A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty

TWO: Eudora’s Education

15 .2 Eudora’s Education The pleasures of reading itself—who doesn’t remember?—were like those of a Christmas cake, a sweet devouring. —Eudora Welty, “A Sweet Devouring,” The Eye of the Story E udora credits her parents for what she calls her “knowledge of the word,” meaning her reading and spelling skills, because they taught her the alphabet at an early age. In One Writer’s Beginnings , she describes how essential she believes the alphabet is as the cornerstone of learning: They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting to school. I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge.You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned“Now I lay me” and the Lord’s Prayer and your father’s and mother’s name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost. Her love of the alphabet itself came from reciting it, she says, but also from simply admiring the letters on the written page before she could identify them as words:“I fell in love with various winding, enchanted -looking initials drawn by Walter Crane at the heads of fairy tales. In‘Once upon a time,’ an‘O’ had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon the flowers.” 16 Eudora’s Education From admiring illuminated letters came learning to read, and Eudora recognizes, as she looks back at her childhood, the sacrifices her parents made to provide her with enough books.“Indeed, my parents could not give me books enough. They must have sacrificed to give me on my sixth or seventh birthday—it was after I became a reader for myself—the ten-volume set of Our Wonder World.” Like the“Little Store” that was a short walk or bike ride down the street, so was the library, and Eudora’s mother quickly realized her nine-year-old daughter would need a library card. Chessie introduced Eudora to the wonders of the library, and it was on the shelves of the downtown Carnegie Library (today the main branch of the Jackson library is called the Eudora Welty Library) across the street from the capitol that Eudora discovered the“Series Books.” Children today gobble up the seven volumes of Harry Potter or the hundreds of Nancy Drew; in the early decades of the 1900s children enjoyed series of books which included The Wizard of Oz, the Five Little Peppers, and the Camp Fire Girls. Her discovery of the“Series Books” at the Carnegie Library was a revelation for Eudora : “There were many of everything , generations of everybody, instead of one. I wasn’t coming to the end of reading, after all—I was saved.” Summertime trips to the library were as exciting as trips to the “Little Store.” Eudora describes how the librarian, Mrs. Calloway, wouldn’t let a young girl past the front door without a second petticoat (young ladies had to be dressed appropriately), and “[s]he called me by my full name and said, ‘[Eudora Alice Eudora, in her petticoats, standing with her bike, 1920. 17 Eudora’s Education Welty,] [d]oes your mother know where you are?’” Children were limited to two books only, and Eudora would put her selections in her bicycle basket and take a shortcut through the capitol lawn as she eagerly rode home. “I coasted the two new books home, jumped out of my petticoat, read (I suppose I ate and bathed and answered questions put to me), then in all hope put my petticoat back on and rode those two books back to the library to get my next two.” A former schoolteacher herself, Chessie recognized that Eudora had the necessary foundation for school. She knew the alphabet and loved to read.So, at the age of five, Eudora recalls, with the elementary school located directly across the street from the Weltys’house, “My mother walked across the street to Jefferson Davis Grammar School and asked the principal if she would allow me to enter the first grade after Christmas.” And the principal, Miss Lorena Duling, replied,“Oh, all right. . . . Probably the best thing you could do with her.” Miss Duling ruled Davis School with an iron hand; according to Eudora, she was “a...