William Alexander Percy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alexander_Percy

William Alexander Percy (May 14, 1885 – January 21, 1942), was a lawyer, planter, and poet from Greenville, Mississippi. His autobiography Lanterns on the Levee (Knopf 1941) became a bestseller. His father LeRoy Percy was the last United States Senator from Mississippi elected by the legislature. In a largely Protestant state, the younger Percy championed the Roman Catholicism of his French mother.

Early life and education

He was born to Camille, a French Catholic, and LeRoy Percy, of the planter class in Mississippi, and grew up in Greenville on the big river. His father was elected as US senator in 1910. As an attorney and planter with 20,000 acres under cultivation for cotton, he was very influential in the state.

Percy attended the Episcopal University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, a postbellum tradition in his family. He spent a year in Paris before going to Harvard for a law degree. After returning to Greenville, Percy joined his father's firm in the practice of law.

During World War I, Percy joined the Commission for Relief in Belgium in November 1916. He served in Belgium as a delegate until the withdrawal of American personnel upon the U.S. declaration of war in April 1917. He served in the US Army in World War I, earning the rank of Captain and the Croix de Guerre.

From 1925 to 1932, Percy edited the Yale Younger Poets series, the first of its kind in the country. He also published four volumes of poetry with the Yale University Press. A Southern man of letters, Percy befriended many fellow writers, Southern, Northern and European, including William Faulkner. He socialized with Langston Hughes and other people in and about the Harlem Renaissance. Percy was a sort of godfather to the Fugitives at Vanderbilt, or Southern Agrarians, as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren were often called.

Percy's family was plagued with suicides, including his first cousin LeRoy Pratt Percy and possibly his wife Phinizy, who died in an auto accident. William adopted his cousin's children, Walker, LeRoy (Roy) and Phinizy (Phin) Percy, after they were orphaned. As an adult, Roy married Sarah Hunt Farish, the daughter of Will Percy's law partner, Hazlewood Power Farish. He took charge of the Percy family plantation, Trail Lake. Phin married and moved to New Orleans to practice law.

Percy's most well-known work is his memoir, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1941). His other works include the text of "They Cast Their Nets in Galilee," which is included in the Episcopal Hymnal (1982) (Hymn 661), and the Collected Poems (Knopf 1943). One of his pieces was published under the name A.W. Percy in Men and Boys, an anonymous anthology of Uranian poetry (New York, 1934).

A friend of Herbert Hoover from the Belgium Relief Effort during the early years of World War I, Percy was put in charge of relief during the great flood of 1927, when an area larger than all New England (minus Maine) was inundated. During the flood, thousands of blacks fleeing farms and plantations under water sought refuge on the levee in Greenville. Percy believed that the refugees needed to be evacuated to Vicksburg, Mississippi to receive better care and food, and arranged for ships to prepare to remove them. But, local planters, including Percy's father, a forcefull former US Senator, opposed this decision. They worried that if the black workers were removed from the area, they would never return. Percy capitulated and the ships left Greenville empty. After conditions on the levee deteriorated, Percy was strongly criticized in the national press. He later resigned his post and left for a trip to Japan the following day.

Legacy and honors

The William Alexander Percy Library at 341 Main Street, Greenville, Mississippi is named for him.

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William Alexander Percy was born on 15 May 1885 in Greenville, Mississippi, and was named after his grandfather, a planter and lawyer who served as a colonel during the Civil War, earning the nickname the Gray Eagle of the Valley. Will Percy perceived himself as distanced from and overshadowed by his father, LeRoy, a powerful planter, lawyer, and US senator. Percy never felt close to his mother, Camille, and found maternal affection from his young nurse, Nain. The weight of family tradition pressed on Percy, who was marked as different from an early age. During his early education at the Sisters of Mary Convent, Percy accepted Catholicism. His parents withdrew him from the convent when he decided he wanted to be a priest, and he finished his early education with a personal tutor.

Percy attended the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, following a path trod by three generations of earlier Percys. During his time in college, Percy’s ten-year-old brother, LeRoy, was accidentally killed by a rifle, which may have led to Percy’s disaffection with the Catholic Church. After graduating from Sewanee in 1904, Percy spent a year traveling Europe and Egypt. He then received a law degree from Harvard University in 1908 and returned to Greenville to practice law. Percy composed poetry that was largely ignored in Greenville but won the attention and praise of the Fugitives at Vanderbilt. Percy’s first volume of poetry, Sappho in Levkas and Other Poems (1915), invokes many themes of classical literature and romantic poetry. The influence of place can be seen in poems such as “To the Mississippi.”

Percy was climbing Mount Etna when World War I erupted and in 1916 served on the Commission for Relief in Belgium. He joined the US Army from 1917 to 1919 and trained soldiers in the 92nd Division (the US Army’s first African American division), earning the Croix de Guerre in 1918 and rising to the rank of captain. Some of the poems in his collection In April Once (1920) reflect his wartime experiences in France.

Percy returned to Greenville to fight battles on the home front against the Ku Klux Klan. Beginning in March 1922, his father began openly campaigning against Klan activists in Greenville. He humiliated Klansmen in several open speeches and letters that led to Klan threats on his life. Will Percy responded by threatening to have KKK Exalted Cyclops Ray Toombs killed. Under the protection of the Percy family, Washington County and Greenville never saw the rise of Klansmen into the seats of local power. Percy’s next book of poetry, Enzio’s Kingdom and Other Poems (1924), contains several “Delta Sketches” that reflect the land conflicted by a pastoral ideal where spring “is too sweet” and by violence “where yet men hate and kill.”

If the memory of spring was “too sweet” in the poem “Delta Autumn,” the reality of spring became all too nightmarish on 21 April 1927, when the Great Flood broke the Mounds Landing levee and threatened the thirty-two hundred acres of the Percys’ Trail Lake plantation. Much of the Delta would not be dry again for months, and people took refuge on the highest ground available—the surviving levee wall and the second story of buildings. LeRoy Percy put Will in charge of the Greenville Relief Committee, where he confronted the task of feeding ten thousand displaced townspeople. White residents were quickly evacuated to Vicksburg, but seventy-five hundred African Americans were concentrated on the seven-mile-long levee to simplify the logistics of delivering food and supplies. Adequate shelter could not be provided, so Percy began to plan for their evacuation. However, his father intervened. He and the other planters feared that their African American laborers would not return to Greenville if they were allowed to leave. Will Percy could not countermand his powerful father, and instead of fleeing with the white citizens to Vicksburg, African Americans were trapped on the levee and forced to work at gunpoint in brutal living conditions. On 31 August Percy resigned his post.

After LeRoy Percy’s death in 1929, Will Percy took charge of the family and inherited his father’s plantation and business. He became a patron of the arts and paid for various social welfare programs to help African Americans in Greenville, but the schism brought by the flood could never be repaired, nor could Percy, ever resorting to the bonds of paternalism, consider African Americans as his equals.

Shortly after the appearance of Selected Poems (1930) Percy adopted his three recently orphaned cousins, LeRoy, Phinizy, and future novelist Walker Percy. At the urging of Alfred Knopf, his publisher, Percy committed many of the events of his life to paper in his autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941). Emphasizing that he was not a planter but a planter’s son, Lanterns offered a stoic perspective on the decline of upper-class traditions of paternalism, patronage of and respect for the arts, and good manners. Lanterns is Percy’s only literary effort that has met with critical praise and endured as a masterpiece. After his death on 21 January 1942, Knopf published The Collected Poems of William Alexander Percy (1943).