♪ The Institute for Southern Storytelling ♪ ♪ at Mississippi College.

♪ Yeah.

(laughing) - Eudora is made possible by the Phil Harden Foundation, the Mississippi Arts and Entertainment Experience, also known as The Max, Bill and Carole West, Dave and Reba Williams and Friends of the Institute for Southern Storytelling at Mississippi College.

- (Welty) Are we on the air?

My mother says that I used to come and sit down with a bunch of ladies and say, "Now start talking."

- Those stories are about people with real problems and real emotions, - And I would just hear these wonderful, exaggerated tales.

- That's the magic of Miss Welty's writing.

She could capture feelings, and I have a hard time doing that.

I'm just not, that's not what I'm good at.

I like plots and action and dead bodies.

- A profound sense of place.

- If you wanna know what the South was like, read Eudora Welty.

- I never thought, I never dreamed that I could really be taken seriously as a writer.

For years, even after I had things published in the little magazines, I thought that was just luck.

People that live in a little town amuse themselves by dramatizing everything.

- She's one of our finest short story writers.

- They have fights and quarrels and stop speaking to each other and quit calling people by their names.

- She's also a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

- I was just howling.

I thought she was the funniest, coolest thing in the world.

- Will you welcome again Eudora Welty.

Life Magazine referred to "Losing Battles" as Mozartian music, - She was a genius.

- To demand, "I won't speak in front of, "uh, segregated audiences.

You want to hear me?

Bring some black folk in."

- When Ms. Eudora was upstairs working, she stayed at that typewriter.

- My hair just stood on end.

- I met Eudora for the first time when I was eight years old.

My Aunt Maggie whispered in my ear and said, "Son... she writes them stories her own self.

- She has global Influence.

- People underestimated her.

- The Government of France wants to welcome Eudora Welty.

- And underestimated her power.

- I'm in this class with Barry Hannah and he goes, "Eudora was a peach."

- Was on the bestseller list 46 weeks.

- Through her photographs and her stories, that charm was a product of her grace.

- But she was not just a little matron.

She was a badass.

- I grew up with an encyclopedic knowledge of the kind of society this is, and so I could draw on it and I knew it.

That's why I used it.

- She is a first lady of, uh, American Letters.

- Jackson, Mississippi.

We're... on a pilgrimage down here to come to the home of Eudora Welty, that great, great writer.

(applause) - Well, you know, miss Welty was an extraordinary woman, and she described herself as locally underfoot in Jackson, Mississippi.

But the fact of the matter is, is she was tough.

She ran her career and it was an extraordinary career from that house on Pinehurst Street in a male dominated profession like publishing.

Miss Welty hit it out of the park.

- Eudora liked to write in the morning.

She liked to get up and start writing before she ever got out of her nightgown.

- It has to be light.

I think anything you wrote in the dark might be suspect.

I made it up as I went because I was just reflecting that way of talking.

But as far as a plan of sharp, psychological delving, it did not exist.

I was just writing a talk pattern that I was familiar with.

How people talk, you know?

I enjoyed it.

- Eudora is just all about voice.

You hear a voice on a record player as a little kid, and then all of a sudden it influences your life for the rest of your life.

- Why does she write something funny?

Because life is funny.

Why does she write something sad?

Life is sad.

- I just love to do it.

And after I write something, it's when my most precise and persistent work begins, because the work itself teaches me what is possible and what could be done and what can't be.

- She does this in language that is so precise and so varied.

It's demanding of readers, but it's brilliant.

- I kind of thought she might be a little old provincial lady, a little bit lost in the big city, and she was of course, absolutely nothing of the sort.

- I think you certainly have to be aware of the world and imagine yourself as having some kind of place in what you imagine, a position from which you can watch.

- I said, "So do you, do you not think of Faulkner as one of the writers who are closest to you?"

"Oh, no, dear" she said, affecting shock.

"I'm from Jackson.

He's from Oxford.

Miles away."

(laughter) - She loved Jackson.

She really did.

She loved downtown Jackson.

- Such a source of, not only of knowledge, but your measure of comparison of things.

You, you got your idea of-- the development of ideas by knowing what went before.

- And of course, she loved the Lamar Life because her father had been president and oversaw the building of it.

She loved the state, but she really liked Jackson.

- I write about things the way they came to me.

You have to have a sense of time and place.

A man wrote to me named Lindsey Dixon, and I did a bad thing when I had the flu.

He had the flu too down the street.

And every day I used to hear my parents say, "How is poor little Lindsey doing?"

And I was, I was jealous.

And so I wrote this terrible poem: (laughter) When I was a little girl, there was a young man in the town that thought he was a street car and used to go up and down the street saying, ting-a-ling, ting-a-ling.

Well, that would be called macabre in a story.

But to us, that was poor Wiley Cooper, who had been hurt, dropped on his head as a baby or something, and the whole town took care of him.

He was a human being.

I Learned from real people and individuals, not from abstract ideas.

