Welty’s Words for the Birds … and for Children and Scholars, Too

Eudora Welty had a great sense of humor and a sharp wit. Those who knew her or even met her just once often speak of her ability to entertain with both. Reynolds Price, for example, says, “I could hold you well past dinnertime with recollections of the laughter she generated so effortlessly” (11). Humor and wit seemed to simply emanate from Welty, just as they flow from the characters and situations of her greatest stories. Who could forget Sister’s justifications for taking the sewing-machine motor in “Why I Live at the P. O.” or the “playfulness … a kind of bloody and ruthless comedy” (17) that Ellen Douglas says she found in The Robber Bridegroom? Yet with Welty’s moments of humor and wit there also comes a deep understanding of human nature; as Welty said in an interview with Tereza Marques de Oliveira Lima, “Humor … has to interpret…. I think that humor interprets better than most any other aspect of writing. But it has nothing to do with gags, with jokes, as you know. It is much more profound: the sense of human relationship and human nature” (11). There are many moments of human insight in Welty’s novels and short stories. Laurel McKelva Hand, the protagonist of The Optimist’s Daughter, offers one such realization: “The past is … impervious, and can never be awakened. It is memory that is the somnambulist. It will come back in its wounds from across the world … calling us by our names and demanding its rightful tears” (991–92). Welty’s understanding of human nature is, rightfully, as widely praised as the humor and wit with which she infuses her tales.

Although Welty’s humor, wit, and insight into human nature are well known, it is less well known that among her novels and short stories she also penned a children’s book, The Shoe Bird. Perhaps this fact is little known because not quite 7,000 copies were printed and bound when the book was first published (Polk 114) or because the book has been reprinted only once, twenty-nine years after its initial publication in 1964. Or, perhaps it’s because, as Ann Waldron surmises, “the powers that be in the children’s book world found it lacking” (269). It is true that a handful of reviewers and scholars commented negatively on the book. For example, Jeanne B. Hardendorff claims in her review that the “stereotyped characterizations of birds based on their names … and the heavy handed moral spoken by the Phoenix are poor fare from such a talented writer of adult fiction”; Neil Isaacs claims in his Southern Writers volume that the book is not enjoyable because Welty is “talking down” to the audience (15); and Albert J. Griffith claims that The Shoe Bird is missing “great imaginative inspiration” (87) and that it “lacks the high levels of fantasy, poetry, and humor one might have hoped for in a Welty story written especially for children” (86).

Cover of The Shoe Bird, 1964 (UP of Mississippi, 1993). Illustration © Beth Krush.

There are only a few such reactions to The Shoe Bird, however. In fact, The Shoe Bird has received a fair amount of praise from book reviewers. Nancy D. Hargrove rejects Hardendorff’s reading, stating that Welty’s “remarkably clever characterizations of the various birds ... rely heavily on humor in descriptive details and in dialogue” (77). Helen Bevington’s review reads, “You can tell by the opening words that it’s a delightful book” (50), and Leslie Myers says, “her pen … produced great joy, imagination and comedy in Shoe Bird.” Aside from various reviewers, other artists have praised The Shoe Bird in their own ways: the Jackson Ballet Guild adapted the book for the stage in 1968 (Waldron 269) and composer Samuel Jones transformed it into a musical in 2003.¹ Thus, it is unlikely that stereotyped characterizations, heavy-handed morals, talking-down-to, or below-par fantasy, poetry, and humor have caused The Shoe Bird to be excluded from collections of Welty’s works...