A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

ONE: Life in Jackson: Eudora’s Early Years

3 .1 Life in Jackson: Eudora’s Early Years Learning stamps you with its moments. Childhood’s learning is made up of moments. It isn’t steady. It’s a pulse. —Eudora Welty, “Listening,” One Writer’s Beginnings S eeing a snowflake for the first time is one of these moments. Eudora Welty recounts this experience she had as a six-year-old elementary student in music class. She was living in Mississippi, in the hot and humid South, where snow was seldom seen, and she remembers how her teacher stamped this moment in her memory: [Miss Johnson] was from the North, and she was the one who wanted us all to stop the Christmas carols and see snow. The snow falling that morning outside the window was the first most of us had ever seen, and Miss Johnson threw up the window and held out wide her own black cape and caught flakes on it and ran, as fast as she could go, up and down the aisles to show us the real thing before it melted. In 1909, the year that author Eudora Welty was born, Jackson, Mississippi , was a much simpler place, where snow falling was an exciting event, children ran after lightning bugs, and mothers baked bread, churned butter, and called the butcher and asked him to send over the best cut of the day. During her ninety-two years in Jackson, 4 Life in Jackson: Eudora’s Early Years Eudora witnessed close to a century of change in her hometown and state, but the year she was born, her family lived only two blocks from the state capitol and kept a cow behind their house. There were no modern grocery stores, and each household, Eudora recalls,“provided (ours did) its own good butter (which implies a churn and, of course, a cow) and its own eggs, and most likely it grew its own tomatoes, beans, strawberries, even asparagus.” She recalls her childhood home on Congress Street in her essay“The Little Store”: Two blocks away from the Mississippi State Capitol, and on the same street with it, where our house was when I was a child growing up in Jackson, it was possible to have a little pasture behind your backyard where you could keep a Jersey cow, which we did. My mother herself milked her. A thrifty homemaker, wife, mother of three, she also did Chestina and baby Eudora, 1909. Eudora’s first home in Jackson, circa 1907. She lived there from 1909 to 1925. 5 Life in Jackson: Eudora’s Early Years all her own cooking.And as far as I can recall, she never set foot inside a grocery store. It wasn’t necessary. Downtown Jackson in 1909 had a small urban center, but as Eudora remembers,“it was still within very near reach of the open country.” Farmers brought their wares to you, and Eudora described “the old familiars” many years later in an essay about her hometown: Many Jackson familiars were seasonal; and they were punctual. The blackberry lady and the watermelon man, the scissors grinder, the monkey man whose organ you could hear coming from a block away, would all appear at their appointed time. The sassafras man at his appointed time (the first sign of spring) would take his place on the steps of the downtown Post Office, decorated like a general, belted and sashed and hung about with cartridges of orange sassafras root he’d cut in the woods and tied on....And when winter blew in,the hot tamale man with his wheeled stand and its stove to keep his tamales steaming hot in their cornshucks while he did business at the intersection of Hamilton and North West. However, if Mrs. Welty discovered she was missing something from the pantry that she needed right away, she sent Eudora out with the correct amount of change in hand to retrieve it at the “Little Store” down the street. “I knew even the sidewalk to it as well as I knew my own skin.”The path to the “Little Store,” as it was dubbed by the Welty family, was a familiar journey for a nine-year-old girl. Eudora remembers these trips fondly, especially the knowledge that her mother typically gave her an extra nickel to buy a treat for herself.“I’d skipped my jumpingrope up and down it, hopped its length through...