Eudora Welty's Language of the Spirit

Abstract

An interesting gap in Eudora Welty’s portrayals of Mississippi life in the small towns and countryside of the 1930s and ’40s is the slight attention to the vigorous, often fundamentalist Protestantism that typified the culture, whatever the social class, race, or gender. Indeed, Mississippi lies so centrally in the South’s Bible belt that it has sometimes been referred to as the belt’s buckle, signifying of course the intense religiosity that continues to characterize the state—today one of the most conservative theologically and politically. It is a very, very red state, in the current lingo of political coloration. Mr. Rondo, the preacher who marries Dabney and Troy in Delta Wedding, hardly makes an entrance into the family’s busy life. The family clan and other Banner folk of Losing Battles are immersed in Baptists and sprinkled with Methodists, but Brother Bethune, Brother Dollarhide, even Grandpa Vaughn, the Baptist preacher, are small players in the frolic that pits Jack and Gloria and the fortified family reunionists against Judge Moody and schoolteacher Julia Mortimer. When a cyclone tosses the Methodist church across the road, cheek by jowl with the Baptists, only comedy ensues. The Methodists methodically pick up every board, every scrap, and move the church back to where it belongs. Only Uncle Nathan, the wayfaring stranger, labors under the indictment of sin. Having slain Mr. Dearman and allowed a jury to convict and hang a black man for the murder, he amputates the murdering hand and then wanders the land in penance, removed from family except for the annual reunions. Welty was herself christened in the Galloway Methodist Church in Jackson, attended Sunday school in her youth, and, as she writes in One Writer’s Beginnings, followed her mother’s example as one who loved to sit and read the Bible for herself (873). It was the language of the King James version that affected Welty most deeply. Speaking for herself and for southern writers of her generation, she said that “its cadence entered into our ears and our memories for good. The evidence, or the ghost of it, lingers in all our books. In the beginning was the Word” (878). She’s playing, of course, on the word “word,” invoking not the divine but the human possession of language, the founding attribute of human kind.