Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Yet, like the Stoa of the Empire, the Stoa of the South was based on a particular hierarchical structure and could not survive the change. Nor did it wish to survive. Its most characteristic mood was a poetic pessimism which took a grim satisfaction in the dissolution of its values—because social decay confirmed one in his original choice of the wintry kingdom of self. He is never more himself than when in a twilight victory of evil, of Modred over Arthur. And of course he is in good company in his assessment of the modern world. It is not just Faulkner who bears witness to the coming of the mass man, to the alienation and vulgarization of the urban consumer. Ortega y Gasset and Marcel are neither Southern nor Stoic.

  The difference is that for the Southern Stoic the day has been lost and lost for good. It seems to him that the Snopeses have won, not only the white Snopeses, but the black Snopeses as well: the white man has lost his oblige, the black man has lost his manners, and insolence prevails. For Southern society was above all a society of manners, an incredible triumph of manners, and a twilight of manners seems a twilight of the world. For the Stoic there is no real hope. His finest hour is to sit tight-lipped and ironic while the world comes crashing down around him.

  It must be otherwise with the Christian. The urban plebs is not the mass which is to be abandoned to its own barbaric devices, but the lump to be leavened. The Christian is optimistic precisely where the Stoic is pessimistic. What the Stoic sees as the insolence of his former charge—and this is what he can’t tolerate, the Negro’s demanding his rights instead of being thankful for the squire’s generosity—is in the Christian scheme the sacred right which must be accorded the individual, whether deemed insolent or not. For it was not the individual, after all, who was intrinsically precious in the Stoic view—rather, it was one’s own attitude toward him, and this could not fail to be specified by the other’s good manners or lack of them. If he became insolent, very well: let him taste the bitter fruits of his insolence. The Stoic has no use for the clamoring minority; the Christian must have every use for it.

  We in the South can no longer afford the luxury of maintaining the Stoa beside the Christian edifice. In the past we managed the remarkable feat of keeping both, one for living in, the other for dying in. But the Church is no longer content to perform rites of passage; she has entered the arena of the living and must be reckoned with. The white Southerner, Catholic and Protestant, has been invited either to go inside the edifice he has built or to consider what he is doing on the porch at all.

  Unfortunately, the Catholic laity of the South have not yet realized this. Rather, it is, to some extent, the other way around—Catholics have absorbed the local prejudices of the community. Two days before last Good Friday, a membership blank appeared in the New Orleans Times-Picayune inviting “Roman Catholics of the Caucasian Race” to join an “Association of Catholic Laymen” for the purpose of “investigating and studying the problems of compulsory integration; to seek out, make known and denounce Communist infiltration, if there be any, in the integration movement,” etc. “Roman Catholics of the Caucasian Race”—what a tragic distortion to connect the word Catholic with the miserable euphemism of the Sugar Bowl ticket: “For members of the Caucasian race only.” Archbishop Rummel’s pastoral letter of February 19 is a hard saying for Louisiana Catholics. No one yet knows what their final reaction will be; there is evidence both of loyalty to and disaffection from this luminous message of Christian charity. Here again the upper-class white Catholic has not distinguished himself. The truth is that the Catholic Church and the twentieth century have caught up with the white Catholics of the South. They can no longer afford the luxury of Creole Catholicism à la Lafcadio Hearn, of Tante Marie going to daily Mass at the Cathedral on a segregated streetcar and seeing God’s will in it.

  The Stoic-Christian Southerner is offended when the Archbishop of New Orleans calls segregation sinful (or discusses the rights of labor). He cannot help feeling that religion is overstepping its allotted area of morality. In the comfortable modus vivendi of the past, he had been willing enough to allow Christianity a certain say-so on the subject of sin—by which he understood misbehavior in sexual matters, or in drinking and gambling. He is therefore confused and obscurely outraged when Christian teaching is applied to social questions. It is as if a gentleman’s agreement had been broken. He does not want the argument on these grounds, but prefers to talk about a “way of life,”“states’ rights,” and legal precedents, or to murmur about Communism, left-wing elements, and infiltration.

