By Ed Reynolds
The portrait of Eudora Welty beside her casket in the rotunda of Mississippi’s Old 
Capitol building offered quiet reassurement to the thousand or so mourners paying homage to the acclaimed writer. Welty’s inquisitive eyes—blue and round as the moon-—gazed thoughtfully at all who filed past her white-draped coffin on a rainy afternoon in Jackson. A modest but pretty arrangement of orange Montbretia from Welty’s garden offered an unpretentious symbol of her simple yet uncommon life. On the floor beside the coffin lay a single long-stem rose. High above, the walls of the rotunda balcony were adorned with samples of quilt patterns from 1850 to 1946, a fitting display that paralleled Welty’s embrace of everyday people in their attempts to extract meaning from mundane lives. Pattern names sounded not unlike metaphors from a Welty tale: “Drunkard’s Path,” “Russian Sunflowers,” and “Gentleman’s Bow Tie.” She was only the fourth person to lie in state at the Old Capitol.
Welty had written of the Old Capitol rotunda years before while reflecting on her passion for words and the sense of accomplishment derived from writing the perfect sentence: “I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street, where I could walk through it on my way to school and hear underfoot the echo of its marble floor and over me the bell of its rotunda.”
After years of rejections, Welty made her first sale in 1936 to Manuscript, a small literary magazine that published “Death of a Traveling Salesman,” an account of the last day in the life of a lonely, terrified shoe salesman who gets lost in rural Mississippi. The character dies of a heart attack before he can find his way, sadly realizing how little of life he has understood. Two years later the Atlantic Monthly published “Why I Live at the P.O.” and “A Worn Path.” Her first published hardcover was A Curtain of Green, a collection of short stories that sold only 7,000 copies in 30 years, yet whose 17 stories managed to find life in anthologies and college textbooks. Her first novel, Delta Wedding, was published in 1946.
During the Depression, Welty was employed by the Works Progress Administration, which sent her traveling throughout Mississippi to document the lives of poor Mississippians. The collection was published in 1971 as One Time One Place: Mississippi in the Depression. The photos represented a keen sense of observation, which she dubbed “story-writer’s truth.” Welty wrote, “Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them.”
The afternoon of her funeral, the sky grew dark as the threat of thunderstorms loomed over flags flown at half-mast in Welty’s honor. Galloway Methodist Church began to fill for her memorial service, where fond memories of the 92-year-old
Welty’s everlasting impact on close friends poured forth freely and earnestly. It was the same church Welty attended until she grew weary of requests to address various garden clubs. “She let us see each other with greater clarity. We ceased to be strangers,” former Governor William Winter, a friend for 50 years, eulogized. “She kept us from being indifferent to one another.” Her literary agent marveled at the rejection letters Welty received, amazed that the world at one time had ignored her genius. “Eudora was the perfect creative writer, without a trace of sentimentality,” he assessed. A Methodist minister recalled with awe her ability to capture the moment when a person reveals themselves, while another friend laughed about Welty’s uncontained delight upon discovering that her hotel room had twin beds with identical watercolor paintings hanging above each.
My request for directions to Welty’s gravesite resulted in a ride from the 82-year-old funeral home director in charge of the service. Riding to the gravesite in a black Cadillac driven by
Welty’s chain-smoking undertaker, the afternoon suddenly took on the aura of an anecdote snatched from one of her short stories. The old man could easily have been Earl Comfort, the gravedigger form Losing Battles. His primary concern on a day honoring a Mississippi heroine was that her burial proceed without hitch. At the gravesite, he praised the burial location for its skyscraper Magnolia trees that provided shade as Welty’s maple casket waited to be lowered
into the ground. When asked if he had read much of her work, the old man took a puff off his cigarette and shook his head. “No, I tried to read Delta Wedding once. But she’s like William Faulkner and all those others. They drag their sentences on and on, trying to describe stuff, and I just get lost.” It was an honest sentiment Eudora Welty no doubt would have appreciated. &