Welty at Millsaps



	Eudora Welty and Ellen Douglass talk following readings at Lewis Art Gallery on Campus. In the center background is Millsaps Professor of English Suzanne Marrs, a noted Welty Scholar. (Millsaps Archives)
by Jon Parrish Peede
When former governor of Mississippi William Winter lectured at Millsaps as the 1989 Eudora Welty Chair, a pleasant elderly woman from the Belhaven area attended the sessions regularly. She wasn’t enrolled in the class and didn’t speak often, but eyes still drifted toward her like metal filings to a magnet. She was, of course, Eudora Welty herself. By 1989, Miss Welty’s bond with Millsaps was well established. She spoke at Millsaps at a campus symposium in 1960, the Southern Literary Festival in 1963, the Civic Arts Festival in 1964, the Arts and Lecture Series in 1968 and many other years; was Writer-in-Residence in 1964-1966; was awarded the Doctor of Humane Letters degree in 1969; joined the Board of Trustees in 1978 and became a Life Trustee in 1985; and was honored with the creation of the Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Studies in 1983 and the celebration of her 75th birthday with an international literary festival on campus in 1984. She has read and discussed her work in Millsaps classes, forums, Leadership Seminars, and other campus gatherings. Miss Welty’s presence and influence has been vital to Millsaps over the past four decades, such as with the 1963 Southern Literary Festival. At that time, the festival was hosted by all-white institutions – including Millsaps, the first school in Mississippi to voluntarily desegregate though then still segregated. Welty agreed to be the festival’s keynote speaker, with one request: her audience should be integrated. The Millsaps administration agreed that it should be, and Tougaloo College professors and students were invited to her reading. She read “Powerhouse” – the surface story about a bluesman’s journey in song, the story underneath about an entire people’s journey in life, a journey still being traveled. The bluesman Powerhouse carries his nightclub audience away from their turbulent daily lives into the transcendent, mysterious world of music. And so Welty carried her own audience away from their separateness into a greater plane, if only for a night. Millsaps Professor of English Suzanne Marrs believes that Welty chose the story because of its celebration of African-American culture and because she identified personally with the blues singer. As Marrs points out, in “Powerhouse” the narrator says, “When somebody, no matter	who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him”; similarly, in One Writer’s Beginnings, she writes, “What animates and possesses me is the love of [my] art and love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left.” Two months after Welty’s reading, Medgar Evers was assassinated at his Jackson home. Within days, Welty wrote the poignant story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” from the perspective of the killer, which The New Yorker immediately published. When asked by a reporter if she feared the Klan might burn crosses in her yard because of the story, she said that people who burn crosses don’t read The New Yorker. As the summer of 1963 raged on and her mother’s health began to fail, Welty needed to be close to home. So she became Millsaps’ first Writer-in-Residence, teaching workshop-style writing classes from 1964 -1966. Among her students were writers Ellen Gilchrist (B.A. 1967) and Johnny Little and New Stage theatre founder Jane Reid Petty and founding patron Tom Royals (B.A. 1962). “Welty warned writers to be cautious about using literature as propaganda, or to crusade,” says Marrs. “But she made a strong statement of her values by personal example and through her work.” In fall 2000, Marrs and coauthor Harriet Pollack will publish Did the Writer Crusade? Eudora Welty and the Political, which examines Welty’s use of literature as a means of social commentary and as a force for social change. Marrs came to Millsaps to study a famous writer and instead found a close friend. But, she says, don’t confuse Welty’s friendliness with softness. Though she is nearly as famous for her warm, encouraging personality as for her literary work, there is a firmness at the center of Welty, a firmness borne of conviction. In her WPA photographs, she does not shy away from the gritty underside of life; in her fiction, she offers up not only blooming flowers but raging floods; and in her life, she has stood against those who would think of any struggle for freedom as “the late unpleasantness.” Welty at Millsaps: it is a story about the movement of an artist toward her art, and of an institution toward its soul.