Read Online Lancelot by Walker Percy - Free Book Online

me, bad dentist, good golfer; and two successful newcomers, the undertaker and the chiropractor.
    But golf is a bore. I quit.
    During the sixties I was a liberal. In those days one could say “I was such and such.” Categories made sense—now it is impossible to complete the sentence: I am a—what? Certainly not a liberal. A conservative? What is that? But then it was a pleasure to take the blacks’ side: one had the best of two worlds: the blacks were right and I wanted to be unpopular with the whites. It was a question of boredom. Nothing had happened since I ran 110 yards against Alabama—we lived for great deeds, you remember, unlike the Creoles, who have a gift for the trivial, for making money, for scrubbing tombs, for Mardi Gras. The sixties were a godsend to me. The blacks after all were right, the whites were wrong, and it was a pleasure to tell them so. I became unpopular. There are worse things than being disliked: it keeps one alive and alert. But in the seventies the liberals had nothing more to do. They were finished. I can’t decide whether we won or lost. In any case, in the seventies ordinary whites and blacks both turned against the liberals. Perhaps they were right. In the end, liberals become a pain in the ass even to themselves. At any rate, the happy strife of the sixties was all over. The other day I ran into a black man with whom I had once stood shoulder to shoulder defying angry whites. We hardly recognized each other. We eyed each other uneasily. There was nothing to say. He told me had had a slight stroke, nothing serious. We had won. So he bought a color TV, took up golf, and developed hypertension. I became an idler.
    I gave up golf and stayed home to do a bit of reading and even some research and writing: the Civil War of course: nobody knew much about what happened in these parts. I even wrote a learned article or two. Sometimes I took the tourists around Belie Isle, like my grandfather before me. But instead of telling them Eleanor Roosevelt jokes as he did, I gave them scholarly disquisitions on the beauty of plantation life, somewhat tongue-in-cheek—to see how far I could go without getting a rise from these good Midwestern folk—hell, I found out it’s impossible to get a rise from them, they hate the niggers worse than we ever did. Things are not so simple as they seem, I told them. There is something to be said for the master-slave relation: the strong, self-reliant, even piratical master who carves a regular barony in the wilderness and lives like Louis XIV, yet who treats his slaves well, and so help me they weren’t so bad off on Belle Isle. They became first-class artisans, often were given their freedom, and looked down on the white trash. “Now take a look at this slave cabin, ladies and gentlemen. Is it so bad? Nice high ceilings, cool rooms, front porch, brick chimney, cypress floors. Great arching oaks back yard and front. Do you prefer your little brick bungalow in Lansing?” They watched me carefully to catch the drift and either nodded seriously or laughed. It’s impossible to insult anybody from Michigan.
    On winter afternoons it began to get dark early—five o’clock. Elgin would build us a fire and Margot and I would have several drinks before supper.
    During the day I found myself looking forward to radio news on the hour. At night we watched TV and drank brandies. After the ten o’clock news I had usually grown sleepy enough to go to bed.
    So what was my discovery? that for the last few years I had done nothing but fiddle at law, fiddle at history, keep up with the news (why?), watch Mary Tyler Moore, and drink myself into unconsciousness every night.
    Now I remember almost everything, except—Every event in the past, the most trivial imaginable, comes back with crystal clarity. It’s that one night I blank out on—no, not blank out, but somehow can’t make the effort to remember. It seems