SOURCE: "The Metaphor of Race in Eudora Welty's Fiction," in The Southern Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, October, 1986, pp. 697-707.

[In the following essay, Marrs discusses certain aspects of African-American culture that Welty portrays in Delta Wedding and The Golden Apples including: "separateness despite intimate contact, a consequent and paradoxical freedom from white conventions, and a once common belief in ghosts and magic potions."]

During the 1930s and early 1940s Eudora Welty was almost as busy with her camera as with her typewriter. She photographed scenes and faces, tried to sell a book of her pictures, and gave a one-woman photographic show in New York City. A primary subject of these photographs was black life in Mississippi: a fortune teller in exotic costume, bottle trees designed to ward off evil spirits, a slave apron with a whole mythology stitched upon it, a black state fair parade, a "Colored Entrance" to a movie theater, black women wearing evening dresses or men's hats for their Saturday afternoon of shopping were all subjects for Welty the photographer. We might logically expect, therefore, black life to be an important element in Welty's fiction, and indeed it is. Although Welty's fictional world is not typically black—it is the white world she knew much more intimately—black characters appear as protagonists in four of her earliest stories. That fact has been widely discussed. Almost unnoticed, however, are the numerous black characters in Delta Wedding and The Golden Apples. The exclusion from white society, the folk beliefs, and the freedom from white social convention so often depicted in Welty's photographs of blacks are especially crucial in these works. Set in the Mississippi Delta where cotton was king and where large numbers of black field hands and household servants toiled, both works rely upon a supporting cast of black characters who are at once real and emblematic, telling us of "each other's wonder, each other's human plight."

In Delta Wedding the institutionalized and artificial separation of black and white serves to dramatize the less obvious but wholly inevitable separateness of each human being, a separateness which coexists with intimacy. The plantation-owning Fairchilds deal with their servants in a congenial fashion, white and black children play together, and Ellen Fairchild sees to the health and well-being of black servants. But these surface relationships mask a very deep separation. When the black matriarch Partheny is subject to spells of mindlessness, for instance, the Fairchilds are sympathetic, but they never see the tragic import of the spells. Partheny, whose seizures resemble those experienced by Jackson midwife Ida M'Toy, describes her latest spell to Ellen Fairchild:

"I were mindless, Miss Ellen. I were out of my house. I were looking in de river. I were standing on Yazoo bridge wid dis foot lifted. I were mindless, didn't know my name or name of my sons. Hand stop me. Mr. Troy Flavin he were by my side, gallopin' on de bridge. He laugh at me good—old Partheny! Don't you jump in dat river, make good white folks fish you out! No, sir, no, sir, I ain't goin' to do dat! Guides me home."

Partheny's "mindlessness" takes a particularly appalling form—she loses all sense of her identity. Mindlessness for Aunt Shannon Fairchild takes the form of senility, not of blackouts; she is able to "talk conversationally with Uncle Denis and Aunt Rowena and Great-Uncle George, who had all died no telling how long ago, that she thought were at the table with her." The white woman retreats into the past. Partheny doesn't know her own name or the names of her sons. She recalls no past. In fact, Partheny scarcely has a past of her own. Her life has been focused upon the Fairchilds. Her contact with the family has been close and affectionate: she attended Ellen Fairchild at the birth of daughter Shelley, was the nurse to several of Ellen's children, and assists in the final preparations for Dabney's wedding to Troy Flavin; Ellen Fairchild, similarly, has ministered to the ailing Partheny, provided her with Shellmound Plantation's old wicker furniture, and refused to criticize Partheny's appropriation of insignificant Fairchild possessions. But no other family members even think about Partheny except as she plays a role in family activities. They take her for granted, never questioning that her life should be devoted to them, never realizing that she has been denied a separate past of her own. Though they are more sensitive than Troy, the overseer who laughs as he stops Partheny from jumping into the Yazoo River, the Fairchilds' empathy for their servants is limited.