It's like an invitation to go on forth into the world.

You might feel all by yourself, but you don't, as long as you have eyes and ears and is in your imagination, is touched and starts to work.

- Sometimes my students, uh, I think, think of Eudora as that sweet little old lady who lived on Pinehurst Street.

Well, I tell them she wasn't always old, you know.

She had a youth.

- Somebody said, "Ms. Welty, do you always write stories about olden times?"

It was the present when I was writing about it.

- There was sort of an image grew up that you have this sweet little old lady who just fooled all of us because she wrote all these great stories and we didn't know that, behind that facade, were these great stories.

No, her friends knew that was a myth that had arisen.

The real Eudora is far more interesting, far more compelling.

- I'm sure you often get asked, why do you go on living in Jackson, Mississippi?

- Well, I love it here.

Everything's catty-cornered the way I like it.

No, but all my friends live here.

A lot of them do.

And I know how to get to where my other friends live.

- When Eudora began to work on "One Writer's Beginnings," it's a book, not about her career as a writer, but about her beginnings as a writer.

- Well it's nice.

Jackson was a little town, I guess, and we all knew each other and played together and are still friends.

- Eudora's mother was really a kindred spirit when it came to literature and the love of fiction.

Eudora said her mother read Dickens in the spirit with which she would've eloped with him.

- I wanted to read everything.

My mother's idea was that nothing could do me any harm.

- Her father was a great reader too.

So it was a book loving household.

Eudora talks too about the love that she felt for her mother, but that her mother was reluctant to tell her some things.

And so she would say to her mother, you know, "Where do babies come from?"

She never would tell her.

But then one day Eudora was playing, but she found in the box two shiny nickels.

And she ran to her mother, can I have these?

Can I go to the store?

No.

And her mother then told her that these nickels had been placed on the eyes of her first child after that child had died.

And she was devastated.

The mother, of course, telling her this.

And Eudora said, she told me one secret in the place of another, not how babies could come, but that babies could die.

And so there's that, uh, awareness that comes to her early on of the tragic possibilities of life.

And a mother who wanted to protect her from that sort of knowledge, but inadvertently, uh, revealed it to her - "One Writer's Beginnings."

People loved it.

They read it.

They could identify with it.

I learned a lot about my family.

I didn't know.

- We were all pretty young as teenagers.

We don't do what teenagers do now.

And we were the graduating class of 1925.

- In high school, she was on the annual staff, and you can go through the annual and you see a lot of little drawings, illustrations.

Eudora always, I think, wanted to go afar and see the world.

- I was only 16 when I was a freshman in college.

They thought that was too young to move clear out of the state.

So I went two years to Mississippi State College for Women, - She came to The W as a student with a great sense of humor and, I think, a sense of mischief.

- She contributed to the, the yearbook, "Meh Lady."

But she wrote a send up and entitled it "Oh, Lady!"

President did not approve.

- The April Fools edition, in which she writes about five freshman students who had been drowned in the floods.

"Tragic, but it made space," she said, "for the rest of us."

She had that kind of wicked sense of humor that she built on, I think in her career.

- In fact, that was the only thing that bothered me.

There weren't any boys there.

(laughter) - But she did some of the illustrations and she could draw.

She was an artist in her own right.

She would tell stories about sneaking out of the dorm, and it was just a big no-no, she would've been sent home.

I think it was just her sense of adventure and wanting to know people, - Mr. Painter in Literature, lessons I will never forget The starting out of the imaginative mind.

- I was interested and kind of amazed that Eudora Welty's grade was 77 one semester, 78 the next.

But she talks about his class, that literature came alive, and I think that's what motivated Eudora Welty.

- It was a solid background.

It meant everything to me.

- She had been at The W for two years and wanted to go further afield.

She first went to Randolph Macon and when she got there, she found they wouldn't take all her credits.

She called her father and he said, "Well, "you were accepted at the University of Wisconsin.

Just get on the train and go there."

And she got a wonderful education there.

- Well, I discovered Yates for myself at, uh, University of Wisconsin.

It was several years before I knew you didn't pronounce it "Yeets" Reading.

That was a marvelous revelation to me.

- She made some good friends there.

She also was introduced to a whole new world of literature and art at Wisconsin.

- Her next place to study was Columbia University.

- My father was wise enough to tell me, when I said I wanted to be a writer, he thought that would be fine, but I must find some way to earn a living.

So I went to Columbia School of Business and studied business and advertising.

That happened at the moment of the Great Depression when hardly anyone advertised - When they got to Columbia, they were staying in a dormitory for graduate women.

- She won a Charleston contest when she was in college, which is kind of, that's funny to think about.

- Head of this dormitory was a woman named Eliza Reese Butler.

And the Southern girl, she wouldn't give them tickets to the opera because she thought, well, you know, southern girls, they couldn't possibly appreciate that.

