Eudora Welty's Language of the Spirit

An interesting gap in Eudora Welty's portrayals of Mississippi life in the small towns and countryside of the 1930s and '40s is the slight attention to the vigorous, often fundamentalist Protestantism that typified the culture, whatever the social class, race, or gender. Indeed, Mississippi lies so centrally in the South's Bible belt that it has sometimes been referred to as the belt's buckle, signifying of course the intense religiosity that continues to characterize the state—today one of the most conservative theologically and politically. It is a very, very red state, in the current lingo of political coloration.

Mr. Rondo, the preacher who marries Dabney and Troy in Delta Wedding, hardly makes an entrance into the family's busy life. The family clan and other Banner folk of Losing Battles are immersed in Baptists and sprinkled with Methodists, but Brother Bethune, Brother Dollarhide, even Grandpa Vaughn, the Baptist preacher, are small players in the frolic that pits Jack and Gloria and the fortified family reunionists against Judge Moody and schoolteacher Julia Mortimer. When a cyclone tosses the Methodist church across the road, cheek by jowl with the Baptists, only comedy ensues. The Methodists methodically pick up every board, every scrap, and move the church back to where it belongs. Only Uncle Nathan, the wayfaring stranger, labors under the indictment of sin. Having slain Mr. Dearman and allowed a jury to convict and hang a black man for the murder, he amputates the murdering hand and then wanders the land in penance, removed from family except for the annual reunions.

Welty was herself christened in the Galloway Methodist Church in Jackson, attended Sunday school in her youth, and, as she writes in One Writer's Beginnings, followed her mother's example as one who loved to sit and read the Bible for herself (873). It was the language of the King James version that affected Welty most deeply. Speaking for herself and for southern writers of her generation, she said that "its cadence entered into our ears and our memories for good. The evidence, or the ghost of it, lingers in all our books. In the beginning was the Word" (878). She's playing, of course, on the word "word," invoking not the divine but the human possession of language, the founding attribute of human kind.

The Weltys were not a church-going family, a descriptor that speaks volumes about the independence of her parents from Jackson's tight, churchy community. And yet, Welty notes that her parents had grown up in "religious households"; their three children had been taught to pray at bedtime, and all three had been baptized in the Methodist Episcopal Church South (873). What Welty's own secular sense of social justice may have owed to the prominent tenets of Methodism's Social Gospel does, I think, pose an interesting and almost untapped area for future Welty research.

By Social Gospel, I refer to that set of beliefs, dating at least from late-nineteenth-century Methodism, calling for a Christianity that enacts on this earth the New Testament commandments to aid the poor, the outcasts, the rejected minorities. The actualization of these beliefs fell largely to the Woman's Board of Foreign Missions and the Woman's Home Mission Society in the M.E. Church, South. The activism of Methodist women in the South in many social reform movements of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries has been widely recounted by such scholars as Anne Firor Scott, Jean E. Friedman, and John Patrick McDowell. In The Social Gospel in the South: The Woman's Home Mission Movement in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, 1886-1939, McDowell writes that the record of this period reveals that women active in home missions were deeply interested and involved in addressing social problems and initiating reform (4-5). They were particularly concerned with the stability of the family and sought to ameliorate conditions (for example, child labor, availability of alcohol) that were detrimental to the home. The commitment to missions was also a chief emphasis in the children's Sunday school classes. In The...