The expeditious and dispassionate way Troy deals with a fight in which Root M'Hook has cut two other black field hands more explicitly emphasizes Welty's theme of human separateness. Troy, of course, is not the stereotypical sadistic overseer, but Troy sees blacks only as workers, not as human beings. Troy's reaction to the fight is thus to deal only with the facts—he shoots and disarms M'Hook, but he never explores the reason for the blacks' violent confrontation. What role has Pinchy's religious fervor, her "coming through," played in their fight? The field hands suggest it precipitated the violence. How? Troy doesn't inquire, and Shelley Fairchild, who sees and disapproves of the way Troy handles this matter, is not interested in its cause. No one else in the family even hears of the incident. Having an overseer distances them from the blacks. Moreover, neither Troy nor Shelley responds as George had years before to a fight between two black boys. He stopped their knife fight, embraced them when they cried, asked their names, and sent them off unpunished. George cared and continues to care; he tries to break through barriers that separate him even from those outside the family. But George, who repeatedly defies convention, and Ellen, who goes to the "mindless" Partheny, are the only white adults capable of such actions.

Perhaps the novel's clearest representative of separation is Aunt Studney, an emblematic character even though her name, the mysterious sack she carries, and her unusual mannerisms were those of an actual woman (as Welty told the author in a conversation of November 1, 1985). She is as oblivious to the whites as they are to her—"Ain't studyin' you," she tells them. In a sense she mirrors their detachment; the white characters find her attitude to be eccentric, perhaps frightening, often amusing, but they do not see their own attitude toward her in similar terms. And though the Fairchilds study each other carefully, their study does not narrow the distance between them. Though they look "with shining eyes upon their kin," though "their abundance of love" comes forth in jests and teasing, there is much about each other that they do not or cannot or will not know. Welty's focus in Delta Wedding is thus upon separateness within the cohesive family. Dabney and Shelley have similar fears and concerns, though one is more emotional, the other more intellectual, but they never realize their common plight. Ellen struggles to understand her two daughters. George and Robbie love but are separated. These characters in some ways are as cut off from one another as Aunt Studney is from them all.

Despite the Fairchilds' distance from one another, the barriers between black and white provide them with occasions to assert family solidarity, occasions which George, to his family's dismay, refuses to act upon. Though she has moments when she wants to be like George, when she does not care if she is a Fairchild, Dabney recalls being shocked by George's behavior during the knife fight, for that fight is "something that the other Fairchilds would have passed by and scorned to notice." George's noticing tells Dabney that he loves "the world…. Not them! Not them in particular." Dabney wants, at least at times she wants, that sense of belonging, that assertion of group solidarity which comes when others are excluded. Racial barriers, it thus seems, both encourage the illusion of absolute unity and represent the inevitable separateness of individuals.

The significance of black characters, however, extends beyond the notion of separateness. Welty suggests that both Partheny and Aunt Studney recognize and accept the mysterious power of love and the fact of their own mortality. Their white counterparts, on the other hand, typically repress such knowledge. Dabney loves and immerses herself in that love, though "timid of the element itself," but Shelley fears such an immersion. And no one, Ellen realizes, save George and herself, sees "death on its way." The novel suggests, moreover, that these mysteries must be confronted intuitively; they cannot be explained or dealt with logically.

