By Taylor McKay Hathorn
Eudora Welty is all-too often eclipsed by her male contemporaries when people list their favorite Mississippi writers: Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, John Grisham. Miss Welty, however, is in a league all her own and is in a class above the rest, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Optimist’s Daughter is essential reading for any Mississippian.
The Optimist’s Daughter relates the tale of the Mount Salus (yes, Clintonians, Mount Salus!) native Laurel McKelva and the ways that her life has been shaped and complicated by being the optimist’s daughter. Her father, the storied Judge McKelva, turned an optimistic (and blind, in more ways than one) eye to the dying sufferings of Laurel’s late mother and to the antics of his young new wife; and, when he passes away, Laurel is forced to confront the ways her father’s optimism, her mother’s illness, and her own husband’s death have changed her – and the person those events have left behind in their wake.
It’s a distinctly Mississippi narrative: the book is littered with the “bless your heart” gossips that populate small towns, the sense of being known by those gossips without necessarily being understood by them. But it’s Eudora Welty’s writing, however, that sings the loudest of Mississippi, as she elevates the unsung details of rural life: the feel of Yazoo clay giving beneath your fingers, the creak of old floorboards, and the smell of the food brought by well-meaning neighbors who know your name as well as they know their own. For a Mississippian – native or transplanted – reading The Optimist’s Daughter is like coming home.
Once you finish the novel, there’s ample fodder for extending it beyond its scant 180 pages: you can listen to the 1986 audiobook – read by Eudora Welty herself – before visiting the Eudora Welty House and Gardens at 1119 Pinehurst Drive in the Belhaven neighborhood of Jackson, Mississippi. If you visit in the spring or summer, it is likely that Miss Welty’s back garden is will be in full bloom with the warmer weather.
Once you leave the house where the writer grew up and spent nearly all of her adult life, you can stop by the Belhaven Corner Market to pay a visit to the mural on the wall of the store that faces Fortification Street – the same storefront where Eudora Welty shopped for groceries amongst her neighbors until her death in 2001.
There are also bite-sized versions of Miss Welty’s work available for free online, if you still have a taste for her Southern tales: “Where Is The Voice Coming From,” Welty’s lament and indictment of the Evers assassination that happened less than five miles from her lush back garden, is available for free online at The New Yorker, and the Raymond-based Thaxton Studios is currently producing a documentary on the life of the Mississippi writer, slated for release in fall 2024.
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