Eudora Welty’s Mississippi River: A View from the Shore

The river is a strong brown god . . . the river is within us.

—T.S. Eliot¹

Place is “one of the lesser angels” of fiction, writes Eudora Welty in her essay “Place in Fiction.” Feeling is the archangel “who . . . carries the crown, soars highest . . . and relegates place into the shade.” Nonetheless, place has much work to do. Place, “where [the writer] has his roots, is where he stands; in his experience out of which he writes, [place] provides the base of reference; in his work, the point of view.” Place gives “validity,” the “appearance” of “the achieved world” of the fiction (Welty, “Place in Fiction” 781). The place from which Eudora Welty writes of the Mississippi River is on the mighty river’s shores and tributaries. Mark Twain’s place is the river itself as exemplified in Life on the Mississippi. Twain anchors himself in the river whereas Welty roots her characters on land. She stays ashore. Her characters look out from and under the bluffs at Natchez and Vicksburg; they move away from the river towns or yearn to escape to those towns on the shore of the river. They live in places now several miles inland, vacant and ghostly towns where feelings starkly contrast the boyhood excitement Twain descries upon hearing the steam whistle announce the coming of life to Hannibal. Welty’s towns are rendered obsolete because industry moved out when the Mississippi River abandoned them, re-routing itself elsewhere. Huckleberry Finn and his friend Jim find some measure of safety on the shore, but on the mighty Mississippi that they mistakenly take for an easy escape, they repeatedly meet danger. Welty’s characters travel east, inland from the Mississippi, encountering challenge and comfort along a land-river, the Natchez Trace, or they are arrested in their westward movement by bandits, the Natchez Indians, or the river itself. Her waterways—the Yazoo, the Big Black, and even the Ohio—run to the Mississippi. Welty’s great story “At the Landing” is set in the town of Rodney, on the Mississippi, just south of where the Big Black empties into the Big Muddy. The Pearl River, on the other hand, runs from the eastern part of the state, through Welty’s hometown of Jackson, turns due south, bypassing a merger with the Mississippi, and empties directly into the Gulf of Mexico at the Mississippi-Louisiana state border. Among Welty’s thousand photographic negatives stored at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, only a half dozen are views of the Mississippi River itself. Another dozen or so capture shanty boat life, fishing, or industry along the shore at Grand Gulf and Vicksburg. In 2003, the University Press of Mississippi published Some Notes on River Country with twenty-eight of Welty’s photographs. Only two of these are of the river itself: “The Mississippi River, near Vicksburg” and “The Mississippi River, near Natchez” (25, 50). Both are distant images, taken by Welty from high above the river (Figures 1 and 2). What, then, are the sources of Welty’s knowledge and feelings of the Mississippi River and of what importance is the Mississippi River in Welty’s oeuvre?

Figure 1.

The Mississippi River, near Vicksburg. Photographed by Eudora Welty. Reprinted courtesy of the Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Archives and Records Services Division), and Russell & Volkening as agents of the author’s estate.

© 1930s Eudora Welty, LLC.

As a child, Welty and her family vacationed to the east with her mother’s West Virginia family and to the north visiting her father’s Ohio family. River crossings were ominous for her mother, Welty tells us in her autobiography One Writer’s Beginnings, because her mother had a great fear of water, perhaps due to the harrowing raft trip on the Elk River taking her father to Baltimore where he died (886, 893–94, 942). Welty seems to have restricted herself to Mississippi lakes, natural and man-made. As a school girl, Welty likely studied her state...