Set in the twilight years of southern aristocracy, The Percys of
Mississippi is a biography of a family in whose bloodline ran both
a strong commitment to public service and an equally strong but
more private dedication to literature. Following four generations
of Percy family history, Lewis Baker chronicles the lives and
public careers of Colonel William Alexander Percy, a planter and
lawyer; his son LeRoy, a lawyer and United States Senator; LeRoy's
son Will, a poet and lawyer; and Will's nephew and adopted son, the
novelist Walker Percy. Known as the ""gray eagle of the delta"" for
his piercing eyes and silver hair, Colonel Percy served as a
Confederate officer in both the eastern and western campaigns of
the Civil War. He returned home to practice law and manage the
family's property, but he was soon drawn into the arena of state
politics, where he fought vigorously to strengthen the Mississippi
River levee system and to protect his district from the perils of
Reconstruction. With Colonel Percy's death in 1888, LeRoy Percy
inherited his father's law practice and his mantle of leadership in
the community. LeRoy used his power as a United States Senator to
continue his father's long quest for an adequate levee system;
struggled to loosen the Ku Klux Klan's grip of fear on the delta;
and campaigned tirelessly to discredit the divisive creed of the
state's rising demagogue politicians. In the election of 1911,
LeRoy Percy was defeated in his bid to be returned to the Senate,
losing to the flamboyant demagogue James Kimble Vardaman, the
""White Chief."" It was a defeat echoed across the South throughout
the dawning years of the twentieth century, as poorer whites
rejected the moderate counsel of the planter class, their
traditional leaders, and embraced the demagogues' fiery gospel of
resentment. It was this troubling, altered South that LeRoy Percy
bequeathed to his son William Alexander. Will Percy fought in World
War I, taught for a time, and stood at his father's side throughout
many of the battles to safeguard the delta from extremism. But
Will's true calling was as a poet, and his lasting contribution to
the delta would be in the form of a memorial to its past, his
memoir Lanterns on the Levee. ""During my day,"" he wrote Will
Percy not long before his death, "" I have witnessed the
disintegration of that moral cohesion of the South which had given
it its strength and its sons their singleness of purpose and
simplicity."" It would be left to Walker Percy to fully confont
htis modern, disintegrated South; to seek in such works as The
Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman, and The Second Coming the place of
the Percy family's values in a world that has little use for
aristocrats.
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