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5 “Super-Negroes” and Hybrid Aristocrats: Race and Class in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins
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5 “SUPER-NEGROES” AND HYBRID ARISTOCRATS Race and Class in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins In an essay written shortly after the publication of his first novel, The Moviegoer, Walker Percy asserted the inescapable commitment of the writer—especially the southern writer—to the issue of race: “Every Southern writer must come to some kind of terms with the Negro. He can no more avoid it than a Negro writer can avoid writing about the white man” (Virtues and Voices 82). As one might expect, Percy focuses his attention on racial issues in many of his novels, from the subtly nuanced interchanges between Binx Bolling and his Aunt Emily’s butler Mercer in The Moviegoer to the satirically exaggerated chaos of the Bantu revolution in Love in the Ruins (97).1 Like Hurston, Faulkner, Welty, and Gaines, Percy inevitably writes about race when he writes about class, and his work is crucial to understanding the relationship between racial paternalism and the construction of aristocratic class identity as the South moves from a society and an economy rooted in the agricultural life of the plantation to a society and an economy firmly planted in the business world of the cities and suburbs. Percy evinced an interest in the breakdown of racial paternalism as early as his 956 essay“Stoicism in the South.” In this piece he notes that “the old alliance of Negro and white gentry has broken up,”and he muses, “What is the reason for this dissolution of the old alliance? . . . Does it not, in fact, reflect a profound cultural change which, as it has turned out, cannot be accommodated within the ethos of the upper-class white?” (84). He further argues,“The fact is that neither the ethos nor the traditional worldview of the upper-class white Southerner is any longer adequate to the situation” (84). In The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins, Percy explores the implications of this truth, searching for an ethos that would be adequate for a South in which paternalism no longer serves to organize relationships among races and classes. In the earlier novel, 23 24 PLANTATION AIRS Percy explores the concept of racial hybridity; though he sees some hope in the potential of hybrid figures to disrupt the traditional, strictly binarized hierarchies of race and class that organize southern life, his depiction of privileged whites as the only successful hybrids suggests that, far from being a subversive or revolutionary concept, hybridity may simply serve to reaffirm those hierarchies. In Love in the Ruins, Percy satirizes white paranoia about the collapse of essentialist racial categories and offers a vision of coalition and community that contrasts sharply with The Last Gentleman’s problematic privileging of aristocratic whiteness. Percy’s treatment of the relationship between racial hybridity and paternalism is much influenced by the theories of his adoptive father, Delta planter William Alexander Percy (to whom Walker and his cousins referred as “Uncle Will”). The elder Percy played a major role in the political and social development of the early-twentieth-century South, and Walker’s perceptions of the relationship between race and class could not have escaped his enormous influence. However, though he pays warm tribute to Will Percy in his introduction to Lanterns on the Levee, his adoptive father’s memoir, he significantly chooses his attitudes about race as a representative example of the significant differences in their philosophies :“The views on race relations . . . diverge from my own and have not been helpful, having, in my experience, played into the hands of those whose own interest in these matters is deeply suspect. But even when I did not follow him, it was usually in relation to him, whether with him or against him, that I defined myself and my own direction” (“Uncle Will” 56).2 These “views” are most succinctly and comprehensively expressed in a passage from the Lanterns on the Levee chapter “A Note on Racial Relations”:“To live habitually as a superior among inferiors, be the superiority intellectual or economic, is a temptation to dishonesty and hubris, inevitably deteriorating. To live among a people whom, because of their needs, one must in common decency protect and defend is a sore burden in a world where one’s own troubles are about all any life can shoulder. . . . And, last, to live among a people deceptively but deeply alien and unknowable guarantees heart-aches, unjust expectations, undeserved...