If I had a boat

Eudora Welty, by Curt Richter

If I could be reborn and exist wholly immersed in a different place, it would be Eudora Welty's Mississippi. Excluding the racism, the world from which she came and the one she put on paper have surpassed for me, suddenly, even the beloved world of Flannery O'Connor's creation. Mississippi has a bad rap these days, accused of backwardness and redneckness and other dismissive terms of the outsider's perspective. I haven't spent much time there, other than driving through, so I can't defend it properly, but I suspect the Mississippi of Delta Wedding didn't get a whole lot of respect either, not that you'd know it once you become immersed in it.

Once you arrive in the Delta with the Fairchilds' outsider cousin from the Yellow Dog train, on the day of Miss Dab's wedding, you are tasked with staying put until the end of the wedding, at the very least, and certainly until you've popped in and out of the heads of the various children and adults making up this plantation legacy family and the servants who bake cakes and tend to their whims. I've read Delta Wedding three times, and I'm still not sure I totally understand it, but such is the wonder of Eudora Welty.

In both this novel and her short stories, two of which were read recently on the Selected Shorts podcast, she possesses two gifts which make a story vibrant and exactly as I like them to be. First, she is a master of presenting place, but it is revealed slowly, in bits and pieces in between a usually omniscient narrator's character mind-reading and casual physical description. It is almost always summer, hot, and the characters move at a languid pace, even when they're hurrying. They talk to one another with equal parts of fondness and exasperation, and always proper decorum and manners. People are just this side of surreal, and it lends to the writing a significantly slowed pace, which leaves the narrator free to give copious commentary of the smallest things whenever she sees fit. (I am assuming - she usually feels like a woman; though it’s not how I was taught, I have a hard time picturing anyone other than Welty herself. That face is so regal and lived in and captures what I am describing in her prose.)

Second, she writes wonderful and complex women - or, more precisely, Southern women, which are a class unto themselves and a class I adore. I am sure Southerners tire of incessant analysis of their lifestyles and mannerisms from outsiders, especially if they are done without sympathy. I hope that I can say this without reproach, because I long to be Mrs. Fairchild for a week, or Robbie, the shadowy and judged Fairchild (by marriage only), married to the most beloved Uncle George. Each woman fulfills expected 1923 Delta woman roles, obeys tradition, is loving and nurturing in her own way. But what I like about trips inside their mind is that we don’t find subversion there, but a deepening of the psychology of this kind of woman, and revealed in language that takes its time to get to the heart of it, and then steps back quickly so you’re left with a little more than before but also a little more wonder. It’s writing to the tune and speed of “April the 14th, Part 1” or “I Dream a Highway” by Gillian Welch. You might never get there, and then suddenly you do. It’s exactly what I look for in fiction.

I’ve been accused of being too esoteric when I talk about this kind of thing, but I feel discontented these days (maybe because my house is such a mess) and I want to time travel to become one of these women, managing the men around her without them knowing, keeping them anxiously intrigued, sipping lemonade in a white lace dress and a straw hat on the wraparound porch in intense Delta humidity with only a slow fan to cool me down, no BlackBerry, DVR, car, plane, or email to answer in sight.