  Yet, eventually, he must come to terms with his own Christian heritage. So far, Archbishop Rummel has been answered only by having his name booed by the Citizens’ Council and by having a cross burned in his front yard. The secular press is silent; the Sartorises are silent if they are not booing; many of his Protestant colleagues are silent; more sadly, his own flock wavers. But sooner or later the archbishop must be answered. And the good pagan’s answer is no longer good enough for the South.

  1956

  A Southern View

  DEAR EDITOR:

  In reading “Climate of the South” by Stephen P. Ryan in the June 15, 1957, issue of America—I have always found Mr. Ryan’s articles on the Louisiana situation valuable and informative—I was surprised to come across my name given as an example of one of those backsliding Southern liberals who have betrayed the cause by affirming certain values of the South while continuing to oppose segregation.

  Mr. Ryan finds it unbelievable that anyone living in 1957 could maintain that the South might have had better constitutional grounds in 1860 for seceding than Lincoln had for invading. (Lincoln himself wasn’t quite so sure; he had to wait for something better than his constitutional position and he got it: Sumter fired on.) I made this subversive remark in an otherwise patriotic and pro-Union article in Commonweal; but I did not really expect anyone to take offense, since it was my impression that the issue has always been one of the great mooted constitutional questions, a question relevant, of course, to the South’s prerogatives in 1860, not in 1957. I would tend to agree with Mr. Ryan that we got whipped and that, whatever the merits of the case, the issue was settled for once and all, and that it was even for the best.

  It hardly seems worthwhile to renew this particular argument, since I do not regard it as applicable to the present situation. But Mr. Ryan’s article does raise another issue which is of the utmost importance in the race question. It has to do with the grounds upon which one bases his indictment of segregation.

  Let us begin by agreeing on two more points: 1. Segregation is sinful, because, as Archbishop Rummel of New Orleans has said, it is a denial of the unity and solidarity of the human race; it is sinful as openly practiced in the South; it is at least as sinful as covertly practiced in the North. 2. The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court is the law of the land and should be obeyed by all Americans.

  This double-barreled blast against segregation is extraordinarily effective in the South and will eventually prevail, however much the South may dislike the verdict. These two charges are directly sanctioned by two traditions deeply rooted in the Southern consciousness: Christianity and the majesty of the law.

  In respect of the latter, incidentally, it seems particularly unfortunate that the Supreme Court should have relied so heavily on sociopsychological theory in its decision against segregation when there were ample grounds, according to some jurists, for a purely legal decision. Sociopsychological theories change much more rapidly than Anglo-Saxon law.

  But what seems to me nothing less than monstrous is to couple the case against segregation with an ideological hatred of the South and Southern tradition. Mr. Ryan says he doesn’t understand how a Southerner can oppose segregation and at the same time cherish his heritage. I don’t understand how a Southerner can do anything else. Mr. Ryan sneers at Southern tradition, at “that breed of men, indigenous to the South, who are capable of approving integration and then, in practically the same breath, falling into a state of almost relig
ious ecstasy as they hysterically extol the glories of the Old South of slavery, of mocking birds, hominy grits and bourbon whiskey …” This really seems to me to be gratuitously offensive. If Mr. Ryan wonders why the Southern integrationist is discouraged, he needn’t look any further. If the rite of initiation into liberalism requires one to swear a blood oath against his native land, then the proposed initiate is going to take another look at the club.

  In the first place, even the best-disposed Southerner knows that this sort of charge is not only insulting; it is false. There is a Southern heritage, and it has nothing to do with the colonel in the whiskey ad. It has to do with the conservative tradition of a predominantly agrarian society, a tradition which at its best enshrined the humane aspects of living for rich and poor, black and white. It gave first place to a stable family life, sensitivity and good manners between men, chivalry toward women, an honor code, and individual integrity.

