My first stop is in Jackson, Mississippi, the hometown of the masterful short-fiction writer Eudora Welty, where she was, as she put it, “locally underfoot” for most of her life. “It’s where I live and look around me—it’s my piece of the world—it teaches me,” Welty told Alice Walker. “It’s just a piece of everything that happens to be my sample.”
EUDORA WELTY, or “Miss Eudora” as native Jacksonites affectionately call their literary patron saint, was a fixture in the capital city of Mississippi from her 1910s childhood until her death in 2001. Her presence is still inescapable. Visit the Mayflower Cafe, off Capitol Street, and you’ll hear about Miss Eudora’s fondness for plate lunches of fried catfish and butter beans. Visit Bill’s Greek Tavern and you can trace more of Welty’s culinary indulgences, and Bill Matheos himself will tell you about Welty attending his daughter’s wedding as a guest of honor. If you were to dig through the waist-high stacks of material at the now-defunct Choctaw Books, with luck, you might come across a volume signed in Welty’s bunched and looping hand. Welty used to stop into Choctaw on occasion to collect another stack of murder mysteries, a genre she particularly adored. Her neighbors will recall the informal system fans had for obtaining signed books: leave them on Welty’s stoop and collect them, inscribed with a note from Miss Eudora, the next day.
The main branch of the Jackson Public Library, named in Welty’s honor, has a banner with a portrait of her gentle, toothily smiling face hanging above the entrance. If you catch them in an off moment, the librarians will tell you about how Welty, as a nine-year-old girl frothed with petticoats, used to roller-skate into the former location of the branch to scoop up her allotted two books a day, how the strict librarian Miss Annie Parker could not keep enough novels in stock to satisfy Welty’s literary appetite. Neighbors will smile and recount the $25 prize that Welty won in a jingle-writing contest, in which the sponsor, Mackie Pine Oil Specialty Co., sent a letter encouraging the twelve-year-old Welty to “improve in poetry to such an extent as to win fame.”
Ask an alumnus of Belhaven University about Welty, and they’ll tell you how, in her later years, Welty used to keep the window of her bedroom open to listen to people in the music department practice, her head just visible in the top-floor window as she sat at her typewriter. Welty’s routine trips to the hairdresser down the street, and the grocery store—Jitney Jungle number 14, the etched-out sign just visible now behind the glossy neon of the local chain that bought it—became the stuff of general knowledge in the community, as well as the seeds of her fiction. Welty’s story “Petrified Man” borrowed the rhythms of the gossip she heard at the salon, where she would go to get her short, curly hair fixed every week. (Her hairdresser, Miss Fanny, kept a scrapbook of Welty’s hairstyles. She recently turned one hundred years old.) Welty captured the local culture around her as with a butterfly net, preserving the specimens of doddering Southern ladies and mischievous children.
Authors’ homes on public display tend to have a stuffy quality, all velvet ropes and beds with hospital corners. The assiduousness of the preservation drains the life from them, makes them seem impossibly antique. But Welty’s house, a Tudor-style revival tucked into a thicket of pines, is almost unbearably welcoming. “A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out,” Welty wrote in “Some Notes on River Country,” and you can see the spark flickering in her living room. Visiting feels like an intrusion on her privacy. The rooms are littered with paintings and clever bric-a-brac—a gaudy bust of Shakespeare on the mantel, a gold heart-shaped box inscribed with “The Ponder Heart” on a living-room table. Her many accolades—the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Book Award for The Collected Works of Eudora Welty—are sequestered in a small museum adjacent rather than hung on the walls or placed on the mantel, since Welty herself had kept them in a cardboard box tucked in the upstairs closet. Books cram into shelves in almost every room and teeter in piles on most surfaces: dictionaries, collections of Greek myths, novels by Wodehouse, Thurber, O’Connor, and Pritchett. The stone path leading to Welty’s front door has one crooked stone, which she always described as looking like a false tooth.
The lived-in feeling is the result of the generosity of Welty’s nieces, Mary Alice White and Elizabeth Thompson, who donated all but a few sentimental treasures back to the state when Welty died. Mary Alice, the former director of the house, who shares Welty’s distinctively sloping jaw and quick wit, still occasionally leads tours of her aunt’s home, reminiscing about Thanksgivings and Christmases spent in the spacious dining room. She and her sister found the house after Welty’s death “slamma-jamma” with books and letters, papers pouring from the cabinets, the Kleenex scraps that Welty used as bookmarks still scattered throughout the house library. “We wanted it to still have the feeling of clutter,” White told me. “We wanted it to be honest, and spontaneous.” When visiting their aunt, Mary Alice and Elizabeth used to have to restack Welty’s reading material just to sit down. “When I ask company to dinner I have to carry the old mail off the dining room table and hide it on my bed,” Welty wrote to her friend and agent William Maxwell. “Isn’t that one of the cardinal sins? Sloth I mean. I suffer from it.”
