Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Perhaps the most serious consequence of the hardening of attitudes has been the waste of energies, with much of Northern liberal thought preoccupied with Southern intransigence and nearly all the best minds of the South enlisted in the defense. Instead of being constructively concerned with race questions, as the South was ten years ago, Southern brains are now committed to circumventing the Supreme Court and to cataloguing the failings of the North.

  The quarrel has the nightmarish quality of a feud; the same old charges and countercharges have been revived in every dreary particular—with one difference. Rapid social changes are taking place which can only have the effect of radically altering the character of the problem, if not of solving it. Like most social changes, they are ambiguous. They may even be regarded as social evils, but they are evils from which good can come. Indeed, they hold out the first real promise of ridding the country of its greatest curse.

  One change is the rapidly ongoing emigration of the Negro from the South. What is taking place is not merely the national distribution of the Negro but the national distribution of the problem of racial injustice. For the first time, the Gallup Poll reports that the race question is now regarded as the number-one American problem. This means, as I understand it, that the American dilemma is no longer what shall we do about the South, but what shall we do about the Negro. The change would seem at first sight to be only the spread of an evil and nothing to rejoice over—certainly, the increasing racial difficulties of the North are a sorry comfort to the South—but paradoxically a great good can come of it. One can only imagine what reserves of energies and good will might be tapped, North and South, if at long last the problem were shared in common. It could even mean the beginning of the end of the two complementary American failings, the neurotic guilt of the South and the triumphant Pharisaism of the North.

  The country has been so long preoccupied with the wrangle that perhaps no one has an inkling of a future free of it, free, not of the problem, but of the sterile divisiveness in the face of the problem. The other night, as my daughter was reading aloud from her fifth-grade history about Revolutionary times, I could not help wondering what it was like to live as a Virginian or Carolinian or New Yorker without the old bloody reflex, one arm ever upraised to strike or defend. It may be the suffering Negro himself who will save us all from what we have done to him.

  The other change in progress is an economic one. As Harry Ashmore expressed it, a pattern is emerging in which the South will accommodate its dwindling Negro population as it moves from second- to first-class citizenship, a pattern which has nothing to do with the harsh words and extremist laws, which is imperfect but bids fair to be effective. Racial injustice is bad business. There is no segregation in the stores. Let us hope the Christian conscience will be decisive, but, failing this, let us be glad that for once the pocketbook is its ally.

  These changes indicate possible areas of settlement; they also indicate social dangers which could make the cure worse than the disease. Perhaps the real role of the moderate is, not to press for a quick solution, but to humanize, to moderate, the solution which is surely coming.

  Let us not forget the stubborn fact that, whatever the shortcomings of the North, a man may sit where he pleases on the subway, attend the closest school; he may not always live where he pleases if he is a Negro, and he doesn’t even know which hotels and restaurants he may enter. Nevertheless, it is the de jure segregation of the South, and the sign FOR WHITES ONLY, which the Negro must find increasingly humiliating. This being the case, and in the face of our present national embarrassment in world affairs, a cynical solution has been proposed. The obvious answer, the suggestion goes, is the Northern answer, de jure integration for the record and de facto segregation where it really counts. Even throw in the buses and drinking fountains; there are ways and means of zoning suburbs and school districts. The proposal is unmeriting. I mention it because it unwittingly provides clues to sociological realities which are usually overlooked in the heat of polemics and which, if examined closely, provide areas for real progress toward a settlement.

  First, there is such a thing as a de facto segregation in the public schools of the North. It is partly racial but mostly ecological, a natural consequence, whatever the morality of it, of the economic organization of the city. Professor Frazier of Howard University suggests that if the South really wants to do something about de jure segregation, a knowledge of this state of affairs would go a long way toward countering the usual argument that desegregation would mean racial mixing. The fact is that, even after integration, the white schools would remain largely white and the colored schools largely colored.

  Second, it illustrates the nature of the Southern protest. Southerners are frankly concerned about the social and sexual consequences of integration. If, instead of scouting this fear as exaggerated or neurotic, one takes it at face value, one will discover that it reflects a very real social phenomenon in the South and that the fear is more or less appropriate to the phenomenon. This phenomenon is the peculiar social role which the public schools play in the life of the community.

  But, before making a proposal, let us first understand the gravity of the problem of school desegregation. Serious enough under the best conditions, it has become immeasurably more serious through a concurrence of bad luck, bad timing, and federal stupidity. Only such a combination, plus political irresponsibility, could have brought to pass a national disaster like Little Rock.

