In “The Hitch-Hikers”, from Eudora Welty’s first book A Curtain of Green
(1941), Tom Harris, a thirty-year-old salesman, travelling in office
supplies, “got out of Victory a little after noon and saw people in Midnight
and Louise, but went on toward Memphis”.
"It was a base, and he was thinking he would like to do something that
night. Toward evening, somewhere in the middle of the Delta, he slowed down
to pick up two hitch-hikers. One of them stood still by the end of the
pavement, with his foot stuck out like an old root, but the other was
playing a yellow guitar which caught the late sun as it came in a long
straight bar across the fields."
Harris offers the pair a ride because having company in the car will stop him
falling asleep at the wheel, but also because evening on a straight road
through flat country produces in him a feeling of loneliness, not just his
own but the whole round world’s. He soon realizes that his hitch-hikers are
tramps, though only the one with the guitar is inclined to talk. “I came
down from the hills”, he tells Harris. “We had us owls for chickens and fox
for yard dogs but we sung true.” Coming to the little town of Dulcie, Harris
decides to stop; he has an understanding with a woman there and is popular
at local parties. But while he is checking into the Dulcie Hotel, a forlorn
establishment with an old collie dog in its hall, there is a noise outside.
The two hobos have tried to make off with Harris’s car, and they have had a
quarrel, in which the silent man has viciously beaten the guitar-carrier.
During the night the victim dies, and in the morning his assailant, who has
been locked in the hotel room next to Harris, is taken to the local gaol.
And Harris, who has made a valiant attempt to amuse himself that night with
some old girlfriends, sadly accepts that “none of any of this [was] his, not
his to keep, but belonging to the people of these towns he passed through,
coming out of their rooted pasts and their mock rambles, coming out of their
time. He himself had no time. He was free; helpless”.
“The Hitch-Hikers” has proved one of the most enduring stories from a
remarkable collection. It is satisfying in literal terms: the salesman, just
past his first youth, is affected by the small tragedy of the two men he has
picked up, and yet he is able to pass on to other places, other folk. In the
morning he feels the better for a good shave, and is pleased enough to hand
over the dead man’s instrument (“the po’ kilt man’s gittar”) to the “little
coloured boy” who asks for it. The tale constitutes a beautifully compact
microcosm of life in the Southern states, indeed all of provincial America,
in the 1930s: the commercial traveller; his car and his car radio, a turn of
the dial on which relays “The One Rose that’s Left in My Heart”, played by
the Aloha Boys; the ubiquitous poverty and joblessness, hence the tramps
themselves and their desperate scheme, hence too the atmosphere of the
Dulcie Hotel, the town’s frequent explosions of violence, and, at the bottom
of the ladder, the black children who wait behind their white fellows in the
main square, in the tale’s final paragraph. But another way of reading “The
Hitch-Hikers” is to see Harris, for all his thoroughly realized
ordinariness, as representative of the artist, of Eudora Welty herself, the
writer who created him. Like Harris, she extends sympathy to people of every
degree in a society which is bereft of hope and lacking in cohesion, yet
remains obstinately itself. Harris is both beneficiary and victim of its
unsophisticated culture, but refuses to be enmeshed in it, always seeing it
in some wider context – the opening image of the Delta representing
revolving Earth itself. The road out from Dulcie, which Harris has no
alternative but to take, provides that perspective without which the artist
cannot create.
“The Hitch-Hikers” came out of Eudora Welty’s life in the 1930s. Born one
hundred years ago this month in Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in that
city, she left her native state for the University of Wisconsin before
attending the Columbia University School of Business, New York. She dreaded
becoming a teacher like her mother and had decided on a business career,
specifically in advertising. However, having seen New York City in the grip
of the Depression – its queues and groups of the jobless are viewed through
Mississippi eyes in another early story, “Flowers for Marjorie” – she
understood the impracticability of her plan, and returned south.
In 1935 she joined the Works Progress Administration – begun on Roosevelt’s
initiative in January of that year, though not receiving funding until the
Emergency Appropriation Act was passed in April. The WPA (after 1939 the
initials would stand for “Works Projects Administration”) was one of the
most remarkable endeavours of the New Deal; it provided jobs for about
8,000,000 people and concentrated on rural areas, putting up buildings for
public use, and launching arts and literacy programmes which made inroads
into the divide between white and black, so notable in the South. The
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People praised the WPA
for this.
Eudora Welty was a WPA Publicity Agent, Junior Grade, and travelled, mostly by
bus, into every one of Mississippi’s eighteen counties. She was later to say
that “the Depression . . . was not a noticeable phenomenon in the poorest
state in the Union”. Even so, she responded to the grinding hardness of life
everywhere she went (though she also saw a good deal of high spirits and joy
in being alive). And it was precisely because of the disastrous economic
predicament of the United States that she was now able to go to places
previously considered too remote or too unimportant for someone like her.
