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The Remains of the Weekend

Four hundred of Walker Percy's friends came to town the other day
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So that’s what it all came to: spending late Sunday night on my neighbor’s back porch, eating leftover crawfish from the Walker Percy Weekend, drinking 80-Acre beer (me) and Basil Hayden’s bourbon (him), and listening to the blues. I’d say it was the best Sabbath denouement I’ve experienced in years.

It was a good weekend, though I didn’t realize until Sunday morning that I had taken only a handful of pictures. D’oh! Here’s one someone from the festival took of the gardens of the ruined plantation, in which we had the Friday night event; she snapped this image just as guests began to arrive:

Afton Villa Gardens, late afternoon
Afton Villa Gardens, late afternoon

I had never been to Afton Villa Gardens, even though I grew up here. I was deeply impressed by their beauty and serenity, and by the contemplation of the remains of the plantation house, which burned a few years before I was born.

That thought came to mind on Saturday night at the Crawfish Boil, when I stood at a table with one of the out-of-town visitors, a man from Phoenix, both of us peeling the most delicious mudbugs I had eaten since, well, the last Walker Percy Weekend. “I hope you know what you have here,” he said, then began a litany of the good things he has seen in the West Feliciana hills. He contrasted it with the desert urbanity in which he lives, where everything is flat, dry, and new. I appreciated so much his kind words about our place and its people and culture. It is easy to stand under an oak tree on a sweltering early summer night, drink cold, crisp Abita beer, eat crawfish so spicy they burn your fingers, and think you are in paradise.

For me, the most surprising and delightful moment of the weekend occurred when Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell, the older of Walker and Bunt Percy’s two daughters, opened up about her father and his relationship with bourbon on the Alcohol and Southern writers panel. Don’t worry, there were no secrets, only charming stories. She said that once her folks were vacationing with Shelby Foote and his wife on the beach at Gulf Shores, Alabama, which in those days was not the easiest place in which to find liquor. Shelby stepped on a dead saltwater catfish that had washed ashore. The fin pierced his bare foot. Walker, who was a doctor, looked at it and told Shelby that if he cleaned and sterilized the wound, it could hold until the next day, when they could go to the hospital and get it fixed up.

“Let’s just pour some vodka on it,” Percy said, alluding to the spirits back at the hotel room.

“You’ve got some bourbon on you right now,” Foote said.

“Shelby,” Walker admonished, “we can’t waste bourbon.”

And so forth. Mary Pratt said that when she and her sister were small children, Daddy called bourbon his “eye medicine.” As it turned out, I saw Mary Pratt and her Covington crew yesterday at Hot Tails, having lunch. She promised they would be back next year. I say we give her a session of her own. She is a terrific storyteller, and had the audience in the palm of her hand:

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Baylor’s Ralph C. Wood came to the divine liturgy with us on Sunday morning, which was a treat. Ralph, who generously reviews How Dante Can Save Your Life in the current issue of Christianity Today, had shared with me a day earlier that he had been reading deeply into the theology of the Orthodox church, especially the Russians, in recent years. Ralph is a lifelong Southern Baptist who is not interested in converting, but he wants to know the full historical, theological, and liturgical roots of the Church. He and his wife are about to embark on a trip to Russia that is more or less a pilgrimage to the holy sites there. Here’s Ralph with our Father Matthew during coffee hour after the liturgy:

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Late last night, our last houseguest asked me if I had been pleased with the festival this year. It was her first, and she said she can’t wait to come back, not only because of the Walker Percy Weekend (“I met the most amazing assortment of people. You wouldn’t believe the kind of people who come to this event”), but also because she has discovered a love of south Louisiana, and is eager to get to know it better.

I told her I wasn’t sure what I thought of the festival this year. It’s in my nature only to see the things that went wrong, or at least the things I could have done better. And I had a list of things I could have done better with my part of the festival. It takes a few days for me to get perspective, I said.

She said that she thought it went very, very well. I’m quoting her from memory here, but she said something like, “This is what you want a festival like this to be. I’ve been to a lot of academic events, and they too often seem dry and dull. Because you all have the bourbon, the crawfish, and all the conviviality mixed in with the lectures, it really does make the ideals behind the Weekend real in a way you might call incarnational. It really is the right thing to do.”

