I Met Eudora Welty In Church

I met Eudora Welty in church. Depending on where you’re from, that will either sound kind of crazy, and maybe a little made up, or perfectly mundane. That’s the point. If you ever study Eudora Welty or any Southern writer worthy of the title, your professor will discuss “sense of place” with you. In Mississippi, your sense of place will include the idea that many of the most remarkable people go to church. That you can find them there isn’t extraordinary. You’d be surprised at the people I’ve met at church.

My attempt at establishing a sense of place in saying that I met somebody so unique and extraordinary as Eudora Welty in a church that Garrison Keillor considered the most mundane of all the mundane protestants sounds preposterous. He said we “make fun of Methodists for their blandness, their excessive calm, their fear of giving offense, their lack of speed, and also for their secret fondness for macaroni and cheese. But nobody sings like them.

I’m sure there were times before when a much smaller version of myself was told to “say hello to the nice lady” upon encountering Miss Welty, but unless I was ordered to hug the neck of whatever stranger my parents or grandparents presented me with because they were related, I often didn’t retain it, but as I was turning from little boy to little man, I was expected to maintain more significant social entanglements.

My father read some thirty to forty books a year from the day I was born until the day I died. Only ten or twelve percent of them were fiction. If you subtract out all the Tom Klancy books, that leaves very little room for people like Eudora Welty, but I’m sure he read her, just not that much of her. Eudora Welty wrote little about sticking it to the Russians or the Germans.

My father tended to view all fiction as an attempt to escape the very serious responsibilities in life. He drilled the trait of being a responsible citizen into me from early childhood. For a man who delivered hundreds of speeches, his most famous one was “For The Public Good,” which was about his uncle, the man I was named for.

My father explained that Eudora Welty was “important to Mississippi and important to Millsaps, “ which was all he needed to know. She could have been a rugby player or an electrical engineer instead of a writer, but as long as she met those two criteria, he would want me to meet her and retain her name. Miss Welty taught at Millsaps sometimes, and my father was Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the first half of my life. If you look at most of the bronze plaques scattered around campus, it will list her and Rowan Taylor as “Life Trustees.” His name will be important later.

Dorothy Kitchings first taught me Eudora Welty at St. Andrews Day School. She had us read “Why I Live at the PO,” which was a great story for junior high students. She also taught us “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Foghorn” by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury was Forrest J Ackerman's best childhood friend. Their names will come up later.

Charlotte Capers was one of Miss Welty’s closest friends and most common co-conspirators. My father was one of her biggest fans. Capers was involved in getting William Winter elected governor, which took three tries before the idea took hold. Once he was governor, he made sure Miss Capers had the money and the power to change the Mississippi Department of Archives and History from a collection of musty, dusty Civil War relics and a dubious South American mummy into one of the most important historical collections in the country. Sometimes, my platitudes sound like an exaggeration, but I don’t think you can exaggerate the importance of Charlotte Capers to Mississippi History.

My mother considered my meeting Eudora Welty a part of my training as a gentleman. At thirteen, I was no longer her most troubled child, so I sometimes struggled for her time. She implored me to be reasonable when I mentioned that I might want to write too. Diagnosed with ADHD and Dyslexia, she made the very valid point that I struggled to read, and if I struggled to read, then how could I be a writer? My mother loved me dearly. She spent countless hours working with me to get me to read as well as possible, which wasn’t very well. Protecting a child from disappointment and failure because you love them can clip their wings every bit as much as fastening shackles to them.

When I was thirteen, Forrest J Ackerman, editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland Magazine, suggested that his young followers might enjoy reading The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Even though we corresponded (he corresponded with thousands of thirteen-year-old boys), Ackerman didn’t know I was dyslexic. Hugo’s pre-French Revolution tale about Paris was decidedly beyond my scale when I was thirteen, even in translation, but I struggled through it.

Like most of the classic monsters, Hunchback of Notre Dame was about a man who was secretly more beautiful than anyone else. Hugo described Quasimodo as a “broken giant.” The phrase stuck with me. In a world surrounded by little old people, I learned to identify those among them who might have once been giants.

Sitting a few pews in front of my grandparents on the lower level of the Galloway United Methodist Church on the North side, I could identify Eudora Welty by her white head and lack of a hat. Even when I was thirteen, she was showing signs of osteoporosis. Doctors learned all sorts of ways to prevent women from developing this condition in the generation after her, but in Miss Welty’s generation, it was common. At Galloway, she was hardly the only one.

Despite what age had done to her, I could tell she was once tall and athletic. Even now, I find it hard to have face-to-face conversations, so I rarely ever spoke to her, but when I did, I could tell she wasn’t just any other little old lady.

I was named for my uncle. One day, Eudora Welty told me that she used to go down Capitol Street to pick up typing paper and ribbons at the Office Supply Company, his business, and then on to The Lamar Life building two blocks down.

Lamar Life Company began as a subsidiary of First National Bank. Eudora Welty’s father was involved in erecting the impressive Art Deco and Gothic (an unusual combination) skyscraper and served as its first manager. Banks could use their access to cash to run a very profitable life insurance business, which is why First National wanted one. Still, Roosevelt’s administration considered that an unsafe combination after the banks failed, so the bank was forced to spin off the life insurance company, which they did by giving some of the directors a share in Lamar Life stock in exchange for First National stock.

They used to say that Capitol Street was the only thing that separated First National from Lamar Life. Whatever safety Washington sought by separating the two, they found a way around it. In the years to come, the independent Lamar Life found ways to invest in all sorts of things considered too risky for the bank, including a television station that lost its license for being too racist and a radio station that introduced the concept of album rock to Mississippi.