Eudora said that Ms. Butler, who's always warning them about things like accepting an aspirin from a stranger, because if you do, the next thing you know, you'll wake up and Buenos Aires in a house of prostitution with a friend of your father staring down at you.

The girls wrote a little poem: She was at Columbia 1930, 1931.

She didn't come back to finish a degree because, uh, her father was diagnosed with leukemia.

So she stayed at home to be with her parents and with her father in those last days.

And in fact, it's a, it's a horrifying story.

But she witnessed his death.

They were in the hospital.

Her mother was desperate to save her husband.

This was a real match of love.

And Mrs. Welty was convinced she could save her husband.

And I don't know how much was known about blood typing.

Evidently not enough.

They decided Mr. Welty needed a blood transfusion.

Eudora was there watching, and a tube was simply run from her mother's arm to his arm for the transfusion.

And that's what killed him.

She said the doctor made a sound like a woman dropping a stitch and her father was gone.

And I think this was one of the key events in making Eudora Welty a writer.

This sense of, uh, our mortality.

How fragile our existence is.

The importance of living life fully in the face of death.

I think that informed an early story called "A Curtain of Green."

It's a story about a young woman who witnesses the death of her husband.

He pulls the car up in the driveway and a chinaberry tree falls exactly so as to strike and kill him.

And after that, the young woman, Mrs. Larkin, goes into her garden every day and creates not an orderly, tidy garden, but a jungle as if she's trying to understand the natural world which destroyed her life and her happiness and her husband.

I asked Eudora decades later, "Eudora, were you thinking of your mother when you wrote this story?"

And she said to me, "I hope my mother never realized that."

That year she spent in New York, I think she had a grand time in the city enjoying the city.

- I love Manhattan.

I spent all my girlhood trying to get here.

And I love it.

I love Manhattan.

- She had friends, but she also met lots of people.

- She had a boyfriend from Jackson.

Eudora and George went together to Harlem to listen to music.

And they loved doing that.

Eudora and her friend Frank Lyle used to go to the theatere.

They went to night court.

They thought that was a great fun.

So a very diverse, adventurous spirit there In New York.

- It used to be you could come to New York and live three weeks and go home again on the train for a hundred dollars.

It would take me a couple years to get it, though.

- Eudora and her friends in the 1930s would get together and play word games and listen to music and take funny pictures of each other.

And they called themselves the Night Blooming Cereus Club.

- This plant only blooms once a year and people in Jackson would advertise and invite the city to come see this plant bloom.

- And their motto was, "Don't take it cereus (serious).

Life's too mysterious."

So they would just go around in a kind of camp spirit and watch the blooming.

And Eudora would use this twice in fiction.

- There's a clubhouse out back.

- Those were the days of, uh, the bootleggers in Rankin County.

- It was prohibition, and they could, you know... My grandmother wouldn't see 'em - Letting her hair down in the 1930s and just not, not giving a crap what anybody thought just made me love her even more.

- And they began to call it The Penthouse.

And Eudora told me "It was the house of passions pent."

So they were out in The Penthouse having a good time out in the, in the yard back in the thirties, Eudora and her father had a really very happy relationship.

He never knew her as a writer because he died so young.

He took lots of photographs of his family and he introduced Eudora to photography.

And she became, of course, a great photographer.

And I assume it was from Mr. Welty that she learned to set up her own dark room in the kitchen of the Welty house and print her own photographs.

- Everything I've read about you always mentions, uh, during the 1930s, your work with the WPA traveling around Mississippi.

- It was a state office and we traveled all over the state.

It was a great eye-opener to me and it introduced into Mississippi.

I'd never seen any of it before.

- She was probably awestruck.

There's places in Mississippi that you cannot believe are here.

This church being one of them.

I think her spirit of adventure overrode any fear she might have.

Just wanted to go see something she'd never seen before.

She was an explorer.

- I just kept taking pictures along the way.

- I love the photographs.

She could capture someone.

You felt like she was really connecting with them.

- I mean, she was a storyteller and her photographs told a story.

- Her capturing these moments of everyday life in little nooks and crannies of out-of-the-way Mississippi are, are just a complete treasure.

And words and literature are not the only way to tell a story.

She found ways to do it through her photography, - There's a rawness to those photographs.

You see someone who's willing to take a chance and to go down a different route.

It took some courage to do that.

She was out of her element.

- This was not a lady who sat in her home in Midtown Jackson, stared out the back window at her mother's garden.

- She decided that she would explore the river country.

- I just came upon it.

It was sort of scary because there were farm animals grazing around there, eating blackberry bushes and things.

- She went down to Windsor, to Rodney's Landing and she saw a fabulous environment.

The Ruins of Windsor.

You come upon just out of nothing, and there they are.

- When these big houses were along the river, and Mark Twain used them as guides for the steamboat.

That's when Windsor was one of the marks along the river.

It would be lighted up for parties at night and they'd see it from the river.

It's amazing to think that Mark Twain looked at it, you know, and saw it.

