Two Jackson Excursions

Abstract

Two Jackson Excursions Peggy Whitman Prenshaw Like most writers Eudora Welty has turned to the life around her for the material of her fiction. Unlike many, however, she has shown a remarkable gift for storing indelible impressions, intricately detailed, to be called up years later to furnish a story with a vivid, concrete sense of place. Both her power of recall and her talent for precise selection of details are illustrated in an autobiographical sketch appearing in Esquire in 1975. Miss Welty describes the adventure of going to the “corner store” when she was a child growing up on North Congress Street only a few blocks from the capitol in Jackson. Readers will recognize many details in this sketch and in interviews such as the recent one in Jackson Magazine that closely resemble descriptions of Laura McRaven’s Jackson home in Delta Wedding and Josie’s childhood experiences in “The Winds.” Here and on several other occasions, of course, Miss Welty has commented on specific Jackson memories that have set stories into motion or given them a habitat: The Fondren sisters’ beauty shop (“Petrified Man”), a Fats Waller concert in Jackson’s old City Auditorium (“Powerhouse”), a summer camp for children (“Moon Lake”). As a footnote on Miss Welty’s fictional use of regional details, particularly those of the Jackson area, it may interest readers unfamiliar with Mississippi to know that the Old Ladies Home visited by Marian in “A Visit of Charity” is a familiar Jackson landmark. Still standing on West Capitol Street, though today nearer the center than the outskirts of the city, it once appeared (before being remodeled) exactly as it does in the story: “of whitewashed brick” that “reflected the winter sunlight like a block of ice” (137). Adjacent to the Old Ladies Home is Livingston Park, the site of the city zoo and Livingston Lake, which for many years was open to the public. A small lake built for swimming, it is the setting of the young girl’s shocking encounter with a group of bathers in “A Memory.” The borders of oak trees, the little pavilion, the lake’s sandy beach dotted with several small benches all identify the site, although no place name is mentioned. Both stories explore an early confrontation with the frightening aspect of disorder and mortality. In “A Memory” the child narrator dreams of love as an aura that protects and beautifies the beloved, but she finds love corporeal and vulnerable as soon as she transfers it from her imagination [End Page 7] to the world of flesh and blood. The slightly older narrator of “A Visit of Charity,” by contrast with the child of “A Memory,” turns a corner literally and symbolically when she travels to the Old Ladies Home. Unconcerned with idealized dreams of love, Marian is bent resolutely upon accumulating Campfire Girl “points” for her act of charity. Her awareness of the world is more mature and calculating than that of the child. She well understands the give-and-take balance society imposes, or almost understands, for she takes the equation to be neat and even. Not until the jolt of looking closely at one of the old ladies, seeing her cry, does Marian glimpse the human mystery, the tense balancing of horror and love, and thus complete her visit to the outskirts of the city. In both stories the lone excursions of the youthful narrators, westward excursions in the Jackson setting, bring them knowledge of the world before they return home. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw Millsaps College Acknowledgment This note was previously published in the Eudora Welty Newsletter II.1 (Winter 1978). Works Cited Reid, Jane. “The Town and the Writer: An Interview with Eudora Welty.” Jackson Magazine. 1 (1977): 22–31, 34–35. Rpt. in Conversations with Eudora Welty. Ed. Peggy Whitman Prenshaw. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1984. 200–10. Google Scholar Welty, Eudora. “The Corner Store.” Esquire 84 (1975): 160. Rpt. as “The Little Store” in Stories, Essays, & Memoir. New York: Library of America, 1998. 819–26. Google Scholar ———. “A Visit of Charity.” Stories, Essays, & Memoir. New York: Library of America, 1998. 137–43. [End Page 8] Google Scholar Copyright © 2009 Department of English, Georgia...