Eudora Welty

And yet by sixteen she was ready to get out. She convinced her parents that she was old enough to go away to college—first to Columbus, Mississippi, and then to Madison, Wisconsin, which was far enough from home, but in the wrong direction. After graduation, she moved to New York, to attend Columbia Business School; this was 1930, and the theatre and Harlem jazz clubs and Martha Graham occupied her far more than her classes did. She returned to Jackson only when her father was dying, in 1931. Two years later she was back in New York, but financial worries and pressure from her mother brought her home again. It was then that she started to take photographs, principally in Jackson’s black neighborhoods, where she went to buy jazz records.  

Her real awakening, though, came with a job as a publicity agent for the Works Progress Administration, in 1935, for which she travelled by car or bus through the depths of Mississippi and saw poverty—black and white—that she had never imagined before. Taking pictures now became her passion, and Welty published photographs before she published her first story. When the W.P.A. job was over, in 1936, she returned to New York several times, searching for a job in publishing and pounding the pavement with her photographs. All she ever got was a small exhibition in an optician’s store on Madison Avenue. Her subject was black Mississippians, in the fields or on the streets or simply looking outward, meeting impossible odds with a frank and powerful dignity.  

It is telling that through the late thirties Welty tried to publish her stories and her photographs in a single volume. The impetus for what she knew to be her first genuine writing had come from the same shock of discovery—from her W.P.A. travels, when, as she put it, “my feelings were engaged by the outside world, I think for the first time.” The evidence of this experience is sometimes stark, as in “The Whistle,” a story about impoverished tomato farmers who strip off their only warm clothing to cover the delicate crops during a frost, and in “A Worn Path,” about an ancient black woman who undertakes a long journey on foot to get medicine for her grandson (and who serenely ignores the petty insults of the white people she meets along the way; she, too, receives a nickel). Despite the subjects, there is nothing didactic in these stories; Welty’s tone remains as light and precise here as in her freak-show comedies. And, like the comedies, these stories do not need to name the big subjects they touch on—race, deprivation, ignorance, morality—because the author’s quick chiselling of character includes them all.

Claudia Roth Pierpoint, A Perfect Lady, 

artigo muito antigo para a The New Yorker, 

 recuperado ontem, dia do aniversário da escritora.