Patterns of imagery in the novel clearly link Partheny and Aunt Studney with a knowledge of love as well as death. Partheny in her mindless condition has almost plunged from the bridge into the Yazoo, literally the River of Death, and Partheny recognizes, without fear or horror, her near brush with death. But the Yazoo is as much an emblem of love as of death. It is the river into which George, clearly enchanted with his wife, once chased Robbie, and Partheny seems to have a special understanding of such passionate relationships. Knowing in some unaccountable way that George and Robbie have separated, she attempts to remedy that situation, sending George a magical patticake that will bring Robbie back to him. She tells Shelley: "You take dis little patticake to Mr. George Fairchild, was at dis knee at de Grove, and tell him mind he eat it tonight at midnight, by himse'f, and go to bed. Got a little white dove blood in it, dove heart, blood of a snake—things. I just tell you enough in it so you trus' dis patticake." In her knowledge of both love and death, Partheny is linked to Ellen Fairchild. Ellen thinks that George alone of his family sees "death on its way," but her recognition signifies her own knowledge of human mortality as well. And Ellen, whose love for her husband Battle, for her children, and for her brother-in-law George permeates the novel, is primarily responsible for the reconciliation of George and Robbie, the reconciliation Partheny had hoped to bring about.

Perhaps even more importantly, Ellen acts in the intuitive fashion that characterizes Partheny. Partheny's faith in the magical patticake serves as an emblem of Ellen's intuition. That intuition is seen most clearly in Ellen's prophetic dreams.

Ellen herself had always rather trusted her dreams. It was her weakness, she knew, and it was right for the children as they grew up to deride her, and so she usually told them to the youngest. However, she dreamed the location of mistakes in the accounts and the payroll that her husband—not a born business man—had let pass, and discovered how Mr. Bascom had cheated them and stolen so much; and she dreamed whether any of the connection needed her in their various places, the Grove, Inverness, or the tenants down the river, and they always did when she got there. She dreamed of things the children and Negroes lost and of where they were, and often when she looked she did find them, or parts of them, in the dreamed-of places. She was too busy when she was awake to know if a thing was lost or not—she had to dream it.

The novel shows us that Ellen's dreams are valid guides—Laura finds the garnet pin where Ellen has dreamed it will be. But most of the white characters tend not to rely on dreams, not to act on the basis of intuition. Shelley seeks to understand her life by thinking, by analyzing, though this approach leaves her helpless to understand the passion George and Robbie feel—she will not deliver Partheny's patticake to George. Neither does rational Shelley comprehend the meaning of death: "'River of Death' to Shelley meant not the ultimate flow of doom, but the more personal vision of the moment's chatter ceasing, the feelings of the day disencumbered, floating now into recognition…." Though the mystery of death never crosses her mind, Dabney is more open to passion. She loves Troy and describes her love as a river: "In catching sight of love she had seen both banks of a river and the river rushing between—she saw everything but the way down." Yet even Dabney has trouble seeing "the way down," has trouble trusting her intuition as a guide through uncharted territory. George, however, does not have this difficulty. He can fully accept mystery. He can, Ellen realizes with "the darker instinct of a woman," meet "a fate whose dealing out to him he would not contest," whether that fate be death or a seemingly inappropriate love. Thus, only Ellen, who nurses Partheny, and George, who grew up at Partheny's knee, trust their intuition absolutely.

Laura McRaven, the nine-year-old motherless girl, seems most destined to share the wisdom of George and Ellen. Laura, who has loved and lost her mother, is further initiated into the mysteries of love and death on her visit to the Fairchilds, and the enigmatic black woman Aunt Studney, as Carol Moore noted in this journal, plays a crucial role in that initiation. Laura and her cousin Roy journey by boat to Dabney's future home, Marmion, only to meet Aunt Studney carrying her mysterious sack. Aunt Studney, who lives beyond The Deadening, will not let the children look inside her sack. Though the location of Studney's home makes her seem an emblem of mortality, Roy believes her sack is the place "where Mama gets all her babies." And when Laura is plunged into the Yazoo River, these associations with both life and death are reiterated: "As though Aunt Studney's sack had opened after all, like a whale's mouth, Laura opening her eyes head down saw its insides all around her—dark water and fearful fishes." Laura, whose only previous "swims" have been in Jackson's Pythian Castle with the protection of water wings, is immersed in the river which has repeatedly been associated with the mysteries of love and death and which is now linked to Studney's sack. She placidly accepts this experience, and at the end of the novel she holds her arms "out to the radiant night." She is not disoriented by the unknown and unknowable. Laura, still a child of course, cannot achieve the kind of awareness that George and Ellen know; but Laura, who so much wants to belong to the Fairchild family, will be able to face life's transience and the consequent urgency to love, and she will not have to use the extended family as a shelter from those enigmas. Her decision to return to her father and to Jackson signifies as much.

