"You Know Who I Am? I'm Mr. John Paul's Boy"

Abstract

Inspired by the work of Saidiya Hartman, Stephen Best, and others who ask us to account for the absences in the archive, this essay looks to Eudora Welty's photograph, "A village pet, Mr. John Paul's Boy/Rodney, ca. 1940," for clues to animate his life and the lives of others with intellectual disabilities who lived in Mississippi during the Great Depression. It argues that Welty employed what Tobin Siebers characterized as an "aesthetics of disability," to challenge traditional politics, upend expectations of age, race, gender, and ability, and provide insight into the "amazing worlds" of people with cognitive impairments.