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12. The Flood and After
- The University of North Carolina Press
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210 12. THE FLOOD AND AFTER I learned from it due humility as to my own indispensability and due wonder at that amazing alloy of the hellish and the divine which we call man. —William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee Early 1927 found Will Percy writing a letter to his friend Witter Bynner. Bynner was a poet who lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and who counted among his friends artists such as D. H. Lawrence, Ansel Adams, Igor Stravinsky, and W. H. Auden, among others. He was a part of the circle of intellectuals who made Santa Fe and Taos home to a culture of experimentation—with drugs, with sexual expression, with art. Percy and Bynner had been friends since at least 1914, though only two letters between them have surfaced, both in Bynner’s papers. Bynner lived openly in a monogamous homosexual relationship with his partner, Robert Hunt, for thirty-four years and was outspoken about his racial egalitarianism and his advocacy of women’s suffrage and gay artists. He traveled to China and Japan and translated Chinese poetry. Percy wrote to Bynner that the reading he had done recently “fires me up to go to China. If I go next summer will you give me a line to a Chinese gentleman or two? May I expect wisdom or peace or romance ... ? I’m prepared to receive a lot. I’m very needy.”1 In addition to planning his trip to Asia, which he would take later in the year, Percy was also writing. In fact, he wrote in his memoir, in April 1927 he was in “a writer’s tantrum.”2 He was trying to finish a poem called “Three April Nocturnes.” The poem provides a compelling snapshot of Percy writing in Mississippi in 1927, perhaps thinking of his recent trip to Florence, perhaps of a more recent episode. It begins with a reminiscence: This night of air like warm finger-tips touching Sleepily my cheek or asleep in my shoulder’s hollow, I remember the kisses they gave me in tenderness or passion, Never in love, the ones they could spare me, forgetful, The Flood and After : 211 And I am thankful for each, regretting nothing, Only wishing they lay on my mouth again To-night when the moist buds are uncrinkling in starlight.3 Like many of Percy’s poems, “Three April Nocturnes” celebrates sexual passion ; though one notable difference is that here, sex is disconnected from love. “They” are not named, they are “forgetful,” and they brought pleasure without regret. This is an instance in Percy’s writing that depicts physical passion enjoyed merely for the pleasures of the body. The narrator is not troubled by this but rather takes pleasure in the memory and wishes for more. It was raining outside as Percy worked on this poem, and it had been raining for weeks. The river was beginning to swell, as was its habit every spring. But this rain seemed to keep coming. Another Greenville writer, the diarist Henry Waring Ball, was in his home writing as well. His observations of Greenville life in his diary during March and April gave voice to his range of anxieties, foremost among which was the rain: “pouring almost incessantly for 24 hours”; “Rain almost all night”; “I believe the filth of theatres and pictures, dress, ‘music,’ is due largely to Jew dominance”; “Violent storm almost all night”; “Rain last night, of course”; “We have heavy showers and torrential downpours almost every day and night”; “Nell and I to church, Red hot sermon on the evils of the theatre and moving pictures and women’s immodest dress”; “The worst Good Friday I ever saw. A night of incessant storm—wind, lightning, thunder and torrents of rain”; “I have never seen it look so appalling. I am very anxious.”4 On the night of April 21, the levee broke. When it did, a torrent of water washed over the Mississippi Delta that eventually covered ten counties in water five to twenty feet deep. Over 100,000 people fled their homes. Within days, Greenville’s population doubled as black and white refugees poured into town. Cow and mule and horse corpses floated past houses and schools. The deep brown and foaming water cut Greenville off from the rest of the world: train tracks were underwater, roads were underwater, cars were underwater; to dock a boat at the landing in Greenville risked further damage to the levee. The mayor...