Read With Welty: Southern Sideboards

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

 

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Twelve: Southern Sideboards by the Junior League of Jackson

There is almost nothing on this planet that I love more than a cookbook, but two factors make my love grow exponentially: one, if it is from another era, and two, if it is a community cookbook, with recipes submitted from a variety of people. The Junior League of Jackson’s 1978 classic Southern Sideboards fits the bill.

I’m looking for something delicious, but truth be told, I’m looking for something disgusting, too. Part of the fun of an old cookbook is laughing at what someone thought was good. Bonus points are awarded for things that are dated, like pretty much anything involving gelatin and a mold. Look, maybe aspic is delicious. I’ll never know. Same goes for any dish that calls for a jar of dried beef. It is just not going to happen.

Mississippi author Wyatt Cooper wrote the introduction, and that is how you know that Southern Sideboards is something special: who wrote the introduction to your grandma’s community cookbook? (Probably no one, and probably not someone who was married to Gloria Vanderbilt and was Anderson Cooper’s dad.) Cooper muses on what makes food Southern, his own poor cooking skills (he says his sons politely decline his peanut butter sandwiches), but he ends with an anecdote about his uncle, who was looking for romance after the death of his wife. He really had one qualification for the role, summed up thusly: “The huggin’ and kissin’ don’t last forever. The cookin’ do.”

Welty contributed to Southern Sideboards with her delicious sounding Onion Pie recipe, which reads like poetry. I can only imagine that it tastes like poetry as well:

Some of the cookin’ (or at least assemblin’) that I look forward to taking on soon include this recipe, which wins the Awesome Name award:

Velvet Hammer
– submitted by Frank M. Duke

1 blender vanilla ice cream
2 ounces brandy
1 ounce Cointreau
½ ounce banana liqueur

Place ingredients in blender. Turn to medium speed. Mix to pouring consistency. Serve immediately in champagne glasses. Serves 4-6.

Southern Sideboards can be hard to find, but let us know if one of these recipes appeals to you and we can get you the full information:

Shrimp on Crackers
Emerald Soup
Congealed Broccoli
Mayonnaise Muffins
Mystery Casserole
Swiss Enchiladas
Impossible Pie

I hope you’ve enjoyed our Read with Welty reading challenge, and I hope next time you’re looking for something to read, you’ll consider one our selections from Welty’s home library. You can curl up with a champagne glass full of Velvet Hammer, a plate (or bowl? who knows) of Mystery Casserole, and read to your heart’s delight.

Read With Welty: The Age of Innocence

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Eleven: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Part of the appeal of reading is the sheer escape from the reader’s real life, and books where entire worlds are spun and described are the very best for this kind of immersive escapism. While usually books that create their own worlds fit this bill, Edith Wharton’s novels, The Age of Innocence in particular, let us completely become enveloped in the Gilded Age. The rules, the traditions, the rituals—especially those of upper class New York at the turn of the century—seem as fantastical and far away as Narnia or Middle-earth.

I’ve written before in this blog post series that just because Eudora Welty owned a book doesn’t tell us if she liked it or even read it, but I can say with semi-confidence that Welty was probably a big fan of Edith Wharton. She had several Wharton novels, story collections, and biographies in her home library (including a couple Library of America versions; Welty would become the first living writer to have their works published by the Library of America).

While The Age of Innocence is very much about society, class, and expectations, it is also about love and missed opportunities. If you’re in the mood for a period romance that will make you cry a little this holiday season, try it out, or at least try the movie version, which is available free via PlutoTV.

Read With Welty: In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

If you haven’t read Ellen Gilchrist’s 1981 collection of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, I envy you. This was Gilchrist’s first collection of stories and in it, she introduces us to characters she’d return to in future stories. In “Revenge,” we meet Rhoda Manning for the first time. Rhoda, who we can perhaps read as a Gilchrist stand-in, appears in dozens more stories at various ages. Don’t get too caught up in the Rhoda canon, though—sometimes details change, and you’re just going to have to deal with it.

Gilchrist’s characters are usually women, sometimes rich, and almost always Southern. In “There’s a Garden of Eden,” she combines all three:

Scores of men, including an ex-governor and the owner of a football team, consider Alisha Terrebone to be the most beautiful woman in the state of Louisiana. If she is unhappy, what hope is there for ordinary mortals? Yet here is Alisha, cold and bored and lonely, smoking in bed.