I take her point. It was good to hear that, because that is exactly the sweet spot we are aiming for. Every year, we hope to get better and better about hitting it. The last thing Ralph said to me before he left town was, “I think we could do a good session on Dostovesky and Percy next year.” He offered to put it together. Sold, absolutely.

At the festival, a number of people very kindly came up to me and thanked me for putting it on. I’m easy to pick out in a crowd, with my goofy glasses. What they couldn’t have known is I was the member of the organizing committee who did the very least of all. It is staggering to contemplate the amount of work necessary to stage even a minimalist festival like our Walker Percy Weekend. Festivalgoers saw a lot of these workers, but may not have realized (because they do not have blogs) that it was they who did all the heavy lifting, and made the Weekend possible. Our crew includes Missy Couhig, Connie Hunter, Nancy Vinci, James Fox-Smith, Carly Whatley, Miles Higgins, Sylvia Leake, Betsy Levasseur, Janice Wynn, Thomas Temple, Norman Ferachi, Ashley Fox-Smith, Liz Hazlip, Stacey King, Willia Parkerson, Lauren Field, and Dave Carner. I say “includes” because that’s the list I can come up with this morning, before my second cup of coffee, but we also had a number of volunteers. Plus, all the speakers and performers at the weekend came to St. Francisville — some from a long ways away — on their own dime, solely out of love for Walker Percy and Southern literature. Theirs was a gift to the rest of us.

I have to give special mention to the contribution of Nancy Vinci to our event. Here she is earlier this year, on the banks of the Bogue Falaya, in Walker’s back yard, with Ann Percy Moores:

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We joke about Nancy, and affectionately call her the Dowager Countess of West Feliciana Parish, but the truth is that Walker Percy Weekend would not happen, and would not have happened, without her. She is one of those women who makes culture happen in small Southern towns, and always has been. Three years ago, not long after I moved back, she knocked on my door one day, came in for iced tea, and said, “Honey, we need a new event in our town. What do you think we might do?” I had no idea, but at last I said that Walker Percy was a great Southern novelist who had lived here in the Florida parishes of Louisiana, and had set some of his fiction here in West Feliciana. Maybe we could do a festival about him? She thought that sounded good, and left. After which I promptly forgot about it.

Until the phone call came to Julie and me, and to our friends James and Ashley Fox-Smith, summoning us to dinner at Galatoire’s. Miss Nancy gave us our Walker Percy marching orders that night at her table, and so we began. For the last three years, she has been the inspiration behind the perspiration, and more than the inspiration: she directs the Walker Percy Weekend as Gen. Eisenhower directed the invasion of Europe. It takes a lot of people to pull this event off, but I think all of us would agree that Miss Nancy keeps us together, focused, and moving forward. The last event of the festival on Saturday night was the drawing for a weekend in the Walker Percy Suite at the Southern Hotel in Covington, which the hotel, which has recently undergone a breathtaking renovation, donated to the festival. I stuck my hand in the closed box on stage, drew the winning ticket — and damned if it didn’t read “Nancy Vinci.” Which, let’s be honest, proves there is justice in the universe. She deserves it.

If you slipped out of town without buying a Walker Percy tee shirt, a coozy, or any of the other paraphernalia, stop by our online store. We still have some things in limited quantities — also including DVD copies of Win Riley’s great documentary, and the festival poster — but when they’re gone, they’re gone. These are the only tee shirts like this in the world; we produced them by special arrangement with the Walker Percy estate (thank you Ann and Mary Pratt!), which licensed his signature to us because all the profits from the sale of tee shirts and the rest go to the Julius Freyhan Foundation, the not-for-profit entity whose aim is to restore the old Freyhan school downtown, and turn it into an arts and cultural center. In fact, every penny we make off the Walker Percy Weekend goes to restoring the Freyhan school. Your presence at our weekend party was literally an investment in the future of Southern writing. Thank you all for coming, and we will see you next year.

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