Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  And visitors! In those days, and especially in the South, a visit was a thing of noble dimensions. A would-be writer showed up one weekend, an ex-Greenvillian who, having succeeded in business in New Orleans, decided to retire and write a book. He came for advice from Uncle Will about the business of writing, stayed for a year, and wrote his book. He was David Cohn, a good writer, and the book was God Shakes Creation.

  A young newspaperman from Louisiana, named Hodding Carter, came to talk, having made himself persona non grata with Huey Long in Louisiana. Uncle Will, not having a high opinion of the local paper, thought it might be a good idea to start another paper. They did. There in Greenville, Hodding Carter published his paper, won the Pulitzer Prize, and lived the rest of his life.

  But it was the man, of course, not his house and not his visitors, who meant the most to my brothers and me. What to say of him here? Very little, for he said it much better in his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee. It is enough to make a simple acknowledgment. Without him I do not think I would have been introduced to the world of books, of music, of art. I am sure it would not have crossed my mind to become a writer.

  I remember him in his garden—a famous one—hands in pockets, frowning down at something, perhaps an iris with root rot. He took solace in his garden and from it drew human lessons. Once, as he put aluminum sulphate on his azaleas, because azaleas, of course, need acid soil, it came to him in a flash: some people, too, require acid soil! Of course! This explained a friend of ours, Miss A___, who for reasons that escaped everybody thrived on tragedy and controversy. Thereafter, Miss A___ was no mystery. Uncle Will gave her controversy cheerfully, acid soil aplenty, and the two of them got along famously ever after.

  It’s all gone now, house, garden, Capehart, Beethoven quartets in Victor 78s, pantry, Lorenzo de Medici in bronze, Venus in marble. In its place, I think, are neat little condo-villas of stained board-and-batten siding. Only the garden wall remains. I am not complaining. I have what he left me, and I don’t mean things.

  1984

  A Better Louisiana

  AS THE QUESTION GOES these days, what’s wrong with Louisiana? Who am I to presume to address myself to this question? Offhand I can think of only one credential which might set me somewhat apart and give me leave. I am a writer by profession and, unlike most Louisianians, can live anywhere I choose, starting tomorrow. Unlike most Louisianians, I chose Louisiana, thirty-eight years ago, and do not intend to live anywhere else.

  The state is beautiful, unique, and there are no better people anywhere. If the United States takes pride in being a melting pot, in the sense that many ethnic types tolerate each other, that is, generally don’t kill each other as they do in Lebanon, here in Louisiana an amazing mix of people not only tolerate each other but by and large get along well and have a good time.

  But I don’t like what has happened to this state. The facts are melancholy and all too familiar. One need not dwell on them. Here’s a state richer in mineral resources than any other Southern state, the top gas producer in the country, possessed of the largest port, endowed with a natural wealth which in its use might have been expected to yield manifold benefits for its people.

  The upshot? Depletion of its known oil and gas reserves, its marshes plundered and polluted, one of the highest cancer rates in the country, the loss of fifty square miles of wetlands yearly. And so on and on. Mineral-rich, strategically located Louisiana is in fact one of the poorest states in the country in per-capita income, vies only with Mississippi for the honor of being dead last in the quality of public education.

  How did this sorry state of affairs come to pass? Here again, at least part of the answer is no great mystery. Ever since the palmy days of the Perezes fifty years ago, when Judge Leander Perez acquired royalty interests in public land drilled by major oil companies, some Louisiana politicians and the big oil-and-gas corporations seemed to have enjoyed an extended love-in, a mutually beneficial arrangement, but not necessarily beneficial to the people of the state.

  But there is no use dwelling on the past. The question now is what to do.

  One of the more astonishing reactions to this dilemma, to judge from some responses to the front-page editorial in this newspaper [Times-Picayune]on March 10, is that even asking such a question is seen as negative thinking and bad for the state’s image—as if the state’s image could get any worse. One should think positively; if one is a passenger on the Titanic and the ship begins to list, one should praise the deck chairs.

