Letter from Eudora Welty to Elizabeth Bowen, August 1951

New Orleans, August 17 [1951]¹

Dearest Elizabeth,

November 26^th you'll be here! I just called Tulane University and wrote it down—just when you were South before. We shall have Thanksgiving. I'll meet you here. Is everything working out all right? Please don't let dates and dates come up and crowd out your time this way—I know people will be asking you the same thing all around—and don't give up of course one thing you want to do anywhere, or one place you want to see, but I hope so very much you'll keep as much time as you possibly can free for us to meet. I only wish the time were nearer. It's so hot now—but it will be all right I hope by the time you come. Do you think at the end of the lectures you could come for a real visit? Some weeks? Day before yesterday (what I'm doing here: came to an air-conditioned hotel to do work on a story, high & mighty of me) I went to Venice, La.—the last stop, end of the road, down the Mississippi—it was a strange world too. A sultry, hot (99) day, we went lower than the river, beside² the levee—(I was with a young Harvard professor, Carvel Collins,³ who turns out to work under your friend Dr. Murdoch⁴—he came through) and crossed the river on a good ferry at Pointe a la Hatche, full of Cajuns combing their hair and giving each other baskets of shrimp [what coals to Newcastle!]⁵—we went into a remarkable cemetery that (but you must see it just like this) was two rows of elevated graves, like bureau drawers, with the fronts newly whitewashed, the cartracks paved between—car almost touched as we drove—⁶ straight down this alley to the church, green and white frame with poinsettias planted around it—and beyond the church was the priest's house with his cassock hung out on the clothesline to air—all in an enormous red sunset light—the white and black and the vivid green, and the raging sound of all those crickets and locusts and what-all in the jungle around it. Crawfish scuttled across the road in front of us—Big okra patches high as your head and white as snow from⁷ dust—lots of little fishing boats right at any break in the forest—the water. The towns began with Arabi—and there was Port Sulfur, Jesuit Bend, Naomi, Alliance, Junior, Diamond, Socola, Happy Jack, Empire (a bad smell there, burning old fish?), Buroa,⁸ Triumph, Concession, Phoenix, Nero, Ostrica and Venice. I don't mean we found all those—where were they? But they were on the map—maybe taking in both sides of the river. I wished for you. Except the mosquitoes were so thick, everyone on the road carried a branch of a palm to keep flailing around—this worried my Massachusetts friend all night, he said, poor thing, all that malaria—it is a dreadful thought. Every time I saw a little house I wanted—one of those like I always do—he said, But the mosquitos. Huge sky, and the biggest moon came up—and after dark, the dust was like lakes all around us, with fires burning in their centers, and around the fires, cows—all untended—standing in a ring—in the heat and the night, to keep off mosquitos—away off in the marshes, you could see their horns standing up black against that lonely glow. Life is very gay in the villages—movies ("Rocket-Ship X-M"), Booga Red's Place, Te-Ta's Place, Paradise—cards and you could tell it was a dance floor too—slot machines. Juke boxes lit up. Full of children. They were going to have a Shrimp Dance the next night—I longed to return. Huge catfishes were lying on people's front porches. The whole place was amphibious—The people were dark, merry, with white teeth, teasing—one...