The nieces were particularly close to their aunt, their father having died young. Mary Alice would have Welty help with her homework, and, later, Welty taught both Mary Alice and Mary Alice’s children how to drive in her Mercedes. Welty tried not to push her own work on her nieces, but Mary Alice recalled musing about a novel by Faulkner, only to have her aunt select a signed copy of the book from the wall and press it upon her. One wall of Welty’s house is a floor-to-ceiling shelf that contains signed first editions from friends like Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Anne Porter, the likes of which rare-book dealers pine for. Another simply has the translations of Welty’s works: Losing Battles in Mandarin and German, The Optimist’s Daughter in Hebrew, French, and Italian.
Stepping into Welty’s house feels less like entering another person’s home than like dropping into one of her stories. Many novelists collect autobiographical details to apply to their characters, but Welty’s are culled directly from her Southern surroundings. A notepad on her desk contained a list of names that she thought mellifluous enough to include, like “Miss Charlesta Culpepper (real)” and “Evergraze Hicks.” Critics of Welty’s writing often quibble with her penchant toward the atmospheric and the regional, concentrating on the relatively narrow scope of social life in the Deep South. (In 1943, Diana Trilling gave Delta Wedding a withering review in The Nation, describing the novel as a book in which “nothing happens,” written in language that stands “on tiptoe.”)
But Welty is not a regional writer—her purview is much smaller than that. Her writing is bound up in the romance of everyday objects, in the vagaries of memory and how they become tied to a place, a room, a piece of furniture, or a trinket. Welty had her own response to this claim, as she wrote in her essay “Place in Fiction”:
“Regional,” I think, is a careless term, as well as a condescending one, because what it does is fail to differentiate between the localized raw material of life and its outcome as art. “Regional” is an outsider’s term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the writing, because as far as he knows he is simply writing about life.
In her house, certain objects give you literary déjà vu. There is the desk from The Optimist’s Daughter in her bedroom, every slot filled with letters. The volumes of Dickens from One Writer’s Beginnings, ones that Welty’s mother had devoured and loved so fiercely that she threw them out the window to save them from a house fire before passing them on, are kept behind glass. A small stone carved with her parents’ initials that makes an appearance in The Optimist’s Daughter is part of the exhibit.
Welty’s mother, Chestina, designed and planted the sprawling back garden when the family moved into the house in the 1920s. After Welty returned to Jackson from New York to care for her dying father, she spent most of her life weeding and watering with her mother, browsing through seed catalogues and bulb bulletins, trekking through the swamp with a bottle of snake-venom antidote at her hip to find specimens for archipelagos of flower beds and planters. With her initial earnings from the publication of her first book, Eudora screened in the side porch in order to have a shady, mosquito-sheltered place to overlook the garden. It remained until Hurricane Camille tore the screen down in 1969, leaving the brick patio shorn and bare.
When the night-blooming cereus plant (“a naked, luminous, complicated flower,” Welty wrote in The Golden Apples) began hinting at exposing its fragile white buds each year, Welty would throw parties on her brick porch that would last from dusk until dawn in its honor. Her informal salon of friends and artists, including writers Hubert Creekmore, Frank Lyell, and Nash Burger, dubbed themselves the Night-Blooming Cereus Club. Later, the gardening team at her house was named in honor of those parties. Their shirts have the motto of Welty’s club: “Don’t take life too cereus. It’s too mysterious.”
Like her cereus parties, Welty’s hostessing skills were the stuff of legend. “She was so gracious, and funny,” Suzanne Marrs, a friend of Welty’s and the author of Eudora Welty: A Biography, told me. “She would have the room in stitches. Just as you caught your breath, there’d be another zinger.” Eudora’s fast-paced joking made her a social legend, even outside her work. Her storytelling wasn’t limited to the page; in fact, it seems that all the paper in the world could hardly capture the bon mots Welty threw out. If she wasn’t inclined to do something, then she “would rather eat cold grits in the attic.” Maker’s Mark bourbon, Welty’s personal favorite, flowed generously from her liquor cabinet, what she called her “entertainment center.” And as ever, Welty centered the evening on a visit to the garden, tinged by moonlight or thick with the scent of the late-spring honeysuckles.
