Lanterns on the Levee

William Alexander Percy's memoir recounts the life of a poet, planter, and lawyer raised in the Mississippi Delta during an era of sweeping social change. Writing from middle age, Percy reflects on his life from childhood among the remnants of the old Southern planter class through World War I, political battles, natural disasters, and the adoption of three boys. The book is at once an elegy for a vanishing way of life and a meditation on honor, duty, and the possibility of goodness in a deteriorating world.

Percy opens by describing the Mississippi Delta, the flat alluvial region between Memphis and Vicksburg built by centuries of river sediment, where younger sons from Virginia, South Carolina, and Kentucky brought enslaved people to clear forests and establish cotton plantations. He evokes river steamers carrying passengers between St. Louis and New Orleans, fine plantation libraries, and a society oriented toward New Orleans for commerce and entertainment. He introduces his paternal grandmother, Mur, who managed the family's 1,000-acre plantation alone during the Civil War while her husband fought. He surveys the Delta's diverse inhabitants, including poor whites, Jewish immigrants who rose from peddlers to professionals, Irish and Italian laborers, Chinese storekeepers, and the large Black population, framing peaceful coexistence among these groups as the region's central problem.

Percy was born on Ascension Day in May 1885. His earliest memories center on Nain, his 16-year-old Black nurse, whose lullabies awakened a lifelong sensitivity to sorrow, and on Mur, who read him Grimm, Hans Andersen, Huckleberry Finn, and Alice in Wonderland. He describes his maternal grandparents, Mère and Père, transplanted New Orleans French whose genteel poverty never shook their self-assurance. Père's incompetence in business kept the family poor, while Mère quilted elaborate works from scraps of silk and maintained her authority through sheer force of will. Percy recalls their agonizing deaths: Père sitting alone in a dark room, and Mère tied upright in a straight chair so she would not topple when she dozed, until her final word, when asked if she was afraid: "Non."

Percy's childhood playmates included both Black and white children. He crawfished with Skillet, the cook's son, and spent summers at his Aunt Nana's Virginia farm with the children of Amelia, a Black servant on the farm, hunting arrowheads and climbing aspen saplings in high winds. He credits these companions with teaching him "not only gaiety and casualness and inventiveness, but the possibility that mere living may be delightful" (52). He characterizes his father as brilliant, a superb shot and speaker who loved life but never forgot its tragic dimension, and traces the Percy family's origins through Don Carlos, who arrived near Natchez with a ship and a Spanish land grant, married a French woman, was confronted by an English wife, and drowned himself with a sugar kettle tied around his neck.

Percy's formal education passed through unconventional teachers: Sister Evangelist at the Catholic convent, who triggered an intense religious phase; Judge Griffin, a private tutor who read him Paradise Lost and Dante; Mr. Bass, the school superintendent and Pan-like gardener who dropped lunar moths into lessons; and Father Koestenbrock, the Dutch parish priest who built a Gothic church with his personal fortune and whose periodic drunks taught Percy to reconcile goodness with human failing. At 15, Percy entered Sewanee, the University of the South, where he formed deep friendships and discovered poetry. The pivotal moment came when, riding to confession, he realized he could no longer believe in the Church's authority.

A year abroad in Paris followed, during which Percy haunted the Louvre, read Balzac in the Luxembourg Gardens, and traveled through France, Italy, and Egypt, collecting imperishable memories but enduring pervasive loneliness. Three years at Harvard Law School proved unexpectedly happy: He learned disciplined thinking from the Socratic method and treasured Saturday nights at the Boston Symphony. Returning to Greenville to practice law with his father, Percy felt alienated and began writing poetry. He found a kindred spirit in Caroline Stern, a tiny Jewish teacher forced by lead poisoning to abandon painting, who became his most trusted critic. Her own book of poems was ignored, and she died of cancer. Percy considers her "one of the few successes I ever knew" (137).

The memoir's political center is the elder Percy's Senate career. Percy's father reluctantly entered the race against James K. Vardaman, a flamboyant demagogue who campaigned on white supremacy, for a Senate seat decided by the state legislature. After a 57-day battle, the elder Percy won by five votes. The re-election campaign, now before the general public, became brutal: A Vardaman supporter fabricated a bribery charge with bills issued after the date he claimed to have received them. The younger Percy accompanied his father across Mississippi, carrying a pistol at hostile rallies. At Lauderdale Springs, his father faced a howling mob and cowed them into silence. He lost overwhelmingly but wrote to a supporter that if he could keep his corner of the state "comparatively clean and decent in politics and fit for a man to live in," he would have accomplished his purpose (152-53).

When World War I began, Percy joined Herbert Hoover's Commission for Relief in Belgium, where a small team of Americans fed the civilian population under German occupation. He witnessed Belgian civilians returned from forced labor as skeletal wrecks. After America entered the war, Percy qualified for officers' training camp, where he and four hometown friends formed the "peewee squad," the smallest men in the company who coached each other through every crisis. In France, Percy served as a billeting officer arranging troop lodging, recruited Parisian street toughs as civilian laborers, and instructed at the 92nd Division before reaching the front as a general's personal staff officer with the 37th Division. His combat letters record the progression from the Argonne's first day to the horror of shelling, mud-filled dugouts, and a doughboy repairing telephone wire under fire who says, "Hell, somebody had to do it" (220). On Armistice morning, Percy feels not exhilaration but desolation.

Back in Greenville, Percy fought the Ku Klux Klan, which organized in 1922 using anti-Catholic propaganda. His father answered the Klan organizer with devastating ridicule, but two years of bitter warfare followed in which members lied about their affiliation and community trust dissolved. The anti-Klan candidate for sheriff, George B. Alexander, won by the narrowest margin.

In 1927, the Mississippi River broke through the levee at Scott, flooding the Delta. As chairman of the Flood Relief Committee, Percy had to rescue, house, and feed 60,000 people with almost no resources. Bootleggers arrived in motor boats to find stranded residents. Percy evacuated white women and children but, at his father's behind-the-scenes maneuvering, kept the Black population on the levee, where tents were eventually erected. The Chicago Defender accused Percy of mistreating Black refugees, and a policeman killed a Black man who refused to unload Red Cross supplies. Percy addressed a hostile, armed Black congregation alone and averted violence by force of will.

Percy's parents died within weeks of each other two years after the flood. He inherited Trail Lake, a cotton plantation, and continued the sharecropping system his grandfather Fafar had originated with formerly enslaved people after the Civil War. He defends the system against President Roosevelt's condemnation, citing Raymond McClinton's 1936 study showing tenant families earned a net average of $437.64 for roughly 150 days of work plus free housing, fuel, and medical care, and argues the system's failures lie in dishonest landlords, not its structure.

Percy devotes extended attention to Ford, his Black servant, whose frank assessments provide both comic and painful instruction. Ford tells Percy he sees only the good in people and reveals that Louisa, their cook, believes Percy plans to return Black people to slavery. Percy's last memory of Ford is painful: Ford sobbing that no matter how hard he tries, he will never be anything but "jest Fode" (295), a cry Percy finds unanswerable.

After adopting his cousin LeRoy Percy's three orphaned sons, Walker, LeRoy, and Phinizy, Percy confronts the question of what to teach them. He counsels that beauty and nobility are the only certitudes available to human perception. In his final pages, Percy walks through the Greenville cemetery and envisions the end of life as a pilgrim standing before the High God, who asks, "Who are you?" The answer, given defiantly: "I am your son" (346).