Eudora Welty's Two Jacksons

Eudora Welty was born in Jackson on April thirteenth, nineteen oh nine, one year after Richard Wright, in a city whose racial geography ensured that a white girl from a professional family and a Black boy from a sharecropper family, born one year apart and both raised in the same small city, inhabited almost entirely different worlds.

She grew up in the Tudor Revival house on Pinehurst Street that her father had built for the family, near the Belhaven neighborhood. It became her permanent address. She lived in it, essentially, for the rest of her life. She died in two thousand one at the age of ninety-two, and she left the house to the State of Mississippi. It is now a National Historic Landmark and a museum.

In the nineteen thirties, Welty worked for the Works Progress Administration as a publicity agent for the Mississippi state office. The job gave her a car, a reason to travel, and a camera. She drove across Mississippi during the Depression and photographed what she found. She was looking at Black Mississippians at work and at play and in community, at white Mississippians at the same, at the landscape of poverty and dignity that the Depression had laid bare across the state. She took several hundred photographs. She published a hundred of them in nineteen seventy-one in a book called One Time One Place.

The photographs are beautiful. They are also, for a contemporary reader, complicated. Welty was looking at people whose economic and social circumstances were partly produced by a system she lived within and benefited from and largely declined to write about in political terms. Her stories are full of the emotional weather of Mississippi life. The structural weather is mostly implied.

This is not a charge against her. It is a description of what any careful reader notices. She was one of the finest prose writers of the twentieth century, and she lived for ninety-two years at the same address in a segregated city, and she wrote what she saw with more precision than most people achieve, and what she did not write is also worth noting.