The following is from These Long Shadows: Women’s House Museums in the American South by Monica Nelson. Eudora Welty Writer 1909-2001 Jackson, Mississippi House Name: Eudora Welty House Construction: Built in 1925 Architect: Wyatt C, Hedrick Landmarked: 2002 Open To Public: 2006 Primary Function: Literary tourism Address: 1119 Pinehurst St., Jackson, MS 39202 When she died, The Eudora Welty House and Garden was staged to look exactly as it was when Eudora lived there in 1986. Her books, paintings, linens, and furniture have not been moved at all, giving the space the feeling of being flash-frozen in time.
Eudora was a novelist and photographer whose main subject was the American South. She was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and returned in 1931, after having trouble making money in New York City. She moved back into the home she lived in as a teenager and wrote in the bedroom upstairs.
Welty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for her novel The Optimist’s Daughter, and has been awarded both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She used her writing to metaphorically turn a camera on some of the injustices and racial disparity in the South, most notably in her short story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” which was published in the New Yorker. The story took the perspective of a White male Southerner and addressed a crime similar to the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963.
My shadow stretches across the pavement and onto the pale gray stone of the Mississippi Department of History and Archives. The sun has been absent on my five-day road trip through Mississippi. Now, ending in Jackson, it suddenly appears: a sharp spotlight breaking the cold snap of freezing temperatures that had eclipsed the state.
As I enter the building to grab my bag from the locker, my day plays out in reverse: Medgar Evers’s house tinted by the red-brown 6pm light; the headline “A Site of Tragedy” on permanent display outside of the house, and accompanying photos of the crime scene—one image showing two hands pulling back a white curtain to indicate the bullet mark inside of the house from where he had been assassinated in the driveway; an extended afternoon looking through the photography of Eudora Welty, boxes of loose black-and-white snapshots, Mississippi through her eyes; a 7am drive to Jackson to see her home, preserved, covered in books: another type of snapshot, recreated of her life in 1981, 20 years before her death. Eudora lived her whole life in Jackson, Mississippi, except for 12 years when she was in school in Wisconsin and New York City. The Tudor Revival-style house that is now open to the public in her memory was her home for all but 16 of her remaining years.
The house is considered one of the most substantive writers’ homes in the country, meaning it is the most authentic representation of a working writer. Everything has been held intact from her life there, including paintings, rugs, furniture, drapes, and, particularly, her books. In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora wrote that integral to the function of the house was always that “any room, at any time in the day, was there to read in, or to be read to.” Her parents prized books as their most important collection.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