Not an ordinary bed either. This bed is eight feet wide and covered with a spread made from Alisha’s old fur coats. There are dozens of little pillows piled against the headboard, and the sheets are the color of shells and wild plums and ivory. 

 

The inscription in Eudora Welty's copy of In the Land of Dreamy Dreams:
For Eudora, who showed me there was a way - Love, Ellen

Gilchrist, who was born in Vicksburg, took a writing class under Eudora Welty at Millsaps. In this interview from Deep South Magazine, Gilchrist explains:

I wrote short stories for Eudora. I wrote her about one a week, and she would edit them and put these beautiful little pencil marks on them, very gentle, very light little pencil marks and I’d get it back and I’d say, ‘Well, that must not be any good,’ and I’d throw it away. I’d never heard about rewriting. There was one that she thought was publishable and I think I published it somewhere. The myths that go around about writers are not really the true stories. I’m telling you some true stories. I had a wonderful time knowing Eudora. She was my mother’s age and they had friends in common and she was just a lovely, lovely lady.

I had the luck of stumbling upon Victory Over Japan, Gilchrist’s National Book Award-winning collection of stories, when I was in high school. I immediately became an Ellen Gilchrist superfan and even wrote my one and only fan letter to Gilchrist a few years later. (Exciting: she wrote back and I framed it!) And years after that, I was giddy with excitement to be close enough to her at a Mississippi Book Festival event to secretly/creepily take a photo of her. I won’t share it here because even creepy superfans have standards. 

 

Read With Welty: The Remains of the Day

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Nine: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro 

So far as I can tell, the only link between Eudora Welty and Kazuo Ishiguro is that interviews with them appear in the same issue of a 1991 Mississippi Review—though I’d like to think that a more thorough investigator other than myself would have taken a thoughtful dive into her letters, housed at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, to discover her real feelings about each of the books we’ve chosen for this reading challenge. If that thorough investigator happens to be you, please let us know what you find!

Unless there is a known link between Welty and the author—like with Willie Morris, Ross Macdonald, or Walker Percy—we’re basing a lot of assumptions on the fact that Welty happened to own these books. Did she like them? Did she even read them? If, in some bizarre twist, my books were given to an entity upon my death, and scholars tried to extrapolate meaning and connections from the books I owned, my ghost would have to step in to help those poor fools out. Never read it, meant to read it, someone gave it to me, read it and hated it, read 50 pages and hated it, hated the cover, loved it except for the end and then got very mad—these would be the spooky messages I would have to somehow deposit into my scholars’ minds. (Sidenote: I have spent way too long trying to figure out the best way for a ghost to send a message since ectoplasm is out.)

All of this is to say that we have no idea if Eudora Welty read The Remains of the Day, or if she saw the 1993 movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, but we like to think she did. It’s about a man who lives a small, constrained life as the perfect butler, devoted to the gentleman he served. But as he looks back at his decades of service, and the opportunities he has missed, he starts to doubt whether he has made the right choices. This quiet novel’s subject and themes—tradition, dignity, class, retrospection—aren’t unlike things you’d find in a Welty story or novel, and for that fact alone, we’ve added this book to our reading challenge.

Read With Welty: The Ghosts of Medgar Evers

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

The Ghosts of Medgar Evers is about a lot of things: Mississippi in general, Medgar Evers’ 1963 murder by Byron De La Beckwith, the third trial of De La Beckwith in 1994 (after his first two trials in 1964 resulted in hung juries), and the making of Ghosts of Mississippi, the Rob Reiner movie about that 1994 trial.

Evers, Mississippi’s NAACP field secretary, civil rights activist, and voting rights activist, was murdered in front of his wife and children in his driveway the morning after President John F. Kennedy’s Civil Rights Address on June 12, 1963. De La Beckwith was tried three times for the murder, the last one resulting in a conviction.

When she heard about the murder, Welty stayed up for two nights writing her story “Where is the Voice Coming From?” The story is told from the perspective of the assassin. It was published in the New Yorker on July 6 1963, just three weeks after the murder.

