Remembrance of Things Past

LANTERNS ON THE LEVEE--William Alexander Percy--Knopf ($3).

One day last year William Alexander Percy, a slight, short Mississippian with a broad, tall forehead, gave up the management of his 3,000-acre plantation, gave up his 30-year law practice, and settled down to putter, think, remember. Last week Northerners and Southerners could read in Lanterns on the Levee just what kind of memories he had. They covered 54 years of an active, sensitive, civilized life. They showed their author to be not only the "poet laureate of Mississippi" and one of the South's bigger planters, but a U. S. aristocrat in the Greek sense of the word.

Percy could remember his French grandmother, Mere, who had to sit day & night strapped in a chair so that she could breathe. "One night [Mere] woke suffocating. Mother said: 'It will be all right, it will pass. . . .' But Mere gasped: 'C'est la mort.' Mother leaned to her and whispered: 'Tu n'as pas peur?' Mere steadied herself on the arms of her chair and said distinctly and firmly: 'Non.' "

There was an exalted memory of Percy's father: "Epstein with his heads neurotic, restless, ugly, is the appropriate portraitist of this generation, but . . . Father . . . would have been at home on the west portal of Chartres with those strong ancients, severe and formidable and full of grace, who guard the holy entrance."

There was the instructive memory of the time Percy Sr. ran against Demagogue James K. Vardaman for the U. S. Senate. Vardaman, who looked "like a top-notch medicine man," stood for the poor white against the "nigger." "He was not a moral idiot of genius like Huey Long; he was merely an exhibitionist playing with fire." When Percy Sr. won, they tried to pin a bribery charge on him. It was quickly disproved, but the man who made the charge went on shouting the lie from every platform in Mississippi. He "was a pert little monster, glib and shameless. . . . The people loved him ... not because they were deceived in him, but because they understood him thoroughly; they said of him proudly: 'He's a slick little bastard.' " Next time they threw out Percy Sr. "Wai," said an old man, wet with tobacco juice and furtive-eyed, "the bottom rail's on top and it's gwiner stay thar." That was Percy's "first sight of the rise of the masses, but not my last."

When World War I came, Percy got into bed, crammed down quarts of cream and dozens of raw eggs, made enough weight so that he could get into the A. E. F. He was made a captain, cited for bravery. He got back in time to help his father drive the Ku Klux Klan out of Greenville, Miss., after a two-year fight. That taught him what Nazis were like ten years before most people knew about Nazis.

In 1927 the flood crashed through the Mississippi levees in "a torrent ten feet deep the size of Rhode Island. . . . The south Delta became seventy-five hundred square miles of millrace in which one hundred and twenty thousand human beings and one hundred thousand animals squirmed and bobbed." In Greenville, the mayor appointed Percy chairman of the flood-relief committee and the local Red Cross. When the Negro Chicago Defender stirred up the Negroes against him, Percy went alone into their jampacked, sullen meeting, talked the mutineers back to their senses.

Then there was the ridiculous memory of Franklin Roosevelt. One hundred and twenty-four Negro sharecropper families lived at Percy's Trail Lake plantation. He shared 50-50 with them "as my grandfather and father had done." One of Dr. Odum's boys at the University of North Carolina had written a thesis on the plantation--A Social-Economic Analysis of a Mississippi Delta Plantation--and young Jonathan Daniels had dashed over to Trail Lake when he was discovering the South. Despite individual abuses, Planter Percy believes that "sharecropping is one of the best systems ever devised to give security and a chance for profit to the simple and the unskilled." So he was surprised when the President attacked "the infamous sharecropper system." He was more surprised when he asked a Washington friend where this kind of farming prevailed. The answer: "On Trail Lake."

But the memory that disturbed William Alexander Percy most concerned the three orphaned sons of his cousin, whom he adopted and brought up. He had to try to tell them what to do in a world that was going physically and morally to pieces. "Not the South alone . . . had been killed, but its ideals and its kind of people the world over. The bottom rail was on top not only in Mississippi, but from Los Angeles to New York, from London to Moscow. ... In Russia, Germany and Italy Demos, having slain its aristocrats and intellectuals and realizing its own incompetence to guide or protect itself, had submitted to tyrants. ..." Percy asked himself the question that every worried parent asks: "Should I therefore teach deceit, dishonor, ruthlessness, bestial force to the children in order that they survive?" He answered it as most worried parents do: "Better that they perish." For "virtue is an end in itself ... it is better for men to die than to call evil good. ..." He knew that he and all men like him could never be really defeated, because they could never be changed.

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