(2 of 2)
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.