Willie Morris is the best at taking a work on nonfiction—the making of a movie—and making it personal and autobiographical without hogging the spotlight. He writes of the strangeness of the blending of real life and fictional on the movie set:

The confluence of past and present, the day-to-day mingling of the dark ghosts and the better angels of our nature, graphically evoked for me on the sets of the movie, was strange and often painful but emotionally redemptive at the same time.

We chose The Ghosts of Medgar Evers out of all the Willie Morris books in Welty’s collection for several reasons: it ties into “Where is the Voice Coming From?”; Welty, though not a character, is referenced throughout the book; and it gives context to both Welty and Morris and the time and place in which they wrote. In the introduction, Morris writes, “To understand the world, William Faulkner once said, you have to understand a place like Mississippi. One loved a place, he wrote, not so much because of its virtues, but despite its faults. Faulkner understood Mississippi in his soul, and so did Medgar Evers.”

Willie Morris's inscription in
Eudora Welty's copy of The Ghosts of Mississippi

Read With Welty: Lost in the Cosmos

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Six: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy

When I try to explain Lost in the Cosmos to people, I usually say, “Well, it’s a kind of weird fake self-help book that’s also sort of serious and metaphysical.” That’s a little hard to explain, so I usually describe this passage from the very beginning of the book:

Now imagine that you are reading the newspaper. You come to the astrology column. You may or may not believe in astrology, but to judge from the popularity of astrology these days, you will probably read your horoscope. According to a recent poll, more Americans set store in astrology than in science or God.

You are an Aries. You open your newspaper to the astrology column and read an analysis of the Aries personality. It says, among other things:

You have the knack of creating an atmosphere of thought and movement, unhampered by petty jealousies. But you have the tendency to scatter your talents to the four winds.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

Suddenly, you realize you’ve made a mistake. You’ve read the Gemini column. So you go back to Aries:

Nothing hurts you more than to be unjustly mistreated or suspected. But you have a way about you, a gift for seeing things through despite all obstacles and distractions. You also have a desperate need to be liked. So you have been wounded more often than you will admit.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

Lost in the Cosmos is really about the search for self—and why it’s so hard for us to understand and recognize ourselves. We walk around in our own heads all day, and still we don’t understand ourselves! Why is this? Percy gives us many, many chances to figure this out, with scenarios like the above, quizzes (“Is amnesia a favorite device in fiction and especially soap operas because…”), thought experiments, psychology, psychiatry, aliens (!), charts, and more. Is this book satirical or serious? I think it’s a bit of both: a tongue-in-cheek way to get us to explore our own humanity.

Eudora Welty and Walker Percy were friends and contemporaries. In a March 17, 1988 with Percy’s biographer Patrick Samway, Welty said, “All of his writings fascinate me. I know they go into some type of depth I don’t even realize. I know enough to get the force of the feeling and poetic strength and all the things that mean so much to me.”

Read With Welty: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Five: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez

The first time I heard of One Hundred Years of Solitude was in a creative writing class. I found the class terrifying, so I basically never went back after the first week, but it was an exhilarating first week. My professor, a writer named E.A. Mares, told us about a book in which fantastical things happen as if they were commonplace. What I remember most, and what I wrote about in my journal, is the story of Remedios the Beauty, who was so beautiful she simply floated up into the heavens, to the surprise of no one. It simply made sense.

When I later read the novel, which is the multigenerational story of the Buendía family and through it the story of the town Macondo, not only did I have to keep flipping to the front of the book to consult the family tree—I love a novel that requires a family tree!—but I had to create my own to use as a bookmark for even easier access.

García Márquez’s novel received the single greatest blurbable accolade from William Kennedy’s review in the New York Times Book Review:

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. It takes up not long after Genesis left off and carries through to the air age, reporting one everything that happened in between with more lucidity, wit, wisdom, and poetry than is expected from 100 years of novelists, let alone one man.

It makes sense that a book that allegedly reports everything that happened between the Book of Genesis and modern times is not the easiest read. This is not a book to polish off over the weekend. It’s a book to dive into and to get lost inside of—an escape hatch for reality where you might encounter the wild and profound.

I don’t know for sure if Eudora Welty read the copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude that she had in her collection, but I’d like to think that she did, and that she too got lost in Macondo.