- She truly lived a life as an artist.

And I think one thing feeds another.

Her eye through the lens, I think lends itself to her eye on the page.

It's just a gift.

- Those photographs would be part of New York City shows.

She thought of these photographs as ways to interest publishers are in her fiction.

- I thought if they liked the pictures, they'd say, "Well, what about it?

"We might even print your stories!"

That never worked.

- She never managed to get these photographs published.

Not until 1971.

- There is now to be a book of your photographs.

- What I call it- I don't know if it'll get by- is, uh, "One Time, One Place" 'cause that defines it.

- "One Time, One Place."

Mississippi in the Depression.

- I learned quickly enough when to click the shutter is the moment in which people reveal themselves.

- She looked at people who had lives of grinding poverty, and she looks at them with respect.

She allows their personhood to be known, their common humanity.

- The photography is hugely important.

It offers a Mississippi perspective on the 1930s - In taking all these pictures I was attended, I now know, by an angel, a presence of trust.

And though I did not take these pictures to prove anything, I think they most assuredly do show something.

- The power that she has as a white woman taking photographs of black people, she's trying to remedy the power imbalance.

She is having a conversation with them as an equal, even though she knows I'm the one with the camera.

I'm the one with the power.

I am a appropriating your image.

But she's trying to remedy that power imbalance.

- I thought that said a lot about her, that there must have been so much trust that she pulled out of these people to photograph them in such a beautiful way.

- And this sort of idea of making contact and truly seeing a person was very difficult because in the South of the 1930s, there were rules for who could look at whom, certainly who could take a photograph of whom.

- I think Eudora Welty's sincere interest in looking at people, not for what they kind of are, but for, for who they really were at that moment, what they were going through.

That's huge.

It gets me.

- And she knew Mississippi so well, having traveled the state and had a great compassion and a good feeling for people less fortunate, never lost that.

I know how, how grieved she was by many of the acts of injustice directed toward black people in those years.

- And had I no shame as a white person for what message might lie in my pictures of black persons?

No.

I was too busy imagining myself into their lives to be open to any generalities.

I wish no more to indict anybody to prove or disprove anything by my pictures than I would've wished to do harm to the people in them or have expected any harm from them to come to me.

- Another one of her images that I absolutely love is taken at the state fair.

- For a photographer, that's a wonderful place to get involved in, and to see.

- Three women kind of, they've got their arms around each other at the fair.

It's taken on what would've been called Negro Day, 'cause you only-- there are certain days that black people were allowed at the fair.

And Eudora is at the fair on Negro Day.

- She was sort of interested in showing a kind of dynamic that breaks Jim Crow barriers.

- Everything in the background, but then this intimate portrait of these people enjoying this day at the fair in, what is in essence really an inequity, a social inequity.

Just by her taking a photograph of capturing a moment of black joy, she's trying to capture a moment of dignity and what could be a very undignified existence for a lot of black people in Mississippi at that time.

What is extractive is, in a way giving some of their power back to them.

- Nothing could have been written in the way of a story without such a background, without the experience that I got from these things.

Of course it did.

It suggested things that could never have been made up.

- When you read the description of Phoenix Jackson, that's that photograph from of the 1930s to a T. - Your characters grow out of place and that's the way you test their propriety in, in your work.

- She does powerful portraits.

Her way of embracing across the lines of race.

Enduring, beautiful work of art.

- Her first New York show in 1936 came just about at the same time as her first short story was published.

The Southern Review published a number of her stories, and they recognized the genius that Eudora had.

An editor from Doubleday he said, "You need an agent."

He's told his friend, Dermot Russell.

And Dermot Russell wrote to Eudora and said, "You know, I hope you'll be my client."

She wrote back, "Yes."

And he wrote back and said, "Listen, "you better check us out first.

You don't know a thing about us."

And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

And he would be her agent for life.

Doubleday published her first book, which was called "A Curtain of Green."

- The Curtain is Green" by Eudora Welty.

Wonderful short stories.

- And Elizabeth Spencer said it was as if Eudora was trying out everything she could try.

The stories are so diverse.

- Ms. Welty obviously was more accessible.

Uh, and we read a lot of her stuff.

- Her ability to tell a story, to get dialogue right.

The stories, I think is what she'll always be best known for.

- I know that dialogue is the hardest thing to get right.

- So he says, "Have I heard correctly?

You don't understand why I don't cut off my beard?"

- Adore Welty was a master of dialogue.

- "Why I Live at the P.O."

Like, it's just hilarious how that's good writing that, 80 years later, it still applies.

- She was really intrepid.

1937, her friend John Robinson, his brother Will, and their sister Annabel, invite her to come with them and go by car to Mexico.

- They got in a car and went to Mexico.

I mean, I just can't imagine in the thirties.

- So they set off and Eudora took wonderful photographs there.

From the time they traveled together, onward until about 1952, I think Eudora was deeply in love with John Robinson.