Black characters in The Golden Apples are not so prominent as they are in Delta Wedding, but they are essential to the book's thematic development. Most basically, white attitudes toward blacks in these interrelated stories of Morgana, Mississippi, exemplify the white community's need to insulate itself and to believe in its self-sufficiency. When Miss Eckhart is attacked by a "crazy Negro" who pulls her down and threatens to kill her, the people of Morgana expect her to move away. They do not want to face the ugly memory of her rape, though Miss Eckhart herself seems to consider "one thing not so much more terrifying than another." White Morgana will not confront inevitable threats to community solidarity. These white citizens want a world they can control, and they certainly expect to be in control of blacks. They want blacks to be like Plez Morgan, "a real trustworthy nigger," the "real old kind, that knows everybody since time was." Plez is part of the community and assists in its protective deception of Miss Snowdie MacLain when her wandering husband comes home. Probably he does so out of affection for Snowdie; perhaps he also knows better than to intervene in white affairs. Whatever the case, Plez is a man the white community can patronize and cherish, but that community prefers to ignore black violence. The "crazy Negro" who attacks Miss Eckhart jeopardizes the community's illusion of control, an illusion which helps it to deny individual separateness and vulnerability.

Black violence is not the only black threat to community solidarity in The Golden Apples. More importantly, blacks are associated, often paired with white characters who are imaginative and unconventional wanderers. In "A Shower of Gold," Plez Morgan is the only person who sees King MacLain when he reappears one Halloween day, and it is Plez who constructs the story of King's return, even recounting an event that he could not have seen: "Plez said though he couldn't swear to seeing from the Presbyterian Church exactly what Mr. King was doing, he knows as good as seeing it that he looked through the blinds." Plez, the man who believes in ghosts and who toys with the idea that he has seen a ghost on Miss Snowdie MacLain's front porch, tells this story. Although Plez helps the community conceal King's visit from Miss Snowdie and although he serves white people faithfully, Plez can never be the social equal of whites. He thus is outside the restraints of Morgana society: King has broken free; Plez has been excluded. And like Plez, King is a man of imagination. King envisions the possibilities of life and leaves Morgana in quest of them. Plez's imagination wanders freely in realms of supernatural and natural events, unfettered by white rationalism. As a result, superstition seems an emblem of imagination in "A Shower of Gold."