Read With Welty: Juke Joint

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Four: Juke Joint by Birney Imes

Eudora Welty’s photographs, taken mostly in the 1930s once she returned to Mississippi from New York, are known for their empathy and humanity. Her subjects are the commonplace: children sitting on porches, women strolling down Main Street, abandoned houses, store signs. They capture a time and most importantly, a place: Mississippi. 

State Fair, Jackson, Mississippi, 1939. Eudora Welty.

Birney Imes’s Juke Joint does a similar thing: his photographs capture Mississippi Delta juke joints of the 1980s, many of them now gone. In the introduction by novelist Richard Ford, he relays a story that comes closest to capturing the photos in words:

There is a story Birney Imes tells about a friend who suggested that none of the subjects in his photographs—these shadowed, motley rooms with honky-tonk facades, the oddly objectified humans who stare at us—none of these ever actually existed on the earth but were actually creations of Imes’s imagination—only seemed to be juke joints with men sleeping it off and women smiling out from boozy luminence.

Purple Rain Lounge, Duncan, 1989. Birney Imes.

Imes’s photos are bright, colorful, and vibrant—the viewer is nearly there. We’re in the small rooms crowded with furniture, we see the handlettered signs with prices and rules. They are, as Richard Ford says, a treat for the eyes.

Read with Welty: Music of the Swamp

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week Three: Music of the Swamp by Lewis Nordan

For one second the woman and I seemed to become twins, or closer than twins, the same person together. Maybe we said nothing. Maybe we only lay in the band of sunlight that fell across our bed. Or maybe together we said, “There is great pain in all love, but we don’t care, it’s worth it.”

I’m not sure where to even begin to tell you about Music of the Swamp. Nothing I could possibly say about this book, or really any of Lewis Nordan’s books, could accurately describe the experience of stepping into his wild, fantastic, heartbreaking world. I will try, and it will be inadequate, but maybe you’ll want to find out for yourself and read the book, which you won’t regret.

In Music of the Swamp we meet Sugar Mecklin, whose love for his daddy is vast and confusing. Fathers are often absent, disappointing, or dead in Nordan’s world, and Sugar’s is at least present, if distant and bewildering. In the title story, Sugar and his friend Sweet Austin (who doesn’t have a daddy) find a dead body in the lake. When they return to Sugar’s house to tell his daddy, Gilbert, about it, he is drunk and listening to a Bessie Smith record, unable to give the boys the attention and reassurance they need:

Bessie Smith was telling him what he already knew. You are trapped here, Sweet Austin, we all are. It don’t help to have a daddy, you’re trapped anyway, daddies will always leave, always die, always be somebody you don’t know. Daddies ain’t your trouble, Sweet Austin. Your trouble is the geography.

Music of the Swamp is a book of stories about love and death and fathers and heartbreak, but it is also hilarious in the way that weird and sad things can sometimes catch you off guard. Like this: in one story there is a four-year-old boy named Douglas who wants to be an apple when he grows up. This vexes his mother, who berates him for the choice. He’s pretty steady, until one day he says ok fine, I don’t want to

be an apple, and his mother celebrates. I want to be a dog, Douglas says. His mother sees this as progress. Not perfect, not a fireman or a senator or a painter, but it’s fine. Then he regresses and says he wants to be a cork.

Lewis Nordan grew up in Itta Bena, Mississippi, and the Delta is infused in his work. His own stepfather was friends with Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, the men who murdered Emmitt Till, and Nordan wrestled with his own guilt and feelings of adjacent complicity before writing Wolf Whistle, which is based on the murder.

Nordan wrote this in Eudora Welty’s copy of Music of the Swamp: “For Miss Welty, without whose influence I could never have written a word.” We readers are grateful for this influence.

Read with Welty: Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

 "There is very little about a segregated America that bears nostalgia, and some readers may not be charmed by Mr. Taulbert’s portrait; yet he has evoked such loving memories of Glen Allan and its residents that readers will come away from Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored at least a little sorry that they didn’t grow up there too.”

--Rosemary L. Bray, Review of Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, The New York Times, February 18, 1990

If you do an internet search for Glen Allan, Mississippi, located about 30 miles from Greenville, you’ll get few results: a pretty blank Wikipedia page and a couple of videos touring the depleted current state of this small community. To get a better sense of what the Glen Allan community once was, you’ll have to turn to Clifton L. Taulbert’s Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored.