The connecting roads were sometimes little more than dirt tracks; in fact
the WPA constructed “farm-to-market” roads which could withstand the effects
of heavy rain, and made landing fields for light aircraft. Half the
population of Mississippi worked low-yield tenant farms. The state had the
largest black rural population of any state, with high illiteracy.
Before long, Welty was bringing a camera with her on her assignments, at first
a small Eastman Kodak, then a Recomar, then a larger Eastman Kodak which
proved too unwieldy, and so to a Rolleiflex. She took photographs of
Mississippians of all kinds, young and old, black and white, working and at
leisure. A good many of her subjects had never been photographed before, and
yet she never took a conventional “posed” picture and was keen to include as
much background as possible, “to set people in their context”.
"I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter, but what I was
becoming aware of more slowly was a story-writer’s truth; the thing to wait
on, to reach there in time for, is the moment in which people reveal
themselves. You have to be ready, in yourself; you have to know the moment,
when you see it. The human face and the human body are eloquent in
themselves, and a snapshot is a moment’s glimpse (as a story may be a long
look, a growing contemplation) into what never stops moving, never ceases to
express for itself something of our common feeling. Every feeling waits upon
its gesture."
The relation between these photographs and the stories the young Eudora Welty
began to write is close. Her first tale, “Death of a Travelling Salesman”,
came out of her visits to the red-clay hill country of Tishomingo County in
the north-east of her state, and is characteristic of her art as it was to
develop. It is still moving in its impact today, for its first-hand
appreciation of ordinary but obscure lives. A shy, gentle person, from a
sheltered background, Welty often faced people suffering severe deprivation
and caught up in situations that were alien to her. Yet she repeatedly
insisted that her photographs and stories were different from Walker Evans’s
famous collaboration with the writer James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men (the photographs for which were taken mostly in 1936, but not published
until 1941, because of their subjects’ protests). Where the intention of
Evans and Agee had been missionary, propagandizing and broadly political,
Welty was going out to her people out of interest, friendliness and a belief
in the basic importance of human contact. Not that emotional response was
absent. In another story in her dazzling first collection, “The Key”, she
writes of a young man seen at a rural railroad station: “You felt as though
some exact, skilful contact had been made between the surface of your hearts
to make you aware, in some pattern, of his joy and despair. You could feel
the fullness and the emptiness of this stranger’s life”.
There were some lives which called forth emotions stronger than imaginative
sympathy: indignation, horror, outrage. “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden”
came out of a true story Welty was told about a travelling show which
included among its exhibits “a little deformed nigger man” who was dressed
up as an Indian girl and forced to bite off the heads of live chickens.
Welty said she could never have invented something quite so horrible.
Showmen and victim haunted her, and the ensuing tale is principally told by
a guilty young white man, Steve, who, out of work, colluded in the business
by selling tickets and doing promotion. Steve’s description of what happened
when the black crippled boy (tellingly referred to as “it”) is rescued by an
older white man shows how intensely Eudora Welty had already learned aurally
as well as visually:
"When that man laid out his open hand on the boards, why . . . . it
didn’t know what to do. Then it drug itself to where the fella was standin’
an’ leaned down an’ grabbed holt on to that white man’s hand as tight as it
could an’ cried like a baby . . . . It wanted him to help it. So the man
said, “Do you wanta get out of this place, whoever you are?” An’ it never
answered – none of us knowed it could talk – but it just wouldn’t let that
man’s hand a-loose. It hung on, cryin’ like a baby . . ."
This scene, culminating with the agony of distress, has been photographed by
the heart, and “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden” is not the only story in
which it is voice that impresses and haunts us more than anything else.
Perhaps the most famous, most often anthologized story from A Curtain of
Green, “Why I Live at the P.O.”, is a monologue (which was always a delight
to hear spoken by its author). Here Welty’s sly humour makes itself apparent
from the start, for as we settle to listen to the postmistress’s outpouring,
we know we should not take her at her word, that she is a jealous obsessive,
distorting facts to fit her own self-flattering image:
"I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy and Uncle Rondo until my
sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home
again. Mr Whittaker! Of course I went with Mr Whittaker first, when he
appeared here in China Grove, taking “Pose Your Own” photos, and
Stella-Rondo broke us up. Told him I was one-sided. Bigger on one side than
the other, which is a deliberate, calculated falsehood: I’m the same."