- I don't know when a relationship developed.

- Uh, I think she was thinking that perhaps they would share their lives as a married couple.

During World War II, she was tremendously worried about him.

When he came home from the war, he was of course a changed man.

He went to California.

He invited Eudora to come out there, and she went and stayed several months.

- They felt for one another.

They, there was a love there.

I think it was a push/pull love.

- Their romance was a sort of on again, off again sort of thing, that they would draw close, and John would pull back.

- In earlier years when they were separated, they wrote a lot of letters back and forth.

- You can read these letters and he's busy all the time and you just, you get mad at him.

- They talked about going to Europe, and finally it was Eudora who received a Guggenheim and did go first.

John came over later and they spent time together in Florence.

Her friend Bill Smith said to John, "Why don't you two get married?

You're perfect together."

And John said, "We love each other too much for that."

Although he had not said this to Eudora, John was gay and a life with a wife would be a false life for him.

And he would not do that to her.

Sometime in the early fifties, he came to the United States, and with him came a young Italian man.

Eudora had a sense that they were a couple.

And ultimately John would spend the rest of his life with this young man in Italy.

And she and John had exchanged letters all these years and she wanted to protect him.

Evidently, she burned a good bit of his correspondence.

- But they remained good friends.

We knew that she was doing some watercolors.

I believe all the paintings we have are in watercolor.

And they, they were very good.

Some of 'em very detailed.

And I'm just glad we have the ones we do.

- Her next book was "The Robert Bridegroom," A fairytale set along Mississippi's Natchez Trace.

Her third book, "The Wide Net," the stories are totally different from the stories in the first book.

She began to work on a story called "The Delta Cousins," drawing upon stories that John had told her about, uh, his Delta roots.

- I sent a short story to Dermot Russell and he wrote back and said, "This is chapter two of a novel.

Did you know it?"

- And it became "Delta Wedding."

In a lot of ways, a book prompted by her love for John Robinson.

- She had years of active career.

She had relationships with people that we would all love to know.

- We were driving downtown.

We passed a beauty parlor that said, "We will curl up and dye (die) for you."

And everybody just screamed, "Stop the car!"

So we piled out and took turns taking our picture.

- She had a genius for friendships.

Those people were not coming to her because she was some simpering little old lady.

They came to her because she was brilliant.

- Anytime I can be with her, anytime I can do anything that involves Eudora Welty, I am there.

- Jim Lehrer, Roger Mudd found Eudora to be a friend, like, uh, like no other that they had ever had.

- Men loved being around Eudora.

It was fascinating.

- Eudora loved men too.

I'll say that.

As Reynolds Price, uh, pointed out to me more than once.

- A friend of hers, Elizabeth Spencer, said one day, Eudora said, "Let's go up and visit some of these little country stores."

And there was a sign that said, no loitering or soliciting.

Eudora said, "I think I will loiter.

Why don't you solicit?"

- When my mother and I would walk up to Jitney 14, and she would always point her out to me and say, "That's Eudora Welty.

And I didn't know what it meant to be a writer, but Ms. Welty was a writer.

And my mother distinguished her as a writer.

The fact was something extraordinary.

- Just Jackson friends, they formed a group they called The Basic Eight.

They had fun together.

And of course, Charlotte Capers was her dear friend who was very funny, - Ultimate and ultimatum.

Jubilate, jubilatum.

Happy birthday, dear Eudora, our magnolia.

grande flora.

(laughter) - Eudora called Charlotte Cha cha.

- "The Golden Apples" is a collection, a series of stories connected by a common cast of characters.

A brilliant story cycle.

And then when you think about "The Bride of the Innisfallen" a story set on a boat to Europe, on a boat train going from London to Ireland, but doing a lot of different things in that book, Mississippi stories as well.

- You actually take scissors and cut out a paragraph here in a paragraph there.

- And it's quick.

I don't really throw 'em away.

I turn 'em upside down and put 'em under a saucer.

I hoard 'em till I think I'm through and I rearrange.

And then I pin everything together.

It's like telling yourself a story and correcting yourself at the same time.

- When I was a small child, she said she woke up in the middle of night and a squirrel was sitting at her typewriter, she said.

"And the next morning he had a story written."

She was an aunt, but she was more than an aunt.

She was more like a second mother to us because we lived so close.

And Liz and I were the only children in the family.

Eudora never had children.

And so we were it, and we were doted on.

Eudora, doted on us.

- I'm the older of Mary Alice and me.

She would take my sister and me on trips.

- She took us to New Orleans and Liz and I had a grand time.

We took day trips to Vicksburg.

We-- of course the big trip was to New York.

- I, looking back, I can see that she was slowly expanding, you know, our universe.

- She also sent us to camp.

She provided these things.

I never knew she was the one that sent us to camp until years later.

It was her way of showing her love.

- She only wrote one children's book, and that was "The Shoe Bird."

- One of the birds who appears in the shoe store is the dodo.