Taulbert’s account of his childhood and adolescence in Glen Allan during segregation—when black people were “colored”—crackles with life. The people we meet are as real as if we were there: Miss Shugg, Cousin Beauty, Poppa, Ma Ponk, Miss Doll, and many others populate both the town of Glen Allan and Taulbert’s memories. Their lives were affected and shaped by the realities of racism and segregation, and those realities are certainly present throughout the book. But the reader comes away from Taulbert’s memoir enchanted and perhaps a little wistful that we can’t go visit some of the larger than life characters.

Taulbert continues his memoir in The Last Train North, which details his experiences as he went to St. Louis in the mid-60s, and the realities he discovered of the mythical north he’d heard of growing up. Taulbert serves on the Eudora Welty Foundation National Advisory Board.

Listen to this Fresh Air interview with Clifton Taulbert: https://freshairarchive.org/segments/clifton-taulbert-discusses-growing-segregation

Read With Welty: The Professor's House

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

Week One: The Professor’s House by Willa Cather

The desire to make a work of art and the making of it—which is love accomplished without help or need of help from another, and not without tragic cost—is what is deepest and realest, so I believe, in what she has written of human beings. Willa Cather used her own terms; and she left nothing out. What other honorable way is there for an artist to have her say? 

--Eudora Welty, “The Physical World of Willa Cather,” The New York Times, January 27, 1974

If you’ve read one of Willa Cather’s more popular works, My Ántonia or O Pioneers!, there is a thing that pops into your head when you hear her name: the prairie. Long descriptions of the wind rippling across the grains of wheat or grass, fertile ground, farming—that is Willa Cather to many of us. However, The Professor’s House, chosen as our first title in the Read with Welty reading challenge, doesn’t take place on the prairie at all: it’s a part academic novel, part adventure novel, and part domestic novel.

The Professor’s House is the story of Professor Godfrey St. Peter and his quiet, midlife, Midwestern, domestic, existential crisis. St. Peter is a history professor who has just won a big academic award, allowing his family to move into a bigger house. But he’s very comfortable in the old house, where he’s written all his books in the attic office, as well as where he and his wife have raised their daughters, and he decides…well, he’d really rather stay. This tiny rebellion allows him to truly steep in his own introspection, and he spends months with his life flashing before his eyes as he reviews his life’s choices and decisions.

I get it. This does not sound exciting. But wait! One of St. Peter’s students, the brilliant and mysterious Tom Outland, plays a huge role in St. Peter’s life. Tom’s backstory, which takes us to the gorgeous mesas of New Mexico, is exciting and adventurous where St. Peter’s life is stable and predictable. The middle section of the book, told to St. Peter by Outland years before about how he discovered an untouched Native American ruin, contrasts with the quiet drama of St. Peter’s chosen life.

We chose The Professor’s House over one of Cather’s better known works for a couple of reasons: we couldn’t resist that The Professor’s House was found in the Welty House (and that there’s a Willa Cather house as well!). We also thought that this quiet novel of a person reviewing their life might resonate with readers in this particularly strange year, where many of us were at home this spring and summer, potentially reviewing our own lives and decisions.

If you’ve read The Professor’s House or decide to read it now, please tell us what you think!

MLC Reads: November 6, 2015

We do so love to read! We just love to curl up in a nice spot, pull out a good book, and lose ourselves in the printed word. We've spent the last week reading these wonderful books:

 Freedom Summer

written by Deborah Wiles

illustrated by Jerome Lagarrigue

picture book

five stars

Freedom Summer is picture book perfection. Jerome Lagarrigue won the John Steptoe Award for New Talent for his illustrations and we can see why. The gorgeous impressionism-inspired pictures pulled us even deeper into this story of the South during the summer of 1964. Deborah Wiles's tale of young Joe and John Henry's friendship is incredibly sweet. Joe, who is white, is noticing the ugly side of the segregated world in which he grew up for the first time. He wants his friend John Henry to be able to experience all the same fun things he does in their small town. The ways in which the two small boys act and react to their town's fight against integration is both heartbreaking and inspiring. This is a must read for pre-schoolers and up.