  If one wishes to sneer at such values, let him; but I can’t help wondering if the sneer does not conceal a contempt for all traditions. It is a tradition which even Wilbur J. Cash recognized as stemming not from the Virginia aristocracy but from the frontier and the farm, and which, Cash goes on to say, possessed a prevalent democratic temper that to an amazing degree destroyed class feeling.

  To tell the truth, I can’t believe that Mr. Ryan is altogether serious in this old-fashioned Yankee broadside against the entire South. At any rate, it is difficult for me to take it as a sober contribution to the problem, or as anything but a sort of wry, seriocomic piece of rhetoric. Certainly, Mr. Ryan must realize how an attack on segregation mounted on the battleground of enlightened liberal North versus depraved reactionary South must play directly into the hands of those Southerners who like nothing better than drawing a bead on Northern culture.

  Nothing is easier than to set forth the major contributions of the North to world culture as the automobile, Levittown, and the split-level home—in which there is no sense of the past, or of real community, or even of one’s own identity. Nothing is easier than to let the Northerner describe the Northern ideologist: the ritualistic liberal who sacrifices the human encounter for the abstract liberal passion, who prefers the company of Jews and Negroes, not because of the personal qualities of this or that Jew or Negro, but because they are Jews and Negroes, because of the ritual value of the gesture.

  It is just as easy for a really unreconstructed Southerner like Donald Davidson to point out that Mississippi, with very low sociological indexes, has produced William Faulkner and Eudora Welty; while Illinois and Ohio and New Jersey, with very high sociological indexes, produce professors who write books about William Faulkner. This kind of polemic takes us back to 1860 … Many of us had hoped by now that the days of The New Republic diatribes against the South were over and that men of good will in both sections would be able to approach the problem in the spirit of national unity and a plight shared in common rather than the spirit of Northern righteousness against Southern iniquity. If the Negro emigration to the North is accomplishing nothing else, it is accomplishing this: the universalizing of the problem. It is no longer a regional problem nor even a national problem, but the problem of human frailty trapped by historical circumstance. What we are faced with now are not “democratic ideals” but religious ultimates: is there any real reason, beyond democratic values, why a man should not be cruel to another man?

  Surely it would be better to cherish rather than destroy the cultural cleavage between the North and the South, a cleavage which accounts for the South’s preeminence in creative literature and the North’s in technics, social propaganda, and objective scholarship. The difference has been traced to a Southern preoccupation with the concrete, the historical, the particular, the immediate; and the Northern passion for the technical, the abstract, the general, the ideological. I see no reason why either tradition should not be enriched rather than reviled by the other.

  Here are three simple facts and one deduction which can be drawn from them. The South is a conservative society which openly practices segregation. Segregation is both sinful and illegal. Political conservatism is neither sinful nor illegal—though sometimes one wonders if liberals don’t think it is. This being the case, the most effective way to fight segregation is to distinguish between it and the conservative tradition which seeks to conserve, to keep what is good in the past; and the least effective way to fight segregation is to attack not only it but the society that practices it.

  Meanwhile, it is the Negro who continues to suffer, in both North and South. Mr. Ryan speaks of the Negro who “can’t wait to get out of the lousy South.” Has Mr. Ryan heard of the Negro who did get out and who found himself in the North, which was not only lousy but confusing? It is the Negro who is being required to play the heroic role and to transcend the hatreds of both the segregationist and the liberal—and who sometimes, incredibly, succeeds. The tactics of the Reverend Martin Luther King seem to me as wise and as successful as the sometimes arrogant tactics of the NAACP seemed designed precisely to bring about the defeat of its declared objective.

  The argument from religion and the law is in the long run unanswerable. The Southern segregationist knows in his bones that he can’t continue to profess Christ on Sunday and then draw a racial line to keep his fellow Christians in their place—and his churches are beginning to move. He knows in his bones that the Supreme Court decision will never be reversed and must in the end be obeyed. He has a bad conscience. But the one sure way to give him ground to stand on and to salve his conscience is to attack not only segregation but him, his people, and his past.

