From 2000 to 2004, I taught Spanish at Greenville Weston High School in Greenville, Mississippi as a member of the Mississippi Teacher Corps out of Ole Miss. It was a very challenging time during my life, but a very enlightening time as well. Greenville has been known as the Queen City of the Delta, a city known as a center for barges and tugboat and cotton. Greenville High School is considered a critical needs school where many students struggle academically and where there are a lot of discipline problems. Greenville is also a city of high unemployment and extreme poverty. The high school, at one time, was one the most prestigious in the state. Shelby Foote, one of the most respected Civil War historians to have ever lived, grew up in Greenville and attended Greenville High School. One of his classmates was the novelist Walker Percy. Percy, a convert to Catholicism, became an acclaimed novelist and Catholic philosopher. He is buried at the cemetery at the Benedictine abbey in Covington, Louisiana, where he was an oblate of the Benedictines. If you have not read the Movie Goer, Percy’s acclaimed existentialist novel set in New Orleans and winner of the National Book Award, you really owe it to yourself to read it. It is one of my favorite books, one that I read again and again. Walker Percy is a national treasure, that is for sure, and one of the community of saint whom I respect dearly, even thought he has not been officially canonized (yet, I add with hope!) Saturday, May 28, would have been Walker Percy’s 100th birthday, something my good friend Anne Belcher pointed out to me, since it was mentioned in the daily devotional that we both read - Give Us This Day.
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