"I'm in the right place," said the voice.

"I'd know my family anywhere by all the confusion."

- It's a fun book because adults would enjoy it too, 'cause there's lots of play on words.

Shoes are for the birds.

- They knew who she was, though they'd never seen her before, for who else could such a mysterious relative be?

The dodo.

And this is a particularly, uh, important name because Eudora's young nieces called her Dodo.

- When I was little, I couldn't pronounce Eudora, so I said, Dodo.

Well that stuck for years and years.

Her friends called her Dodo.

Charlotte Capers called her Dodo.

She would sign letters and postcards and gift cards, Dodo.

- And the dodo bird is the bird in this story who says, "I didn't come this long, long way to get shoes on my feet."

"What did you come for?"

they all asked then.

"Tell us."

- When I go back and read "The Shoe Bird," I think about this.

It's wonderful because this bird came back to be remembered and loved.

And that's what Eudora was all about.

The continuity of memory and love and family.

- Those are two important themes in Eudora Welty's fiction: love and memory.

The importance of love and the power of memory to transcend time, our way of coping with loss.

Eudora, in a sense, wrote herself into "The Shoe Bird" as the dodo bird.

- She was just the most generous, compassionate, warm person.

She just, you know.

- The children at the demonstration school did this production.

Our daughter Cameron, was the narrator of "The Shoe Bird."

- (child) They all knew... - The hope weas going to be that Eudora Welty herself would be in attendance.

And of course she was.

When the performance ended, Ms. Welty stood up in her wonderful hype and bowed to the children.

And then in a moment, not captured on camera, Ms. Welty raised her arms and flapped them in tribute to the children.

What a wonderful thing to have witnessed.

- Would you do a little bit from "Powerhouse" for us tonight?

That's such a remarkable story.

Gimme a moment here while we, um... Shall I look toward the center?

- You could look in the index.

- Yes.

That's what-- (laughter) - There was going to be this joint meeting of Millsaps students and Tougaloo students for this literary conference.

Eudora was going to read at that conference.

And there were people who were concerned about there being an integrated audience.

Wanted it to be segregated.

And she wouldn't read unless it was going to be an integrated audience.

And for a white Mississippian to take a stand like that in the midst of a massive resistance movement in Mississippi, you know, that's really very bold.

- When Medgar Evers was shot, not too long after that, you wrote a piece in the New Yorker, a fiction piece.

Was that written out of anger?

- Yeah!

It was written that night.

- What?

- It was written that night, right after the murder.

- Well, in 1963, when Medgar Evers was assassinated, Eudora was horrified, and she immediately tried to turn this into fiction.

It was a way of facing the event, of trying to understand it, to come to terms with it, to protest it.

She said she had heard the voice of hate all around her.

She knew it.

She knew what that voice would sound like.

And she wrote the story, a very daring thing to do in the voice of the murderer.

- I've lived all my life here, and I was so horrified.

So I attempted to do it in the first person.

Of course, imaginary because I didn't know who the man was.

- Unbelievable how close she came to who was actually convicted - As a southern white woman in the days of Jim Crow, when it was dangerous, she was very forthright.

- How I did such a daring thing, I don't know.

But I was carried away.

I wrote it that night and I mailed it the next day, - Her editor, William Maxwell, thought it was a masterpiece.

So here is this story saying we in the south have heard this voice.

No more can this happen.

It needs to end.

After Eudora's short story was published in the New Yorker, she got calls from members of the press saying, "Has anyone burned a cross on your lawn?"

Because they thought that she might suffer violence as a result of having taken this courageous stance.

And she said, "How ridiculous.

- The the sixties, they were difficult for everyone, especially Eudora.

In Mississippi, things were different.

Eudora was always for humanity, compassion for people.

She treated everyone the same.

- One of the most caring person that I've ever known in my life, because when I start to work for her, you know, things was rough.

And relationships between race weren't very good.

She was the sweetest person I've ever known.

- She was also concerned, though, about friends and family.

She did what she could to so-call break the barriers, but she felt like she could speak the lattice through her stories.

- So many telephone calls in the dead of night from strangers saying, "What's the matter with you "sitting back there on your ass?

Why don't you get out there and write about real things?"

Which really burned me up.

I said, "I've always written about justice and injustice.

This is not a new idea to me."

- It doesn't preach, it doesn't crusade.

But she is revealing our faults to us.

- She was not a perfect person.

Understand that there's a few bumps and there's a few places where you think, I don't know, that doesn't play well.

But don't let that stop you.

We can learn from reading Welty and we can learn a heck of a lot about Mississippi, where we are today.

As an educated white woman, she was capturing the lives of poor whites, working class whites, poor blacks, working class blacks and their lives, the full picture of people, black and white, old and young, men and women.

They all populate her photographs and her fiction.

- My name is Jean Luckett.

I was asked to produce a program with William F. Buckley for his "Firing Line" series.