In "Moon Lake" superstition does not play so central a role, but again black characters are free in mind, much freer than their white counterparts. They confront the realities of their world and accept its mysteries. Among the white girl campers at Moon Lake, the orphan Easter lives most intensely. When she sleeps, her hand is open to the night, to the unknown, to the mysterious. But Easter cannot swim and seeks to avoid Moon Lake where there is a chance of "getting sucked under, of being bitten, and of dying three miles away from home" and where Miss Moody sometimes goes out in a boat with "a late date from town." The lake holds out the possibilities of danger and romance—Easter's openness to experience is thus incomplete until she climbs to a diving board, is tickled on the foot, and makes a near fatal plunge into the lake. That initiation experience, which occurs in a series of humorous scenes with serious import, links Easter with the story's black characters and marks her as a wanderer. In the first place, the black boy Exum causes Easter to fall into the lake. Exum plays outdoors in the midday heat as the white girls are forbidden to do; he fishes in Moon Lake, swearing that he can catch an electric eel; and he wears a hat reminiscent of King MacLain's. Exum's freedom, his contact with realities from which the girls are sheltered (the heat, the mysterious lake), his blackness, all make him the appropriate character to prompt Easter's dive. It is not Exum, however, but the white Loch Morrison who then saves Easter. Nevertheless, Loch seems almost black to the girls in the camp. He swims in Moon Lake when all other white characters are indoors. He wears a bathing costume which looks "black and formal as a minstrel suit." And he lives "apart like the cook," a black servant. His rescue of Easter is thus metaphorically significant, for his experiences extend beyond the world of white Morgana with its organized camps and willful ignorance of life's mystery. Ironically, even in acting for the community as its lifeguard, Loch seems to defy its will. Miss Lizzie Stark associates his life-saving endeavors with sexual passion, an emotion that respectable Morgana fears but that neither Loch nor Easter seems destined to repress. Finally, once Easter has been rescued and revived, Twosie is the camp employee assigned to watch over her. It is Twosie who has heard an ominous warning in a bird's call and has asked, "Know why, in de sky, he say 'Spirit? Spirit?' And den he dive boom and say 'GHOST'?" And it is Twosie who tells the girls "Yawl sho ain't got yo' eyes opem good, yawl. Yawl don't know what's out here in woods wid you." Twosie's superstitious nature and her suggestion that the white girls are blind to reality make her the appropriate attendant for Easter. In a comic fashion, she shares the acceptance of mystery and recognition of danger that typify the story's black characters and that now fully typify Easter.

In "Music from Spain," Eugene MacLain has traveled far from Morgana and Moon Lake only to lead a very routine life in San Francisco. Three black characters, however, provide him with images of a freer life, a life as free as his father's and a life that Eugene, consequently, both desires and fears. Eugene's first encounter with a black occurs early in the story. Waiting for a stoplight to change, Eugene stands by an unusual woman: "There was such strange beauty about her that he did not realize for a few moments that she was birth-marked and would be considered disfigured by most people—by himself, ordinarily. She was a Negro or a Polynesian and marked as a butterfly is, over all her visible skin." As Eugene gazes at the woman, he senses "an almost palpable aura of a disgrace or sadness that had to be as ever-present as the skin is, of hiding and flaunting together." Eugene associates this black woman with both the freedom of the butterfly and an ever-present sadness. Welty here again suggests that her black characters are at once free from the confines of white society and oppressed by that society. The woman's "hiding and flaunting" are true to the general experience of blacks, and they are also true to the experience of Welty's wanderers, to the experience of those characters who are unwilling or unable to live according to a formula, who will not or cannot ignore the realities of time, loss, and loneliness, and who seek to live more intensely than convention would permit. Appropriately, then, Eugene believes the strangely beautiful Negress would make a fine mistress for the Spanish guitarist with red fingernails, but he does not think of her as his own mistress. Eugene allots beauty, sadness, defiance of convention to the Spaniard and protects himself.

Eugene's second encounter with blacks comes as he and the Spaniard take a streetcar. The conductor on the car is "a big fat Negro woman who yelled out all the street names with joy." When Eugene sees that the Spaniard is smiling at this woman and at other blacks on the car, he is upset: "Negroes would think he comprehended all their nigger-business." Eugene doesn't comprehend the joy, the plans for a two AM rendezvous at the Cat, the freedom of these characters. Even as he tries to break free from his structured life, Eugene retreats. The Spaniard, however, does understand this "nigger-business" and does share in its joys.

Finally, Eugene looks into a basement as he and the Spaniard walk through San Francisco. There he sees "a big colored woman plying the keys," and he thinks she must be a long way from home. He associates her with the old Negro in Morgana who in times of trouble has always walked into the Morgana store and asked the proprietor to play "Rocks in My Bed Number Two." Blacks, Eugene knows quite well, created the blues, a musical form which defines the black experience. Significantly, though, Eugene cannot hear the woman playing. Eugene himself has good reason to understand the blues; the death of his daughter Fan has been a devastating blow to him, but he and his wife Emma are unable to talk honestly, openly with each other about Fan's death. Not even music can help them to transform and transcend sorrow. Eugene cannot hear the blues, and he will ultimately return to Morgana as a broken and bitter man.

