Jerry Mitchell, investigative reporter for the Clarion Ledger, published a blog piece on fiction set in Jackson, Mississippi. (See full article here.) No discussion would be complete without the mention of Eudora Welty’s story “Where Is This Voice Coming From? based on the assassination of NAACP leader Medgar Evers. Mitchell had the opportunity to talk to Miss Welty about the story. Here are his recollections.
Before it was published in the July 6, 1963, New Yorker, Welty changed the name of the town from Jackson to Thermopylae.
Welty later discussed the story: “That hot … night when Medgar Evers, the local civil rights leader, was shot down from behind in Jackson, I thought, with overwhelming directness: Whoever the murderer is, I know him: not his identity, but his coming about, in this time and place. That is, I ought to have learned by now, from here, what such a man, intent on such a deed, had going on in his mind. I wrote his story — my fiction — in the first person: about that character’s point of view, I felt, through my shock and revolt, I could make no mistake.”
A few months after a jury in 1994 convicted Byron De La Beckwith of murdering Medgar Evers, I ran into Miss Welty at a reunion of her old school in Jackson, Davis Elementary.
I asked her about her short story, and she replied, “It was the only thing I ever wrote in anger.”
-Jerry Mitchell
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Jerry Mitchell is an investigative reporter for The Clarion-Ledger. He is also writing a memoir on his experiences in pursuing these cases for the publisher Simon & Schuster. The book is titled Race Against Time.
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Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty
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