- Shall I begin by asking Ms. Welty, what is it you think you can see better for living in the south than you could living outside it?

- She didn't wanna talk about politics.

She was reluctant to do the program because she thought that was what it was gonna be about.

Very soon after the taping began, he asked some political questions.

Why would writers like you continue to stay in Mississippi?

She did stand up.

She walked off the set.

She didn't leave the studio.

We had to start over.

She said that it was a miserable piece of nonsense.

- Do your books sell well in the South compared to other parts of the country?

- Oh, we don't sell well anywhere, but I mean, I'm not much of a seller.

Oh, it was the Southerners who were first good to me and first published my work.

- She really had a hard time dealing with someone who did not act appropriately.

I think that that was a clear indication of her personality throughout her life.

- One of the most important relationships of Eudora's life, certainly of the last part of her life, was with a writer named Ross McDonald, whose real name was Kenneth Miller.

- Eudora loved mystery, and Ross McDonald was a mystery writer.

- Eudora was invited to review a Ross McDonald novel.

Eudora did review "The Underground Man," and he was stunned by the review.

Found it so meaningful, and their correspondence then began in earnest.

- They met and just had a wonderful time, and they became such dear friends.

Ross and Eudora continued to correspond.

Ross McDonald, he was married, but there are these deep personal feelings of how they felt for one another.

- It was the beginning of one of the most important relationships of her life.

- He dedicated a book to her and Eudora dedicated a book to him.

- And they would send each other over 300 letters.

Ken Miller said to Reynolds, Price, "I love Eudora."

And Reynolds Price said, "So do I Ken, so do I."

And Ken said, "No, Reynolds, you love her as a friend.

But I love her as a woman."

They both loved each other.

But Kenneth Miller was a married man.

Their marriage had become very difficult.

The tragedy of their daughter's death, they were both writers, more pressure.

Margaret Miller was a kind of prickly personality.

It was a very good thing for him to have her as a friend and for Eudora to have him as a friend.

I think Eudora honored his marriage, but that they did love each other.

Shortly after Eudora Welty met Kenneth Miller, she told him a story about her past.

And it was the story of taking the train from Jackson to Chicago and going through Cairo, Illinois and seeing, when she did, up on the high railroad bridge, a flock of birds flying in a V overhead.

The rivers coming together, the confluence of the two rivers, the confluence of the birds overhead.

He wrote back and said, "You know, you need to write about that."

Ultimately, she did realize that that fit in "The Optimist's Daughter," and Eudora told Ken, "There's a passage in here I put in for you.

You'll know it when you see it.

And she must have been thinking also about the confluence of her life with his, a confluence that blessed both lives.

So he left his, as he said, fingerprint in the clay of her work.

It was an important fingerprint.

You know, John Robinson had influenced her work, had a powerful impact upon her decision to write "Delta Wedding."

Ross McDonald, Kenneth Miller, a powerful influence upon "The Optimist's Daughter."

Both of these love relationships examined immortalized in fiction.

- He developed Alzheimer's and it's very sad to see the deterioration.

His memory is destroyed.

And for Eudora to see that memory destroyed was painful.

After this problems in memory had started, well, he wrote to her and he said, "The best thing "that can happen to a man is to be known, and by a woman of your kindness and light and depth."

And when she got this letter, she wrote back to him.

"Dear Ken, we do want to be known truly.

"And I want to know truly.

I'm glad "that you feel you can lean on me.

"It's part of trusting.

You mustn't worry "or imagine that anything but good could happen to me "from our knowing each other truly.

The dark times as well "as the bright.

For you know, as I do, "there is nothing destructive in it, "only everything that moves the other way.

"Depressed, or happy and serene, "our spirits have traveled very near to each other "and I believe sustained each other.

"This will go on, Dear Ken.

"Our friendship blesses my life, and I wish life could be longer for it."

- When she came out the last time, she had this idea that she wanted to kidnap Ken.

She would find out about him, about how he really was.

The next day we had a lunch with Maggie and Ken.

She sat next to him.

After lunch, we all walked down to the ocean.

They were walking together, and so they had this quite a long time together.

After that, she said to me, "You know, I think that that it's okay."

- Kenneth Miller, five years later, would be dead.

John Robinson, by chance, happened to be in Jackson.

So here is another confluence.

The first great love of her life there with her when she loses the last great love of her life and able to offer consolation.

Eudora lived until 2001 and she cherished the memory of Kenneth Miller.

- I brought her, uh, a little gift.

It was Ken's pocket knife that he used to open his mail, and she adored it, told me so at the time, and then wrote, "I keep the little knife you gave me.

"I like to know it's there.

"It it, it comforts me and I like to hold it "or touch it or something.

I don't know what the Freudian boys would make of that."

- Back in the 1980s, the only place in Jackson to get the New York Times was at Parkin's Pharmacy.

So every once in a while, I'd see Ms. Welty in there buying a New York Times.