  So what to do? Governor Edwin Edwards, whatever his faults and his ultimate culpability, is surely right on target with his education reform plan, which amounts to a program of massive support of public education, with rewards for excellence in teachers and provisions to get rid of incompetents.

  But there’s a Catch-22 here, entirely apart from the little matter of where the money’s coming from. It is the nagging doubt in the taxpayer’s mind about all such proposals—for he’s heard them before. Just what are the real priorities of the educational establishment, the National Education Association, the administrators, the teachers’ unions? Are these groups really interested in getting the best teachers into the classroom and the incompetents out? Will throwing more money at the public schools ensure better education? Teachers’ unions are very vocal about higher salaries and job security, and they are right. But when you ask them how they propose to go about rewarding merit and throwing out the dumbbells, the silence is deafening.

  Just as there was evidently no compelling reason why Louisiana politicians and the oil companies should place the public interest first, one wonders how educators can be moved to strive as hard for excellence, both in teachers and in pupils, as they do for more money.

  It does not take a prophet to predict what is going to happen if the public schools are not supported massively and the educators do not get their act together.

  Either the schools will continue to decline in quality until they become a de facto adjunct of the welfare system where children of the poor will be warehoused for twelve years, then dumped into society, ill prepared, a more or less permanent underclass.

  Or taxpayers will finally get fed up with an expensive system turning out an inferior product and demand that the public schools be opened to free-market competition, perhaps by a voucher system which would give poor parents the same freedom of choice of schools as the more affluent. Such a system might have its disadvantages, but you may be sure it would get the attention of the public-school bureaucracy. Why are GM cars getting better? Not because of increased government subsidies or higher salaries. Because of Toyota.

  There is another subtle factor at work which may defeat all such reforms. It is a trait peculiar to the state, part of its peculiar charm but also part of its peculiar weakness. It is summarized by that dubious expression, Laissez le bon temps rouler, which can be read as referring to the genuine joy of Louisiana life. But it also translates into that old Louisiana penchant for voting for flamboyant types, upcountry good ol’ boys and Cajun slickers who are long on show biz and short on ethics. As long as the party lasted, the oil flowed, and the good times rolled, it didn’t seem to matter.

  Well, folks, the party’s over. The bon temps have just about roulered out.

  But I am hopeful. There are some young, honest, and able politicians on the horizon. Education is surely the key. There are plenty of dedicated teachers. And there is an ever-increasing number of informed, sobered-up, and disquieted voters. This is an economic, not a racial issue. It is the children of poor families, black and white, who are suffering from an inferior education. But there is plenty of black pride and white pride around. All it takes is good teachers and the rest of us to support them and all of us to communicate the pride of excellence to the young. It’s too bad Jesse Jackson left PUSH, where he was doing an extraordinary job, and became an ordinary politician.

  As the saying goes, people get the kind of government they deserve. Time will tell. We’ll either continue
our present course and become a somewhat comic, albeit slightly sleazy playground for tourists and conventioneers—as indeed Louisiana is already perceived by much of the country. Or we can realize our unique potential, keep the good times, but conserve our natural wealth and that greatest wealth of all—our young people. There’s the hope.

  1985

  The American War

  WHAT ARE THE REASONS for the current revival of interest in the Civil War? That there is such a revival is undeniable. Books on the War pour off the presses every week—some of them, incidentally, of a very high order, such as Bruce Catton’s This Hallowed Ground and Shelby Foote’s Shiloh! What is at once noticeable about the current literature is its frankly nonpolitical character and the absence of the old rancor. The race issue may be still very much an issue, but Northern and Southern historians have achieved a common view of the War itself. When Catton from Michigan and Foote from Mississippi write about the battle of Shiloh, it sounds like the same battle. Catton is never more eloquent than when he is appraising Lee’s generalship; Foote is just as impressed by the fighting qualities of the Northern soldier. Indeed, from this distance the underdog psychology probably kindles the reader’s enthusiasm more readily than do the social issues—and perhaps this is just as well.