“The sight of the garden and its scent!” Welty wrote in an initial draft of One Writer’s Beginnings. “If work hasn’t proved it real, it would have been hallucination; in this sense gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, young fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.” For Welty, gardening was the process that helped distill the imaginative jumble in her head into stories. It was in the garden, Welty wrote in her papers, that she first “set myself at a storyteller’s remove.”
Indeed, there is something botanical about Welty’s work. The delicacies of her prose trick readers like Trilling into ignoring the deep roots, the hidden thorns, the sheer gumption. Her writing process was inextricable from her gardening. Both took time, patience, and nourishment. Welty and her mother spoke in the language of flowers. Weeding, Welty would remind her friends, is not an emergency. Like her method of writing—rearranging, retyping, refining—it is a slow and constant process, best approached as a habit.
Her letters to friends tracked time by what was in bloom, what plants she could see from the window of the breakfast nook. Seen through her eyes, flowers all have personalities, fashion senses, attitudes. In her correspondence, particularly to William Maxwell, it is as if Welty spun a vocabulary all her own from the horticulture. She described “oak trees in little yellow stars and epaulettes,” and “buds as big as bobbins.” Welty’s horticultural language wasn’t just complimentary. “We saw a TV performance of Judith Anderson and M. Evans in Macbeth,” she reported to Maxwell on one occasion. “But she looked like spinach.”
Camellias were Welty’s particular favorite. They lined the sides of her house, pale pink or dazzling cherry red, some with names, like Berenice Boddy, that sound like small-town churchgoing folk. Welty even referred to her own moods in botanical terms, almost thinking about herself as a part of the garden. “I feel much greener,” she wrote Maxwell after reading one of his stories. Like camellias, Welty suffered cold snaps and roiling humidity, both literally—“Here the thermometer jumps up & down like an ibis,” she complained once—and figuratively, through the intensity of the civil rights movement and the long, painful winters of grief.
The state of the garden also tracked the ebb and flow of Welty’s personal life. Welty never married, and though she had a rich social life, her main connection was with her family—her mother, Chestina, and her brothers, Edward and Walter. Welty’s love life, like many of her friendships, was long-distance, conducted through absorbing, gorgeous letters. When she was in Jackson, her preoccupations were her work, a close circle of friends, and her flowers. While her mother was alive, she and Welty would tackle the garden together, gathering figs from the tree outside and coaxing new roses up from the beds. In the 1950s, as Welty’s friends and family began experiencing ill health, the lavish beds were left untended. All the roses died. After her mother’s death, Welty took to the garden. Nature nurtured her back to writing, comforted her in her grief.
By the 1990s, the magnificent garden had fallen into disrepair, Chestina long gone and Welty too consumed with other activities to preserve it. The once lush, multicolored sanctuary was a place of parched grass and crumbling stone benches, weeds choking whatever remained. Before Welty died in 2001, she authorized the state of Mississippi, led by preservationist and gardener Susan Haltom, to restore the garden to its former glory. The work, which Haltom documented with writer Jane Roy Brown and photographer Langdon Clay in the book One Writer’s Garden, was painstaking. The work was simply a matter of going through seed catalogs. Many of the specimens Welty had are rare or now extinct. Haltom’s goal was to approximate what the garden looked like at its peak. Her dedication to the job meant spending days in the archives, uncovering gems from Welty’s house. In her study, Haltom kept a long piece of butcher paper with a map she had drawn of Welty’s life: On the top, births, deaths, and love affairs. On the bottom, the writing Welty was doing, and, right up the middle, the state that the garden was in. Through the backyard, Haltom had become a cartographer of Welty’s life, a biographer whose main sources were mute vines and seedpods.
Welty was an emphatically private person. She kept her struggles out of the public eye as much as possible, living a quiet life in Jackson. To her, the sum of what a reader should know was within the text. The character of Mrs. Larkin in “A Curtain of Green” is as close as she comes to self-description outside of her own essays, a mixture of Welty and Chestina, touching on her own sorrow after her father’s passing, distracting herself from her grief:
She planted every kind of flower that she could find or order from a catalogue—planted thickly and hastily, without stopping to think, without any regard for the ideas that her neighbors might elect in their club as to what constituted an appropriate vista, or an effect of restfulness, or even harmony of color.