People who study Eudora Welty often get caught up in the romantic tales of her loves that were lost. I never had much interest in that. Because she never wrote about it, I figured I didn’t have any more business digging into her romantic life than she had digging into mine.

I was more interested in how she was the first person I was ever aware of who kept an entourage. Sometimes called the “menopause mafia” by jealous people, Welty surrounded herself with some of the most remarkable people in central Mississippi. When Frank Hains died, I began to see something it took me thirty years to fully understand. Eudora Welty used her fame as a writer and her position in Mississippi society to provide a place of sanctuary and succor for people who otherwise would have otherwise been and ignored because of their sexuality. She allowed people to be what they were. For some people, this gave her the reputation for “associating with queers,” but for me, it signaled that, among other things, she was a protector.

When Frank Hains was murdered, the newspaper he worked for published every salacious and cruel thing the defense attorney said about him. Miss Welty wrote a really beautiful piece about Frank’s life that ran in the Clarion Ledger in place of his regular collum. Whatever else happened in the wake of Frank’s death, she was determined to provide him with some dignity.

My father’s best friend and sometimes mentor was Rowan Taylor. Rowan was remarkable. He existed deep within his own mind. Some people found him to be uncommunicative, but that was a misjudgment. He communicated quite a lot; he just didn’t use very many words.

Like a good many of my father’s friends, Rowan found himself divorced and available in his middle years. Just prior to that, a young woman from Oklahoma, of all places, came to Jackson to study Eudora Welty and ended up being a lynchpin in the English Department at Millsaps College.

A lifelong learner, Rowan never graduated from Millsaps, but he adopted us because the school's purposes and goals resonated with him. Rowan took a continuing education course on Eudora Welty and met Suzanne Marrs, who taught the course. He’d been playing catch-and-release in his personal life since the divorce, but it didn’t take him long to realize that he found a pearl of great price in Suzanne. She was with him until the day he died.

I’d been aware for a while that Anthony Thaxton was working on a film about Eudora Welty featuring the usual suspects, and I was anxious to see it. My first opportunity would be the 2024 Mississippi Book Festival, rescheduled for the fall when it wouldn’t be three thousand degrees outside.

In the past, I would have attended something like the Mississippi Book Festival out of the sense of community responsibility my parents made sure to imprint in me. Since my illness, though, I’ve tried to recreate myself, or maybe reveal myself, as a writer, which I’d been trying to do since 1988. Attending something like the Mississippi Book Festival with the idea of self-identifying as a writer became something different.

Seeing that Suzanne Marrs was listed as a panelist, I knew there was a chance this might be an emotional experience for me. Rowan’s been gone for a while now, and Suzanne has been an emeritus professor for a while, too, but these are fibers that run deep into my being.

I volunteered to help run the door, which is a pretty simple job. A lot of people were whispering when Robert St. John and Ralph Eubanks came through, but I only had eyes for Suzanne. I hugged her neck before she took her seat on the dais.

Once she was in place, I noticed that Millsaps faculty, old and new, were filing in like it was the commencement procession. We were showing out.

The panel, moderated by Thaxton, was charming and warm. As expected, Bill Dunlap dominated the discussion. More associated with Ole Miss than any other school in Mississippi, I can’t ever remember a world without Bill Dunlap in it.

When the film began, I heard voices I hadn’t heard in a long time. The first was obviously Eudora Welty. I hear recordings of her voice pretty regularly. Some I recognized in the film. I saw and heard William Winter’s voice, which I haven’t heard in quite a while. Winter’s life, his political and personal life, his relationship with my family and my father, his leadership, and his example played a huge part in helping me to create a framework upon which I would hang a thing called Mississippi that exists in my head.

I got to see just a few seconds of a very young Jeanne Luckett during the infamous encounter between Eudora Welty and William F. Buckley. While he himself was not at all creative, my father surrounded himself with creative people, including Jeanne Luckett. He laughed once that between Missco, Trustmark, and Millsaps, he worried he might work Jeanne Luckett to death. I always tell young people, “Y’all just don’t understand the impact this woman had in her career.”

While it was all very touching, I was holding up pretty well. Out of the blue, they included a ten- or fifteen-second bit of Ray Bradbury talking about Eudora Welty. I’d met Bradbury through Forrest Ackerman and Ray Harryhausen. I ate lunch with him at the House of Pies in Los Angeles. Other than Eudora Welty, he was the first real writer I ever met, and he was extraordinarily kind to a younger version of me. Seeing his great mop of white hair and oversized glasses, I began to cry.

In the film, they mentioned several famous people from outside of Mississippi who were taken with Eudora Welty. One that they didn’t mention was a woman I began corresponding with in the last two decades of her nearly one century on earth. Fay Wray had starring roles in over ninety motion pictures, but I bet you can’t name one other than King Kong. She laughed once that she buried three husbands and King Kong. She was an extraordinarily sturdy woman.

In my conversations with Wray, she was most interested in Eudora Welty. She mentioned several times that she had a photograph of herself with Miss Welty and Lauren Bacall. She promised to send me a copy if she could ever find it. She didn’t find it, but just the story of hearing about it has been precious to me.

The panel snuck out and high-tailed it over to the Book Signing tent while the film ran. I felt a very genuine sense of completeness watching this film about Eudora Welty in Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church, where I met her as a boy. One of the things about being from here that contributes to this “sense of place” that I talked about before is how you can take just one person and track the threads that lead from them to another person, and another, and another.

Depending on who you talk to, Eudora Welty played many roles in a place like Mississippi. She was a mentor, friend, socialite, protector, teacher, bon-vivant on a budget, artist, and model; she not only wrote about a sense of place, she helped create it.