The Truth About Alice

written by Jennifer Mathieu

YA fiction

five stars

If you've ever attended school with a bunch typical teenagers- hellooo, high school- this book will be a trip down memory lane. If you're still in high school, you may recognize yourself or your friends on these pages. The stories and accusations flying around Alice are shocking, but the untold stories hiding in this high school are equally fascinating. Told from multiple points of view, this short novel is a reflection on stereotypes that will keep you on the edge of your seat to the very end.

Uprooted

written by Naomi Novik

YA fantasy

four stars

Uprooted by Naomi Novik follows the story of young Agnieszka. Every ten years the Dragon, a powerful wizard who defends her village from the corrupting influences of the Wood, comes to Agnieszka’s village and chooses a young woman to take with him. The Dragon inexplicably chooses Agnieszka over her best friend Kasia, who possesses all the charm, beauty and poise Agnieszka does not. Thus begins a story of adventure, loss, friendship, and love. Uprooted is lighthearted and humorous at times but there is also a sense of tragedy and loss that underscores it. While there is a romantic undercurrent to the story, the real relationship at the heart of this book is the honest and moving friendship between Agnieszka and her best friend Kasia.

Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald

edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan

nonfiction: letters

three stars

Lovely letters by two master story tellers... From time to time it plodded a bit, but the commentary by Suzanne Mars and Tom Nolan made this a fairly fascinating peek into the lives of Eudora Welty and Kenneth Millar. If you haven't already, be sure to pick up What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. (Ms. Eudora knew how to write a right fine letter!)

Next week, we have these books on our plate:

• Mister B. Gone
  written by Clive Barker
• Lois Lane: Fallout
  written by Gwenda Bond
• This Is Not My Hat
  written by Jon Klassen
• Mississippi Moonshine Politics: How Bootleggers & the Law Kept a Dry State Soaked
  written by Janice Branch Tracy
  
  Until then, happy reading!

Eudora, Eudora!

Genealogy questions are among the many requests we receive here at the Mississippi Library Commission.  We help patrons look for family links, military records, or anything else we can help them to find using Ancestry Library Edition, Heritage Quest, or books and records in our Mississippi Reference Collection.  It was a delight when I happened across a book titled Eudora while searching through Mississippi documents.  Eudora, edited and selected by Patti Carr Black, is like a family album spanning back to Eudora Welty’s great grandparents on both her paternal (Welty) side and maternal (Andrews) side.  We often see pictures of notable, historical figures during their “prime” years of being famous, and we rarely get a peek of their family history.  Here are a few photos for you to enjoy!  Feel free to say, “Aww!”



"Mother's father, Edward Raboteau Andrews, was called Ned.  he was the first in his family to leave Virginia and move to West Virginia, where he practiced law and met his wife, Eudora Carden [her namesake]" (Eudora 3).

"First visit to Ohio, rocking with Grandpa Jefferson Welty" (Eudora 14).

Eudora Welty and her father, Christian Webb Welty (Eudora 19).

"I was crazy about watches; all children are, I guess" (Eudora 16).

We have many titles about Eudora Welty, and by Eudora Welty.  Do you have questions about her?  Let us know!  Or maybe this post stirs up old memories, inspiring you to fill in the gaps in your own family history!  We would love to help!

Eudora. Ed. Patti Carr Black. Jackson, MS: Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1984. Print.

Happy Birthday, Eudora Welty!

Today would have been Eudora Welty’s 100th birthday. Here in Jackson, we consider Miss Welty royalty. If you’re in the area, head on over to the Welty House today for free tours—and birthday cake! The Welty House is one of the most authentic literary homes in America; Welty not only left her house to the state, but apparently all its contents as well. The books on the shelves are hers. The dishes in the china cabinet are hers. Even the tiny travel bottle of shampoo on the edge of the tub is hers! Take the virtual tour if you’re not a local.

When I first moved to Jackson and found an apartment in the Belhaven area, my parents asked if the neighborhood was safe. “Eudora Welty lived here her whole life,” I replied. And when my mother saw that my apartment had window air conditioning units and told me I would die of heat stroke, I drove her past Welty’s house and said, “Look: she has them, too.” (I learned later during my tour of the Welty House that she only had ONE window unit for her entire house. I had two in my small apartment. I think she was stronger than I am.)

Check out these other Welty Centennial events going on as well. The Mississippi Reads program encourages all Mississippians to read Welty's Collected Stories in 2009.