In "The Wanderers" blacks continue to be those characters who are at once most realistic and most imaginative. Juba, Mrs. Stark's maid who comes to help Virgie pack before leaving, is able to deal with realities Virgie still seeks to avoid, and Juba does so in the form of ghost stories. She tells Virgie, "I seen more ghosts than live peoples, round here. Black and white. I seen plenty both. Miss Virgie, some is given to see, some try but is not given. I seen that Mrs. Morrison from 'cross the road in long white nightgown, no head atall, in her driveway Saddy. Reckanize her freckle arms. You ever see her? I seen her here. She die in pain?" Juba may not consciously know that Mrs. Morrison has suffered from white Morgana's life of Rook parties, speakings, and recitals, but Juba does know that despair drove Mrs. Morrison to suicide. Her vision of the ghost reflects that knowledge just as her vision of Katie Rainey "lyin' up big on a stuff davenport like a store window, three four us fannin' her" suggests the serenity Katie Rainey had achieved. But Virgie is not ready even now to confront Mrs. Morrison's pain or her mother's death. She turns on Juba and accuses the absent Minerva of having stolen silver-headed Katie's yellow hair switch and the Raineys' baby clothes. In these petty and meaningless thefts, Virgie sees the loss of her past. She lashes out and sends Juba away. Juba, however, understands the emotion behind this outburst and returns to tell the sobbing Virgie: "That's right. Cry. Cry. Cry."

At least partially because of Juba, Virgie comes to recognize that her mother is gone and that in human transience lies life's one "irreducible urgency." Her departure from Morgana is not a retreat, but the beginning of a quest. At age forty, having wasted years of her own life and having lost her entire family to death, Virgie recognizes what the piano teacher Miss Eckhart had offered her so long ago. Seven miles from Morgana in the town of MacLain, she sits on a stile in front of the courthouse, thinks of Miss Eckhart with love, not hate, and knows the meaning of "the Beethoven" and of the picture on Miss Eckhart's studio wall: "Every time Perseus struck off the Medusa's head, there was the beat of time, and the melody. Endless the Medusa, and Perseus endless." Virgie has absorbed the hero, the victim, and the music. No longer does she avoid facing the realities of time, loss, separateness. No longer does she lash out at those who call these realities to mind. When a woman carrying a red hen sits next to her, Virgie thinks of this woman as "the old black thief," perhaps recalling her verbal attack on Minerva but certainly identifying herself with this woman's resolve to survive, to wrest from time all that she can. Virgie accepts the companionship of the woman, and together they hear "the magical percussion, the world beating in their ears." They hear "through falling rain the running of the horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon's crusty slither, and the glimmer and the trumpet of the swan." The world of myth, of art, of intuition, of superstition leads to knowledge—a knowledge of love and death which Virgie finally and completely accepts. And her new awareness is marked by the presence of the old black woman, a character who might have seemed a stereotypical chicken-stealing darky to most of Morgana's white citizens, but who for Welty and Virgie is an emblem of courageous striving.

Three realities of black existence in the South are thus crucial to Eudora Welty's achievement in Delta Wedding and The Golden Apples. Separateness despite intimate contact, a consequent and paradoxical freedom from white conventions, and a once common belief in ghosts and magic potions—these aspects of black culture Welty vividly conveys. But she also uses these aspects of black life to develop her major themes, themes which extend to all life. Welty's accurate depiction of black life is a metaphoric one as well, suggesting the inescapable nature of human isolation, the courage and triumph and pain involved in an independent existence, the limitations of reason, and the validity of intuition. Throughout her fiction Welty has succeeded in "making moments double upon themselves, and in the doubling double again." Nowhere is this more true than in Delta Wedding and The Golden Apples. Events involving black characters in these works are typically double, and the works are rich and complex as a result.