  The general impression outside the South seems to be that it is the rest of the country which has rediscovered the Civil War, that the South has never stopped looking back. This is mistaken, I believe, and is due to an understandable optical illusion. The truth is, at least in my experience, that the Southerner never thinks about the Civil War—until he finds himself among Northerners. Then, for some reason—perhaps because the Northerner insists on casting him in his historical role and the Southerner is perfectly willing to oblige, or because, lost in the great cities of the North, he feels for the first time the need of his heritage—he breaks out the Stars and Bars. I remember traveling from Alabama to summer camp in Wisconsin in the twenties. The train would stop in Chicago to pick up more boys. We from Alabama had heard as little about the Civil War as about the Boer War and cared less, but every time the Illinois boys got on in Chicago the War started, a real brawl yet not really bad-tempered. The same sort of thing must have happened during World War I when an Alabama division suddenly found itself in a donnybrook with the Fighting 69th at Plattsburg.

  The truth of it is, I think, that the whole country, South included, is just beginning to see the Civil War whole and entire for the first time. The thing was too big and too bloody, too full of suffering and hatred, too closely knit into the fabric of our meaning as a people, to be held off and looked at—until now. It is like a man walking away from a mountain. The bigger it is, the farther he’s got to go before he can see it. Then one day he looks back and there it is, this colossal thing lying across his past.

  A history of the shifting attitudes toward the War would be enlightening. There would probably emerge a pattern common to such great events, a dialectic of loss-recovery: the long period of recollection, of intense partisan interest which is followed by a gradual fading of the Event into a dusty tapestry. (Lee and Grant at Appomattox taking their place beside Washington Crossing the Delaware.) Then, under certain circumstances, there is the recovery. Perhaps Washington will never be recovered, having been ossified too long in grammar-school tableaux. But Lincoln and Grant and McClellan and even the legendary Lee, who, after all, are closer in time to Washington than to us, have come very much alive. Why, then, their recovery, and what exactly has been recovered?

  What has been recovered, it seems clear, is not the politics or the sociology of the War, or even the slavery issue, but the fight itself. The tableau I remember from school was the Reconciliation, Grant and Lee in the McLean house, Lee healing the wounds at Washington College. Little was said about the War, except that it was tragic, brother fighting against brother, etc. Undoubtedly, this was the necessary if somewhat boring emphasis for the textbooks. Now, after ninety years of Reconciliation, we can take a look at the fight itself.

  What a fight it was! The South is a very big place, yet there is hardly a district that didn’t have its skirmish, its federal gunboat sunk in a bayou—where some old-timer won’t tell you, “Yes, they came through here.” It is startling to realize that there were more casualties in the Civil War than in all the American forces of World War II, and more than in all other American wars put together. Of 3,000,000 men under arms, 2,300,000 for the Union, 750,000 for the Confederacy, 618,222 died, with total casualties probably going well past a million. For sheer concentrated fury, there are few events even in modern warfare to equal that terrible September 17 at Antietam Creek when over twenty thousand men fell—or the May-June of ’64 when, beginning with the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant lost on the average of two thousand men a day for thirty days, culminating in the slaughter at Cold Harbor, when over eight thousand men fell in about ten minutes! There were murderous battles in the West which one never heard of, like Stone’s River with over 25,000 casualties.

  Yet, terrible as it was, it is impossible to read of the Army of Northern Virginia or of the Army of the Potomac without being caught up in the tremendous drama. The armies were big enough so that the action took place on an epic scale, yet the War was, as much as were the Punic Wars, a personal encounter of the opposing leaders. Lee was very much aware of this grim beauty when the fog rose over Fredericksburg, showing Burnside’s entire army facing his, battle flags flying. “It is well that war is so terrible,” he said, “else we should grow too fond of it.” But what gave the Civil War the tragic proportions of the Iliad was the fact, apparent after Shiloh, that the American soldier, Union and Confederate, was not going to be beaten until he could literally fight no longer or was killed. When his leader was great, he was almost invincible; when his leader was mediocre, he was still superb. Pickett’s charge is justly famous, but just as heartbreaking was the Union assault on Longstreet’s position in the sunken road at Fredericksburg. The difference was that, where Pickett’s men had every confidence in Lee, Couch’s men knew very well that Burnside was wrong. Yet they attacked all day long, and only stopped when the field was piled so high with dead that they could no longer run over them.

