring of 1965, looks better t
han Alabama. But who can say what would have happened if Martin Luther King had chosen Greenwood instead of Selma? Mississippi may in fact be better just because of Selma—though at this very writing Ole Miss students are living up to form and throwing rocks at Negroes. Nor can one easily forget the 1964 national election. The bizarre seven-to-one margin in favor of Senator Goldwater attests to the undiminished obsession with race. It would not have mattered if Senator Goldwater had advocated the collectivization of the plantations and open saloons in Jackson; he voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and that was that.

  Yet there is little doubt that Mississippi is even now beginning to feel its way toward what might be called the American Settlement of the racial issue, a somewhat ambiguous state of affairs which is less a solution than a more or less tolerable impasse. There has come into being an entire literature devoted to an assault upon the urban life wherein this settlement is arrived at, and a complete glossary of terms, such as alienation, depersonalization, and mass man. But in the light of recent history in Mississippi, the depersonalized American neighborhood looks more and more tolerable. A giant supermarket or eighty thousand people watching a pro ball game may not be the most creative of institutions, but at least they offer a modus vivendi. People generally leave each other alone.

  A Southerner may still hope that someday the Southern temper, black and white, might yet prove to be the sociable yeast to leaven the American lump. Indeed, he may suspect in his heart of hearts that the solution, if it comes, may have to come from him and from the South. And with good reason: the South, with all the monstrous mythologizing of its virtues, nevertheless has these virtues—a manner and a grace and a gift for human intercourse. And despite the humbuggery about the perfect love and understanding between us white folks and darkies down in Dixie, whites and blacks in the South do in fact know something about getting along with each other which the rest of the country does not know. Both black and white Southerner can help the country a great deal, though neither may choose to do so; the Negro for fear of being taken for Uncle Tom, the white from simple vengefulness: “All right, Yankee, you’ve been preaching at us for a hundred years and now you’ve got them and you’re making a mess of it and it serves you right.” It may well come to lie with the South in the near future, as it lay with the North in 1860, to save the Union in its own way. Given enough trouble in New York and Chicago, another ten years of life in the subways and urine in the streets, it might at last dawn on him, the Southerner, that it is not the South which is being put upon but the country which is in trouble. Then he will act as he acted in 1916 and 1941.

  Someday a white Mississippian is going to go to New York, make the usual detour through Harlem, and see it for the foul cheerless warren that it is; and instead of making him happy as it does now, it is going to make him unhappy. Then the long paranoia, this damnable sectional insanity, will be one important step closer to being over.

  1965

  Uncle Will

  I REMEMBER THE FIRST time I saw him. I was thirteen and he had come to visit my mother and me and my brothers in Athens, Georgia, where we were living with my grandmother after my father’s death.

  We had heard of him, of course. He was the fabled relative, the one you liked to speculate about. His father was a United States senator and he had been a decorated infantry officer in World War I. Besides that, he was a poet. The fact that he was also a lawyer and a planter didn’t cut much ice—after all, the South was full of lawyer-planters. But how many people did you know who were war heroes and wrote books of poetry? One had heard of Rupert Brooke and Joyce Kilmer, but they were dead.

  The curious fact is that my recollection of him even now, after meeting him, after living in his house for twelve years, and now thirty years after his death, is no less fabled than my earliest imaginings. The image of him that takes form in my mind still owes more to Rupert Brooke and those photographs of young English officers killed in Flanders than to a flesh-and-blood cousin from Greenville, Mississippi.

  I can only suppose that he must have been, for me at least, a personage, a presence, radiating that mysterious quality we call charm, for lack of a better word, in such high degree that what comes to mind is not that usual assemblage of features and habits which make up our memories of people but rather a quality, a temper, a set of mouth, a look through the eyes.

  For his eyes were most memorable, a piercing gray-blue and strangely light in my memory, as changeable as shadows over water, capable of passing in an instant, we were soon to learn, from merriment—he told the funniest stories we’d ever heard—to a level gray gaze cold with reproof. They were beautiful and terrible eyes, eyes to be careful around. Yet now, when I try to remember them, I cannot see them otherwise than as shadowed by sadness.

  What we saw at any rate that sunny morning in Georgia in 1930, and what I still vividly remember, was a strikingly handsome man, slight of build and quick as a youth. He was forty-five then, an advanced age, one would suppose, to a thirteen-year-old, and gray-haired besides, yet the abiding impression was of a youthfulness—and an exoticness. He had in fact just returned from the South Seas—this was before the jet age and I’d never heard of anybody going there but Gauguin and Captain Bligh—where he had lived on the beach at Bora Bora.

