Steve Yates is assistant director/marketing director at University Press of Mississippi, publisher of 28 books by or about Eudora Welty. We knew he just might have a Miss Welty story. -Lisa
While she probably never photographed anything with the intention of being an ambassador, Eudora Welty was this outworlder’s first experience of Mississippi, my first concrete connection to the state. Not through her fiction, though, but through her photography.
One of Welty’s phrases in Country Churchyards very much fits the experience of growing up in the Missouri Ozarks in the 1970s and 1980s. She says in that wonderful book, her last photography book published while she was alive, that cemetery art was one of the only art forms worth traveling to see in Mississippi in the 1930s. It was almost all they had.
In the Missouri Ozarks, literature was something forced on us hillbillies. It didn’t exist around us in actual walking, breathing people who claimed a profession called writing. Someone in high school forced us to read William Faulkner’s “The Bear,” and “Spotted Horses,” but I never understood them as set in a state and a landscape apart. They seemed like rousing rural stories to me, especially the one about the horses and the raw deal. Sounded like people from Chadwick. If we read any Welty in high school, it would have been “Why I Live at the P.O.” Once again, a provincial hick, I would have assumed that setting and those contentious, quirky people could exist just as well in Buffalo or Niangua. My eyes were not open yet. I didn’t know there was a place as different as Mississippi.
Photographs came out when I was in college at Missouri State, junior year. And I remember vaguely someone named Eudora Welty being on CBS’s Sunday Morning, and some buzz around the English department about the woman who had written “The Wide Net” and so many other short stories taking all these spectacular photographs.
Now there’s a book I will never forget opening. Photographs. A well-meaning but doomed girlfriend set us out one evening to buy Photographs as a gift for a retiring professor. We found it in a Walden’s in a Mall; Springfield did not have anything like Lemuria. Photographs. Such a plain title. And so large and expensive—this was the hardback edition!
But on opening it, I knew I had something very different in my hands, something from far away in time and certainly in place. And the framing, the narrative in each photograph, the men throwing their terrible knives, the black women in costumes and shopping at the window, the toughs, the wags, the innocents, the idiot. Every photograph bore the seed of a story. So much emotion: people were real-live bored, tired, dirty, enthralled, in love, in pride, sparkling, dressed to the nines, ready to sing. Humanity. And not my people. Some other people, clearly now, from a place called Mississippi. I was racing over bridges, over seething big rivers. Walls were crumbling.
The poor girlfriend was talking and talking, mistaking my reverie for a balk at the price—I was a noted, cheap, and very boorish knothead. She was giving her whispered all in the bookstore to get me to buy this book with her and gift it to a sweet, dedicated man who had taught us, especially taught me. There was only the one copy on the store shelf. Who knew when anything like this would be back?
“We cannot give this to Dr. Heneghan,” I said.
She had a great big chin and could wear dismay twisted like someone in a Thomas Hart Benton painting. I wanted my camera; and I wanted this book. I didn’t want to give it to anybody.
When I came to Mississippi for the first time in 1998, it was to work at University Press of Mississippi, the publisher that brought Eudora Welty’s Photographs to the world. If that wasn’t a buzz enough, within two years the Press brought through the publishing process a new collection of photographs Eudora Welty said she had always wanted to publish. One on Country Churchyards.
I was beginning to understand some of Mississippi. Things were so different from the Ozarks— no real winter, such soil heaving up and down, no limestone, but azaleas, anolis, bamboo, and gardenias. I longed to get out in the country, get away from Jackson and Flowood, and really immerse. When this picture was taken, Hunter Cole, who taught me more about publishing than any one, and more about English than almost any professor, struck on a scheme to visit the cemetery sites and churchyards Welty photographed. We would see what was left.
We set out very early in the mornings, because we also intended to photograph. And the light, Hunter explained, at midday and afternoon was far too bright. Seeking these places where she took photographs, especially in river country around Rodney and Port Gibson and Grand Gulf, was like hunting something elusive and alive. I even saw my first bobcat alive and running, and touched my first alligator gar on these treks. We passed the Rodney church Welty photographed, with the cannon ball still stuck in its brick. We crept way up on a ridge until any fear of trespass was overthrown, the place was so abandoned.
“Imagine Eudora back then coming all the way out here from Jackson,” Hunter said. We were easing through archways of slick, green thorns, funerary plants gone haywire and wild. “The roads were terrible. It was a long way. A woman, alone, with a car and a camera. Nothing else. Those men with the knives in ‘At the Landing.’ Think of it. It was brave. Daring.”
This photograph Hunter took of me in the Rodney cemetery, where we found extant the remarkable tablet-like crypt that Welty photographed at the edge of a ridge where the sky opens up in her photo as if the river were again near. Now vegetation covered a once bright place in green and black murk. There were, I swear, frigid spots along the ground amid the graves, though it was the blast furnace of summer. Above me in a cedar tree thousands of bees are swarming with a low, urgent hum. I have not seen the bees, and my hands are aghast in one of the cold spots. I never heard the camera snap. I was all in, fully in the moment, truly in Mississippi, probably for the first time. And it was Welty’s photography that brought me there.
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Steve Yates is assistant director/marketing director at University Press of Mississippi, publisher of 28 books by or about Eudora Welty. His novel Morkan’s Quarry was published in 2010 by Moon City Press. His collection, Some Kinds of Love: Stories, won the 2012 Juniper Prize for Fiction and will be published by the University of Massachusetts Press in April 2013. He lives in Flowood with his wife, Tammy. And Lemuria is his hometown bookstore now.
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If you have story about Miss Welty that you would like to share on our blog, please e-mail them to lisa@lemuriabooks.com.
Click here to learn about Carolyn Brown’s A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty
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