The tiny agonies and triumphs that are the sustenance of Welty’s work are all entangled in nature. But they are also, deeply and essentially, tied to the idea of home, of place. “Background matters most in how well it teaches you to look around and see clearly what’s there and in how deeply it nourishes your imagination,” Welty told The Paris Review in 1972. Jackson was the planting bed for Welty’s expansive, bountiful imagination. She was a creative ambassador of her home state in a time when it was particularly difficult to defend.
Loving Jackson, and writing about it, was not an easy task in the 1950s and 1960s. As Welty wrote, various civil rights upheavals tore through the South. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was gruesomely killed a few hours north of where Welty would sit typing. There were the nine black students arrested in Tougaloo for reading books in a “whites only” library. The Ku Klux Klan bombed the Beth Israel synagogue, not far from Welty’s house. Freedom Riders traveled on Greyhounds headed through Jackson, expecting to be met by police clubs and sneering segregationists. Except for one short story on the Medgar Evers assassination, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” Welty rarely commented directly on these events swirling around the South. Critics disparaged her for failing to more pointedly condemn Jim Crow laws, but Welty largely ignored them. Her fiction remained untouched, though Welty did respond in her essay “Must the Novelist Crusade”:
[Southern writers] do not need reminding of what our subject is. It is humankind, and we are all part of it. When we write about people, black or white, in the South or anywhere, if our stories are worth the reading, we are writing about everybody. . . . Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he’s living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.
Welty’s politics were plain: Requiring a fiction writer to respond to current events weakens their work in the long run, making it less universal. Though in smaller ways, she made her stance against segregation known, as in 1963 when she refused to speak at Millsaps, the Methodist college in Jackson, until they integrated the audience.
The only other story she wrote that explicitly addressed race, “Nicotiana,” or “The Last of the Figs,” Welty left unpublished. Its subject is the crotchety, bigoted Mrs. Ewing and her daughter, Sarah. The middle-aged Sarah, trapped caring for her ailing mother, eking out a living by illustrations, is an eerie reflection of Welty’s own biography at the time. In “Nicotiana,” there are boorish dinner party guests, troubling assessments of the “race situation,” and a wayward maid with a penchant for the fruit from the fig tree outside.
Welty’s preferred way of engaging with the racial injustice in her hometown was to write about every part of Mississippi, to paint a picture that included the bright spots as well as the atrocities. She extolled the beauties of Jackson, the Delta, the swamps that she grew up in. She wrote about the lingering distrust from Reconstruction, the complicated pride that Southerners took in their Confederate heritage, the tense, quotidian interactions between races. Today, Welty scholars point to the places her fiction sprang from, speculate upon which particular neighbor was the model for which character. Mississippi was a vast reservoir of stories that Welty could draw from. As she told the interviewer from The Paris Review, “It’s like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full. Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.”
THE FIRST TIME I visited Eudora Welty’s garden was shortly after my parents moved to Jackson, while I was in college. I had been abroad in India the whole summer as they had boxed up my childhood home in Birmingham and shipped the possessions four hours south and west into the sleepy expanse of Mississippi. When I arrived at their new house, I felt disoriented: Jackson was like Birmingham in many ways, but smudged somehow, the drawl a little deeper and the backyard clay tinged yellow instead of red. I concerned myself with rearranging familiar books on foreign shelves, taking short trips around the town to see the old Capitol Building, the fairgrounds, and the local bookstore, Lemuria, where a bust of Welty sits festooned with Mardi Gras beads.
When I got to the Welty house, one August twilight, the last tour had already gone through. I peered through the windows and looked at the brick porch, hesitating only slightly before slipping through the side trellis into the garden. The sweltering heat had died down, but the buzz of mosquitoes hung heavily in the air. I sat on a stone bench and breathed the soupy air, the humid perfume from the clumps of purple, gold, and red flowers. Something about the garden was welcoming and quiet. It made the whole of the town make a little more sense and settle in my mind.
Now I return to the garden on almost every visit. Friends come with me to stare at her trinkets; my mother accompanies me and makes sly comments on how financially difficult it is to be a full-time writer. Every tour is a little different. The docents, many of whom were Welty’s neighbors and friends when she was alive, dig into their memories to tell me about her antics, how much Miss Eudora wanted her home to be an inspiration to young writers like me. I can breathe there. It feels, to me, like a place full of small and camouflaged treasures. It wasn’t until later, reading through Welty’s work, that I realized quite why. “One place comprehended,” Welty wrote, “helps us understand all places better.”