Nevertheless, Eudora Welty’s ear for vernacular speech, never better
demonstrated than in this much-loved piece, so impressed her first readers
that her work’s genesis in WPA commissions and the concomitant practice of
photography was sometimes overlooked until she herself made it clear, in
essays on her own work and in her verbal contributions to two volumes of her
pictures: One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A snapshot
album (1971) and Photographs (1989), which also contains a detailed
interview with Eudora Welty, and an appreciation of her work by her close
friend, the North Carolina writer Reynolds Price, who says:
"If you know her fiction, the world you’re likely to find herein is a
sister-planet to the long verbal dream or a bedrock stratum from which that
long dream rises like breath. But suppose a patient viewer knows nothing of
her stories and novels, my guess is still that a solid world can be
constructed in a willing mind, from just these faces, these moving limbs,
the air and light behind them and the acts and feelings that wait to be."
“A solid world” must have, as well as a present and a future, a past. As she
explored Mississippi, Welty turned her mind more and more frequently to the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as experienced in the River
Country between Vicksburg and Natchez. Here lies a chain of small towns,
neglected since the Mississippi River changed course and abandoned forever
such places as Rodney’s Landing, built to receive ocean-going ships and the
cosmopolitan, moneyed folk they would have brought. Creepers and kudzu bear
down on buildings designed for lively business or pleasure, and that great
old road, the Natchez Trace, forged by Native Americans, then used by
settlers and traders travelling between Natchez, Mississippi, and Nashville,
Tennessee, is a main route no longer, but merely cuts a quiet way through a
luxuriant “great world of leaves”. But as Welty says in a fine essay, “Some
Notes on River Country” (1944):
"A place that ever was lived in is like a fire that never goes out. It
flares up, it smoulders for a time, it is fanned or smothered by
circumstance, but its being is intact, forever fluttering within it, the
result of some original ignition. Sometimes it gives out glory, sometimes
its little light must be sought out to be seen, small and tender as a candle
flame, but as certain."
If her first collection of stories is made up of heartfelt snapshots of
present-day life, her second, The White Net (1943), deriving from WPA
ventures, has as its finest items two stories set in the past, “First Love”
and “A Still Moment”. Both have metaphysical preoccupations which are a
result of the writer’s early absorption in photography. In them, as in her
later oeuvre, Welty is fascinated by non-verbal and non-confrontational
means of communication, and she devotes her artistry to exploring them. In
“First Love”, we see the politician Aaron Burr, on trial for conspiracy with
his accomplice, Harman Blennerhassett, through the medium of a “deaf boy
twelve years old”, little Joel Mayes, in Natchez in the cruel winter of
January 1807. Though he cannot understand a word of what the famous
rhetorician says, Joel feels its impassioned quality, and falls deeply in
love, not so much with the doomed man as with his mysterious potent aura.
“A Still Moment” is an even more remarkable achievement. In the dangerous
wilds of the Natchez Trace, in 1822, three men coincide (rather than meet),
as in historical reality they (just about) might have done: Lorenzo Dow, an
itinerant Man of God, who preaches dualistic sermons from horseback; James
Murrell, a bandit with a line in slave-stealing and reselling; and the
famous naturalist, John James Audubon. Then there arrives, at the
intersection of their three ways, a “solitary snowy heron” come “to feed
beside the marsh water”. The bird rouses all three men out of their
self-absorption. One of them kills it – not the murderous Murrell, not the
preacher in his Manichaean religion nervous of everything beautiful, but the
dedicated ornithologist and artist, Audubon. “In memory the heron was all
its solitude, its total beauty . . . . But it was not from memory that he
could paint.” In the tense moment before Audubon pulls the trigger, eternity
resides, and a wordless exchange takes place. Lorenzo Dow, appalled and
saddened, reflects
"The hair rose on his head and his hands began to shake with cold, and
suddenly it seemed to him that God Himself, just now, thought of the Idea of
Separateness. For surely He had never thought of it before, when the little
white heron was flying down to feed. He could understand God’s giving
Separateness first and then giving Love to follow and heal in its wonder;
but God had reversed this, and given Love first and then Separateness, as
though it didn’t matter to Him which came first. Perhaps it was that God
never counted the moments of Time; Lorenzo did that, among his tasks of love."
“A Still Moment” may seem a long journey from the hitch-hikers and the
eccentric post office mistress of the racy early stories, yet there is a
unity in the imagination that produced all these works. The moment
experienced on the Natchez Trace aspires to the transcendent in a way that
recalls Rainer Maria Rilke and W. B. Yeats, the poets Welty most admired,
but it is also inextricable from its place and time, from the landscape in
which it occurs and the natural forces that occasioned it, as well as the
rhythms of its historical protagonists. This author’s powers of empathy are
by no means confined to people of her own times but reach beyond.
Paul Binding's book With Vine-leaves in His Hair: Ibsen and the artist
was published in 2006.