And I got to thinking, well, if Ms. Welty wants to read the New York Times, by golly she doesn't need to drive up here precariously and buy it.

I'm gonna start delivering it to her.

So the next day I drop the paper on her front doorstep for the first time.

Uh, this went on for about two weeks.

So the next day I buy my two Times, I run across Miss Welty's yard, I drop the paper on her front doorstep, and as I'm coming back across her lawn, the door to her car flings open.

And Miss Welty had been crouching underneath the steering wheel and she raises up dramatically and says, "Aha!

I found you out!"

Now I'm getting to talk to Miss Welty.

She invites me into her home.

She breaks out a bottle of Maker's Mark whiskey and we drink a bourbon at one o'clock in the afternoon for the next 10 years, I delivered Ms. Welty's newspaper every day, - Eudora, she enjoyed her bourbon and she was not a drunk, she wasn't anything like that.

She was a social drinker.

We were worried about giving her too much.

She wanted a bourbon and water, so Donnie said, "take this to Eudora."

She takes a sip and hands it straight back to Andy and says: I was painting Rembrandt self portraits and he never complained.

And I was painting a little bit from Vermeer.

He never complained.

But Ms. Welty got all up in there.

She, she suggested I go make my own photographs.

- And I said, "Ezra Pound didn't need to read Ezra Pound."

And she says, "No.

He was spared that."

- Willie Morris, and his wife, Joanne, occasionally would come pick up Eudora and they'd go for drives in the country.

Willie saw a road sign that said Paradise, one mile.

And he said, "Eudora, shall we take this road to paradise?"

And she said, "We'd be fools not to."

- I grew up in Germany.

In part my desire to come to the United States was motivated by my encounter with these writers that I was curious about.

- Your works have been translated, of course into many, uh, many languages.

- Yeah.

The Japanese were the first people to buy "Losing Battles."

That's rather odd.

(speaking Japanese) - I kind of translated, in my own way, how I read it, how I enjoyed it.

- Uh, I believe you told me sometime back that England did not want "Losing Battles."

- So far as I know, they still don't.

- The French love her.

Evidently the translation comes across very well.

She received awards from the French government, - (speaking French) - So I feel very happy and grateful.

- I think Eudora was an inspiration that you could have a full life, independent, wonderful life.

And she did.

She lived it to the fullest.

- We just did the kind of things that friends do together.

But my friend happened to be Eudora Welty, one of the great writers of the 20th century.

And she was also one of the greatest friends one could have.

- Writer Eudora Welty died yesterday in Jackson, Mississippi, where she was born and lived most of her life.

She wrote dozens of books that brought her international acclaim.

- She wrote that she was a writer who came of a sheltered life.

A sheltered life can be a daring life, for all serious daring starts from within.

- She was 92 years old.

- Who knows what her legacy is.

It's here.

You know, it's a beautiful expression of our country and it's, it's a gift.

- As Eudora walked by, people in the restaurant began to stand up and bow to her.

And my father was walking behind her, nodding and bowing.

- She'd be sitting in the living room and people would walk up.

The house was not air conditioned.

They would talk through the screen.

She'd say, "Oh, come on in."

- When you think of Eudora Welty, what comes to mind?

- Her house.

- Her house?

- Her beautiful house that people still go to tour and see.

- The house has basically remained unchanged.

She left all of her papers, correspondence, negatives.

All of it is at the archives.

Really the complete body of her work and life is right here in Jackson.

- All Presidents love Miss Welty.

Bill Clinton wrote a note.

I delivered it the the next day.

- Loved "The Optimist's Daughter" when it came out in 1972, - The rebel in me just got such a kick out of seeing her drink beer at Bill's Burger House.

- Eudora loved Bill's Burger House.

For her birthday celebration, he arranged to have a belly dancer.

Written round her naval Happy Birthday, Eudora.

- Everything was always coming upon me like a surprise.

- She was snooping for a book.

She was prospecting.

- We found her Pulitzer Prize in the closet in a box.

- One would hate to follow Eudora Welty.

- The name Eudora means "Good Gift," and Eudora truly has been a good gift to all of us.

- She said that her purpose was to lift and veil that separates people - And in view of the rich work she has left us, we can continue to be grateful forever.

- You were a good audience and nice, good questions.

Thank you.

And very responsive.

And I was happy to be here.

- I appreciate it very much.

- Thanks for having me.

- Thank you very much, Ms. Welty.

- Thank you.

I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa Daddy, and Uncle Rondo until my sister, Stella Rondo, just ... (changes to another story) Reach into my purse, and get me a cigarette without no powder in it if you can, Miss Fletcher, honey, (changes to another story) So somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed.

I don't know how All you foxes, owls, beetles.

A huge tail seemed to lash through the air and the river broke in a wound of silver.

Billy Boy stomped through the group of wild haired ladies and went out the door, but flung back the words, "If you are so smart, why ain't you rich?"

Oh, I think I probably said all I know and more.