  He had come to invite us to live with him in Mississippi. We did, and upon my mother’s death not long after, he adopted me and my two brothers. At the time what he did did not seem remarkable. What with youth’s way of taking life as it comes—how else can you take it when you have no other life to compare it with?—and what with youth’s incapacity for astonishment or gratitude, it did not seem in the least extraordinary to find oneself orphaned at fifteen and adopted by a bachelor-poet-lawyer-planter and living in an all-male household visited regularly by other poets, politicians, psychiatrists, sociologists, black preachers, folk singers, itinerant harmonica players. One friend came to seek advice on a book he wanted to write and stayed a year to write it. It was, his house, a standard stopover for all manner of people who were trying to “understand the South,” that perennial American avocation, and whether or not they succeeded, it was as valuable to me to try to understand them as to be understood. The observers in this case were at least as curious a phenomenon as the observed.

  Now, belatedly, I can better assess what he did for us and I even have an inkling what he gave up to do it. For him, to whom the world was open and who felt more at home in Taormina than in Jackson—for, though he loved his home country, he had to leave it often to keep loving it—and who in fact could have stayed on at Bora Bora and chucked it all like Gauguin (he told me once he was tempted), for him to have taken on three boys, age fourteen, thirteen, and nine, and raised them, amounted to giving up the freedom of bachelorhood and taking on the burden of parenthood without the consolations of marriage. Gauguin chucked it all, quit, cut out and went to the islands for the sake of art and became a great painter if not a great human being. Will Percy not only did not chuck anything; he shouldered somebody else’s burden. Fortunately for us, he did not subscribe to Faulkner’s precept that a good poem is worth any number of old ladies—for, if grandmothers are dispensable, why not second cousins? I don’t say we did him in (he would laugh at that), but he didn’t write much poetry afterwards and he died young. At any rate, whatever he lost or gained in the transaction, I know what I gained: a vocation and in a real sense a second self; that is, the work and the self which, for better or worse, would not otherwise have been open to me.

  For to have lived in Will Percy’s house, with “Uncle Will” as we called him, as a raw youth from age fourteen to twenty-six, a youth whose only talent was a knack for looking and listening, for tuning in and soaking up, was nothing less than to be informed in the deepest sense of the word. What was to be listened to, dwelled on, pondered over for the next thirty years was of course the man himself, the unique human being, and when I say unique I mean it in its most literal sense: he was one of a kind: I never met anyone remote
ly like him. It was to encounter a complete, articulated view of the world as tragic as it was noble. It was to be introduced to Shakespeare, to Keats, to Brahms, to Beethoven—and unsuccessfully, it turned out, to Wagner whom I never liked, though I was dragged every year to hear Flagstadt sing Isolde—as one seldom if ever meets them in school.

  “Now listen to this part,” he would say as Gluck’s Orfeo played—the old 78s not merely dropped from a stack by the monstrous Capehart, as big as a sideboard, but then picked up and turned over by an astounding hoop-like arm—and you’d make the altogether unexpected discovery that music, of all things, can convey the deepest and most unnameable human feelings and give great pleasure in doing so.

  Or: “Read this,” and I’d read or, better still, he’d read aloud, say, Viola’s speech to Olivia in Twelfth Night:

  Make me a willow cabin at your gate,

  And call upon my soul within the house … And make the

  babbling gossip of the air

  Cry out “Olivia!”

  “You see?” he’d as good as say, and what I’d begin to see, catch on to, was the great happy reach and play of the poet at the top of his form.

  For most of us, the communication of beauty takes two, the teacher and the hearer, the pointer and the looker. The rare soul, the Wolfe or Faulkner, can assault the entire body of literature single-handedly. I couldn’t or wouldn’t. I had a great teacher. The teacher points and says, “Look”; the response is, “Yes, I see.”

  But he was more than a teacher. What he was to me was a fixed point in a confusing world. This is not to say I always took him for my true north and set my course accordingly. I did not. Indeed, my final assessment of Lanterns on the Levee must register reservations as well as admiration. The views on race relations, for example, diverge from my own and have not been helpful, having, in my experience, played into the hands of those whose own interest in these matters is deeply suspect. But even when I did not follow him, it was usually in relation to him, whether with him or against him, that I defined myself and my own direction. Perhaps he would not have had it differently. Surely it is the highest tribute to the best people we know to use them as best we can, to become, not their disciples, but ourselves.