  The difficulty of the school problem is the difficulty of any enforced cultural change. The bad luck is that the most important cultural change should be in the area of education, where those exposed to the change are children. Even Southerners who believe the change to be ultimately for the best are disturbed about subjecting their children to a culturally retarded group, however temporary the lag. But, worse luck, the group most affected must be the co-educational high school and junior high, where the problem necessarily takes on a sexual coloration. The problem of co-education at this level is itself a moot one. That it should intersect with the racial problem is unfortunate, to say the least. But the incredible bad luck is that the crisis of school integration should coincide with the crisis of juvenile morality and with the upturn of crime statistics among urban Negro populations.

  But federal stupidity was the last straw. Of all possible educational levels, postgraduate, college, high school, junior high, grammar school, kindergarten, the Justice Department had to choose as the arena of its major test the co-educational high school with its full complement of explosive ingredients! As Walter Lippmann put it, this was the worst imaginable place to join the issue.

  And all this at the most critical period of America’s leadership in world affairs! Our enemies could not have done a better job of assembling our every fault into the ugliest possible façade for the world to see.

  One has other regrets. It is perhaps a necessary evil that major changes have to be announced in an authoritative language that commands obedience. For unquestionably a great deal of the furor is engendered by words, or rather the space between word and deed which encourages myth. To give one example: I have seen white Catholics in Louisiana attend unsegregated barbecues and horse shows at “mission” churches and never think twice about it because no one advertised the affair as an “integrated horse show”—some of them Catholics who, when Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel announced his intention of integrating the parochial schools, were bitterly opposed to mixing the races. The announcement of a change encourages all sorts of specters, in this case the specter of the abstract Negro delinquent put together from newspaper headlines.

  Once we appreciate the seriousness of the impasse, however, it becomes possible to make realistic suggestions. A clue to the kind of settlement the situation calls for is to be found in the nature of the Southern protest. The opposition to integration of the schools is almost invariably expressed in social terms, social, that is, in the sense of personal intercourse. This protest stems from a sociological
reality which is a characteristic of Southern life. This reality is the zone of social encounter. Anyone who has gone to school North and South knows what I mean. In the North the zone of obligatory social encounter usually stops at one’s front door. A public high school is a place where one goes primarily to acquire certain services, just as the A & P is a place to acquire certain goods. One may, of course, make friends in school, have dates, but this is far more of an option, far more segregated, if you will, from the business at hand.

  A public high school in the South is at least as social an institution as it is educational. The social body almost coincides with the student body. This is a particular manifestation of a more general phenomenon. The same social dimension includes as well the people upstairs, next door, the corner drugstore, and so on. The agreeable state of affairs in the South was made possible, of course, by the highly homogenous character of the non-Negro population. Except for a few coastal areas and river ports, it was and is white, Protestant, and Anglo-Saxon. The schools were never seen quite as public institutions, as the word is used in the rest of the country to mean a tax-supported service provided for any person at all. That is why so many Southern schools never had sororities and fraternities—the whole school was a white, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon fellowship. Nor is this said in criticism—on the contrary: the small-town high school in the South is an extremely pleasant, humane, democratic institution.

  Perhaps a similar distinction might be drawn between the small-town and big-city schools of the North. I don’t know but I doubt it.

  This very phenomenon—and what is happening to it—may, like the economic changes Harry Ashmore talks about, suggest its own “solution.” It is an ambiguous solution. It means the passing of a unique way of life. The change is inevitable but perhaps the loss is not. One hopes that the South’s genius for graceful and humane relations between people may not be forgotten in the coming urbanization.

  What must take place if we are ever to have interracial peace is a shrinkage of the zone of personal intercourse. No doubt, it would be preferable to achieve racial accord by an implementing of Christian teachings. But if men do not wish to love one another, then let them at least strive for neutrality. We must, for better or worse, see the public school for what it is, a public place, as public as a post office or a department-store elevator. In spite of the physical intimacy of an elevator, the passengers do not feel they are sharing the same living space.

  Once this happens, and once it is realized that desegregation does not necessarily mean a substantial mixing of the races, the greatest fear of the segregationist is removed—the fear of the necessary social, ergo sexual, encounter which, of course, is not being required of anyone. It is this difference in the social roles of the schools which leads to a major misunderstanding. The Northerner is mystified by the massive defiance of the South in this matter because to him there is no qualitative difference between sitting next to a person in the subway and sitting next to him in the classroom. For the Southerner it is very different. School integration means the lowering of two barriers, not one: the public and the social.

  No doubt, human brotherhood is better than a depersonalized society. But a depersonalized society is better than one threatened by violence.