  As in all tragedies, a great deal seemed to depend upon fate. Small mischances become as important as Thetis’s oversight when she dipped Achilles—all but his heel—into the Styx. A Confederate courier loses some battle orders; they are found wrapped around three cigars and brought to McClellan; the direct result is the Battle of Antietam. One can’t read of that War without playing the fascinating game of what-if … What if Jackson had lived through Chancellorsville? What if McClellan had listened to Phil Kearny (instead of to the Pinkerton detectives) during the Seven Days? What if Jeb Stuart had tended to business at Gettysburg? Lee was always just missing his Cannae and Lincoln’s generals were always just short of ordinary competence—until he got Grant.

  Besides the great failures, there were the great successes, the heroes’ deeds which are always irresistible to the human spirit and so pass over immediately into the legend of the race. There was Chancellorsville when Lee, facing Hooker’s 85,000, divided his battered army of 43,000, sent Jackson to the left, leaving him in front of Hooker with 17,000 men—and attacked and very nearly destroyed the Army of the Potomac. There was the Union’s “Pap” Thomas’s assault on Missionary Ridge at Chattanooga and the subsequent demoralization of Bragg. And there was the fateful decision at Spotsylvania when, after taking a fearful mauling, Grant, instead of falling back toward Washington as the army had been doing for the past three years, retreated—south, sliding around Lee’s right.

  Therein lies the tragedy. If Lee had been a little more or a little less—if he had gotten his Cannae or if he had only been just competent and been whipped by McClellan in ’62—the results would still have been notable, but they would not have approached the terror and piteousness of what actually did happen. The summer of 1864 has a Götterdämmerung quality. With the issue hardly in
doubt after Gettysburg, the fighting nevertheless increased in fury with both sides attacking steadily, without the usual remissions between battles.

  Yet, with all the horror, or perhaps because of it, there was always the feeling then, and even now as we read about it, that the things a man lived through were somehow twice as real, twice as memorable as the peace that followed. Peace is better than war, yet it is a sad fact that some of the heroes of the War, like Grant and Longstreet and many a lesser man, found the peace a long descent into mediocrity. In the ordeal the man himself seemed to become more truly himself, revealing his character or the lack of it, than at any time before or after. If a man was secretly cowardly or secretly brave, stupid or shrewd, that was what he was shown to be. The War infallibly discovered his hidden weakness and his hidden strength. Hooker the braggart was reduced to impotence simply by having Lee’s small army in front of him (and understandably, for the veterans of the Army of the Potomac used to say to replacements fresh from victories in the West: “Wait till you meet Bobby Lee”). Grant the ne’er-do-well matured in defeat and became a noble and sensitive human being by having Lee at his mercy. It is no wonder that there was the temptation, especially in the ruined South, to enshrine those four years as the four years of truth and to discount all other times, even the future.

  Then there were the thousand and one lesser encounters, any one of which, if it had happened at another time, would have its own literature and its own historians: the Confederate raiders, Farragut’s capture of New Orleans, the battle of the ironclads, Forrest’s miniature Cannae at Brice’s Cross Roads, James Andrews’s stealing the Confederate train, and so on. It was the last of the wars of individuals, when a single man’s ingenuity and pluck not only counted for something in itself but could conceivably affect the entire issue. Forrest himself is quite unbelievable. It is as if Lancelot had been reborn in Memphis. He carried into battle a cavalry saber sharpened to a razor edge and actually killed men with it. He actually did fool a Yankee commander into surrendering by parading a single cannon back and forth in the distance as they parleyed. He actually did have twenty-nine horses shot from under him.