“Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden”: (Story)Telling the Southern Ideology

In considering one of Eudora Welty’s most ambiguous short stories, this essay foregrounds the productive relationship between the artist’s writing and her photographic practice and pinpoints her innovative perspective on issues of identity in the context of the South’s dominant 1930s ideology of race and gender. Furthermore, it examines strategies of storytelling that unveil the subtle but pervasive naturalization of oppression in the politics of daily life.

Fig. 1.

133. Sideshow, State Fair / Jackson / 1939. Photographs. Reprinted by permission of Eudora Welty, LLC.

In the United States, the economic crisis of the 1930s—triggered by the stock market crash of 1929 after a decade of overproduction and worsened by the effects of the Dust Bowl—led to a national identity crisis. Both literature and the visual arts questioned the parameters of American identity and the role of the individual in the national mythic narratives, providing the troubling vision of a society caught up in its own contradictions (Ramalho 201–03). The South became the privileged site of this conflict, not only because of its overwhelming poverty, but also because it represented the alterity of the North since the Civil War (Donaldson and Jones 3–4). At this time the photographers of the Farm Security Administration traveled widely through the region and, concentrating on rural poverty, pictured “the common men” betrayed by the American Dream (Jeffrey 164–65; Price).¹

Fig. 2.

136. Sideshow, State Fair / Jackson / 1939. Photographs. Reprinted by permission of Eudora Welty, LLC.

From July to November 1936, Eudora Welty worked as a Junior Publicity Agent for the Works and Progress Administration (WPA). This experience allowed the artist to acquire a broader geographical perspective of her native state and to come into contact with sectors of the population from which her upper-middle class background had sheltered her.² At the same time, it provided a rich context for her photographic work, much of which focused on the black community, either ignored or stereotyped by the media then. These journeys also gave her the opportunity to engage in storytelling, a communal activity with specific rhetorical strategies that her texts foreground.³ Indeed, according to Welty, “Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden,” included in her first collection, A Curtain of Green and Other Stories (1941), grew from such an oral exchange, and “it’s about the moral response to” a sideshow act similar to the one fictionalized in the story “made by three different people. It troubled me so and I tried to write my story in response to that situation” (“An Interview” [Freeman] 179).

Though a realist writer, rooting the fictional world in her empirical experience, Welty maintained that her creative process distanced the actual events from the situations narrated in her literary texts. Is it a mere coincidence that the author broke this basic rule of composition in some of her stories dealing with race issues (Pingatore 52)? Or could it be argued that these exceptions—we should consider “Powerhouse,” inspired by a Fats Waller concert, and “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” written in 1963 on the same night the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated and later changed because the circumstances detailed were too close to the real events under investigation—reveal Welty’s visceral concern with racial inequalities in the South?⁴

In the interview with Todd Freeman, quoted above, the writer explains that her text focuses on three different receptions of the same story, referring to the main characters in “Keela,” that provide divergent points of view illustrative of the complexity of Southern discursive articulations around race and gender topics. This respectful attention to “the dignity and purity of singularity” over generalization, made it impossible for the author to “crusade,” to privilege one discursive framework for didactic purposes, because she perceived identity as a dynamic process which involved a dialogue with alterity.⁵ In fact, Welty’s texts deconstruct the Southern hegemonic ideologies, favoring indeterminacy of meaning over a totalitarian narrative.⁶

Besides having emerged from a “troublesome...