This article was written by Kelly Pfaff
It is the South that Eudora Welty longs for in her writing.
I am not a Southern, not accustomed to the effusive hospitality and slower pace of things. So this past summer, I marched into Eudora's house, hoping to gain a new perspective into her Jackson, Mississippi life. As an outsider, I didn't know what to expect, but I did know that I admired her, from her simple story "A Worn Path" to her Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Optimist's Daughter.
Jackson was the vehicle for Welty's imagination - although in her day Mississippi was America's lowest-ranking state economically. Unfortunately, that fit the exact description I had of Mississippi from movies, books and plain hearsay.
Yet Jackson had much to offer, presenting a way of life that may be foreign to some, but to people like Ms. Welty and the characters she created, it was nothing more than home.
During my first night in Jackson, I was invited with my companions to a social hosted by the local garden club. The ladies prepared thick layer cakes with endless amounts of frosting. We sipped ambrosial wine and syrupy bourbon while meandering through the fragrant roses, azaleas and magnolias of the gardens. As we wandered around the Weems House across from Millsaps College, the ladies told me that garden clubs were still common in places like Jackson - creating some of the social climate prevalent in Southern cities. Through the entire event, the ladies had abundantly good manners, provided us with endless discussion about people and events of the day, and possessed a common desire to be friendly toward us newcomers. In essence they created an atmosphere of the days of Ms. Eudora Welty, a proper Southern lady herself.
This was the surface, at least, of a woman who was much more complex in the cultural sentiment she explored in her writing.
Not much of a socialite herself, Ms. Welty still valued the time she had with her friends and family - among them Elizabeth Bowen, fellow author, and her mother, with whom Welty lived until her death. Welty never gave the impression of being antisocial. In fact, those who knew her described her as lively and fascinating, but simply uninterested in the gossip and chatter that sometimes dominated the free time of ladies. As a writer, she realized the importance of listening and observing. In her autobiography One Writer's Beginnings, in the section entitled "Listening," she writes, Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Thus being active in town - she could be seen at the library, post office, or downtown - allowed Welty the focus she needed for the solitude of a writing career.
In Jackson, nothing is more unmistakable than the rich and lilting dialect of the region. When I first heard the people of Jackson, their speech had a deep impression on me. The "Yes, ma'am" and "No, ma'am" in the cafeteria line sprinkled with an occasional "might could" and "daddy" instead of the formal-sounding "father" formed the cadence of the Southern speech that reminded me of Welty's writing.
In more than one story, Ms. Welty wrote in monologue, capturing the voice of a Southerner, usually someone with a humorous, limited perspective. Perhaps her greatest monologue, present in "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" portrays the voice of a bigoted white man who planned and executed the murder of a black Civil Rights activist, Medgar Evers. He speaks with the flare of a Southerner, yet the hatred and ignorance of a cold-blooded killer:
It was mighty green where I skint over the yard getting back. That nigger wife of his, she wanted nice grass! I bet my wife would hate to pay her water bill. And for burning her electricity. And there's my brother-in-laws' truck, still waiting with the door open. "No Riders" - that didn't mean me.
This was the only story, Welty explained, she wrote out of anger.
Medgar Evers was no small figure in Jackson; in fact, the airport, Jackson-Evers International Airport, bears his name.
My companions and I visited the Medgar Evers home, couched in a regular middle-class neighborhood northwest of downtown Jackson. However, in Welty's day this neighborhood was the other side of her beloved Jackson, the dark side of racial prejudice and violence. This was the side that she did not know firsthand, yet chose not to ignore in her writing. To Welty, both the noble and the shameful parts of her town represented the truth. She observed, In the act and course of writing stories, these are two of the springs, one bright, one dark, that fed the stream. Although deeply loyal to Jackson and her people, Welty clearly hated the injustices being done to blacks during her day.
The culmination of my trip though was my visit to the home of Ms. Welty herself on Pinehurst Street across from Belhaven College. A Tudor-style and quite large, her home is large in the sense of a spacious, not pretentious manner. In the back of the home lay Ms. Welty's cutting garden, filled with zinnias, camellias, summer phlox, roses, and morning glories, to name a few.
That afternoon, I enjoyed lunch with my companions in her garden, sitting beneath a white trellis that shaded us from some of the afternoon heat. The timing of my trip - the hottest month in Mississippi - only added to the garden's effect. For as sultry and dry as the days could be, they could just as easily turn to rain and storms. That day, as we ate our lunch surrounded by a border of perennials, the air felt wet and sticky, with the perfume of the flowers surrounding us.
It was this shifting in weather, and the fragrance of the green, that Ms. Welty loved and frequently incorporated in her stories. As a child she had delighted in her father's skill at being a "weather prophet," and she herself was always thrilled by the approach of an impending storm. She conveyed this feeling of excitement in "The Winds," a story set during a summer storm.
Ms. Welty also was meticulous in naming her flora and fauna throughout her writing, and this was evidenced through a series of markers throughout her garden. After lunch, I walked down the rows of flowers, descending slowly towards the woodland garden, and read on the markers various selections from her writing.
Inside the house, the front parlor had been carefully arranged into the form of clutter and disorder Ms. Welty would have enjoyed while working at home. The coffee table was strewn with books. An appointment book was open on the sofa with more books stacked up against the pillow. In the adjoining room I saw a flurry of journals on top of the dining table, and alongside them pieces of a manuscript she might have been working on. This was the house of a woman familiar with work, with words and all the wonders they presented.
Walking through the rooms, seeing the kitchen and the photographs and the framed letter from E. M. Forster, I understood how the comforts of Ms. Welty's home were a necessary environment for her imagination. Contrary to some people's views, the imagination does not require exotic sights in order for it to work properly. Ms. Welty understood this well when she wrote:
As you have seen, I am a writer who came from a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring comes from within.
For Eudora Welty, Jackson was home and, after spending a week in her city, I began to understand the source of inspiration for her stories and novels. The travels of my week felt much longer in the end. Eudora Welty seemed to understand why:
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations . . . And all the time that we think were getting there so fast, how slowly do we move.
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