  Mr. Ryan asks “what is to be done” about the Louisiana Catholic who defies his archbishop and promotes segregation. Well, I don’t know what is to be done with him, any more than I know what is to be done with the Illinois Catholic who stones the Negro who moves into his neighborhood. I would presume that if one is a Catholic, one does not “do” anything with him. One follows St. Paul and, instead of despising him as an enemy, corrects him as a brother, all the while in fear and trembling for one’s own salvation.

  But I cannot close without a salute to Mr. Ryan. We need more like him. Anyhow, this is no time for integrationists to fall out, even if one of them happens to be one of those “Southern particularists.” But perhaps particularism is not entirely evil. Perhaps the best imaginable society is not a countrywide Levittown in which everyone is a good liberal ashamed of his past, but a pluralistic society, rich in regional memories and usages. I sincerely believe that the worst fate that could overtake the struggle against segregation would be its capture by a political orthodoxy of the left. I share Mr. Ryan’s dismay at the present mood of the South. Maybe this failure of militant liberalism might serve as an occasion for remembering what St. Francis de Sales said about catching flies with honey instead of vinegar.

  WALKER PERCY, M.D. COVINGTON, LA.

  1957

  The Southern Moderate

  TO THE MODERATE EVERYWHERE it must seem that important public issues are forever being corrupted by extremists. Such an issue was the matter of internal subversion after the war. The people were dismayed when conspiracy came to light and they were forced to recognize the fact that Americans in high places had betrayed their country. It was a necessary cause, the anti-Communism of the early 1950s—something needed to be done and wasn’t being done—even though it was open to demagogic exploitation. Overnight, the situation polarized, with intemperate, flag-waving anti-Communists in one camp and anti-anti-Communists in the other. The moderate was pulled left or right against his better judgment, or was stranded, speechless as usual, in the middle.

  A similar fate has overtaken another good cause, states’ rights. Surely one of the pressing needs of the day is a strengthening of local government and a revival of local responsibility in the face of growing federal power and federal money. States’ rights is in the best tradition of both parties. Yet the cause has been so abused of late that it is in danger of being lost for
good. The word is coming more and more to mean the right claimed by Citizens’ Councils to deny a man something because of his race.

  Yet there usually comes a time when the moderate can state a few hard facts and make some modest proposals. Perhaps such a time is at hand in the issue of segregation, judging from the caliber of men appointed to the Civil Rights Commission and from the generally favorable reception the appointments met with.

  The Southern moderate, let us say, is a man of good will who is aware of the seriousness of the problem, is searching for a solution, but disagrees that the solution is simple and can be effected overnight. From the point of view of either Marvin Griffin or the NAACP, the solution is relatively simple. One sees it simply as a question of obeying the law, and failing this, of enforcing the law. The other sees it simply as a question of leaving to the states the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution; in short, of letting us alone.

  What the NAACP doesn’t realize, or will not admit, is that what it proposes is not possible. The entire U.S. Army could not enforce school integration in the South; the South would only close the schools. (The problem of the schools is, of course, the real impasse. The other problems, voting, buses, etc., are trivial by comparison.) All that would be accomplished is the destruction of the public-school system. What the segregationist doesn’t realize or doesn’t admit to realizing is that racial segregation is increasingly intolerable as the twentieth century wears on. As an editorial in America pointed out, segregation is no wronger now than it was a hundred years ago, but times change and the same wrong may become more obvious and more hurtful. Racial segregation is more hurtful now in the time of world crisis and more demoralizing to Negroes and also, I believe, to whites in a time of heightened social consciousness. The moderate is aware both of the enormous difficulty of the problem and of the pressing need to do something about it. But the greatest need, to him, is the exercise of responsibility. What disturbs him is what he regards as the irresponsibility of both sides which has largely erased the hard-won gains of the past fifty years, the irresponsibility of a Faubus and the irresponsibility of those Northern politicians who, for the sake of the Negro vote, support any and every proposal of federal intervention.