  The shrinkage of the social zone is already going on apace as the South becomes urbanized and suburbanized, along with the general convergence of all regions upon a way of life in which locales are more and more indistinguishable. Television, the automobile, the suburban home, and the shopping center are much the same the country over. We have heard a great deal about the growing anonymity of American life. Even a liberal Southerner cannot fail to regret the passing of an era of true intimacy between Negro and white and cannot help contrasting it with what he sees as somewhat shallow friendships between educated whites and Negroes.

  Yet the growing depersonalization of Southern life may not be such a bad thing, after all. God writes straight with crooked lines. If the shrinkage of social intercourse to patio and barbecue pit serves no other purpose, it might yet provide a truly public zone outside where people are free to move about in a kind of secure anonymity until the time comes when they might wish to be friends.

  1957

  Bourbon

  THIS IS NOT WRITTEN by a connoisseur of Bourbon. Ninety-nine percent of Bourbon drinkers know more about Bourbon than I do. It is about the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat.

  I can hardly tell one Bourbon from another, unless the other is very bad. Some bad Bourbons are even more memorable than good ones. For example, I can recall being broke with some friends in Tennessee and deciding to have a party and being able to afford only two-fifths of a $1.75 Bourbon called Two Natural, whose label showed dice coming up 5 and 2. Its taste was memorable. The psychological effect was also notable. After knocking back two or three shots over a period of half an hour, the three male drinkers looked at each other and said in a single voice: “Where are the women?”

  I have not been able to locate this remarkable Bourbon since.

  Not only should connoisseurs of Bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth—all real enough dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking, that is, the use of Bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?”

  If I should appear to be suggesting that such a man proceed as quickly as possible to anesthetize his cerebral cortex by ingesting ethyl alcohol, the point is being missed. Or part of the point. The joy of Bourbon drinking is not the pharmacological effect of C2H5OH on the cortex but rather the instant of the whiskey being knocked back and the little explosion of Kentucky U.S.A. sunshine in the cavity of the nasopharynx and the hot bosky bite of Tennessee summertime—aesthetic considerations to which the effect of the alcohol is, if not dispensable, at least secondary.

  By contrast, Scotch: for me (not, I presume, for a Scot), drinking Scotch is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward. The whiskey assaults the nasopharynx with all the excitement of paregoric. Scotch drinkers (not all, of course) I think of as upward-mobile Americans, Houston and New Orleans businessmen who graduate from Bourbon about the same time they shed seersuckers for Lilly slacks. Of course, by now these same folk may have gone back to Bourbon and seersucker for the same reason, because too many Houston oilmen drink Scotch.

  Nothing, therefore, will be said about the fine points of sour mash, straights, blends, bonded, except a general preference for the lower proofs. It is a matter of the arithmetic of aesthetics. If one derives the same pleasure from knocking back 80-proof Bourbon as 100-proof, the formula is both as simple as 2 + 2 = 4 and as incredible as non-Euclidean geometry. Consider. One knocks back five one-ounce shots of 80-proof Early Times or four shots of 100-proof Old Fitzgerald. The alcohol ingestion is the same:

  5 × 40% = 2

  4 × 50% = 2

  Yet, in the case of the Early Times, one has obtained an extra quantum of joy without cost to liver, brain, or gastric mucosa. A bonus, pure and simple, an aesthetic gain as incredible as two parallel lines meeting at infinity.

  An apology to the reader is in order, nevertheless, for it has just occurred to me that this is the most unedifying and even maleficent piece I ever wrote—if it should e
ncourage potential alcoholics to start knocking back Bourbon neat. It is also the unfairest. Because I am, happily and unhappily, endowed with a bad GI tract, diverticulosis, neurotic colon, and a mild recurring nausea, which make it less likely for me to become an alcoholic than my healthier fellow Americans. I can hear the reader now: Who is he kidding? If this joker has to knock back five shots of Bourbon every afternoon just to stand the twentieth century, he’s already an alcoholic. Very well. I submit to this or any semantic. All I am saying is that if I drink much more than this I will get sick as a dog for two days and the very sight and smell of whiskey will bring on the heaves. Readers beware, therefore, save only those who have stronger wills or as bad a gut as I.

  The pleasure of knocking back Bourbon lies in the plane of the aesthetic but at an opposite pole from connoisseurship. My preference for the former is or is not deplorable depending on one’s value system—that is to say, how one balances out the Epicurean virtues of cultivating one’s sensory end organs with the greatest discrimination and at least cost to one’s health, against the virtue of evocation of time and memory and of the recovery of self and the past from the fogged-in disoriented Western world. In Kierkegaardian terms, the use of Bourbon to such an end is a kind of aestheticized religious mode of existence, whereas connoisseurship, the discriminating but single-minded stimulation of sensory end organs, is the aesthetic of damnation.